What if small talk fails?

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Relationships are at the heart of business development. That’s true regardless of the length of your sales cycle, meaning the typical amount of time required for a potential client to move from first encountering you to hiring you. It isn’t necessary to build a deep and personal relationship in all cases, but you do have to have enough of a relationship to allow your potential client or referral source to know and trust you.

Whether your potential client first finds you online or offline, one-on-one conversation is where a true connection may bloom. Most commonly, you’ll find that the process of building a connection takes time. (That’s why follow-up is so critically important.)

You’re probably aware that small talk paves the way for follow-up contacts. Through small talk (conversation that meanders through a variety of topics at a relatively surface level), you learn more about your conversational partner. You discover mutual interests and experiences, and you start to build a common bond. Through follow-up, you develop that bond, and over time a relationship flourishes… And you’re off to other business development issues. (If small talk isn’t your strength, you’ll find plenty of resources online that can help you improve your skills and increase your comfort.)

But what about those situations in which small talk fails? Perhaps small talk isn’t culturally accepted or, despite your best efforts, your small-talk skills aren’t creating an easy flow in conversation. In these instances, you’ll need to find ways in addition to small talk to establish and deepen connections.

The Harvard Business Review article Building Relationships in Cultures That Don’t Do Small Talk offers good tips for recognizing a no-small-talk culture (something that you should already know based on your due diligence) and for adapting. The most important two sentences in the article apply to relationship-building generally, not just across cultures:

One essential piece of advice is to take a longer-term perspective on developing relationships. If you assume that relationships and rapport can indeed be developed in a matter of moments, you’ll inevitably be disappointed.

The article goes on to suggest several tactics to use in the absence of small talk, including working to ensure that “your colleagues see you as someone worthy of having a relationship with, even if it’s not going to happen immediately,” finding impersonal topics for conversation, and knowing when it’s acceptable to build personal relationships.

Use these tips when small talk fails you, but also incorporate them into your relationship-building approach even when you get things going with chitchat. The better you are at adapting your approach to your new contact’s style and the more alternatives you have in mind for building a solid foundation for your relationships, the stronger your network will be.

If you haven’t registered yet for the first session of the webinar series, “The Human Touch of Rainmaking”, it’s not too late!

The webinar is TODAY at 5 pm EDT/2 pm PDT so mark your calendar. 

Click here to register. 

Do you think about what you’re doing?

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How often do you think about what you’re doing? Probably more often than you should.

Consider this quote:

 

When it comes to business development (and practice in general), building good habits will help you to accomplish the tasks you want more consistently. For example, if you make it a habit to connect with a new contact on LinkedIn and to send a “nice to meet you” note, then to update your contact management system and calendar a keep-in-touch schedule, you’ll never let a great new connection slip through your fingers. If you routinely enter your time at the end of each day, you’ll never have to spend an entire morning (or more) to recreate your records at the end of the month.

What’s your agenda?

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One of my favorite questions is, “What’s your agenda?” I’ve noticed, however, that we tend not to ask that question of ourselves often enough.

Setting an agenda is a classic time management strategy. If you’re looking to make meetings shorter and more productive, circulate an agenda in advance and expect everyone to come prepared. If you want to make your day more productive, set your own agenda. Of course, other issues may arise in the course of the meeting or the day, but if you set your agenda first, you’ll at least know what you intended to accomplish and you won’t lose track of necessary tasks.

Knowing your agenda is critical for networking. Meeting new people requires you to have a sorting agenda in place: do you want to meet lawyers, bankers, or parents? Are you interested in officers in closely-held businesses, or would you prefer to meet officers in public corporations? Knowing who you want to meet will help you to identify the best groups to investigate and to target the right people for follow-up, which is where the networking magic happens, if at all.

Having an agenda is the difference between effective follow-up meetings and purposeless coffee dates that accomplish nothing. If you have some idea of what you’d like to discuss during a follow-up meeting, you’ll be able to tailor your conversation to be sure that you ask the right questions or offer the right information. It’s easy to wing it for follow-up meetings, but taking a few minutes to think about what you want from the meeting will make you much more effective.

Finally, when you’re talking with someone with whom you’re considering joining forces (for marketing or to form a new practice, for example) ask them directly (or ask yourself) what their agenda is.  Poorly phrased, the question is a bit confrontational, but the more you know or intuit about someone else’s objectives, the better your decisions will be.

Take a few minutes to answer these questions (or others that fit your circumstances):

  • What’s your agenda for today?
  • What’s your agenda for your practice?
  • What’s your client’s agenda?

Share your best ideas with your best clients.

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When do you share your best ideas? BTI Consulting, a group known for its deep research in client satisfaction and preferences, reports that:

“[j]ust over 2/3 of clients tell us the best new ideas they see coming from law firms happen during an RFP process. Somewhere among the sea of bland boilerplate submissions lies one scintillating idea, suggestion or nugget. One firm invested the time and energy to simply blow their potential client away.”

Being the firm that came up with an amazing nugget is great, but as the BTI article continues, “why wait until an RFP to strut your stuff?” RFPs may be a necessary part of business, but preserving—and perhaps expanding—client relationships is critical to a prosperous practice.  (The article is directed to large firms, but the principles adhere to small firms as well.)

Read the article for a suggestion on how you can do better by proactively sharing your best ideas with your best clients. In the meantime, ask yourself…

  • How often do you offer the “scintillating idea, suggestion or nugget” in an RFP? How can you increase the frequency?
  • How often do you proactively bring an idea, an insight, or an approach to your clients? The BTI article focuses on corporate counsel, but regardless of your practice area, you must spend time thinking about what will make things better for your clients. For example, a litigator might recognize a trend in litigation and offer that to clients to help them avoid unnecessary suits.
  • If you tend not to have repeat business from core clients, identify your ideal client profile and ask what would blow that kind of client away. In other words, is there a new process or resource that would be incredibly helpful?
  • More globally, what do you do when you’re trying to win business that you might do to strengthen the relationship with your current clients? Building a relationship with a current client will, in general, deliver much better results than trying to land a new client. (That doesn’t mean you need not pursue new business, though.)

Offering something eye-catching in an RFP is good, but bringing the nugget to a current client is even better. Read the BTI Consulting article, then apply it.

Business Development Trades in Promises

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Sales. Selling. Sales pitch. How do those words come across to you? Positive, negative, or no charge at all? Studies show that a significant number of people have some bad impression about selling, though most people have no negative association with buying. (See Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human for more on this.)

But if you’re to grow your practice, you have to be able to secure new work, and that requires sales skills. I know, you didn’t go to law school to sell stuff (nor did I)… And yet, if you’re uncomfortable in a sales conversation, your potential client will perceive that discomfort and may think you’re uncomfortable with the matter or the client, or even that you’re trying to hide something.

I’m always on the lookout for alternative ways of looking at sales because you must master your comfort with the idea of sales before you can master the skill itself. And I found a new perspective in a recent article that you cannot afford to miss.

Here’s a teaser: “What we’re really trading in is promises.”

Take two minutes to read the post, then five or ten to contemplate its implications. It’ll change your perspective on both sales and client service.

 

Plans are useless, but…

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I see two huge mistakes among lawyers eager to build a book of business:

  • the urge to jump into action without designing a plan, and
  • the tendency to plan and revise and plan some more without ever moving to action.

Today I’ll offer another perspective on planning, from Dwight Eisenhower:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

In other words, when circumstances change and disrupt your carefully-laid plans, the process of assessing all of the factors that affect your practice will show you how to adjust. (Want to know more about how to create a plan? Check Chapter 3 of The Reluctant Rainmaker.)

How effective is your practice planning?

Progress or excuses?

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One simple question for you today: are you making progress toward your business development goals… Or are you making excuses?

Here’s the tricky part: progress doesn’t necessarily require massive action, and action doesn’t necessarily equate to progress.

Take a minute and get honest with yourself. If you don’t like what you discover, do something different today. Making progress can be as simple as picking up the phone to call a strategically selected contact.

Are you reactionary or responsible?

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After I finished writing last week’s article on the relationship between the generative power of language and your business development activity, I remembered several other articles discussing a similar topic. I highly recommend you check Michael Hyatt’s 3 Ways You’re Giving Up Power with Your Words: How the Way You Speak Can Sabotage Your Success. Hyatt’s discussion of how words like “I’ll try” give us an automatic escape from whatever you say you want to do:

“When we agree to a commitment by saying, “I’ll try” or “I’ll give it my best shot,” we’re saying the opposite. At least that’s what people usually hear.

The problem is that it not only undermines our credibility, it also lowers the chance we’ll make good on the commitment because it’s a subtle denial of our own agency.”

After you’ve read Hyatt’s post, check out this one from Seth Godin. Godin’s upshot:

When you decide to set the agenda and when you take control over your time and your effort, the responsibility for what happens next belongs to you.

And that’s why you must take an entrepreneurial approach to your practice. Change is going to come, and you can be reactionary or responsible. The choice is yours, but only one of those options will lead you to success.

View your practice as an entrepreneur.

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One of the keys to building a successful law practice is adopting an entrepreneurial approach, regardless of your practice setting. In other words, whether you’re a sole practitioner or the newest hire in a gigantic firm (or anywhere in between), you must recognize that you “own” your practice, and you must act accordingly. That means:

  • You take responsibility for building your book of business. You actively work to avoid relying on doing or inheriting work for someone else’s client
  • You take responsibility for your career advancement. You determine what additional skills and experience you need to grow as a practitioner and you make it your business to acquire that.
  • You take responsibility for the experience that your clients have with you. You decide (perhaps in concert with others on your team, if appropriate) how quickly you respond to client inquiries, how and when you proactively provide updates about client matters, to what degree you lead and collaborate with clients, and so on. You consistently look for ways to build value for your clients.
  • You take responsibility for making necessary adjustments based on changing circumstances. You watch for trends in law, in business, and in the economy, and you work to adapt your practice to navigate those trends and to help your clients do the same.
  • You take responsibility for your satisfaction in practice. You know that there’s no reason and no value to staying in a practice or a job you dislike. You understand that you won’t love every moment of your work. You stay attentive to be sure the positive moments significantly outweigh the negative, and if you find that untrue, you make the necessary changes.

If you need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, let’s talk.

If you have the entrepreneurial mindset, read this article by Jonathan Fields, a former practicing lawyer who’s now an author, entrepreneur, and producer of Good Life Project. Titled Why Do So Many Entrepreneurs Hate Their Lives, this article will get you thinking about who you are and how you bring that to your practice. Even if you’re happy with your practice, I guarantee that this article will give you important food for thought. As Fields writes, when you consider the questions posed in the article, “you’ll start to cultivate the level of self-knowledge needed to build something that not only makes money and serves a need but also serves you and the life you seek to create.” Read it (and do the work) now.

It isn’t what you said, it’s how you said it.

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I confess: I’m one of the thousands and thousands of people who can’t get enough of the show “Friends”. The early seasons were especially clever, taking all kinds of language out of context for comedic effect. (Stick with me, I do have a business development point here!) In one episode, Chandler accuses Joey of becoming too feminine thanks to the influence of his new female roommate, which makes Joey pout. Chandler asks what he said wrong, and Joey answers, “It isn’t what you said, it’s how you said it.” (And thousands groaned, having heard exactly that charge somewhere along the line from a significant other.)

Somewhere through life experience, we’ve all learned the lesson that language can make a neutral concept unpleasant or aggressive. As a middle school teacher put it, “Say what you mean. Mean what you say. But don’t say it mean.” Language has power, so we know to choose words carefully to avoid tainting a message with unintended connotations.

How often do you pay attention to the language you use to describe business development?

I recently led a workshop for a small group of lawyers who’ve been tapped as high-potential leaders within their firm. I started the workshop, as I often do, by asking what feels uncomfortable about business development, and one answer guided a large part of our conversation:

I don’t like having to sell myself.

That comment kicked off a conversation that can’t be replicated in a short article, but…

Consider:

  • Do you feel like you have to “sell yourself” to build your practice? How does that feel? Does it change your perspective on your task to think of it as selling your services, helping someone to find a solution to a problem, securing new work, or in some other words?
  • How do you feel about networking? How do you feel about meeting new people, making new connections, or talking with people about things that interest you?
  • Do you enjoy following up with a new contact? What about keeping the conversation going or checking in?
  • What comes up when you think about having a sales conversation? Is it different if you think about offering to help solve a problem, asking for the business, or suggesting the next steps?

Language is generative, and the words you choose carry a certain power or energy. Choose your words so that you don’t get stuck in a particular way of thinking. Substituting selling your services for selling yourself won’t magically transform your business development activity or results, but I guarantee you’ll approach the job differently if you can make that shift. (And if that’s a change you need to make, read the book Selling the Invisible, starting with my review.)