Legal Rainmaking: To Sell Is…

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This week, I met with a lawyer who’s been in practice for 50 years, who will be using The Reluctant Rainmaker to teach a law school class on business development.  We touched on how the practice has changed over the years and why he encouraged his sons to become lawyers, but the bulk of our conversation centered on how he has marketed his practice over the years.  Perhaps you’ll be interested in these three takeaways from our talk:

  1. Business development starts with personal development and must be grounded in integrity, authenticity, and truth.  Turns out that we’re both fans of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and I recommended The Speed of Trust by Covey’s son, Stephen M. R. Covey.
  2. Small, consistent touches are memorable and build relationships.  For instance, this lawyer sends a book that meant a great deal to him when his mother died whenever he learns of a death in a client’s immediate family.  His firm also uses a client satisfaction form at the close of every representation, and he’s created cards to send whenever he sees a client mentioned in the news.
  3. Meeting new people is critical to the success of any practice.  This lawyer serves on several boards, speaks regularly to associations relevant to his practice, and is active in a wide variety of community activities.  As we discussed, the small, consistent touches won’t accomplish anything if you don’t have people to receive them.

We also agreed that too many lawyers have bought into the myth that sales is inapplicable to professionals.  Every lawyer must understand how to sell, and that’s why I’ve reviewed Daniel Pink’s recent book To Sell Is Human recently.  Read about that here.

Out of curiosity, how would you complete the sentence stem, To sell is…?

 

Legal Marketing: To Sell Is Human

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The subtitle of Daniel Pink’s recent book To Sell Is Human is The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.  I’m not entirely sure that the truths shared in the book are altogether surprising, but the book puts a human, approachable face on a necessary skill that suffers from a bad reputation.

Pink starts by proving that we’re all in sales now.  He defines sales as the business of persuading, convincing, and influencing, which he calls “moving” others.  With a definition that broad, it’s almost impossible to find someone who isn’t in what Pink calls “non-sales selling.”  Pitching an idea (to a boss, a team, or a jury), convincing a hyped-up kid to go to bed, or teaching resistent students all qualify as sales activity.

Nonetheless, the majority of people view selling with distaste, largely because of the deceptive tactics that salespeople are known to pull.  Pink cites record-breaking car salesman Joe Girard, known for establishing relationships with buyers by fabricating connections.  (“You’re from Yonkers?  Me too!  Your aunt has a beach house on Long Island?  Me too!  Your middle name is Thaddeus The Great?  Me too!”  UGH, right?)  Although Girard was quite successful in the past, Pink suggests that he wouldn’t do as well in today’s world.  Why?

We have shifted, writes Pink, from caveat emptor to caveat venditor.  Today’s purchasers come into sales conversations armed with information, reviews, and ratings of products and services.  As a result, sales now consists of curating information to assist the purchaser, finding answers together, and making sales both personal and purposeful.

In contrast to the old “ABC” = “Always Be Closing” model of sales, Pink defines the ABCs as Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.

  • Attunement refers to approaching the sales exchange from the buyer’s perspective.  Pink notes that in contrast to the stereotype that extroverts are the best personality type for sales, ambiverts (meaning those in the middle of the extrovert/introvert range) are actually more successful because of superior skill in attunement.
  • Buoyancy is the combination of “a gritty spirit and a sunny outlook.”  Pink urges sellers to be optimistic and reason-focused (asking, for instance, “Can I succeed?” before a sales encounter, to prompt reasons to expect success rather than just ungrounded motivation), with just enough negativity to stay pragmatic.
  • Clarity calls on a successful seller’s ability to define the problem to be solved through the sale and why the purchaser might not want to buy your solution.  Pink offers several tactics to use her, including emphasizing experience over material objects and including a small negative attribute to the solution being sold to make the positives more believable.

When it comes to the “how to” of selling, To Sell Is Human is not comprehensive, and if you’re looking to become an expert in sales, you’ll want to add other resources.  However, he offers three points that provide significant insight into the process of selling.  One of the most useful is Pink’s list of six new ways to pitch a solution:  the one-word pitch, the question pitch, the rhyming pitch, the 140-character Twitter-style pitch, the subject line pitch, and the Pixar pitch.  These won’t translate directly to selling legal services, but the exercise is helpful in crystallizing what a buyer needs to know and what will pique her interest.

Pink also recommends the use of improvisation techniques, which allow the seller to accept whatever a buyer says and to add a suggestion that supports the sale.  I couldn’t agree more about the value of improv for sales and any other business discussion.  See my review of Improv Wisdom for additional suggestions.

Pink finally urges sellers to come from service, focusing on the value that the solution will bring to the buyer.  This point feels like the most “human” of the suite:  instead of just looking from the buyer’s perspective, service requires an independent determination that the buyer will benefit.  Sales, in other words, is not done to someone, it’s done for them.

What’s in it for lawyers?

So many lawyers have told me that they can’t possibly excel in rainmaking because they aren’t extroverts.  This interview in which Pink explained why ambiverts (which includes most of us) perform the best in sales is what prompted me to pick up the book.  If you’ve ever worried that your introversion will block your ability to land business, read the book.  That section alone makes it worthwhile.

More generally, the book’s premise and examples will help to mitigate distaste for selling and the idea is something you do to someone, not for them.  That shift in perspective alone can transform the way you approach business development.

Finally, the examples and exercises will focus your attention and will help you to improve in sales.  As I said, learning sales techniques will require additional training (I recommend Mastering the Complex Sale:  How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High!  By Jeff Thull), but To Sell Is Human will help to erase discomfort around sales and provide an authentic way of approaching a necessary task.

Networking Secret: We tend to like people who like us.

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This month, I’ve selected quotes from some terrific blog posts about relationship.  Read the quotes, and then go check out these posts.  They’re too good to miss.

We all like people who like us.  If I show you I’m genuinely happy to meet you, you’ll instantly start to like me.  (And you’ll show that you do, which will help calm my nerves and let me be myself.)
~Jeff Haden, 6 Habits of Remarkably Likable People

A few might dispute the notion, but most will agree — relationship trumps everything.

Whether in the business or personal arena, relationship provides the context in which almost everything is interpreted.  It influences judgment and defines value.
~Eric Fletcher, Deliver the Experience or Lose the Relationship

Social media is the perfect medium for someone like me — someone who’s an introvert, a bit on the shy side, and prefers to have the safety of being behind a computer screen rather than face-to-face.
~Lindsay Griffiths, Taking it Offline 

The Power of the Pocket (of Time)

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I’ve been thinking lately about the power of the pocket.  Not pockets of money, but pockets of time.  You see, I’ve gen myself a deadline of March 15 to finish the draft of my upcoming book Legal Rainmaking Myths:  How What You THINK You Know About Business Development Can Kill Your Practice.

With that big deadline looming, here’s what else I’m doing:  preparing for and holding regular client meetings, doing my own marketing, working on content for a program I’ll be releasing soon, engaging on social media, finishing up a real estate transaction, caring for one of my dogs who almost died recently (dog lovers:  bloat and torsion are terrifying; read up on it in case you ever face the symptoms, because minutes matter), caring for other quad- and biped family members, managing a renovation project, planning some upcoming presentations, and so on.  While our specific tasks will be different, my guess is that you have as much or more on your plate.

Maybe the volume of tasks sounds familiar.  Most of us have more to do than we have hours available.  We also have the inevitable waiting time and downtime, some of which go unused.  Free time is important for recharging and getting grounded.  But it’s hard to recharge while waiting in line to renew a driver’s license or finding 10 free minutes when arriving early for an appointment.

That’s why it’s helpful to know what you can accomplish in a pocket of time.  I use Reeder to catch up on blog posts and Pocket to catch up on other reading I’ve clipped from the web.  I often carry notecards, and I maintain a list of non-critical “when I can” tasks (for example, comparing prices and shipping costs for dog food on various sites) in Nozbe.  Give me 10 minutes, and I’ll knock at least a couple of items off my list.

What can you accomplish in a pocket of time?

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Unhappy lawyer no more: Monica Parker visits Life at the Bar

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Although many lawyers who read this blog enjoy practicing law, comments and emails I’ve received prove that not all readers fall into that category.  Studies show that anywhere between 20 and 70 percent of lawyers would like to leave the practice.  If you fall into that group, where do you turn?

Meet Monica Parker.  Monica is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former unhappy lawyer who now serves as coach and guide for lawyers who want to leave practice.  Thanks to her recently-published book, Monica’s assistance is now available to an even broader audience of lawyers.

The Unhappy Lawyer: A Roadmap to Finding Meaningful Work Outside of the Law is an amazing offering for any lawyer who’s ever wondered about a career change.  Down-to-earth, funny, with gentle but firm “hard truths,” Monica shares her own story along with case studies (for the notoriously hard-to-convince legal crowd) and exercises designed to help an unhappy lawyer make the leap out of practice into a satisfying career.  I’m delighted that Monica is “stopping by” today as a part of her blog tour, to answer a few questions I posed.

Julie asks: I’ve received emails and blog comments from unhappy lawyers who can’t see a way to leave the law and maintain their income, and they feel huge resistance from a spouse or partner about making a career change. And yet, they’re unhappy in practice. What can you say to someone who’s an unhappy lawyer making a great income on which s/he and his/her family have come to depend?

Monica answers: You’ve got 2 major challenges here: one, you’re afraid you won’t be able to support your family if you leave the law and two, your family disapproves of you making a change.

Here are my thoughts about both challenges:

First you should know that you’re not alone in experiencing these challenges. These are the major hurdles for a lot of lawyers. And, yet, they do find ways to overcome them and pursue the careers of their dreams.

I’ve got lots of good tips about these challenges in my book but let me give you some quick and dirty answers:

Can you change careers and make the same income? It’s possible. It’s not the starting point for career exploration though. Why? Because as you’re experiencing, focusing on this issue is like a door slamming in your face. I have my clients start with a “check-up.” Where’s your money going? Is it going where you want it to go? For example, if you do this exercise for a few months and discover that a lot of your discretionary income is going out the door for “retail therapy,” well, it’s worth considering, are you buying all this stuff because you want it or because you’re miserable? Would you want it/need it if you were doing work you love? Probably not.

It’s about trade-offs really. What are you willing to trade for career satisfaction? Maybe it’s a portion of your salary (at least to start) but it may also be frustration, anger, stress, migraine headaches, ulcers, the list goes on and on. That might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

As for your family of “doubting Thomases,” of course these folks are worried. They want you to be happy but not at the family’s expense. It may take a series of difficult conversations but over time you can work to build understanding between you and your family that the move will be a good one for all of you. Your kids may be willing to forego ski vacations and fancy toys if it means Dad/Mom will be able to make their soccer games and dance recitals or heck, actually go on vacation with them for a change.

What you have to avoid is the temptation of trying to convince your family to agree with you that you should leave the law. You can’t make people agree with you, as wonderful as that would be. What’s really underlying that urge is your need to get permission to make the change. No one can give you that permission…but you.

Julie asks:  Some of the lawyers who say they want to leave the law don’t have any idea of where to begin to figure out what they want to be when they “grow up.” How do you recommend an unhappy lawyer might explore career options?

Monica answers:  Start with the basics. What interests you? One, make a list of career possibilities that appealed to you as a child, young adult, and what appeals to you now as an adult. Don’t censor yourself. Two, if you have absolutely no idea what you might like to do, go on a field trip for a couple of months. Keep a little notebook handy and jot down anything you see or hear that catches your attention. See a bakery and wish you could spend your mornings making exotic cookies? Jot it down in your notebook. After a couple of months, you should have lots of ideas. See if you can categorize them into 5 – 7 categories. Now you’ve got a sense of some of the areas that might appeal to you.

Once you know what interests you, it’s time to get out and start exploring! There are lots of ways you can do this without giving up your day job. Interested in owning a dirt bike racing shop? Take some dirt bike racing classes; see if a store owner will let you shadow him for a day. Fascinated by event planning? Offer to plan your grandmother’s surprise 85th birthday or a friend’s wedding. Your goal here is to “try on” the career and see how it fits. Let your gut tell you what it thinks. This isn’t the time for intellectualizing.

Julie asks:  Everyone has frustrating days at work, and sometimes when a job is a bad fit, the entire career can feel wrong. How do you know when to say enough is enough?E

Monica answers:  The answer is as simple as, when the bad days outweigh the good. I actually list 7 reasons you know it’s time to leave your career in my book. I’ll share the “Top 3″ here. First, if you’re fantasizing about everyone else’s job. I mean from the postal worker to the landscaping crew. In other words, you’re romanticizing their jobs. Second, if you’re doing the Sunday night countdown. That means every hour on the hour you’re watching the clock on Sunday and dreading the week starting. Third, you’re either consistently bored or overwhelmed at work. You’re not engaged or you can’t see over the piles at your desk. If this is happening to you all of the time, this is not what work is meant to be.

Michelle Obama, a dissatisfied associate?

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There’s an interesting story in yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times, excerpting a new book that describes Michelle Obama’s dissatisfaction with the work she was doing as a second-year associate at Sidley Austin.  A sample:

Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White [the partner in charge of the firm’s advertising group, of which Obama was a member] says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, “she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn’t giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, ‘Basically she’s complaining that she’s being treated like she’s a second-year associate,’ and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn’t start treating one of them a lot better.”

White says he talked to Michelle about her expectations, but the problem could not be resolved because the work was what it was. He is not sure any work he had would have satisfied her. “I couldn’t give her something that would meet her sense of ambition to change the world.”

 Those who dislike the Obamas will likely find a prima donna attitude here, and those who like the Obamas will likely nod and agree that she was destined for much greater activities.  Let’s set politics completely aside, though, and ask instead: What’s an ambitious young lawyer to do when dealing with work that appears to be unduly mundane?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, I suspect.  If I were to coach someone feeling this level of dissatisfaction, I would ask questions like:

  • What do you want, ultimately, from your career?  What’s the traditional path to get there, and can you identify alternatives that might be more pleasing?
  • What do you want your day-to-day practice life to look like?
  • With whom do you want to work?  (General descriptions of colleagues, though identifying specific individuals might be quite telling.)
  • What kind of organization will be a good fit for you?  How well do you work within a hierarchy?  How do you feel about firms that blend hierarchy and meritocracy?
  • What does it mean to you to “pay your dues” in your career?

Many others, of course, but I’d likely start with those questions.  The goal would be to figure out the end-game first (because if the lawyer in question wanted to be a partner at a large law firm, the path to getting there would likely look quite different from the path she’d select if she wanted to teach law, just for example.)

The article, though, and my imaginary coaching session with Mrs. Obama highlights one comment that I often hear from ambitious large-firm lawyers: making it through the first few years can be difficult and frustrating, and those who stay the course may need a clear reason for doing so, to keep in mind that the boring work ultimately serves a purpose.

Top delegation mistakes

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I’m still getting swamped with questions about the free preview call I did a couple of weeks ago, discussing delegation skills and how to manage email.  So, I thought I’d share the five top mistakes lawyers make when delegating.  If you recognize yourself in any of these mistakes, it’s time to brush up on your skills!

1.  Rushing.  Making an assignment before thinking about the critical aspects of delegation (which are set forth in the next section) is almost a guarantee that you won’t get the end result that you want.  Without sitting down to think about what the finished product should be, you may not even know what you really need.  Rushing means that you may not select the best person to whom to delegate the task or that you don’t describe exactly what you need to know and/or how you want the results.  When you rush, you’re highly likely not to get what you need.  You end up frustrated and even more in the hole time-wise than you were when you started: now you have to do the work (or re-delegate it) and you’re starting late.

An example: Paula, a partner, asked Evan, a third-year associate, to draft a deposition outline.  She told Evan that she didn’t want the outline to include questions, and that instead she wanted a subject matter outline.  Evan took Paula’s direction literally and prepared an extensive outline organized by topic, with issues set out below each topic and supported by well-organized, highlighted, and flagged documents.  Paula was livid, however, when she discovered that the outline didn’t include any questions.  She had wanted Evan to skip the opening questions but to include questions that would get to the heart of the factual and legal issues – but because what she said was, “no questions,” Evan misunderstood.  Should he have clarified before completing the outline?  Absolutely.  Paula, however, bears responsibility as well for a problem that could have been avoided had she simply paused to think about how best to describe the work product she wanted to receive.

2.  Delegating too little.  Lawyers are highly skilled and self-reliant, and too many of us believe that we should be in control of every aspect of our practices.  But here’s some news: you are not the lone ranger.  Failing to delegate costs you time.  What’s worse, if you don’t give your staff and junior colleagues stretch projects that challenge and engage them, they won’t advance professionally.  They’ll get bored and probably move on to another position, or worse yet you’ll find yourself surrounded by “zombies” who show up to the office everyday but are completely disengaged from their work.

3.  Delegating too much.  The first problem with over-delegating is, of course, that it presents numerous ethical issues.  You cannot delegate legal work to non-lawyers without adequate supervision, and you should not delegate legal work to other lawyers without appropriate supervision.

Even when you’re delegating administrative tasks only, over-delegation results in poor practice management.  You should not perform the day-to-day administrative tasks required for your practice, but you must be able to do so if you find yourself short-staffed.  This doesn’t mean that you should be as skilled as your assistants at everything from filing to document formatting to mail room procedures, but you should know enough to muddle your way through.

4.  Micromanaging.  Micromanaging produces problems similar to those encountered with under-delegating, though the problems arise even more quickly and tend to be more acute.  Micromanagement undermines the confidence and/or morale of the person to whom you’ve delegated because it sends the message that you don’t trust their judgment.  That person may leave or become a zombie as previously described, but more likely he or she will become frustrated and resentful.  Micromanagers often have a reputation as being impossible to please, and those who cannot be pleased often find that those who work with them quit trying.

Equally troublesome, micromanagement prevents the person doing the work from exercising his or her own judgment and expanding his or her professional development.  Those who are micromanaged don’t have the opportunity to bring their perspective and ideas to the table, which means that the micromanager doesn’t have the chance to be wowed by what those who’ve been assigned the work could do if only they had the freedom.

5.  Not managing enough.  Failure to manage results in the same problems that rushing and over-delegation can produce.  You may encounter ethical issues that could have been avoided with proper supervision, and you may not receive the work product that you wanted and expected.

You can learn some delegation tips here.

Systems awareness for lawyers-leaders

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Elementary school children learn something that talented adults often forget: systems awareness. Remember the song that goes, “the knee bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone,” and so on? That’s a form of systems awareness: if the knee goes out of whack, you can bet that the leg and the hip will suffer too.

Systems are present in client representations. Imagine that you’re representing a client on a tax matter. Isn’t it natural to recognize that the outcome of the matter may affect not only the client’s tax liability, but potentially
his business, her marriage, or its employees as well? Lawyers are trained to recognize the ripples that flow from client matters, but what about other issues?

Your practice, your office, the personnel serving your clients – all of these are systems. Make a change in one area, and it’ll impact other areas as well. As a leader, it’s up to you to recognize the effects of your changes, both prospectively and retrospectively. Doing so will help you to anticipate and avoid problems and to design outcomes that positively impact a particular system.

A few years ago, the executive committee of a law firm decided that a live person should answer all calls received during business hours. To implement that policy, the office manager created a detailed system that regulated which secretaries could go to lunch or on break at what time and which lawyers’ telephones each secretary would cover. Seems sensible, right? Unfortunately, some lawyers didn’t want to have “strangers” responding to client inquiries, and morale among assistants plummeted since they were no longer free to take lunches and breaks together without careful planning. In other words, the system was disrupted. The plan failed miserably, and the hours spent in creating it were wasted – all because no one considered what impact the planned changes would have on the attorney/assistant system.

Systems awareness is also useful in evaluating how to accomplish professional and personal goals. Barbara hired me to improve her client development activities for her family law practice. She found it difficult to get in her billable hours and her rainmaking activities, much less optional interests like exercise and visiting with friends, or even being involved in her children’s extracurricular activities. As we reviewed Barbara’s activities, she remembered that she’d received a number of referrals in the past from people she’d met when she served as den leader for her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. We discussed a variety of activities she could add in, but Barbara kept returning to her prior Girl Scouts experience and finally decided to get involved again.

By resuming Girl Scout activities, Barbara deepened her connection with her daughter, put herself in a situation to meet parents who might need help with family law matters or know others who’d need help, and even got in some exercise. Barbara added extra time to her schedule to do this, but because the time yielded payoffs in several areas, she was able to leverage the time to get benefits that she might not have realized otherwise. Barbara became aware of the “system” formed by the intersection of her personal and professional life. (You might remember a recent review of Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, which suggests experimenting with 4-way wins, which takes advantage of systems awareness.)

To increase your own systems awareness, consider the ripple effects of changes you make or action you might take.

Top Tasks When Beginning in a New Job

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A lawyer contacted me after switching to a new firm. Eager to make a great first impression and to make the most of the first six months, he asked what he should be sure to do. Here’s my non-exhaustive list:

1. Do excellent work. First impressions are often lasting impressions and fumbling an early assignment creates great difficulty. If you make a mistake, you can recover, but so much better not to need to try.

2. Focus on internal networking. Get to know as many people as you can. You’ll be busy with work (we hope!) and it’s important to keep your “business social calendar” hopping as well.

3. Find a mentor within the firm. Especially for those who’ve made a lateral move, you must find someone who will tell you how your new firm’s culture operates.

4. Establish a fantastic working relationship with your assistant. You will likely need some time to get into the groove with someone new. Have regular meetings (they need not be long) to talk about what you need, what you assistant needs, and how you can work well together. Be sure to listen to your assistant’s input as well; he or she may have valuable input for you about how the firm operates.

5. Look for ways you can contribute beyond your work product. You’ll bring a new perspective and may have useful input on all sorts of situations. It’s impossible to list what they might be, so keep your eyes open.

Did I miss anything that you think belongs in the top 5? Please let me know if I did!