The 3 Phases of Marketing
Seth Godin’s recent blog post Awareness, trust and action, identifies and describes the three phases of marketing outreach. Godin defines “marketing outreach” to include ads, PR, and sponsorships, but I’d suggest that it also encompasses business development activities. Read this post! Using this simple three-phase model will help you to organize your business development tasks and be sure that you’re […]
Meeting Client Expectations… Or Not.
One of the top client complaints received by bar associations across the country has to do with lawyers’ failure to return telephone calls. I haven’t seen statistics, but I suspect that clients also complain about lawyers who fail to answer email. Clients expect that lawyers will communicate with them in a timely manner, and on […]
Clients aren’t property.
An interesting article to share with you this week: Law Firms Leaders’ Moneyball Mistake: (registration is required to view the article) Written by Steven Harper, author of the can’t-miss book The Lawyer Bubble, this article points out the problems with large firms’ “aggressive inorganic growth” via lateral hires. Harper quotes Group Dewey Consulting’s Eric Dewey’s observation […]
How do you establish trust?
You’ve probably heard some version of Bob Burg’s statement that, “All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” We tend to focus on getting known, we work to communicate in a way that increases the chances of being liked, but how do you […]
Don’t make assumptions.
I ran across this quote recently: So true, isn’t it? And yet, we all tend to make assumptions. That client is thrilled with our engagement; this one isn’t. That target client is represented and has no interest in moving; that one understands the legal situation that’s cropped up but can’t (or won’t) spend the money […]
What can law schools teach you now?
I recently paged through the Vanderbilt University alumni magazine and ran across a story titled Law 2.0: Vanderbilt Law School Innovates to Stay Ahead. The article provides a nice summary of the practice a law in the years leading up to the Great Recession, the shifts that the economic crisis created, and the efforts to […]
Two keys to biz dev perseverance and success.
Have you ever had the wind knocked out of your business development sails? That can happen when you expect to land some new business and it doesn’t happen, when you hit a few closed doors in a row, or even when you lay out your business development plan and feel exhausted just looking at it. […]