In military strategy, deploying the troops happens when the right place and the right time have been determined – when the generals and commanders have had the opportunity to identify a strategy for “meeting the enemy where they are” in an effort to reach an established goal. In our previous post, we began to explore the challenges on the battlefield of sales presentations We looked at the importance of knowing how each opportunity should be met with a marketing strategy in mind, and the need to place members of your firm with the individuals on the “must-get-to-know list.”


Within the context of your sales presentations, deploying the troops is about two things:

1. Ensuring that the members of your firm’s staff are accessible to those in attendance.
2. Encouraging attendees to seek out your colleagues so that they can get the information that addresses their needs.

The first step is fairly easy to accomplish. There should be at least one attorney from your firm at each table if it’s at all possible. This creates the potential for every audience member to be engaged. In order to avoid redundancy – and the risk of attorneys simply talking with one another – no more than two attorneys from your firm should be seated at the same table.


Making sure that your colleagues are accessible to attendees enables attendees to easily gather more information. You can encourage this contact in a number of ways; here are some examples:

• Introduce your colleagues before, after, or – if appropriate – during your presentation to create cross-selling possibilities. If, while planning your presentation, you find yourself thinking about your colleague’s area of expertise, work it into the speech. As an example, “This whole related area of sick building litigation is also important – and it’s something that my colleague Don Jones, who is here today, specializes in. Don, can you please identify yourself in case anyone in the audience has a question for you after the presentation?” would allow attendees to identify the person best able to respond to those needs.
• Without being obviously self-promoting, be on the lookout for opportunities to mention one or two relevant successes that you and your colleagues have had during the presentation or panel discussion.

Additionally, you will want to look for opportunities to engage further contact with those who attend the presentation. Any topic-related pretext for future contact is worth pursuing. Consider distributing a survey on your presentation topic with the promise to send results to the attendees once they are compiled. Alternately, refer to an event, opinion, piece of new legislation or related matter saying, “If you want more information, leave me your card and I can call or email you with further details.” This – along with simply asking those who you meet if it will be okay to contact them in the near future – opens the door for permission-based marketing (something that we’ll explore further in Part III: Sealing the Deal).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 5:47 am 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.