Productivity thrives in a clear mind

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Have you ever had one of those nights, when you doze off only to be jolted awake with worry about something you need to do? Or caught yourself thinking “as soon as I get back to the office, I’ll send that email to the client,” only to realize hours later that you didn’t do it?

When you have a lot going on, things tend to get dropped or otherwise fouled up. Especially if you’re worried about something or you’re facing a difficult decision, your thoughts may be agitated by the “noise” of life. To-do items blend with ideas and interruptions into one big fog of mental chaos.

One example from 2003: I was preparing for a major client meeting in between meeting with my mother’s doctors and hospice aides. On the way home, I stopped the grocery store.  By some miracle, I had a list of the items I needed to buy.  But I was so distracted that I returned to my car to find the keys in the ignition and the car engine running!  Just today, I passed by an empty car parked in a garage with the engine running, and I wondered what stress caused the driver to make that mistake.

Maybe you’ve never left a car running, but almost everyone has a story of errors, omissions, and just plain dumb moves that come from an overfull brain. An oldie-but-goodie post by Zen Habits titled 15 Can’t-Miss Ways to Declutter Your Mind can help you get clarity and focus so you can get things done.  The tactics (with clarification available in the Zen Habits post):

  1. Breathe.
  2. Write it down.
  3. Identify the essential.
  4. Eliminate.
  5. Journal.
  6. Rethink your sleep.
  7. Take a walk.
  8. Watch less TV.
  9. Get in touch with nature.
  10. Do less.
  11. Go slower.
  12. Let go.
  13. Declutter your surroundings.
  14. Single-task.
  15. Get a load off.  (Vent!)

Does this seem soft? It’s just another step to reach the focused mind described in David Allen’s Getting Things Done. If what you’re doing isn’t working as well as you’d like, maybe it’s time to try another tactic.

How to deliver exceptional client service

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While I was exploring the ‘net last week to get additional input to my “what is client service… really?” inquiry, I ran across a nice article titled, “How to Deliver Exceptional Client Service.” Written from the perspective of a web agency, the article starts with the bold-but-obvious thesis that just doing what the client hired you to do isn’t exceptional, nor will it set you apart from your competitors.  Consider this:

“You are hired to design and develop a new website for a retail client. The client loves the design, and the pages you develop use the latest in HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design, resulting in a website that works wonderfully across browsers and devices. The e-commerce features of the new website help the client significantly increase their online sales, and the entire project is delivered on time and on budget. Now, is this “exceptional” client service? I don’t think it is.”

Substitute words that are applicable to the kind of legal work you do—you’re hired to negotiate an employment agreement or to handle a divorce or to guide a company through a merger—and you do that, do it well, and do it within the budget the client expects. That’s good client service, sure. But it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, exceptional.

(As a side note, just doing your job in any respect isn’t enough to set you apart from others. That means strategic thinking, responsive communication, and being accessible to your clients won’t distinguish you from other good practitioners. I often urge lawyers to find their points of distinction, and too many count these attributes as extraordinary when they aren’t.)

The article sets out seven ways to uplevel your client service:

  1. Create real relationships. “If we do not engage with our clients in a real, personal way, then we are just another vendor….”
  2. Ask real questions. Connect with your clients.
  3. Participate in more than just projects. Go outside a pure business setting with your clients.
  4. Help them with services that you do not provide. This is where your network supports your business development work: make introductions to help your clients.
  5. Pick up the phone. In today’s environment in which a telephone call may be viewed as an interruption, you’ll want to be careful to equate good communication with a spontaneous telephone call, but the point remains: know how your clients want to receive communications, act accordingly, and do so in a way that builds your relationship.
  6. Face the bad times head-on. How you handle sharing bad news says volumes about you as a practitioner and about how you view your clients and your responsibility to them.
  7. Be thankful and show appreciation. The personal touch is always appreciated, even if it’s not discussed.

Be sure to read the whole article. It’s a quick read, and well worth your time.

 

Evidence-based business development decisions

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Have you ever found yourself wondering whether to pursue one or another course of action for business development purposes? Absent a crystal ball, unfortunately, it’s often difficult to know in advance what will get you the maximum reward. But if you track your results, you’ll be able to use the simplest system ever. Here’s how.

  1. Keep a record of your activities. You can make this simple or quite complex, but you’ll probably find simple to be more actionable. The simplest way to do this is to create a spreadsheet with spaces for date, activity, results,  next step, and decision. Every time you complete an activity, note it.
  2. As you begin to see results (or the lack thereof), update your spreadsheet. Many activities will get immediate results of one form or another (inviting a contact to lunch, for instance), but some may have a longer gap between action and result (actually having lunch with that contact and waiting to see whether you get work, introductions, or some other next step as a result). Schedule a monthly review to keep track of those longer-term results.
  3. Note your next steps.Assuming you’re going to continue this activity, what would your next step be? Ideally, you’d complete this entry after you see results, but if your activity is more prone to long-term results, you may need to project a next step based on the results you anticipate. If that’s the case, be sure that you go back to confirm whether those results actually came to pass. (If not, all the more reason for you to track your activity carefully and improve your predictions!)
  4. Once a quarter, review your activities and results, and decide whether you should stop or continue the activity based solely on the results you’ve attained.You might choose to overrule that decision (if, for instance, your results represent a promising midpoint toward a meaningful outcome), but this decision should be based purely on the evidence you see.
  5. For each “stop” you note, ask yourself what activity you might start to replace it. Use the evidence you’ve gathered to hone your ideas. If every indication is that attending bar association meetings is not beneficial for you, don’t add another bar group and hope for a different result. Instead, investigate an industry organization or a business group.

Want to get even better results? Ask a mentor or trusted colleague to help you determine what to start, stop, and continue. The benefit of this process (adapted from the performance review context) is that you’ll quit making decisions based on emotions like hope (“but if I keep doing this, I might land an amazing piece of business”) or fear (“I’m really comfortable doing this, and if I start doing that instead, it’s going to be hard and I might fail”). And when you remove emotion, you’ll see clearly what to do.

What should you start, stop, or continue?

The Clock Never Runs Out on Legal Business Development

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Sports is a great teaching forum for lessons about business development.

In last weekend’s Super Bowl, the Denver Broncos’ fate was sealed by the beginning of the fourth quarter. There’s always some possibility that a team can make a comeback, but 28 points down with 15 minutes to play takes that possibility almost to zero.

A friend observed that, in the 4th quarter, the Seattle Seahawks were playing just for fun, sure of a win. But here’s the thing: they continued to play hard until the last possession. Not because they “needed” to – even a few mistakes and turnovers probably would not have changed the outcome of the game – but because those who excel in any field continue competing against themselves even when they’ve achieved the initial goal. Not “Whew, we’ve won, let’s relax now,” but “Yes! We won! Now let’s see how far we can take this win!”

And by the same token, even when every player and every fan had given up hope of a Broncos victory, the Broncos continued to play as best they possibly could.  Although they didn’t play anywhere approaching the level that got them into the Super Bowl, they didn’t give up just because it was clear they were going to lose. Instead, they kept fighting to minimize the loss.

What does this have to do with legal business development? It’s all about attitude. Attitude, mindset, mental approach, belief system – all of these concepts describe not just what you do, but how you do it.

Where do you stop yourself when you’re succeeding? This shows up most frequently in the feast/famine cycle: stopping your business development work simply because you’re too busy and don’t need the work…Right up until the moment that you realize you don’t have enough work, and you have to start all over again. If things are going well, how can you ensure that you’re pushing the envelope to make things go even better?

Even more importantly, where do you stop yourself when you’re not succeeding? It doesn’t take a failure to knock some people off their game. Sometimes it’s just being slow to get results. We all want to see speedy success, but especially when it comes to bringing in new business, it doesn’t always work that way. That’s why it’s so important to check your metrics. Are you making progress toward your objectives? (And that’s why it’s important to set goals, so that you can measure progress and not just movement.)

Of course, sometimes failure is final. A critical skill is knowing when to keep pounding away and when to change course. (For more on this, see Seth Godin’s short and smart book The Dip. You’ll find my review here.)

How you choose to push yourself or back off is telling when it comes to whether you’re likely to succeed in building a consistent pipeline of new business. Next time you meet a business development goal you’ve set, ask whether there’s something more you can and should do to exceed that goal. Push yourself just a bit further. And if you catch yourself thinking that you failed or that your plan is never going to work, take a breath, question your assumptions (which often requires some outside help), and see what you can do to transform your failure into success.

Because here’s the truth: the clock never runs out on business development as it does on a football game. You don’t have to accept poor results as the end of the story. Instead, you can reevaluate your plan, reshape your strategy, rethink your objectives, and get some help. Keep fighting smart, and your failure will not be final.

Struggling with failure? Legal Rainmaking Myths offers a full section on the misapprehensions that keep smart lawyers from succeeding in legal business development. Find the Kindle version here; the print version will be available in a few weeks.

Legal Business Development: January’s Must-Read Resources

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We’re all swamped by information these days, but I’ve cut through a lot of that to unearth just three whitepapers and articles you need to read.  Without further ado:

  1. Lawyers ought to blog for an audience of two.  I often discuss blogging with my clients, whether they’re in large firms or solo practice.  Blogging is a terrific way to build a reputation and relationships, and it creates a body of work that you can draw on in numerous ways.  The pushback tends to be twofold: what can I write about, and how will I find time to write it? Keep a list of topics that would interest your ideal client, and check out this article for some “how to write” tips. Writing a note to one particular person simplifies the process and is more useful as well. Even if you aren’t a blogger, read this article for its insight into content marketing generally. It’s quick.
  2. The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Selling Anything.  The article’s overall points are strong, no nonsense, and a very doable “good human” take on selling.  And, like most lawyers, this author has an initial resistance to the idea.  It isn’t what I would call a “cheat sheet” (don’t look for a numbered action-item list) but it might just shift your attitude about sales and your understanding of the underlying dynamics.
  3. Is Your Law Firm Looking to Hire an SEO Consultant?  This whitepaper is intended for small firm and solo lawyers, but SEO is such an important topic that you should read it regardless of your practice setting.  It suggests 7 questions to ask an SEO consultant, and question 1 (which addresses in part the easy-to-overlook ethical considerations in SEO that spill over into many aspects of marketing) is critical for you to keep top-of-mind.

Have you found a resource I should have listed?  Please share!

Audio Interview with Deborah Dubree, Author of Average Is An Addiction

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Are you ever curious about what it would be like to sit down with the author of a useful book and find out how she came to write the book and to dig deeper into the topic?  Although the written word is powerful, there’s nothing like a conversation to flesh out ideas and check their application to your own situation.

This week I had the opportunity to interview Deborah Dubree, author of Average is an Addiction.  We had a terrific conversation about what it means to be average, the cost of mediocrity, how to find your “edge” over the competition, the role of emotion in high performance, and how to bounce back from the inevitable defeat.

I’d intended to record one interview, but the conversation was so good that we recorded a second, each lasting about 20 minutes.  Take a listen today to find out more about how you can step out of average, once and for all.

Download part 1 here (about 22 minutes)

Download part 2 here (about 18 minutes)


After you listen, please drop me a note and let me know how the conversation impacted you and what additional questions you’d like to ask.

Legal Business Development: Will Your Clients and Contacts Think Of You First When They Need Help?

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Jon, a midcareer lawyer working in a boutique law firm, handles white-collar criminal defense matters.  Most of his clients come through referrals from other lawyers.  Far too often, those lawyers fail to appreciate that they need someone who practices in the area every day.  Instead, they try to handle a matter themselves.  After doing the best they can and finding that their best is insufficient, they discover that they need someone who knows the government prosecutors and who can read the subtle signals in government requests.  That’s where Jon comes into the picture.

Jon can only get referrals early in the process–early enough to be of maximum assistance to the client–if the lawyers who send those referrals, think of him as soon as a white collar issue arises.  A prevalent myth holds that simply being a great lawyer who gets great results is enough to bring in business.  Unfortunately, if you are not top-of-mind for your clients and contacts, they won’t think to call you even if they do need you.  What’s more, especially if you deal with clients who are not legally sophisticated, they may need you and not even know it.

In an ideal world, your contacts will always think to call you when there’s a matter with which you might be able to help.  In the real world, your contacts are likely to be so preoccupied with their own concerns that they won’t think of you unless you have taken steps to ensure that they know your skills and that you regularly engage with them.

What’s the solution?  Deliver interesting and useful information to your clients (including former clients) and contacts on a regular basis, and use that delivery of information to build and maintain relationships with them.  When you engage in a useful way with your contacts, you raise your profile with those contacts.  You may become the go-to person in a particular area of practice by virtue of the relationships you build over time.

Here’s what you need to do:

  • Create a clear description of your practice, including examples.  Test it to be sure that a wide variety of people understand what you do and what kind of work you handle.
  • Share that description (in a natural way) when you talk with others, and share the stories that will root that description in their memory.  We’d all like to believe that a single explanation of the work we do is sufficient, but chances are that it isn’t.
  • Look for opportunities to deliver useful information.  That delivery can come in the form of widely distributed newsletters or client alerts, or you can send interesting articles or thought snippets one-by-one.  Just be sure the information you share is relevant and adds value for the recipient.
  • Whenever you get in touch with someone in your network, create opportunities to build the relationship just a little more.  Relationship-building doesn’t have to mean a 3-hour lunch.  It can be as simple as, “Did you catch the game last night?  Do you follow [seasonal sport]?  Who’s your team?”  When you keep in touch, you’ll have plenty of chances to have a short exchange that will grow your relationship.

Everyone is operating inside his or her own bubble, and it’s your job to reach into the bubble (in a welcomed, non-intrusive way) as a reminder that you’re a likeable person who’s ready to help.  Done properly, that message will be exemplified in everything you do, and you’ll feel much less pressure to make a plea for business.