How you revive a neglected professional relationship.

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Despite the best of intentions, it’s easy to let a relationship slide.  You may not appreciate the value of maintaining professional relationships, or you may simply get too busy to keep up with an effective follow-up contact schedule and system.  It’s all too easy to allow a relationship to atrophy.

So… Can you resuscitate an atrophied professional relationship? Yes! By focusing time and attention on your relationship and maintaining consistent effort, you’ll often be able to revive a good relationship more easily than you built it in the first place.

But you might feel awkward trying to re-energize a stagnant relationship, especially if you aren’t sure that the relationship can be reinvigorated.  Don’t write off a beneficial or enjoyable relationship is unless you have grounded evidence that it can’t be resurrected!  It’s easy to allow discomfort to lead you into turning a neglected-but-viable relationship into a dead one, and lawyers far too often give up on relationships before they’re truly finished.  But how do you know?  Or, as someone often inquires when I’m presenting a business development workshop,  Is it ever too late to rebuild professional relationships that have languished?

The short answer is that it depends on nature and character of the relationship.  The deeper the relationship was in its heyday, the more likely it can be resurrected later.  If, however, you meet once and fail to follow up, or if you follow up only once or twice, the relationship will lack the firm footing necessary to allow it to flourish following a period of silence.  That said, it never hurts to try to rebuild a relationship, particularly if your sole reason for reconnecting is to re-establish communication and not to seek a favor. (If you haven’t been in reasonably consistent contact with someone, chances are that a request for a favor will be met with silence. Pick your battles accordingly.)

So, what can you to do rebuild a connection that has faded?  The simplest, and often the most effective, approach is to do precisely what you would do with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time:  pick up the phone and say, “I realized it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, and you’ve been on my mind.  Is this a good time to talk for a few minutes?  How are things with you?  What’s new?”  If several months have passed since you were in touch with this contact, you may even begin the conversation by re-introducing yourself.  (This is where my recommendation to maintain a database of contacts proves especially helpful:  you don’t have to try to remember when and where you met.)  You may experience a few awkward moments as your contact gets back into the connection, but most people will pick up relatively quickly. Better yet, leave a warm voicemail expressing your desire to reconnect, giving your contact the opportunity to recognize your name and remember your relationship before getting into conversation with you.

If, like many lawyers, you’d rather do nine hours of painstaking document review without a coffee break than pick up the phone, you do have other options.  For example, you might consider the following:

  • Send an email to reconnect.  You might suggest talking by telephone and either arrange a time to let your contact know you’ll be calling.  While you’ll still have to pick up the phone, you’ve created an expectation that you will call, and chances are good that you’ll avoid an awkward beginning.  If you suggest that you’ll call, though, you absolutely must do so — or run the risk of looking like a flake.
  • Send an article or other resource that will interest your contact.  The resource may address a legal or non-legal issue, but it must be tied in some way to a conversation you’ve had with the contact.  Attach a note that says, “I remember talking with you about [topic of resource] at [wherever you had the conversation] and thought of you when I saw this [resource].  Hope it’s useful!”  By doing so, you not only reconnect by offering assistance, but you do so in a way that will bring your conversation back to your contact’s mind and refresh the relationship.
  • Issue an invitation.  You might invite your contact to an open house or to attend a CLE or other seminar of interest with you.  If you deliver an invitation by mail or email, be sure to attach a note saying that you look forward to reconnecting.  This personal touch will indicate to your contact that your interest in genuine.
  • Seek out news about your contact.  This may be a more challenging approach if you’re seeking to reconnect than to maintain a relationship, but it’s worth a quick search to see whether your contact has been in the news recently.  You may find news of a professional event (an honor awarded, a trial won, a leadership position attained) or a personal event (a new marriage, a new baby, a recreational or community activity).  Such news offers an ideal reason to get in touch again.
Take a few minutes this week to review your list of contacts.  With whom should you reconnect?  Choose three to five people and reach out to them.  Building and maintaining your network is always a valuable activity, and keeping relationships alive will often pay off (often in unexpected ways) over time.

Biz dev is a marathon.

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A friend recently ran her first marathon. She didn’t know how it would feel to run 26 miles, and she was concerned about giving up partway through if she started to feel too tired. She even used a marker to write on the inside of her arm, “Your mind will give up before your body. Don’t stop.” She not only finished: she finished almost 15 minutes faster than she’d imagined she might.

Her tip? Don’t let the mind run the show when it’s tired, stressed, and worried. Make a commitment to action and keep going even when it gets hard.

That approach works for literal and metaphorical marathons. And that’s another reason why it matters so much that you have a business development plan with clear interim and ultimate goals: you’re less tempted to stop even when it gets hard if you can look to your interim goals to mark progress and focus on your ultimate goals to provide continues motivation. (Your ultimate goal refers not to originating and/or serving $X of business, but doing that so that you can make partner or pay cash for your kids’ college tuition or stay at the Four Seasons on your next vacation.)

Here’s the bottom line:

Don't stop when you are tired.Stop when you are done.

The power of quiet selling

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Susan Cain launched a national conversation about introverts with her 2013 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and that conversation continues three years later. Even the ABA Journal recently jumped into the introvert discussion with its January cover story Introverts in an Extrovert’s World: Most lawyers are introverted, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Several articles and book have addressed sales for introverts, most notably Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which concluded that ambiverts (those who lie between introversion and extroversion) tend to be the strongest performers in sales. A quick Google search on “sales introvert” will turn up some 481,000 results. It’s a hot topic.

I recently ran across an article titled The Power of Quiet Selling that, although it’s primarily directed to introverts, offers tips that anyone engaged in business development should consider. For example:

  • Ask thoughtful questions that will help you (and your sales prospect) understand their priorities.
  • Educate instead of persuade: using a collaborative approach positions you as a trusted advisor.
  • Be patient—the relationships you build will generate even greater rewards down the road
The Power of Quiet Selling is worth your time, and if you apply the article’s recommendations (whether you’re an introvert, ambivert, or extrovert), you can expect to see business development benefits from your efforts.

My favorite biz dev book

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I do a lot of reading about business development, and I share reviews of some of the best books with you. For this week’s celebration of the 10th anniversary of Fleming Strategic, here’s a review of my all-time favorite business development book, which I first shared in 2010.

But first… Did you grab your complimentary copy of the e-book version of Legal Rainmaking Myths? If not, get it here—but hurry: the offer ends at midnight on January 16.

And now, on to the book review…

Selling the Invisible

by Harry Beckwith

“You can’t see them-so how do you sell them?

That’s the problem with services. . . .

This book begins with the core problem of service marketing: service quality.  It then suggests how to learn what you must improve, with examples of techniques that work.  It then moves to service marketing fundamentals: defining what business you really are in and what people really are buying, positioning your service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating.”

Selling the Invisible offers targeted suggestions for marketing your services, with plenty of anecdotes to illustrate its points.  Divided into eleven sections with multiple one- to three-page chapters in each section, Beckwith’s book gives bite-sized lessons on what clients and prospects (that is, potential clients) want, expect, and find persuasive.  A few notable tidbits:

 

  • Serve your clients as they want to be served.  Beckwith criticizes the lawyers who write a “really good brief” but fail to notice that the brief was “equally effective for the client $5,000 earlier” and that it “covers an issue that might have been avoided entirely through good lawyers.”  In other words: don’t get so caught up in technical merit that you overlook what the client sees.
  • Marketing starts with you and your employees.  “Review every step—from how your receptionist answers to the message on the bottom of your invoices—and ask what you could do differently to attract and keep more customers.  Every act is a marketing act.  Make every employee a marketing person.”  For example, notice how you (or your assistant or receptionist) answer the telephone: would you-the-caller want to talk with whoever answers your phone, or would you-the-caller have the impression that you were interrupting something more important?
  • Clients seek personality and relationships.  “Service businesses are about relationships.  Relationships are about feelings.  In good ones, the feelings are good; in bad ones, they are bad.  In service marketing and selling, the logical reasons that you should win the business—your competence, your excellence, your talent—just pay the entry fees.  Winning is a matter of feelings, and feelings are about personalities.”
  • Being Great vs. Being Good.  “People in professional services are especially prone to thinking that the better they get, the better their business will be.  The more the tax lawyer knows about the tax code . . . the more business will beat a path to [her] door[].”  Beckwith cites examples in law, medicine, and financial services to prove that clients place relationship, trust, good communication, and other non-technical proficiencies above technical skill.  (I would add the corollary that technical excellence is a prerequisite rather than a pure competitive advantage.)  Beckwith’s summary: “Prospects do not buy how good you are at what you do.  They buy how good you are at who you are.”  (But you still have to have the skills to deliver.)

Why should you read Selling the Invisible?

 If you consider yourself skilled at selling your services (and you have the business to back it up), review Selling the Invisible for reminders.  If you’re new to marketing your services, this book will serve as a foundational text for basic marketing principles.  You’ll also pick up terrific ideas for client service and for contributing to your team’s or organization’s business development efforts.

Selling the Invisible is an invaluable addition to a marketing library.  It’s quick to read; one could even read the bolded summary statements at the end of each chapter to get the gist of Beckwith’s ideas.  But, as you read, be sure to implement Beckwith’s bottom line in the chapter entitled Fallacy: Strategy is King, and “Do Anything” (preferably passionately) rather than creating and revising strategy endlessly.

Your anniversary gift (limited time!)

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We made it through the holiday season! But there’s one more to celebrate, and it’s pretty special to me.

Fleming Strategic (originally known as Life at the Bar and then Lex Innova Consulting) is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this month! At the end of December 2005, I left my last full-time law firm position, and on January 30, 2006, I wrote my very first blog post, partly as a challenge for myself to see if I had anything to say. Ten years, three books, and hundreds and hundreds of blog posts later, I think the answer is yes.

I believe in celebrations, and so I’ll be celebrating Fleming Strategic’s tenth anniversary all month. This week, I have a special anniversary gift for you: a free electronic copy of my most recent book, Legal Rainmaking Myths: What You Think You Know About Business Development Could Kill Your Practice. Just click this link to find out more and claim your copy – and feel free to invite colleagues to get their own copy as well.  Just be sure to download your copy no later than January 16, 2016. In this case, good things will not come to those who wait!

In the meantime, here’s one of my earliest articles on networking skills. The blog isn’t pretty (because I “designed” it myself) and the links no longer work, but the information is still relevant. As an example, here are three tips on how to network well:

  • Be prepared to introduce yourself in 15-20 seconds. Without stumbling. This is usually called the “elevator speech.” Make it interesting. If it’s boring to say, it’s boring to hear.
  • Carry business cards and have them easily accessible…..
  • But don’t offer indiscriminately them at the beginning of a conversation! It’s far better to chat for a while, to know someone about the person, and then to ask for his or her business card. What if, horror of horrors, they don’t reciprocate and ask for yours? Not a problem. Send them one when you follow up after the event.

Lots has changed in the last ten years… But the basics of good networking have not.

See you next week with another fun (and still relevant) blast from the past.

Not the same year-end pablum again!

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We’re at the tail-end of the year, a busy time whether you’re celebrating with family or pushing to meet a year-end matter deadline. At year’s end, the ‘net is awash in articles about evaluating last year and prepping for the new year that are just warmed over from previous years. Ugh! Who has time? But…

Here are two articles worth making time to read this week because they’ll challenge your way of thinking:

  • Paying the Smart Phone Tax by Seth Godin. I essentially run my business from a smart phone, and I rely on it for critical news about a terminally ill family member. When I saw the title of this post, I immediately worried about a financial tax on my phone, but the post itself points out a much more significant price to pay from overusing it.
  • The Four Hardest Questions to Answer at the End of the Year  by Michael Bungay Stanier. We all reflect on the closing year as a new one approaches, and our questions tend to scratch only the surface. As Stanier argues, asking only “what did you do” and “how did it go” allows you to avoid going deeper into what’s really going on. He recommends four alternate questions:
o    What do I need to kill off?

o    Where have I stayed stuck?

o    How did I let myself down?

o    Where are you really headed?

Read the article for further explanation of these questions, and then answer them honestly to gain deep insight leading into to purposeful action. I particularly like Stanier’s suggestion that you answer the questions out loud with a trusted friend or colleague.
These two articles got me thinking in a fresh and challenging direction. I’ll be working on Stanier’s four questions next week. Will you join me?

2016’s hot-or-not forecast

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It’s prediction season! This time of year, you’ll find one article after another reviewing trends and predicting next year’s conditions in the legal profession. Here’s the best forecasting article I’ve read this season, with a few highlights:

  • Legal project management is a hot topic, though it’s also under-utilized.
  • Alternative fee arrangements continue to be popular, especially in the context of an overall reduction in legal fees. Some firms are using non-partner track attorneys to ensure more consistent profit under these arrangements.
  • Younger attorneys, especially millennials, are not as interested in the traditional law firm model as previous generations, which is causing a crimp in succession planning and challenges in hiring.
  • Corporate legal departments continue to expand and take on work that would previously have gone to outside counsel; lawyers with large books of business are joining in-house departments in search of better quality of life. (Though the article doesn’t draw this conclusion, I’d suggest that this is also a result of an increased squeeze on lawyers who don’t originate enough work to be considered financial contributors to the firm, particularly non-equity partners in large firms.)
  • Increased competition is here. Law firms are competing not only against one another, but also against accounting firms that are building legal services divisions and other outside service providers that can provide services previously offered only by lawyers.

Here’s another article that offers the 15 Best Opportunities and Trends for 2016. A key takeaway from this article is that “[m]ore clients expect outside counsel to understand their business” and that lawyers must seek to understand the business and demonstrate that understanding. If you serve business clients, this should be considered a non-negotiable area of focus for the coming year. (Interestingly, this article offers a generally rosier view of the upcoming year than the previous article.)

Read the articles and consider the trends… Ask yourself whether your experience bears out these articles’ conclusions. Predictions are often incorrect and where there’s a trend, there’s often a counter-trend as well. But the bigger question is, so what? What do the trends these reports identify mean for your practice, and what adjustments do you need to make? 

New study: Should you blog?

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I ran across two interesting articles last week summarizing a recent survey on in-house counsel’s content consumption habits and preferences. (Download a summary of the survey results here.) The survey suggests that content marketing for lawyers may not be all it’s cracked up to be… But is that true?

“The survey clearly shows that in-house counsel know the value – or the potential value – of relevant content generated by law firms,” said John Corey, founding partner of Greentarget. “But the sheer volume of content out there combined with the dearth of documented strategies, and even the absence of any kind of strategies, has caused a problem for many firms – and an opportunity for those who can get it right.”

Survey findings include:

  • Client alerts and newsletters are more valuable to survey respondents than blogs
  • Professional use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is on the rise (though LinkedIn is still the preferred social media platform for professional use)
  • 71% of in-house counsel have used Wikipedia to conduct company and industry research
Blogging seems to take a particular hit in the study findings, with 30% of in-house counsel stating that they don’t visit blogs at all and a decreasing number who report being influenced by a blog in making a hiring decision. However, that means that 70% of in-house counsel do read blogs. It also overlooks the increased visibility that can result from valuable content generation, because a blog can often be a springboard to being quoted in traditional media, which 98% of respondents consider to be very or somewhat credible.

What’s the takeaway message for you?
  1. Have a strategy for producing and using content for marketing purposes. Value quality over quantity.  65% of in-house counsel rate blogs as “somewhat or very credible,” but 75% find law-firm blogs valuable. Don’t waste your time trying to crank out voluminous content; instead, invest the time to provide thoughtful exposition and commentary on topics that matter to your clients and potential clients. Be clear on your content marketing objectives.

  2. Be clear on your content marketing objectives. Are you producing content to establish your credibility in your area of practice? Are you writing in an effort to attract attention from potential clients? Are you writing (or paying someone to write for you) in an effort to attract web traffic through optimized search terms? Each of these objectives (along with others) is viable, but effective implementation calls for different strategies.

  3. Build distribution strategies into your content marketing approach. If you’re spending the time to produce high-quality content, you should also spend the time to distribute it via social media, perhaps to submit it to Wikipedia where appropriate, and to highlight it on your bio sketch and/or firm website.
  4. View content marketing as a door opener, not a business closer. If you’re expecting a blog or newsletter to generate business in and of itself, you’re likely to be disappointed. Instead, use it to build a reputation, to buttress your credibility in practice, and to open or continue conversation with contacts that can lead to business.

  5. Value quality over quantity. It bears repeating, because this point is really the bottom line of content marketing. Throwing something together because you know content is supposed to be valuable is a dead-end effort. Producing content that starts or adds to conversation on issues that matter to the kinds of clients you seek to serve can create significant opportunity.
What’s your content marketing strategy, and how might the survey results influence it?

Take time to Work ON your practice.

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Lawyers, like other business owners, tend to spend their days working in their business: seeing clients, writing documents for client services, having meetings about client projects, and so on. And that’s good and important work, without which the business that is your practice would cease to exist.

Marketing lives and thrives, however, when you’re working on your business. That’s when you come up with a new way to talk about what you do and identify an under-served client sector that needs your services. That’s when you come up with a great idea for an article, you write that article, and you consider who might help you land a speaking opportunity to develop further and share what you wrote in the article.

So, here’s today’s question: how much time are you spending on your practice? And is the time you’re spending effective?

Effectiveness is driven by not just the degree to which you’re able to raise your professional profile and the business you bring in, but also by the number of smart ideas you have and implement. As Seth Godin writes, “Pretty good ideas are easy. The guts and persistence and talent to create, ship and stick it out are what’s hard.”

Take some time today to work on your business. If you don’t know where to start, start with asking what is your vision for your practice. Consider your practice area, your sub-niche within that area, the clients with whom you work, how you serve those clients, and your practice setting, for starters.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT FROM YOUR PRACTICE?

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A number of my clients recently seemed to hit a brick wall with their business development plans. Nothing was wrong, exactly; but progress was much slower than it had been in the past, and my clients seemed to have a certain malaise. In each case, problem solving revealed no problem with the plans themselves, but one key issue: uncertainty about the ideal result.

Here’s the issue: without clarity and a certain excitement about the preferred practice setting, the preferred number of clients and matters, the preferred kind of client and matter, and so on, business development is almost destined to fail. That isn’t an airy-fairy “thoughts become things” assertion. Instead, it’s the result of two truths.

  1. Business development is a simple process, but usually not an easy process.
  2. If you don’t know exactly what you want and why, business development challenges that might otherwise be overcome will seem insurmountable because you don’t know clearly what it is or because you don’t want it enough.

Certain telltale signs reveal this lack of clarity.

 

If your business development progress has slowed, ask yourself these questions:

  • Are you a high achiever who’s suddenly feeling meh about the goals you’ve set?
  • Does business development work that seemed doable in the past suddenly seem unusually difficult?
  • Do you find yourself unwilling or unable to make the time for business development activity?
  • Do you know what to do to grow your practice, but find yourself resistant to taking those steps?

If you responded “yes” to more than one of these questions, something is out of kilter. Very often, that something is a mismatch between what you say you want and what you actually want or a lack of clarity about your objectives and how your business development plan will get you there.

To get clear on your objectives, ask yourself what you want from your practice in terms of your subject matter, your practice setting, the kinds of clients with whom you want to work (and those with whom you do not want to work), the kind of matters you enjoy, how much time you want to spend working, how much money you want to make, what you want your day-to-day professional life to look like, and what you want your personal life to look like. You’ll know you’ve got clear objectives when you can describe the practice you’re aiming for and how it fits into your life with clarity, and you’ll know your objectives are right for you when that description gives you a sense of excitement or satisfaction.

If you’re at a standstill, stop beating yourself up and start asking questions. I have yet to meet a lawyer who simply cannot build a practice, but I’ve met a lot who actually don’t want to build a practice or who want something that isn’t likely to result from executing the business development plan they’ve created.

So… What do you want from your practice?