Get more referrals!

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Think about the last three referrals you received. Were they good referrals? Did you receive them recently? Are they part of a regular flow of referrals that you receive?

If the answer to any of these questions is no (or if you couldn’t think of three referrals you’ve received), it’s time to pay attention. An “all referral” business is a dream for many professionals, but only a few succeed in reaching that goal. Many get referrals here and there and have to weed through a number of bad fits to find a few good referrals, and even more suffer the pain of hearing about what would have been a great referral, had your contact only thought of you.

I recently ran across the blog post 5 Marketing Tips to Build a Referral Based Business, and if you aren’t thrilled with the referrals you’ve receiving, you must go read it now. Even though this post is not directed to lawyers, the principles are the same

A 6th tip I would add (and in fact would argue is critical): add value whenever you can for clients and contacts alike. When you add value, you become more memorable, perhaps generate a “wow” reaction, and build relationships. You may possibly tap into the law of reciprocity, which holds that when someone does something nice for us, we seek to return that favor.

What will you change to increase the likelihood of getting a frequent stream of good referrals?

Enjoy biz dev!

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Business development is serious work. The success of your practice and your private practice career may hinge, at least to some degree, on your ability to secure new work. The process demands care and strategic attention.

It can also be fun. Like practicing law, not every bit of it will be enjoyable and some moments will be downright awful. But if there is no humor or pleasure in what you’re doing, the inevitable failures will be hard to take. What’s more, you’ll be more likely to get discouraged and possibly throw in the towel.
Check out this quote from the legendary advertising wizard David Ogilvy, then ask yourself how you might bring “lighthearted gusto” to your efforts.
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Where biz dev & leadership meet

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I have long believed that being a leader is critical to succeeding in business development. For more on why that’s true, check this 2009 post.

Michael Hyatt’s recent blog post The 5 Marks of Authentic Leadership outlines five key aspects of leadership, which include:

  1. Insight
  2. Initiative
  3. Influence
  4. Impact
  5. Integrity 

While Hyatt’s post does not focus on the intersection of leadership and the ability to generate new business, each of his five marks reflects a capacity that is necessary for successful business development. For example, Hyatt describes a leader’s insight in this way:

Leaders need wisdom and discernment for the present. They need to be able to look at complex situations, gain clarity, and determine a course of action.

This insight is, of course, a foundational skill for success in practice, but it applies equally well to business development. Effective business generation tactics will include a display of this wisdom and discernment whether in person-to-person conversation, in which case the comments will be at least somewhat specific to the potential client, or in an article or presentation, in which case the comments will focus more generally on a specific legal issue or on a particular client profile. Your legal and, where applicable, business insight is valuable for clients and for developing new business.

Read Hyatt’s post and ask yourself whether and how your business development activity reflects each of his 5 Marks of Authentic Leadership. Which do you need to amplify?

3 Articles You Need to Read

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I’ve found some interesting articles to share with you this week.  

  1. The skills new lawyers need right away The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System has published a report of the skills necessary for a new lawyer’s success in practice based on a survey of over 24,000 American attorneys. The survey responses identified the skills necessary for short-term success, necessary for long-term success, not necessary but advantageous, or not relevant to success. The results are fascinating, but my eye was drawn to the responses to “Business Development and Relations.”

    While “generate new business” was deemed necessary by 63.3% of respondents and advantageous by an additional 14.4%, “engage in appropriate marketing or fundraising” was deemed necessary by only 43.8% of respondents, advantageous by another 31.4%, and not relevant by the remaining 24.8%. While it’s likely that these responses are skewed somewhat by in-house counsel respondents who are not responsible for generating new business, the disparity makes me wonder what we’re teaching new lawyers and what the “we” represented by these survey respondents believes about our own business development skills. Check out all the business development skill ratings here.
  2. Make yourself important! Mark Herrmann’s column in Above the Law is always a favorite, and his recent column responding to Business Development Gripes does not disappoint. It’s all useful (especially for lawyers concerned about competing with colleagues who have better credentials), but this comment hits home: “And, of course, you could always make yourself important by speaking and writing and developing a reputation. I admit that’s hard, but wallowing in self-pity ain’t a barrel of laughs, either.”
  3. Gaining the Power of Metrics Means Looking At More than Just Legal Spend (registration required) This article addresses the use of data not just to manage legal costs but also to identify and avoid issues that might arise for your clients. This approach also speaks to creating additional value for your clients. Depending on your clientele and practice setting, “data” and “metrics” may feel out of reach for you, but the lessons adhere equally when it comes to studying trends among your clients, in their industry, and in the law as it relates to their interests.

Happy reading!

Does your biz dev plan measure up?

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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:

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Listening to news & trends

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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:

  • Clarify what your clients (and potential clients) do and don’t want. Most answers will be specific to legal representation, but the better you know your clients, the better you will be able to tailor your services.
  • Innovate. Other industries and other practices can spark ideas, but meaningful change will be driven almost exclusively by what your clients view as valuable. Change for the sake of change does nothing.
  • Distinguish yourself and distinguish your firm. When you’ve made a meaningful change, make it loud. There’s always a risk of a misstep, but if you look like everyone else, others will assume that’s how you act, too.

Read the full post, and then ask yourself… Are you listening to the trends? More importantly, are you responding?

Get productivity help!

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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:

  • Notes and Capture
  • Journaling
  • Mind Mapping
  • Storage
  • Time Management
  • Task Management
  • Email Management
  • Project Management
  • Team Sharing
  • Team Chat
  • Calendar Management / Sharing
  • Workflow and Automation
  • Writing
  • Markdown
  • Dictation / Transcription
  • Text Expansion
  • Editorial Calendar
  • Research and Organization
  • Time Tracking
  • Social Media
  • Financial and Business
  • Password Management
  • Personal Digital Assistants
  • Environment

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?

What’s the story about your value?

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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:

Marketing tells a story

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.

Working with Millennials

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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.

  • Managing Millennials in the Legal Workplace: Written by two millennial lawyers, this article is slightly (but not unreasonably) defensive about common perceptions of millennials. One piece of advice is to “[s]et clear expectations, anchor them to an actual purpose and consistently apply them.” While this advice adheres to any generation, for reasons the article explains, it’s particularly on point for millennial lawyers. You may consider setting explicit goals for millennial associates about assistance in writing articles, social media marketing, etc. and connecting the dots on how those activities will help your practice and the firm grow as well as how the millennial lawyer can expect to benefit. Experience suggests that in many cases one cannot simply expect younger associates to be pleased to perform nonbillable work, even if that’s how it was done “when I was a young associate.”
  • 2015 Is The Year Of The Millennial Customer: 5 Key Traits These 80 Million Consumers Share: Although the date in the title of this article might suggest it’s out of date, it’s anything but. One key point here is that “[m]illennials enjoy the possibility of collaborating with businesses and brands, as long as they believe their say matters to the company in question.” This perspective should influence how you work with millennial lawyers as well as how you market to them.
  • The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016: This reports states that 66% of millennials expect to leave their current employment by 2020 and offers ways to increase millennial loyalty. You might consider that today’s associate may well be tomorrow’s associate in-house counsel, which may create opportunities for you to seed and continue valuable relationships for future business development opportunities.

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 not enough

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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.