Some people are born curious. They always want to know how, why, who, when & what? And why not? And what if?
Curious people make great salespeople.
This is because they demonstrate the 2 characteristics of great salespeople:
- They ask the right questions
- They listen to the answers.
Clients love curious people, because they ask great questions which force the client to think. Then they help the client talk through the issues raised. Which makes the questioner be more like a valued consultant than a salesman - or even a lawyer.
Lawyers are trained to gain deep specialism in a narrow field. They ask questions in this narrow field to get the information necessary to do great legal work. As a result, however, they often miss joining-the-dots. They feel awkward asking questions outside their legal expertise, lest the client is offended or baulks at the question.
Too many fail to engage with their client's business, which is a shame, because clients love talking about their business.
"Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens" Jimi Hendrix
Things continue to get tougher
RBS have asked law firms to consider Mexican wave arrangements to drive down fees. Others are said to be following suit.
Tenders are no longer won by offering wafer-thin margins, as more and more firms drift towards low price as their key differentiator.
To lower price, most firms have considered off-shoring or outsourcing for routine work to reduce costs, but this is open to all firms, so cannot offer a definitive advantage.
Many firms are stuck in the middle - seen as neither volume producers or high-end practitioners by their clients. One solution being tried by some firms is the "Waitrose essentials" approach. These firms are looking at their standard offerings and finding ways of making them simpler to understand, simpler to buy, and tying the product to a bottom-line saving for the client.
This methodology requires some lateral thinking from the law firm partners, who will typically state "everything we do is bespoke" & "we cannot measure a bottom-line benefit for the client".
We have worked with other firms, in most sectors, and know this isn't true. In the meantime the firms that change will eat the lunch of those who say it isn't possible.
Stat 1. Facebook reports that half of the UK population over 13 has a facebook account. Half.
2. And it's not just for the young:
So what's your facebook strategy for engaging with your clients, your potential trainees, your coleagues and your own workforce ?
Law firms have a fascination with discovering what clients look for in a lawyer. Yet to the best of my knowledge, the answers coming back from clients haven’t changed for the last 20 years.
There are 4 As. I’m not sure who first described the relationship in these terms, but it’s as true now as ever. Clients are asking themselves:
- Affability – Do I like you, and do you like me? Clients don’t expect you to always be interesting, but they expect you to be interested in them.
- Ability – Are you good at what you do? You might ponder how I would know; much of it is your firm’s reputation, coupled with the professionalism you display when I meet you.
- Affordability – Can I afford you? This is not the same question as “how much do you cost?”. My willingness to pay is related to my understanding of the seriousness of my position and the perceived results of a successful outcome.
- Availability – Are you available to work with me, and are you keen to work with me? It doesn’t have to be you personally doing the work, but if it’s not you I’m buying you need to tell me why not upfront. If I’ve built trust with you, I’d prefer to work with you.
The Client's View
The client rates these factors in the order:
- Affability – I want to work with people I like.
- Availability – I want to work with someone who wants to work with me & can do so.
- Affordability – I want you to offer good value.
- Ability – Since you work for a good firm, I assume you're a good lawyer, so sector expertise means more than legal know-how.
The Lawyer's View
The lawyer commonly presents himself or herself in the order [with the underlying message in brackets]:
- Ability – I know your problem, have seen it before, and can fix it. [Be quiet and let me tell you the solution]
- Availability – You’ll get me, because I'm an expert. [In fact I’d rather not delegate anything to anyone]
- Affability- The main thing is that we are good lawyers. Let's concentrate on the matter in hand. [Just look at the brochure with the client quotes.]
- Affordability – Let’s not talk money. [I’ll tell you about our hourly rates in an e-mail after the meeting]
2 Implications
- If the lawyer is leading with the ability card, yet the client is looking for affability, we are immediately off to a poor start. You can mitigate this by showing your interest though planned questions. These allow the client to put the project in a wider context, and allow you to show your wisdom through the choice of question.
- A client can only decide affordability by setting gain against cost. We cannot assume that the client knows why we are recommending what we are, and what would be the costs/implications of not taking this action. Their budget may be too small, and we must therefore be open in discussing the overall cost set against the overall benefit. This is best done face-to-face.
Practical Implementation. The next time you are discussing a project with a client, ask questions that put the project in context. As the meeting progresses ask about the impact/costs of not doing the project, either now, or not at all. Ask & listen. Doing so will cover the affability, ability and affordability bases in a very professional manner.
Training departments in law firms spend a great deal of time and effort getting their training "right". We gather feedback from delegates, and constantly revisit the programme to get it as near perfect as possible.
Yet perhaps we shouldn't bother.
Over the past dozen years or so I've seen, delivered, read-the-course-notes-from and taken part in a huge quantity of training. Most of it was well designed and delivered, with a few exceptions. The subsequent impact, however, did not seem to be linked to the design or delivery of the training. Success depends on the willingness of the delegates to become participants.
In former days, when we had days rather than hours for training, a large part of the initial phase was spent "digging for pain" - drawing-out from the delegates the necessity for the training, their own personal journey, and how they would apply it. This phase prepared the ground for the seeds to be planted. Nowadays we move swiftly into the planting phase, throwing the seed out hoping that some will bed in.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy. The Darwinian process of the tough surviving means that those who are motivated and willing to really listen will succeed, and those who are just chair-fodder will fail. Capitalism at its finest. Yet we should not, in these circumstances, take the feedback from the non-participants too seriously. If delegates don't want to participate, modifying the training in line with their thoughts may be a big mistake.
It's not really a secret, is it? Business development planning doesn't work in a law firm.
Depending on your firm, the stated aims of business development planning will include:
- To enable the firm to accurately predict revenue, and hence match expenses
- To promote and facilitate "whole-firm" thinking
- To enable individual partners to be directed/encouraged before the year commences
- To encourage more creative thinking in client development
- To form part of the overall remuneration profile
- To allow sales to be tracked against predicted profile
- To enable marketing to allocate appropriate resources.
But even in firms where the aim of the bd planning process is stated, the plans aren't assessed against the aim. Do they really encourage creative thinking? Or facilitate whole-firm thinking, even if the "promoting" part could be considered a partial success? And who is really held accountable to whom?
Meanwhile, at the partnership level, the overall purpose of bd planning is a mystery to the partners, who complete tedious forms with initial gusto (the analystic part at the front, which can be cut-and-pasted from last years), and eventual imagination (the action-planning which forms the last few pages - often a collection of optimistic new contact meetings arrayed over the next few months). Don't even ask more junior lawyers the content of the plan.
Not that it matters. Once the plans have passed initial scrutiny we're already 3 months into the FY, and the plans aren't looked at until next year unless disaster strikes.
But something has changed. Disaster has struck. The "+10% fees" strategy, dressed up as a business plan, has come unstuck. Faced with declining revenues, stressed clients and empty diaries, partners are suddenly adrift. The very reason for the bd plan was to give structure to times such as these, yet the whole planning edifice has failed to give the point-of-need support which a partner needs.
If a business development plan can't help a partner faced with a empty diary, supported only by a telephone, e-mail and a slightly-neglected CRM system, it's useless. In fact it's worse than useless; it's like a parachute which you had for emergencies, which when unfurled is threadbare and useless.
So what's to be done?
Produce a real bd plan. One that's for you. One that actually engages with you, your clients, your network and your aspirations. One that you can scrawl on, update, and use for real direction.
If you want to see one, click here. It's not pretty. It's just very useful. And when you've completed it you can have a sensible discussion with others about who is doing what.
Mentoring doesn't have to be an old guy passing his knowledge onto a keen young wannabe.
There are other ways of doing it:
- 2 way mentoring
- Peer mentoring
- Facilitated group mentoring
- Peer group mentoring
- Team mentoring
- Reverse mentoring
Most of these should be self-eveident. If they're not, click here to download an overview.
Linking lawyers with other lawyers not only frees up our workload, but it also provides a source credibility we cannot hope to match, even if we're ex-lawyers ourselves. It does mean that we need to build up the bench strength of mentoring skills, but as someone who spends over 60% of his time teaching sales skills, I can assure you that the skills are just as valuable when chatting to clients. This means that our coaching & mentoring skills programmes can be badged as bus dev programmes, and hence get greater traction.
An added twist is the realisation that Gen Y love feedback & love being mentored (no surprise there) but that it doesn't need to be face-to-face. The mash-up between social networks (Facebook, Linkedin etc) & new forms of mentoring provide different ways to facilitate group learning. You don't need to get everyone in the same room - not even on video or audio link. Instant Messaging works fine, and when suplemented with some webcasting technology provides outstanding opportunities at little cost.
In fact this blog post may even cut down my workflow. So ignore the above. Phone me and offer work!
Zeigarnik is not well known. Yet her research in 1920's Viennese coffee bars is the answer to why procrastination causes stress. She noticed a curious phenomenon. When a customer asked for the bill the waiters could easily recall the food that had been ordered. However, if the customer paid the bill, but then queried it a few moments later, the waiters struggled to remember anything about the order. It seemed that the act of paying brought a sense of closure in the waiter's mind and erased the order from their memories.
The Tests
Zeigarnik then tested this hypothesis in her laboratory, where she asked people to carry out a number of simple tasks (such as taking up counters or placing toys in the box), but some tasks she stopped the participants before they had finished. At the end of the experiment at the participants were told to describe all the tasks. As with her observations of waiters, unfinished tasks stuck in people's minds and so were far easier to remember. According to Zeigarnik, starting any activity causes your mind to express a kind of psychic anxiety. Once the activity is done and dusted your mind breathes an unconscious sigh of relief and all is forgotten. However, if you are somehow prevented from completing an activity you anxious mind quietly nags away until you're finished what you started.
So What?
So what? Well, as soon as you know there's a task to be done - or a task yet undone - your unconscious mind nags your conscious mind not to forget. And your unconscious mind isn't situation-aware, you can be nagged at times even when you can do nothing about the situation, yet be completely unaware when you do have the chance to do something - the time to remember you've run out of loo paper is when you're in the supermarket, not when you're delivering a sales presentation - or worse, sitting on the loo.
Taking Action
To pacify your unconscious mind, you need to have a system so that you know what you have to do, you know the next step in each matter, and you knew that the system works. And it's no good trying to cheat your unconscious mind. It knows whether you really have a working system!
If you're current system is suspect, I recommend Getting things Done by David Allen. I have been teaching time management for over 10 years, and this is by far the most practical book on getting a system that works. It doesn't solve procrastination, but it does give you piece of mind. Do it now, or there's one more thing to try to remember!
In his recent book Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell suggests there was a time to be born in New York if you wanted to succeed in law. He builds the case based on the study of several individuals who made it big in the expansion in corporate take-overs in the 70s and 80s in New York. His point was not just that these successful people were born at the right time but they also did 10,000 hours of practice in a field not popular with the big firms of the 50s and 60s and this is what meant they were ready for the brave new world when it came.
The question is therefore - were we born at the right time for the current changes in the business environment and have we spent the last 10 years practicing enough to be ready now?
Mark Jarvis
mark@penningtonhennessy.com
There is a lag between what's happening in "the real world", and the effect it has on law firms.
So have a look at the short video on the landing page of Right Brain Media http://www.rightbrainmedia.com/, and ponder how long do we have to adapt, and what will adaption look like?
Jamie Pennington
Jamie@penningtonhennessy.com