Client Speak: The Do-or-Die Business Development Moment

Cat's Got Their Tongues

Some attendees at the LMA luncheon offered a few suggestions to explain this commonplace goal-line choke ' rather instructive suggestions, really, for the additional light they shed on why so many lawyers typically struggle through the legal sales process. The dynamics go deeper than just personal timidity although, at the end of the day, we're talking about a multilevel arrogance amounting to the same thing. A powerful self-consciousness inhibits direct communication at the very time when such communication is needed the most.

So what does lie at the root of this crippling diffidence? Perhaps '

Lawyers Just Don't Know How to Ask for the Business

Lawyers are great at asking questions in court, fair at asking questions during conferences, and poor at asking questions (of any sort) at sales settings. Notice how their capabilities diminish as the prevailing structures get looser. Courtrooms are carefully controlled by hard and fast rules of procedure while, by contrast, legal sales meeting have no official stipulations that unambiguously define appropriate behavior. (Professional conferences are somewhere between the two in terms of structure.)

The great litigator Morris Abram, who said he began life as a shy and not particularly physical lad in a tough Georgia town, once remarked that he relished trials because he could finally express anger in an approved way without fear of reprisal. He was taught the structure in law school and it was as explicit as the Rules of Evidence.

But, for that one little question, “Would you like to hire us?” there is no approved wording to use or tone with which to ask it. Is there a more effective or delicate phrasing than to simply blurt out, “Will you hire us?” Are we supposed to deferentially lower our voices when we pop the fateful question? How much confidence should we exude?

There are innumerable business books on how to sell anything to anybody, but there is no formal, institutionally sanctioned curriculum for attorney marketing or legal sales. Absent that, lawyers are often all at sea.

Lawyers Think It's Beneath Them to Ask for New Work

For some lawyers, this attitude may just be pure pomposity not worth our concern. For others, however, it reflects a more serious, professionally ingrained state of mind informed by a very narrow view of their craft. “I described my background. I chronicled my successes in court. I provided proof positive of my expertise. It should all speak for itself without my having to kick the tires or rev the engines to make a sale.”

According to this view of attorney marketing and legal sales, the practice of law requires nothing else besides demonstrable legal skills: Drafting a brief or delivering a summation to the jury or whatever else is required for the work at issue. For these lawyers, it is superfluous to then ask for the business after their verifiable skills are presented. Yes, they are aware competing lawyers have more or less the same qualifications, but that is a vagary of the marketplace with which they haven't quite grappled.

What if the answer to the question is, “No, I will not hire you?”

Here we're back to Morris Abram's fear of reprisal, a metaphoric “slap in the face” as stinging as a shove in the back from a backwoods bully. In a related context, marketers often observe with dismay how loath lawyers are to ask for feedback from clients. They'd rather hear nothing than something unpleasant, even if it means eventually losing the business altogether. With this exquisite form of denial, the busier they are (probably handling work another lawyer developed), the less they have to even think about the phone that never rang or the decision that was never imparted.

No wonder, then, that some lawyers are often equally afraid to ask existing clients for more work. Doing so increases the likelihood they'll get performance feedback they might not otherwise have to hear.

Learning Curve

True, there is a direct correlation between how lawyers are formed (personally and professionally) and their stubborn incapacity to say those magic words: “Will you hire us?” The good news is that the marketplace is forcing attorneys to overcome such limitations of their own breeding. Ways are being found to teach them and, given today's revenue pressures, there is an increased willingness to learn among lawyers of every stripe.

In other words, there are correctives for the impediments we've discussed. For example:

1. If lawyers don't know how to ask for the business, help them demystify the process.

There may be no logical formulas for closing business (and there's no closing business without asking for it) ' but it's not a s'ance either. Lawyers can be trained to understand selling as a relationship not fundamentally dissimilar from other relationships. In this attorney consulting relationship, the seller provides the buyer with enough value over the course of time so that comfort levels on both ends continue to increase. “Will you hire us?” may eventually become as natural a part of the conversation as “Would you like another cup of coffee?”

It's important to emphasize that, when we talk about the “course of time,” we're talking about discussions informed by strategic insights of value to the prospective buyer. We do not mean protracted wining and dining. Quite to the contrary, as the managing partner of one national litigation firm is fond of saying, “Get to 'no' quickly.” Structure the process so you ask for the business at the earliest appropriate moment.

2. If lawyers think it's beneath them to ask to be hired because their resumes ought to speak for themselves, the lesson to impart ' perhaps the greatest lesson anyone in the professional services can learn ' is that service and responsiveness drive hiring decisions, not past successes or conspicuous expertise.

Once they understand that hiring decisions are not based simply on qualifications, they can begin to understand why “Will you hire us?” is a question that must inevitably be asked. It's a harder lesson for some lawyers than others, while many professionals parrot the client service gospel without living it. Fortunately, the ones who actually mean it are the ones who succeed.

3. If lawyers dread rejection, teach them that rejection is not an end but a new beginning. On the one hand, there are the post mortems that prepare us for the next conquest. On the other hand, and even more important, relationships don't end with rejection. The lesson for professionals is that they still have powerful incentives to stay in touch with the buyer and protract the attorney consulting dynamic.

Chances are, the Associate General Counsel or the COO did not hire their last law firm when they hired your competitor. Low-key follow-up ' “how's it going? Is the case working out for you? Is there anything else on the front burner that could be right for us?” ' is itself an ongoing sales process that legal service buyers appreciate and may well someday reward. Here too, the advice of the managing partner quoted above is important: the faster you “get to 'no,'” the faster you can launch a sales effort that continues after the turn-down.

No doubt lawyers are tougher pupils than some other professional types, but consider the progress that's been made. The extent to which the lawyers of 2009 have humanized and therefore improved their sales skills would have been amazing to contemplate 30 years ago.

Asking to be hired is one such sales skill that, for sure, remains especially challenging to master. But it's as teachable as any other.

Allan Colman is CEO of The Closers Group and a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors. Mr. Colman can be reached at 310-225-3904, [email protected] and www. closersgroup.com.

At a recent presentation to the Virginias chapter of the Legal Marketing Association, we called attention to an odd paradox. If you think about the partners in your firm, you'll likely agree that most of them probably have the raw guts to look another human being in the eye and growl, “I'm going to sue your butt off!”

Yet those same lawyers are seemingly too timid to finish a discussion with a prospective client by politely asking, with the kindest intentions for all concerned, “Will you hire us?” Additionally paradoxical, this apparent attorney timidity extends ' not just to relative strangers unfamiliar with their talents and achievements ' but to existing clients as well. The lawyers may have produced good results. They've been responsive and maybe provided appreciated value-added service as well. Still they cannot quite bring themselves to ask for new work or cross-sell colleagues to folks they've known for years. Even Oliver Twist had the courage to beg a second bowl of gruel!

It must strike buyers as rather peculiar. They've been regaled with collaterals and proposals. They've been talked to for hours. They've been wined and dined and taken to football games. But then ' nothing, not a word. They're probably saying to themselves, “What are these guys waiting for? Am I supposed to fall on my knees and exclaim, 'You're so marvelous, I just can't wait to give you my money?'”

Cat's Got Their Tongues

Some attendees at the LMA luncheon offered a few suggestions to explain this commonplace goal-line choke ' rather instructive suggestions, really, for the additional light they shed on why so many lawyers typically struggle through the legal sales process. The dynamics go deeper than just personal timidity although, at the end of the day, we're talking about a multilevel arrogance amounting to the same thing. A powerful self-consciousness inhibits direct communication at the very time when such communication is needed the most.

So what does lie at the root of this crippling diffidence? Perhaps '

Lawyers Just Don't Know How to Ask for the Business

Lawyers are great at asking questions in court, fair at asking questions during conferences, and poor at asking questions (of any sort) at sales settings. Notice how their capabilities diminish as the prevailing structures get looser. Courtrooms are carefully controlled by hard and fast rules of procedure while, by contrast, legal sales meeting have no official stipulations that unambiguously define appropriate behavior. (Professional conferences are somewhere between the two in terms of structure.)

The great litigator Morris Abram, who said he began life as a shy and not particularly physical lad in a tough Georgia town, once remarked that he relished trials because he could finally express anger in an approved way without fear of reprisal. He was taught the structure in law school and it was as explicit as the Rules of Evidence.

But, for that one little question, “Would you like to hire us?” there is no approved wording to use or tone with which to ask it. Is there a more effective or delicate phrasing than to simply blurt out, “Will you hire us?” Are we supposed to deferentially lower our voices when we pop the fateful question? How much confidence should we exude?

There are innumerable business books on how to sell anything to anybody, but there is no formal, institutionally sanctioned curriculum for attorney marketing or legal sales. Absent that, lawyers are often all at sea.

Lawyers Think It's Beneath Them to Ask for New Work

For some lawyers, this attitude may just be pure pomposity not worth our concern. For others, however, it reflects a more serious, professionally ingrained state of mind informed by a very narrow view of their craft. “I described my background. I chronicled my successes in court. I provided proof positive of my expertise. It should all speak for itself without my having to kick the tires or rev the engines to make a sale.”

According to this view of attorney marketing and legal sales, the practice of law requires nothing else besides demonstrable legal skills: Drafting a brief or delivering a summation to the jury or whatever else is required for the work at issue. For these lawyers, it is superfluous to then ask for the business after their verifiable skills are presented. Yes, they are aware competing lawyers have more or less the same qualifications, but that is a vagary of the marketplace with which they haven't quite grappled.

What if the answer to the question is, “No, I will not hire you?”

Here we're back to Morris Abram's fear of reprisal, a metaphoric “slap in the face” as stinging as a shove in the back from a backwoods bully. In a related context, marketers often observe with dismay how loath lawyers are to ask for feedback from clients. They'd rather hear nothing than something unpleasant, even if it means eventually losing the business altogether. With this exquisite form of denial, the busier they are (probably handling work another lawyer developed), the less they have to even think about the phone that never rang or the decision that was never imparted.

No wonder, then, that some lawyers are often equally afraid to ask existing clients for more work. Doing so increases the likelihood they'll get performance feedback they might not otherwise have to hear.

Learning Curve

True, there is a direct correlation between how lawyers are formed (personally and professionally) and their stubborn incapacity to say those magic words: “Will you hire us?” The good news is that the marketplace is forcing attorneys to overcome such limitations of their own breeding. Ways are being found to teach them and, given today's revenue pressures, there is an increased willingness to learn among lawyers of every stripe.

In other words, there are correctives for the impediments we've discussed. For example:

1. If lawyers don't know how to ask for the business, help them demystify the process.

There may be no logical formulas for closing business (and there's no closing business without asking for it) ' but it's not a s'ance either. Lawyers can be trained to understand selling as a relationship not fundamentally dissimilar from other relationships. In this attorney consulting relationship, the seller provides the buyer with enough value over the course of time so that comfort levels on both ends continue to increase. “Will you hire us?” may eventually become as natural a part of the conversation as “Would you like another cup of coffee?”

It's important to emphasize that, when we talk about the “course of time,” we're talking about discussions informed by strategic insights of value to the prospective buyer. We do not mean protracted wining and dining. Quite to the contrary, as the managing partner of one national litigation firm is fond of saying, “Get to 'no' quickly.” Structure the process so you ask for the business at the earliest appropriate moment.

2. If lawyers think it's beneath them to ask to be hired because their resumes ought to speak for themselves, the lesson to impart ' perhaps the greatest lesson anyone in the professional services can learn ' is that service and responsiveness drive hiring decisions, not past successes or conspicuous expertise.

Once they understand that hiring decisions are not based simply on qualifications, they can begin to understand why “Will you hire us?” is a question that must inevitably be asked. It's a harder lesson for some lawyers than others, while many professionals parrot the client service gospel without living it. Fortunately, the ones who actually mean it are the ones who succeed.

3. If lawyers dread rejection, teach them that rejection is not an end but a new beginning. On the one hand, there are the post mortems that prepare us for the next conquest. On the other hand, and even more important, relationships don't end with rejection. The lesson for professionals is that they still have powerful incentives to stay in touch with the buyer and protract the attorney consulting dynamic.

Chances are, the Associate General Counsel or the COO did not hire their last law firm when they hired your competitor. Low-key follow-up ' “how's it going? Is the case working out for you? Is there anything else on the front burner that could be right for us?” ' is itself an ongoing sales process that legal service buyers appreciate and may well someday reward. Here too, the advice of the managing partner quoted above is important: the faster you “get to 'no,'” the faster you can launch a sales effort that continues after the turn-down.

No doubt lawyers are tougher pupils than some other professional types, but consider the progress that's been made. The extent to which the lawyers of 2009 have humanized and therefore improved their sales skills would have been amazing to contemplate 30 years ago.

Asking to be hired is one such sales skill that, for sure, remains especially challenging to master. But it's as teachable as any other.

Allan Colman is CEO of The Closers Group and a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors. Mr. Colman can be reached at 310-225-3904, [email protected] and www. closersgroup.com.