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Three Business Development Steps to Take Right Now

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Have you accomplished at least 10% of your marketing goals for the year? Now that we’re into February, pause and take stock of what you have and haven’t accomplished from your 2023 business development plan. Give yourself credit for reviewing and/or updating your plan, but look for specific actions that you’ve taken that are likely to lead to business and/or to raise your professional profile.

Even if you haven’t yet landed new business this year, you should be able to identify the actions you’ve taken so far, the results you’ve seen, and what ultimate outcome you’re realistically aiming toward. Stop right now and send yourself an email with that information. If you can’t make a cogent statement of activity and accomplishments, schedule time to review and update your business development plan (if you haven’t) and then calendar specific steps you’ll complete this month.

If you can point to progress you’ve made toward your business development goals since January 1, then take a look at these three steps and add, as appropriate, to your calendared BD activity for the next month.

Complete this relationship circles exercise to grow your network.

While a network’s strength lies in strong, reciprocal relationships, you must consistently be meeting people and growing the scope of your business development network. That will, of course, allow you the opportunity of meeting new people who may deliver business or professional opportunities to you. Moreover, as you grow your network, you’ll put yourself in an ever-better position to make referrals and introductions that benefit key contacts.

If your network pipeline feels a bit dry, try this simple exercise. Using the schematic below:

  1. Select six groups of people you can access easily. These groups might include a professional organization such as AUTM (previously known as the Association of University Technology Managers), a business group such as a Rotary Club, your college or law school group of friends, or the PTA at your child’s school. Write those group identifiers on the lines above each circle. Ensure that there’s a reasonable connection between each group that you identify and your business development plan.
  2. Brainstorm four to six names of people you should contact in each circle. You’ll end up discarding or delaying many of the opportunities you identify, but you’ll come up with at least a handful of relationships that you may be able to cultivate starting now.
  3. Calendar a reminder to contact those people and follow through. This exercise will generate a list of people with whom you might develop a beneficial relationship. Designing a plan to deepen your contacts and implementing that plan is up to you—and the particulars should be defined in a thoughtfully-crafted business development strategy.

You can repeat this exercise as often as you’d like, proving that you have a full supply of useful contacts…or that it’s time to join some new formal or informal groups of people.

Keep your eyes on the economy – your clients certainly are.

Clients almost always appreciate proactive communication. In today’s environment, one topic that nearly every client will be watching is the economy. That has two consequences for you.

  1. Couch your advice with an eye to the economy and the effect your client will likely experience. Tailoring advice based on financial exposure is something that you should always be doing, but when the financial pundits are discussing whether a recession is on the way or already present, that’s more important than ever—even if your clients don’t specifically raise financial considerations. You’ll put yourself in good stead when clients know that you’re conscious of what matters to them and seeking to focus your work accordingly.
  2. Stay current with your billing and collections. Think back to the beginning of the pandemic, and you’ll see how quickly a client’s generous budget can dry up due to a change in external circumstances. Don’t put your practice behind the financial eight-ball by letting billing slide.

Review Denney’s 20 Marketing Maxims.

Having practiced law for some 45 years and then consulting on matters including business development, Bob Denney was recognized as a leader in strategic planning, leadership, and management. He had a talent for providing a great deal of insight in just a few words, and that’s perhaps best demonstrated by his Twenty Marketing Maxims.

You’ll benefit from reviewing these fundamental principles of business development, but don’t stop with just a review: ask yourself whether you’re implementing each maxim and how you might adjust your business development activity to better reflect it.

Freshen Up for Successful Business Development in 2023

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Happy New Year! You probably spent some of the last days of 2022 or the first of 2023 working on your business development plan, right? If not, hop to it! A current plan will coordinate your BD actions so that everything you do is working in a cohesive way toward a strategy you’ve defined. It’ll keep you on track and avoid wasting time on efforts that aren’t aligned with your objectives. (Not sure where to start? Check out these free Rainmaker resources.)

But did you do your New Year’s freshening up for your business development strategy? The beginning of the year (along with the beginning of the school year, in the fall) is a natural time to look at work you’ve done previously to make sure it’s current. Some suggestions:

  1. Update your LinkedIn profile. This LinkedIn for Lawyers article has a good list of items to consider. Also, be sure that you’ve updated your credentials including professional history, publications, certifications, etc. Ask yourself what a client seeking a lawyer in your practice area would find important and use that answer to guide the information you highlight in your summary as well as other parts of your profile. Start with identifying what you do, not solely your role within your firm, as your headline.
  2. Review your firm bio sketch. How well does its content mirror what you’ve shared on LinkedIn, and vice-versa? While the two profiles should not be copies of one another, the information and the tone should be consistent. This is also a good time to make sure that your sketch is indeed up to date.
  3. Review and update your contact list. Ideally, you’ve been maintaining your contact list throughout the year, but check it now. The list should include up-to-date contact information, an indication of each person’s relevance for business development purposes (A list, B list, or C list), and perhaps personal information that will help you build a deeper professional relationship.
  4. Schedule the conferences you plan to attend this year. Successful conference attendance requires advance preparation; knowing which conference(s) you plan to attend is step one. Schedule the conferences that fit your Business Development strategy and make a note three months before each conference to make a final decision on attendance and to begin preparations. You may be able to get some mileage even from conferences you don’t attend: see items 3 and 4 on the article linked above for pre-conference tips that you can adapt.

Completing these steps will ensure that your Business Development foundation is solid as you prepare for a successful year of growing your profile, your platform, and your book of business.

 

Have You Checked Out?

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Consider this:

How often do you check out on your Business Development activity and goals? A friend and I were talking about the many opportunities for us to distract ourselves while feeling virtuous about it: clearing email, checking LinkedIn for updates from contacts, making lists of the things we plan to do. Most of us even carry Instant Distraction Devices (also known as smartphones) everywhere we go. And, of course, your billable work is both a must-do and a bulletproof source of distraction from other things you’d rather not think about.

I sometimes check out when a task feels too daunting. When it’s big and involved and complicated (even if that’s only because I’ve made it so in my own mind) or when the risk of failure is high. I don’t necessarily mean to do it, but I get distracted because I want to get away from the task at hand. Checking out feels especially legitimate if I’ve actually failed at something, like I’m taking a justified break to catch my breath and renew my energy so I can come back from the failure. Maybe you can relate?

The problem is that checking out, especially when things aren’t going well, eliminates the opportunity to turn things around.

Checking out (even when it’s otherwise a productive activity) ruins momentum. Whatever you do instead interrupts your flow and prevents consistency in your Business Development strategy. Worse yet, it undermines the opportunity to reflect on what isn’t going well and learn from mistakes or obstacles. Lifting your attention from your business development plan (or whatever goal you’ve set for yourself) is analogous to working out for a few weeks or months and then stopping cold turkey: you’ll lose your stride, you’ll lose the strength you’ve built, and most importantly, you’ll lose confidence in yourself and your commitment.

If you check out because things aren’t going as well as you’d hoped they would, here’s what you need to know: some failure is guaranteed to occur when you’re working to grow your practice. You won’t land every potential client or every piece of business. It’s painful to experience even though we know nobody succeeds at everything they attempt. That’s why it’s critical to learn how to fail forward by taking the lessons from your failure so you can make the necessary changes to succeed instead. (For more on this, read John Maxwell’s excellent book Failing Forward.)

Failing forward means that you need to pay attention even when you most want to distract yourself. When you went all-out on a pitch and didn’t get the work. When a potential client promised they were ready to retain you but somehow slipped away. When a promising opportunity to reach a specific potential client or an ideal audience falls apart. When you have the steps of your strategic Business Development plan in place, when you’ve identified the tasks you’ll undertake to effect that strategy, and you stop—whether that’s due to cold feet or other business activities that takes precedence over your plans. Surrender the easy comfort of distraction in favor of doing the hard work that will allow you to reach your Business Development goals.

As you do your annual Business Development review this month, be sure to notice where you stopped because of a failure, an unexpected circumstance, or cold feet. Think about how you can trigger yourself to “pay attention like never before” when something similar happens to your Business Development strategy in the future. You might design a “what stopped me?” analysis. You could arrange an accountability partnership with a friend or colleague and emphasize that you want your partner to ask the hard questions and force you to pay attention when you hit a block. Be creative: there are an infinite number of ways to ensure that you’re paying attention when you want to check out instead, and the only thing that matters is that you choose one and use it.

As for me, I’ve been using a weekly review process. Here’s how that looks:

  1. At the beginning of the week, I set weekly tasks in the various areas of my life that are tied to my annual goals.
  2. At the end of the week, I track what I accomplished from my task list.
  3. Finally, I apply the “traffic light test”: where did I stop (red light), where did I keep going but pull back on my efforts (yellow light), and where did I press forward with all my energy (green light)?

Using this process doesn’t necessarily guarantee that I won’t check out during the week, but it gives me a structure so that I don’t stay checked out. When I look at my red and yellow light lists, I’m forced to pay attention to what’s happening and the decisions I’m making. I can make a conscious decision to stop or slow down, but I can’t stay distracted from the lessons that each week offers.

Take a moment right now to ask yourself: how often do you check out from your Business Development goals? When and why? Then design your own structure so that you don’t check out. Build that structure into your 2023 Business Development plan. Pay attention and refine your plans based on what you discover. By doing this, you’ll avoid stopping because of cold feet and missing the lessons of failure. Your attention will propel you forward, and 2023 can be your best year yet.

If you’d like help with this process, let’s chat. (I’m only accepting one new client to begin working together in January 2023, so don’t delay.)

Enjoy your holidays, and happy new year!

 

 

 

 

On Strategic Planning

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When I begin working with a new client, someone who wants to build a book of business (or a bigger book), the first thing we do is to build a strategy. I’ve written extensively in the past on the process of developing a strategy for business development. (See, for example, Chapter 3 of The Reluctant Rainmaker and the blog posts How Do You Choose Biz Dev Strategy and What’s Your Strategy?) And yet, what every client wants, quite understandably, is a plan of action items that they can do to build the practice. In fact, we talk about a business development plan more than strategy, and it’s a BD plan, not strategy, that I urge lawyers to revisit on a regular basis. What gives?
 
A BD plan is only as good as the strategy that underlies it. Without strategy, a plan is just an uncoordinated task list of actions that you think will bring in more business, but the actions don’t function together or reinforce one another, nor are they pointed to a specific outcome other than more business.

Succeeding in business development requires strategic planning; creating a plan that flows from your strategy comes next. Strategic planning can be difficult (usually is, if it’s done well), and it’s easy to slip into developing a task list instead of a strategy because that creates the illusion of being more productive.

So how do you know when you’re truly engaging in strategic planning?

I ran across this terrific video from the Harvard Business Review called A Plan Is Not a Strategy. In the video, Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, distinguishes strategy from routine planning and highlights the fallacy of what we usually call “strategic planning.”


Martin defines strategy as an “integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win.” (Emphasis added.) A strategy is coherent and doable, but it’s also built on a theory about why this is the best playing field for you and why you’re better than anyone else on this playing field. That theory can’t be proven in advance, so it’s a calculated risk that must be tested.
 
A plan, on the other hand, is composed of discrete, concrete action steps that you can complete. The outcome of those actions must be projected, but it is not guaranteed, and unless the individual steps are tied specifically to a strategy (do this to accomplish this aspect of the strategy), the plan lacks an internal coherence. It’s a task list that defines how to use the resources at your disposal, including your time and budget.
 
And so it follows that strategic planning is the process of defining a strategy and then building a plan to implement that strategy.
 
An example of strategic planning: Beginning at 4:05 in the video, Martin discusses how, years ago, almost all airline carriers were building plans like one another to grow their market share. More routes, better customer service, steps designed to improve on what was already existing. These carriers had a plan designed to further a long-ago defined strategy.
 
But Southwest was an upstart that defined a new playing field (point-to-point flights, rather than hub-and-spoke, for one example) that would allow it to reach a desired type of customer (the group of fliers who essentially wanted a more convenient mode of travel than Greyhound without dramatically increasing the cost). In other words, Southwest built a strategy, whereas other airlines simply continued to implement their growth plans. Changing the curtains, if you will, as opposed to placing the window in a new location.
 
A key criticism of law firms and lawyers is that they tend to follow one another, building a better version of a fairly uniform concept of how to build a practice. Although the planning is often described as strategic planning, it’s usually planning for an old strategy or creating a BD plan that isn’t closely tied to any strategy at all. When did you (or your firm) last take on a review and, if necessary, an overhaul of the strategy underlying your business development plans? Do you know what the current strategy is, beyond seeking clients who need X kind of work and can pay Y kind of dollars?
 
One line makes this a must-watch video: “While you’re planning, at least one competitor is working on strategy.” Query which camp you (or your firm) belongs to and what result that’s likely to achieve.
 
Note that I’m not saying you necessarily need to abandon your current strategy and adopt a new one. It may be that you’ve been through the hard work at least somewhat recently and have a strategy that allows you to distinguish yourself from other lawyers and law firms—to win on the playing field of your choice, to use Martin’s words. If that’s the case, check your BD plan to be sure that it’s designed to meet your strategy.
 
But if you haven’t recently revisited your strategy to determine whether it’s on point—or if you can’t clearly articulate the strategy underlying your BD plan—take this as your sign that it’s time to enter a true strategic planning process. Check out the video for a primer on how to develop a strategy that makes sense for you.

Don’t Surprise Your Client With Your Invoice.

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Let’s talk about billing and the effect it can have on your client relationships. Billing is, of course, one of the fundamental business and ethical aspects of practicing law. But it isn’t just that: it’s also a form of relationship development, practice management, and even business development. How you manage billing shows something about your attention to detail, how you clearly and fully communicate with a client, and more.

Most of the time, invoicing is fairly routine. You have an agreement for an hourly or alternative fee arrangement, you and your team track the work you do, that work is reflected on monthly invoices that explain the work completed, you review the invoices and correct or modify them before sending them to your client, and the client pays within a reasonable amount of time.

But what if there’s a fee increase, a delayed bill, or a passage of time that leaves a client surprised by your invoice? Surprise will leave your client dismayed. The legal budget may be strained in unexpected ways, and your client contact may face unpleasant questions from a superior or a corporate Board. You’re guaranteed to get pointed questions about the invoice, and you and your client contact will spend time resolving the issue. Worst of all, trust may be damaged, maybe even broken. This change in your client relationships can further impact your business development process and growth goals.

The good news is that avoiding these problems is simple: communicate about any changes in advance.

  • Planning a fee increase? Notify your clients about the change in advance—don’t just send a bill at the new rate. I’m also hearing that some firms are increasing rates multiple times a year now, without any guideposts for when that may happen. I don’t recommend that: it creates unpredictability and brings undue attention to your fee.
  • An unusually high amount of work to be charged against an annual legal budget? As soon as you see the meter going up, reach out to discuss the work, the spend, and the client’s priorities.
  • Something slipped and you’re sending a late invoice? Give thought to how you’re going to position the tardiness, what effect it will have on the budget and perhaps other pending work, and how it reflects on you as a businessperson. In some cases, you may find that a discount or write-off, perhaps a significant one, makes sense.

The same is true if there’s a misstep in a matter you’re handling that causes your client to conclude that a fee is unduly high or unearned in light of the circumstances. Here, you likely can’t communicate in advance. You may ward off these issues if you evaluate each invoice in context before sending it to the client, but there will be times when a client’s feedback, or its intensity, is surprising. Aim for collaborative communication. Listen to the client’s concerns and emphasize that you value the relationship as you respond. The outcome of the discussion is important, but maintaining trust is likely more important than receiving.

While it’s important that you receive due compensation for your work, be aware that clients are likely watching the bills more closely now than they have in the recent past. Inflation is hitting us all, individuals and corporations alike, and expenses may be increasing without a corresponding increase in income.

Clear communication can help you to manage expectations, prevent surprises, and build or maintain a collaborative approach that leaves your client feeling comfortable that your interests are aligned. Ensuring clear and effective communications with your clients will greatly contribute to your business development strategy and future business growth.

P.S. I have two openings for the new clients this month, and then I will not be accepting new clients again until January 2023. If you’d like help in growing your book of business, let’s have a conversation. Book a complimentary consultation here.

“I’m too busy for business development!”

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There’s one objection I hear more than any other from lawyers who want to grow their practices but find themselves stuck: “I’m too busy for business development!”

That objection is often factual (sometimes there’s more billable work to do than any reasonable human can accomplish in a day) as well as an unassailable excuse for those who feel resistance to business development. After all, billable work comes first, right?

If you’re feeling a time pinch, consider these questions to determine how to proceed:

  1. Ask whether this busy period is a short-term situation or a long-term one. When might you reasonably expect that your load will be lighter? If it appears that this level of busyness is a new normal, you’ll need to revisit your BD plan and start fresh. A short-term adaptation can keep you moving forward according to your plan, but a long-term situation requires a fresh approach.
  2. Ask whether there’s a way to offload some of your responsibilities to create time for BD. Perhaps this would be a good time to focus your LinkedIn activity on sharing good content created by others (along with an insightful comment) rather than writing something new. Perhaps you could ask a colleague to write a newsletter article that addresses a topic of interest to your clients from another perspective so that you’re off the hook for drafting your own article. (Points as a cross-selling effort!) Or perhaps it’s shifting some personal obligations to free up time for BD.
  3. Determine how much time you can realistically devote to BD during this period and what to do for maximum effect. Whatever your answer may be to this question, block that amount of time out on your calendar and hold it as a high-priority appointment.
  4. Determine the highest value activities that you can complete in the time available. Your BD plan is a living document, so go back to it and re-examine your priorities. If you’ve decided to create a document or course to guide potential clients through an issue related to your practice, for example, you’ll need to decide whether that’s an important enough investment to devote your limited time to it. Unless you’re at the beginning of your BD journey and focusing on establishing your platform and professional brand more than working to bring in new business in the short term, you’ll reap the most benefit from person-to-person contact. Revisit your “A list” and calendar reminders to communicate with those high-value contacts. Set aside 15 minutes for a catch-up call with one of them. Schedule coffee with one of these contacts to explore mutual interests and opportunities. Remember, people are the route to new business, so when you’re busy, be sure you’re staying visible to your most valuable connections.
  5. Calendar a date to re-evaluate your workload. The mistake I see too many lawyers make is putting BD on hold “temporarily” while they’re busier than usual and never moving back to the activities they’d planned. Without some defined end to the busy period (preferably a date to revisit the workload, but possibly also a defined benchmark such as the close of discovery in a large case), it’s easy to let the busy period expand… and expand… and expand. At some point, the hiatus will become so long that resuming BD activity feels like you’re starting from scratch, and that may be a daunting prospect to face. Know how you’ll identify the end of the hiatus and trigger your return to regular BD activity.

Finally, when you’re too busy for regular BD activity, cut yourself a bit of a break—but not too much. Don’t fall prey to all-or-nothing thinking. Business development is a long game, and you will likely go through several periods of reduced activity when you’re unusually busy. As long as those periods are limited and you focus on high-value activities, you can continue moving forward with success.