How do you know when your business development plan is well designed? It may be an easy answer when you have new business flooding in (as long as that flood is due to your effort rather than good luck), but when you’re working and you don’t see new business as an immediate result, what should you ask yourself? Try these questions:
I read an interesting article this week titled Law Firm Leaders Still Aren’t Listening. You no doubt know where the article is going based on the headline alone, but here are a couple of excerpts:
On the one hand, [law firm leaders] admit that client demand is shaky, there are too many lawyers, the delivery of legal services is creakingly inefficient and firms are unwilling to change. But at the same time, they remain content to simply let the future just happen.
. . .
Mostly, law firms are playing with fees yet only 33-percent of firms surveyed are instituting strategic changes to their pricing structure.
. . .
More law firm leaders need to look for where the puck is going when it comes to planning for the future of their organization.
Especially if you aren’t a law firm leader, you may be asking, so what? A few tasks every lawyer should be taking on right now:
Read the full post, and then ask yourself… Are you listening to the trends? More importantly, are you responding?
If you’ve ever wondered if there’s an “app for that” when it comes to productivity, you’re going to love the resource I’m sharing this week. Visit this page to view a list of apps and websites that help with the following productivity needs:
When you get to the page, you’ll see an offer for a PDF of the list plus a bonus, but keep scrolling down to see the list itself.
This is also a great example of how strong content (like the list of resources) can help you to build a mailing list. The post was so helpful that I signed up to get the PDF, and I’m interested to see what the author will send in his upcoming newsletters. Would a potential client who tripped across your website say that?
I’ve written over and over and over again about creating value for clients. Value matters in business development too, of course. Check this quote from Seth Godin that puts marketing into the context of value:
How do you tell a story about your value? Case studies? Data and statistics? White papers or other kinds of presentations? Consider today how effectively your marketing communications convey your value. It isn’t your potential client’s job to discover the value that you would bring; it’s your job to illustrate it so the potential client understands.
Last month, I lured a friend to Santa Fe for a surprise 50th birthday party on the pretext that I needed her help to deliver a retreat for a law firm. She asked a lot of questions, so I made up an entire retreat on the fly, including a presentation about millennials. My friend, a high school teacher, offered some fascinating insights that led me to some additional reading. My private clients are sometimes perplexed by working with millennial associates (especially when requesting nonbillable help on creating content for marketing and business development purposes), and I thought I’d share several useful resources with you today.
While a full discussion of millennial tendencies and characteristics is far beyond the scope of this article, the point remains that understanding millennials is important both to garner support for your business development activities and for growing your practice. Review these and other articles, and if at all possible, attend a CLE and/or read up on how millennial tendencies are affecting business. It’s an interesting topic with far-reaching implications.
Speaking is, hands down, one of the best strategies to use for growing a practice. Why? Because you have an opportunity to showcase your knowledge about some aspect of your area of practice, to give the audience some taste of who you are and how you approach the kinds of problems they may face, and you’re doing so literally in front of an audience, thus creating the opportunity to make personal contact.
But if you don’t take three key steps long before you begin your presentation, speaking is unlikely to yield new business. Those three key steps are:
1. Choose your audience with care. The audiences to whom you speak must be composed of potential clients and/or potential referral sources. That’s why delivering a CLE to other lawyers in your field of practice probably won’t yield new business unless your practice is so distinctive that some of those lawyers are likely to refer business to you.
2. Give useful information, but be clear about the problems not addressed in your presentation. You want to demonstrate your skill, but you also want to set yourself up to handle the kind of problem you’re addressing and others related to it. Unless your area of practice lacks nuances (which is unlikely), be clear that your presentation covers problems A and B but doesn’t attempt to address problems C-E, which are critical to a successful outcome. You don’t want to complicate a topic, but you also don’t want to simplify it so much that further assistance seems unnecessary unless in fact it is.
3. Plan your follow-up process. It’s unlikely that audience members will approach you ready to hire you even after the most successful presentation. In an ideal world, potential clients will remember your name and keep your contact information at hand so they can contact you when they need your help, but you shouldn’t count on that. Instead, offer useful follow-up material like a checklist or infographic that summarizes your presentation. Deliver that information as a part of a follow-up sequence (which might include an invitation to answer questions, an offer of additional resources, perhaps a personal contact, and possibly a newsletter for ongoing contact) so that you may remain in contact with interested members of the audience.
If you take these three steps (and deliver a solid presentation in terms of content and style), you’ll be on the way to securing new business from some member(s) of your audience. Remember, however, that landing the work (and even getting into conversation about specific work you might handle) won’t necessarily be an immediate outcome—which is why you’ll have your ongoing follow-up planned before the day of your presentation.
This weekend, I opened an email and read a list of 10 tested, proven ways to become less productive. Nobody wants to be less productive, but it just happens some days, right?
Problem is, as I read the list I realized that it’s like a checklist of problems that prevent lawyers from succeeding in business development—or really, anything else. Nobody wants to fail (especially while working to succeed) but these ten behaviors will undermine productivity. Of these ten, the most common that I hear are:
If you’re feeling less productive than you’d like when it comes to business development (or to any other priority in your life), check this list to identify the likely reasons… And then do the opposite.
Are you willing to sacrifice to build your practice? The only way to answer that question honestly is to weigh the sacrifice against what you expect to gain as a result. This quote from Simon Sinek offers a neat summary:
What might you sacrifice? This answer will be unique to each person, but common responses include time, energy, money, and missed social and professional opportunities.
What might you gain? Again, answers will vary, but lawyers generally expect increased income, more professional opportunities, more control over their time and their career, and increased professional and personal satisfaction.
When you’re clear on what you may sacrifice and know that your anticipated gain is sufficiently appealing, it’s easier to decide to keep going when it would be easy to stop. Alternatively, if the gains you expect aren’t worth it, you’ll decide to stop more readily and with more certainty.
So… What are you sacrificing to build your practice? What do you expect to gain? And is the gain worth it?
One of the best ways to build your reputation as being skilled in your area of practice is through content marketing. Offering articles, blog posts, presentations, and the like that are centered on your practice area and that share substantive information useful to your audience highlights your knowledge, adds to your credibility, and shares something about who you are as a lawyer. If used well, these pieces can also lead to website traffic and even direct contact with a potential client.
Content marketing just might be a reluctant rainmaker’s best tool, if used strategically. Assuming you select the right topics and that you place your writings in appropriate online and offline publications and speak to the right audiences, you can benefit because your audience is actively interested in the information you’re sharing and you’re demonstrating your value while marketing.
But the need for content generation can also be the bane of a lawyer’s existence. The content must be timely (or evergreen), relevant, easily consumed, and—most importantly—good. Creating qualified content isn’t necessarily easy. If you imagine sitting in front of an blank computer screen, wracking your brain for an interesting topic you can cover effectively in the time you have available, not to mention trying to squeeze in one more activity in your already-overburdened schedule, you aren’t alone.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be so painful. Many of my private clients find that coming up with ideas is the most difficult part of content marketing. Here’s how to make it easier:
Most importantly, keep a running list of your ideas for content. You’ll probably find that the best ideas occur to you while you’re exercising, showering, watching TV – anything except sitting at your desk. Use Evernote or a simple Word document to list your ideas. That way, when you’re facing a blank computer screen, you’ll have a list of ideas ready to go.
Pop quiz: why are you a customer of your cell phone carrier? Take a second to answer. Got it? You likely gave one of these reasons:
Legal services are no different. If you’re competing on price alone, you’ll wind up in a race to the bottom, just like the carriers who have introduced their cut-rate brands to capture the cost-conscious market. If your clients are working with you simply because it takes too much effort to hire another lawyer, they’re ripe for the plucking.
But if you offer an advantage that others don’t, clients have a reason to hire you and to stay with you. Your point of distinction not only sets you apart: it establishes your value proposition, and as long as you deliver that value, your clients are less likely to explore other representation.
Points of distinction take many forms, but examples include:
To return to the cell carrier example, I was with AT&T (and its predecessors) for many years—inertia—but then I began spending more time in Wyoming, where AT&T’s coverage was pitiful. Verizon offered much better coverage (their point of distinction), and so I switched even though Verizon is more expensive than other options.
What would make a client prefer to work with you rather than someone else? If you can’t answer that question persuasively right now, you have some work to do.