Today, more law firms understand that they must be total sales cultures, which by definition involves the total professional population. A house divided - between partners who are required to sell, and non-partners who are not empowered to - may stand for awhile but it cannot grow.
 
For law firms, marketing training is thus a recruitment asset and a retention tool. The key is to ensure that the training is practical - not just promises, but specific action steps lawyers can take to compete and win.
 
Importantly, the training agenda should be bifurcated. Half of it is about getting found; that’s called marketing. The other half is about getting chosen; that’s called sales. The skills are interrelated but different, and senior associates and new partners need to be extremely good at both. Business development tactics, closing skills, and building relationships must be practiced and repeated.
 
This series begins next time with a series of columns on Positioning To Compete, to be followed by a series on Positioning To Win.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Legal Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.