Have you accomplished at least 10% of your marketing goals for the year? Now that we’re into February, pause and take stock of what you have and haven’t accomplished from your 2023 business development plan. Give yourself credit for reviewing and/or updating your plan, but look for specific actions that you’ve taken that are likely […]
Happy New Year! You probably spent some of the last days of 2022 or the first of 2023 working on your business development plan, right? If not, hop to it! A current plan will coordinate your BD actions so that everything you do is working in a cohesive way toward a strategy you’ve defined. It’ll […]
Consider this: How often do you check out on your Business Development activity and goals? A friend and I were talking about the many opportunities for us to distract ourselves while feeling virtuous about it: clearing email, checking LinkedIn for updates from contacts, making lists of the things we plan to do. Most of us […]
Making and executing decisions is a key part of practicing law. Litigators decide what strategy to follow on a case; negotiators decide where to stand firm and where to compromise; partners decide which associates are right for an assignment and advancement; patent lawyers decide which features of an invention to claim… And so on. In […]
Nearly two years ago, I began spending time on creative writing for the first time in many years. I certainly wrote while I was practicing law — memoranda and briefs galore! —and I’ve written voluminously for my business (The Reluctant Rainmaker, among other books and articles) and for the nonprofit I founded. But this kind […]
When I begin working with a new client, someone who wants to build a book of business (or a bigger book), the first thing we do is to build a strategy. I’ve written extensively in the past on the process of developing a strategy for business development. (See, for example, Chapter 3 of The Reluctant Rainmaker […]
Let’s talk about billing and the effect it can have on your client relationships. Billing is, of course, one of the fundamental business and ethical aspects of practicing law. But it isn’t just that: it’s also a form of relationship development, practice management, and even business development. How you manage billing shows something about your […]
There’s one objection I hear more than any other from lawyers who want to grow their practices but find themselves stuck: “I’m too busy for business development!” That objection is often factual (sometimes there’s more billable work to do than any reasonable human can accomplish in a day) as well as an unassailable excuse […]
A few years ago, I ran across an article that’s stuck with me 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 […]
Having spoken with thousands of lawyers in the almost 20 years I’ve been consulting, I’ve identified three universal challenges to business development success. Do any of these sound uncomfortably familiar to you?1. “I don’t know what to do.” There’s so much information out there about how to bring in new cases and clients and, even more importantly, how to […]