Selling Services to Law Firms: Are You Up to the Challenge?
by Allan Colman, the Closers Group
(As seen on RainToday.com)
If you've spent any time selling professional services to lawyers, you should already know that this market is uniquely idiosyncratic, uniquely resistant, and uniquely challenging. It requires special insights, strategies, and training to successfully penetrate.
There are problematic dynamics at both individual and institutional levels:
Because many lawyers hate to sell, they're resistant to anyone who's trying to sell them anything—even before they meet you.
- The unique ethical restraints that affect lawyers' client relationships encourage an additionally guarded mindset with respect to anyone selling services that have impact on their clients.
- Law firms are most often flat organizations, so the decision-making process is roiled by internal politics often involving irreconcilable priorities among the partners. Executive committees and practice group heads are often at loggerheads. In the same spirit of open trust, have the client clarify their budgets. Meet with the CEO/Risk Management Committee to increase your understanding – and theirs – of the options and value available.
- Law departments are often cost centers challenged at every turn to demonstrate cost-efficiency. As an organizational fact of life, it is a huge barrier to entry.
How can we cut through these Gordian knots?
Strategy: Crossing the Moat
The "hate to sell" blockade remains formidable even after decades during which marketing and business development programs have been implemented at law firms. Despite significant progress, many attorneys remain ambivalent, resistant, inexperienced, or presumptively above the fray.
If they don't like to market or, like in-house counsel, they tend to pass the purchasing buck to others, how receptive will they be to your closing business? You have to cross a deep moat before entering the castle.
At bottom, lawyers distrust you. Although you may be selling the most sophisticated litigation support or forensic accounting, they dread being manipulated by anyone, and they have contempt for any hint of hucksterism.
The solution is to confront that tacit distrust by building trust. We teach lawyers to build relationships with their prospects. We need to do the same with them on our own behalf. We teach them to "understand" their clients' business. We need to understand their business, both the larger marketplace dynamics and the specific challenges that affect their client relationships.
We need to know something about the deals they're doing or the cases they're litigating without pretending to have expertise we don't have. We must pursue the kind of relationship with them that in effect transforms our own identities from salespeople to team members.
Tactics: Entering the Castle
Just as we teach lawyers specific tactics to create this partnering relationship with their clients, we must realize that there are specific behaviors that can further our relationship with them or destroy it altogether.
- Start slow and be patient. The best way to alienate a lawyer is to grab his hand, hold on to it, and ask when you can come to their office. It confirms everything they dislike about the selling process.
- Use research as a platform for discussion and to identify intelligent questions to ask. Say the firm has an office in Dubai. It's an obvious cue to ask how the recent economic woes there affect growth, what specific legal matters have been precipitated, and how your service might help in those matters.
- Get them talking. In training its sales force, IBM advises that clients/prospects should do 60% of the talking. Here, too, ask questions that demonstrate what you've learned about the firm, its competition, past experiences, decision-making processes-or even the local football scores.
- Go ahead and name-drop a couple of your major clients in relevant industries, but tread carefully. Lawyers fear salespeople who are indiscrete about past or current clients. Use phrases like, "What I am able to tell you at this point is …"
- Lawyers are no less impressed and often more impressed by public accolades than other groups. Leverage your media appearances, articles, and speeches.
- Find out what they're reading and read it. Identify the key issues covered, and if they are relevant to what you're selling, prepare and present a briefing on those topics.
- Lawyers respect structure, and it is in your interest to provide one with a written agenda for any formal meetings or communications. Ask for a review and revisions prior to the call or meeting, and re-confirm the agenda at the beginning of the meeting.
With every tactic, there should be an unobtrusive next step. That's how relationships are made and trust gets built.
Overriding Message: The Need-to-Have
There is a critical point at which strategy and tactics dovetail in selling professional services to lawyers. As a result of your relationship, and of the trust you engender, you build credibility for your key message: that what you are selling is a must-buy.
That message is fundamental for closing any significant sales transaction with lawyers and legal organizations. That message is crucial to what we have called "closing in the RED ZONE." Borrowing a football usage, we're talking about the last 20 yards when, after all you've set up, and all you've labored to create in terms of a relationship, you must now deliver the final play that will result in a score. Once you're in the Red Zone, establishing your service as a must-buy is the key deliverable for people who, like lawyers, are both risk adverse and sales-resistant.
In this context, we're talking about two opposing fears. One is the fear of the sales process, which we have discussed: their fear of being manipulated, being sold a bill of goods, and debasing their professional integrity by being part of a promotional culture.
The other fear is of lagging behind, of not being able to match their competitors or serve their clients with the best jury consulting, strategic business guidance, e-discovery technology, CLE training, or whatever. We don't know of another profession where firms play monkey see, monkey do quite as instinctively as law firms.
Your job in selling is to ensure that the second fear overpowers the first, that what you are selling is a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have, and that by partnering with you (not just buying from you) they are investing in their own success. Once such a message is inculcated, we begin to address all the problematic dynamics with which this began.
First, the hate-to-sell resistance ebbs as a more pressing necessity-the need to keep up with their competitors, usually by providing superior client service-impinges on their consciousness.
Second, those "unique restraints" are addressed. In establishing your relationship, you've taken pains to assure them that you are fully attuned to how their business operates, including the need for confidentiality, ethical compliance, and client-specific sensitivities. At the same time, you've sent the message that, if anything, they have an obligation to at least consider the latest advances in client services that your firm offers. You've thus reversed the burden from worrying about dealing with you to worrying about what might happen if they don't.
Third, at law firms you simplify the internal political landscape. To that end, follow another precept that we teach lawyers about selling to their own clients: identify the key decision makers, anticipate conflicts among them, and find ways to create a common ground. If you don't succeed in ultimately closing the deal, it won't be because your intramural targets have competing goals.
Fourth, at law departments, you directly address the value question. If in-house counsel must answer to their non-lawyer compeers, the "need-to-have" message powerfully abets that effort and in a way that makes cost considerations relatively unimportant. After all, you could be selling something that will keep an operational business unit out of court.
The legal profession is about as challenging as any market on earth, but there's a reason why some of us have continued to slug away for decades. Once that iron wall of resistance totters, the intellectual and professional rewards are extraordinary. There is also the sweet satisfaction of knowing that you have succeeded where many other worthy aspirants have failed.
Allan Colman is the CEO of the Closers Group, a business development advisory and consulting firm. He has spent over 23 years selling professional services to lawyers and other professionals. The Closers Group now provides a special business development training program for individuals and organizations that market and sell professional services to the legal profession. Contact Mr. Colman at acolman@closersgroup.com.
