Archive for year: 2011

Every professional has some skill, opportunity, or attribute that few (if any) others can access. You may have heard the marketing acronym USP, which typically stands for Unique Selling Proposition.  A USP refers to those distinguishing factors.  Identifying your USP is key not only to letting your potential clients know what makes you different and why they should hire you, but also paves the way for you to market yourself in fresh ways.

For example, a Unique Selling Proposition might be that you draw on your background in tax law to support your clients’ licensing needs. Perhaps you are a divorced father of two who draws on your own life experiences in serving divorcing fathers.  In either case, you might use the USP you’ve identified to craft a marketing message that answers potential clients’ questions or concerns (some of which they may not even be aware of yet) by highlighting your USP.

To identify your Unique Selling Proposition, ask yourself:

1. What past experience (professional or personal) bears on your practice?
2. What skill, knowledge, or experience do you bring to your practice that will be helpful for clients?
3. What kind of practice-related opportunities can you forecast, and how can you position yourself to meet them?

Another way to think of a USP is as a Unique Service Proposition. How can you serve your clients in new or innovative ways?  In addition to your primary services, can you offer any ancillary services or products that will better meet your clients’ needs?  Are there free or reduced-fee services that you might offer as a way of introducing yourself and your skills to a class of potential clients or referral sources?

A Unique Service Proposition might include offering monthly free Q&A meetings during which you respond to potential clients’ questions about topics related to your practice area. For example, if you practice elder law, you might host a monthly gathering to help adult children learn what legal issues they should plan for as they assist their aging parents.  You could offer a fee-based group in which you cover key issues in more depth, and you might have certain forms or templates for sale that the adult children could use to implement your suggestions,

Perhaps your practice spans geographic areas in such a way that you don’t often have an opportunity to meet face-to-face with your clients. You might offer videoconferencing of other technology-based communication and collaboration resources to bridge the distance and interact more directly with clients.  Since many lawyers still limit their interactions to telephone, email, and mail, you might craft a marketing message around the personal service you offer, the importance of tailoring legal solutions to each individual (or business) and weave in your enhanced communication opportunities.

To identify your Unique Service Proposition, ask youself:

1. How can I meet both legal and non-legal needs that my clients frequently present?
2. How can I build innovative services that will benefit my clients?
3. What might I do to answer potential client questions, introduce my clients to beneficial resources, or otherwise extend my services in unexpected ways?

Identifying your USPs and using them to craft a marketing message requires analysis, insight, and sometimes even an intuitive leap. Try brainstorming what can distinguish you and your practice with the proviso that no answer is too wacky to be considered.  Sometimes impractical or unpalatable ideas provide the leap to a truly unique marketing message and practice.

Sometimes it’s hard to gain the 30,000-foot perspective necessary to identify what you can harness to distinguish your practice. If you’re having trouble spotting your opportunities, contact me to set up a time to discuss how I might be able to help.

I joined a new gym last week and had my first appointment with a personal trainer since 2004. I haven’t been totally inactive since then, of course; I’ve hit the gym on my own, gone swimming in my backyard, walked a bit (sometimes even long distances), and played with my dogs a lot.  But none of that is the same as a true workout with someone I’m paying to make me work hard.

The assessment made me want to die. That’s an overstatement, but not much.  Not only did it not feel good, but it also reminded me just how far I am from my goals and even from where I was when I quit going to the gym.  I was surprised that I wasn’t in agony the next day.

The first real workout was much harder. I’d paid the trainer by then, so she knew I was committed, and she probed the edges of my abilities.  (Fair point that the edges aren’t a long distance these days!)  I pushed beyond what she asked of me a few times, and I left feeling a little wobbly and tired, but proud.  And I did hurt the next day.

I can already feel differences — none that are objectively observable, of course, but I see them:  the satisfaction of knowing that I’m moving closer to my goals, the relief that my goals are no longer actually getting further away, and the kind of tiredness and soreness that comes with a good workout.  And the externally observable goals?  As long as I keep it up, they’re coming.  Probably nothing dramatic really soon, but they’re on the way.

That’s how it works with business development, too. You start by doing something.  Preferably, you make a commitment to someone who will hold you accountable and you create a plan that you’ll stick to.  You start seeing shifts immediately, even when no one else does, and they add up over time.  Stick to the plan, and those shifts will result in new billable work.

How was your workout today?

Total Leadership:  Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life
By Steward D. Friedman

Spurred by conversations I’ve been having with clients recently, this month’s book review focuses on “work/life balance” or (as I prefer to call it) work/life integration. As I’ve previously written, self-management is a critical skill for leaders.  That it’s also a challenge is reflected on the number of leaders who excel at work but have less satisfactory home lives, or those who prioritize “success” above health and suffer the consequences.

In Total Leadership:  Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Stewart Friedman urges leaders to seek “four-way wins”, meaning high performance in the four domains of life: work, home, community, and self (mind, body, and spirit).  Achieving these wins creates “total leadership”, which in turn creates sustainable change to benefit the leader and the most important people around him or her.

Traditional “work/life balance” principles, which suggest that there’s one single point called balance and innumerable other points that are unbalanced. That connotation is why I prefer the phrase integration to balance, and why I find Friedman’s approach to be so helpful.  By recognizing that our lives are more than “work” and “everything else”, Friedman opens the possibility that we don’t have to live on a see-saw.  Instead, we can find give-and-take among the domains, ideally finding activities or ways of being that serve all four.  Doesn’t that sound better than stealing time from work to serve life, or vice versa?

Scoring four-way wins is grounded in a clear view of what you want from and can contribute to each domain of your life, now and in the future. Naturally, you must pay thoughtful consideration to the people who matter most to you in each domain (the “stakeholders”) and the expectations you have for one another.  Doing so raises the likelihood that you will take steps that serve not only yourself but also the stakeholders in each domain.  Otherwise, you might end up with a brilliant plan that suits you perfectly but undermines or alienates colleagues, friends, and family members — or one that serves everyone in your life except yourself.

Having done this foundational work, the next step is to systematically design and implement carefully crafted experiments, doing something new for a short period to see how it affects all four domains. If an experiment doesn’t work out, you stop or adjust, and little is lost.  If it does work out, it’s a small win; over time these add up so that your overall efforts are focused increasingly on what and who matter most.  Either way, you learn more about how to lead in all parts of your life.  The ROI that Friedman reports is truly impressive:

In a study over a four-mont period of more than 300 business professionals (whose average age was about 35), their satisfaction increased by an average of 20% in their work lives, 28% in their home lives, and 31% in their community lives.  Perhaps most significant, their satisfaction in the domain of the self — their physical and emotional health and their intellectual and spiritual growth — increased by 39%.  But they also reported that their performance improved:  at work (by 9%), at home (15%), in the community (12%), and personally (25%).  Paradoxically, these gains were made even as participants spent less time on work and more on other aspects of their lives.  They’re working smarter — and they’re more focused, passionate, and committed to what they’re doing.

Four-way wins tend to have direct impact in one domain of life and indirect impact in others. For example, a commitment to working out three mornings a week directly benefits the leader’s “self” domain, with better health and reduced stress, and the work and home domains indirectly benefit as the leader focuses more effectively on matters at hand, has greater emotional stability, and is a better “partner”, whether to colleagues or family members.

Each individual will create his or her own unique experiment, but Friedman has identified eight general categories of worthwhile experiments:

• Tracking an activity and reflecting on progress toward a goal:  increases self-awareness.
• Planning and organizing:  find ways to use time more effectively and plan for the future.
• Appreciating and caring:  building relationships.
• Focusing and concentrating:  being fully present to key stakeholders.
• Revealing and engaging:  enhanced communication and relationship-building.
• Time shifting and “re-placing”:  changing when and where work is done.
• Delegating and developing:  passing appropriate tasks to subordinates and assistants.
• Exploring and venturing:  taking steps to align the four domains of life with a leader’s core values and aspirations.

As Friedman recommends, tracking the results of the experiment is critical, tweaking an experiment as it proceeds will often increase the benefits.

What’s in it for lawyers? Friedman’s approach is an evidence-based approach to help lawyers learn to make challenges that will benefit all aspects of their lives.  Choosing no more than three experiments, measuring the results, and then deciding whether to continue the experiment removes the “high stakes” nature that so often tanks sweeping changes.  (For example, how often have you sworn “never” to do something again, only to find yourself doing the foresworn activity within the next few days?)  This excerpt encapsulates why I expect Friedman’s work will speak to lawyers:

The best experiments let you try something new while minimizing the inevitable risks associated with change.  When the stakes are smaller, it’s easier to overcome the fear of failure that inhibits innovation.  You start to see results, and others take note, which both inspires you to go further and builds support from your key stakeholders.

If you’ve been looking for a workable work/life integration solution, pick up Friedman’s book. You’ll find it a rational, sensible approach that will offer substantial directions toward a life you want to lead.

What a week we’ve had with weather on the East Coast:  if it isn’t an earthquake, it’s a hurricane. And for us east coasters, there’s nothing natural about that sentence.  Long-time readers know that I think Seth Godin is a brilliant thinker, and he hit it again with his insight into earthquakes and human nature:

1. The first thing that happens after we encounter an earthquake is to wonder if anyone else felt it.  The need for group validation is widespread and happens for events that don’t involve earthquakes as well.
2. [P]eople like to do something. Action, even ineffective action, is something societies seek out during times of uncertainty.

Do you see how these observations apply to business development, both from the perspective of you who’s developing the business and also from your potential clients’ perspective?

What’s more, seeming everyone on the East Coast wanted to share where we were when the quake hit, did we feel it, did we know what it was. The coverage probably would have continued for an even longer period had it not been interrupted by Hurricane Irene.  Meanwhile West Coast dwellers were bemused at East Coast reaction to what would have been a non-event had it happened in California.

The earthquake was unexpected, uncommon, and thus worthy of discussion despite its lack of widespread impact. (The proof’s in the follow-up:  how much have you heard about the 16 aftershocks, four of which were over the “insignificant” 3.0 magnitude?)

Finally, did you see that the news spread via social media much faster than it did through traditional media? CNN.com had no reports ten minutes after the quake had hit, but Facebook and Twitter were ablaze with on-the-spot reports.

There’s a lot to learn from this “little” shake-up.  Don’t let it go unnoticed, and consider what it means for your business development efforts.