Business Development

An Agenda for Success

by Allan Colman
published by Diversity and The Bar, a publication of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association

There is an art in getting clients to talk enough about themselves so that a level of personal and professional trust is achieved.

Some rainmakers come to it naturally. Some work hard to get there, and not everyone who succeeds as a rainmaker possesses innate qualities for that success.

Lawyers who are “natural” rainmakers don’t necessarily need formal programs to drive and coordinate their efforts. Their instincts often are unerring. But for lawyers who cringe at the thought of marketing and are intimidated by the word “sales,” the good news is that systematic approaches are available that are designed to maximize bottom-line potential.

Lawyers can articulate and structure such approaches in any number of ways. One particularly comprehensive agenda includes the following:

Take specific steps to understand the client prospect;
Create a plan of attack;
Identify and utilize what can be called “invisible marketing tools;”
Learn from failure; and
Define next steps.

Understanding the Target

The more that lawyers decide to probe the business realities of their prospective client base, the more multifaceted the rainmaking process becomes—and the greater the horizons for significant bottom-line revenue generation.

First, lawyers need to identify who the final decision-maker is on the project they are proposing. It isn’t necessarily in-house counsel. Often, there is an “economic buyer” as well as the “user buyer” enmeshed in the substance of the project. Both buyers require a sensitive response from the seller.

Second, in-house buyers often are under significant pressure from the CEO or board of directors to meet budgetary limitations, to win more litigation, or to provide closer Sarbanes-Oxley counsel. Identifying these pressures opens up a number of selling opportunities, or at least, relationship-building opportunities.

By understanding what might be driving the client crazy and learning about their business beyond the specifics of the legal engagement itself, lawyers demonstrate vital concern. Indeed, in a 2006 survey performed by the BTI Consulting Group, entitled “Key Trends in Client Relationships and Satisfaction with Law Firms,” the highest-ranked differentiator for developing superior client relationships was “Understands the Client’s Business.”

How can such a critical understanding be developed? A quick media search or internet probe will provide some of the information needed, including the following.

What new products or services have they recently marketed?
How many community service projects does the company sponsor?
Are they going through layoffs in any divisions?
Are they merging, acquiring, or being acquired?
Have they won awards or special honors?

Beyond such public information, there is an art in getting clients to talk enough about themselves so that a level of personal and professional trust is achieved. This art cannot simply be memorized. It must be rehearsed and mentored.

Attorneys are skilled at asking questions in court, where the rules are defined. In sales, there are no rules—but there are best practices and approaches to relationship-building that can be taught and learned.

By the way, that BTI survey also includes some very specific tips on what in-house counsel don’t want to hear—the “worst practices,” as it were. Top of the list are “boring pitches that talk about firms, not clients,” and unresponsiveness to questions about billing practices.

They don’t want to know how many offices the firm has, and they certainly don’t care where lawyers went to school. They want to know what the lawyers they hire know about them.

A Plan of Attack

For outside counsel, a key step for firms in creating the plan of attack is to clearly articulate what differentiates them from their competitors. In their marketing initiatives, as well as in their real time conversations with the buyer, lawyers must emphasize what makes them unique.

For some firms, a heightened level of client knowledge is itself the differentiating factor—simply because their competitors haven’t yet thought to develop that knowledge. In that sense, the different components of the business development plan dovetail: Client understanding is law firm differentiation.

Media research completed by law firms’ marketing departments is an essential first step to understand the company’s business, to understand the pressures faced by the general counsel’s office, to offer true client-centric proposals, and to talk strategy as soon as possible.

Once the seller is talking actual strategy, a critical frontier in the inside/outside relationship has been crossed.

Invisible Marketing Tools

In building personal relationships, charity and community service organizations are obviously important. Contact with alumni and former colleagues is equally important. Such commonsense networking is a business development building block.

But “invisible marketing tools” move the process even further along at every stage of the client development process. Often these opportunities seem trivial at first. At any point in time, for example, clients or colleagues will simply ask, “What’s new?” Lawyers can seize the opportunity to mention a recent big win, for example, rather than their daughter’s soccer team successes.

These invisible marketing tools become more potent as the inside/outside relationship moves forward. For example, when the client calls with a complaint, lawyers can leverage the moment by fixing the problem and then making a point to remind the client that they fixed it fast.

The stage is then set for an even more powerful follow-up: asking the client if there are other problems or issues of concern—“because if there are, I’d like to fix them as fast as I fixed the last problem we had.”

Good deeds thus get extended over time and become ingrained in the client’s memory.

Maximizing Rejection

Responding to rejection is critical. There should be equal scrutiny of what worked and what didn’t. Most people don’t realize how important “rejection analysis” is.

Regardless of the reasons the prospect gave for not hiring them, lawyers should call back in three months and again ask why. With time and distance, there is likely much more to learn beyond the original stated reasons for the rejection that will help in the future.

Just as lawyers and law firms invest in a proposal or pitch, the in-house counsel have an investment too. They know and appreciate everyone who made it to the “finals.” Lawyers who stay in touch stand an excellent chance of being retained in the future.

Asking for the Business

There should always be agreement on the best next steps for the client. Nat Slavin, former publisher of Inside Litigation, has identified closing questions that specify such next steps; asking them is almost tantamount to directly asking for the business.

When will a decision be made?
What is the internal decision-making process?
What additional information might be needed?
When is it best to follow up with a call?

These practical questions drive the process toward its moment of truth. In this context, a familiar football metaphor—the “Red Zone,” referring to the final 20 yards the team must cover to cross the goal line—is useful.

On the one hand, a Red Zone strategy requires its own playbook. It entails separate skill sets with a wholly different focus than is used at other stages of the marketing and sales process. That said, many of the fundamental best practices covered in this article apply in the Red Zone as well. For example, in the Red Zone, the importance of understanding client needs and listening carefully to what clients say is multiplied a hundredfold at least.

Lawyers are great talkers, good questioners, and only fair listeners. Even on the 3-yard line, the importance of listening is inestimable. The old IBM 60/40 rule always applies: Get the client talking 60 percent of the time. The art of listening should permeate every best practice, every coherent marketing plan, every concerted sales pitch.

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