Practice Building Skills: Marketing Kryptonite That Will Overcome Attorney Objections

Yes, you can win an argument with an attorney and get your marketing initiative approved, if you present the right data to get your point across.

Marketers everywhere have told me downbeat tales of rejection when they proposed client surveys, cross-selling initiatives, client team efforts and other practical business development programs. Heck, when I was in-house I even had a group of clients and the partners who represented them ready to start a client survey program, but got turned down by top management. Actually, we weren't told “no.” We just never got an answer.

The obstacle is always a single influential partner who looks askance at the marketer's proposal, and says “we've never done this before,” “no other firm our size is doing this,” or “your proposal is flawed because you put a comma where it should have been a semicolon,” or some other nonsense.

You as the marketer or marketing partner cannot win an argument with this Superman lawyer. He/she will be way too skilled at fining a flaw, identifying a downside or raising an irrelevant question to which there is no answer.

Reach for Your Kryptonite

This is when savvy marketers reach for their kryptonite ' the irrefutable element that overcomes all lawyer objections to new marketing initiatives, the factor that cannot be argued with, the singularity that cannot be distinguished away.

The kryptonite is facts. Lawyers can argue the law and strategy until hell freezes over, but the facts are the facts. They have to accept them. And for marketers, the key facts to amass are financial data. Numbers are kryptonite.

It's always good to introduce a marketing initiative by saying, “this will help us get more business and make more money.” To back up the point, there are three sorts of data marketers must be able to present. You'll need the help of the accounting department, so treat the CFO to lunch, smuggle whiskey to the accounting staff, buy them ice cream and do what it takes for them to get you the data.

Sorting Clients

Crown Jewels, VIPs and 'Good' Clients

This is also known as stratifying your clients. Say you want to propose client teams for the firm's most valuable clients. You'll need a spreadsheet listing the top 50, 100 or 500 clients in horizontal rows. The vertical columns per client are:

• Net receipts (or billings)
• Percentage the client income is of overall firm receipts (or billings)

You'll quickly identify the crown jewel clients. Usually they will be the top 10 or 15 clients and they'll generate 30% to 40% of the firm's overall revenues. Then there will be a sharp drop-off in revenue, and the next step down I refer to as VIP clients. They are important, but the firm won't die if it loses one. The next level are like minivans ' not really sexy, but good, practical all-around clients. The idea is to grow good clients up to the VIP level, and VIP clients up to the crown jewel level.

The firm cannot afford to lose a crown jewel client ever. It would be devastating. You must keep these clients at all costs. Up to this point, the lawyer/decision-maker will be with you 100%. “We need to have a client retention program to keep these relationships going,” you'll say, and the lawyer should still be with you.

Now is your chance to say that these crown jewel clients need to be part of a lawyer visitation program, have a client team dedicated to them, should be a part of ongoing client satisfaction surveys, and should have as many points of contact with the firm as possible. Faced with irrefutable data, the lawyer will have to yield to the facts.

Client Watch List

A watch list is an expansion of the stratification list, to add data about annual client revenue over a three- or four-year period. In this case you are looking for trends. My colleague Steve Barrett would present this data to the top management of Drinker, Biddle & Reath, where he is the former CMO. He sorted the clients into colors:

• Green is growing ' these are happy clients spending more.
• Red is for clients who are leaving ' their revenues are going straight down.
• Black is new.
• Orange is shrinking ' their revenues jump around and end up down. The “red” clients pop off the page. Unless the client is going broke or its industry has tanked, an emergency plan must be devised to determine why it is using the firm less. There is more than meets the eye and the relationship partner must inquire what is going on with the company. The reason might be unhappiness with firm staff, or fees or service. Perhaps the partner is hoarding the client and the lack of multiple contacts has allowed the client to hire other law firms. Sometimes all that's needed is a personnel change or a series of free CLE seminars at the client's offices. Marketers can be invaluable in these situations by coming up with relationship-repair ideas.

Next, marketers want to prevent “orange” clients from turning into “red” clients. A number of factors could be at work here. The firm could be losing “wallet share,” meaning that the revenue is dropping because the legal work is going elsewhere. Now is the time to propose a “reverse seminar,” where the client addresses a room full of your lawyers about their company. Certainly the firm should find out what legal services the client is buying, who what law firms are doing the work. Often, a smart marketer can discover which person at a competing firm has established a stronger business relationship, and can recommend relationship-building activities to turn the situation around.

Cross-selling Spreadsheet

Cross-selling is the El Dorado of marketing ' often longed for and rarely attained. This is because most partners consider a client part of their personal book of business. They don't want anyone intruding who could screw up the relationship. Some partners aggressively hoard and defend clients. This is a tough attitude to overcome unless you can establish that clients are an asset of the firm, not the partner, and exist to be exploited by the firm.

Data can help depersonalize the resistance of partners, so they'll share their clients and introduce their partners. Simply create a spreadsheet like the one below, where the horizontal rows list your key clients, and the vertical columns identify the firm's practice areas. In each cell, the accounting department should put a dollar amount for revenue obtained from that client by each group. Numerous empty cells will appear, and they represent money that the firm is leaving on the table.

In the hypothetical chart below, we can see that Wal-Mart is well cross-sold. There are at least five partners working for the client and many points of contact. This is the ideal picture.

In this chart, the firm is doing a lot of securities work for AT&T, but nada for the other practice areas. This is actually a client at risk, because they are dealing with only a single partner. Research shows that single-partner relationships are the weakest ones, where the clients have the highest attrition rate, according to Redwood Analytics.

This chart is very impersonal. We're looking at clients and revenue numbers, not personalities. But the solution is compelling: The relationship partner has to spend more time with the client to find out about their other business needs, and see if there is an opportunity to introduce another client.

Conclusion

Therefore, I advise marketers and marketing partners to do what litigators do ' they assert that they are not making the point, the evidence is proving their case. This approach takes you and your status level out of the equation. There are facts to face, data to prove your point, and the chance for the firm to make some money. So buy that case of liquor for the accounting department today.

Larry Bodine, Esq., a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a business development adviser based in Glen Ellyn, IL. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and http://www.larrybodine.com/.

Yes, you can win an argument with an attorney and get your marketing initiative approved, if you present the right data to get your point across.

Marketers everywhere have told me downbeat tales of rejection when they proposed client surveys, cross-selling initiatives, client team efforts and other practical business development programs. Heck, when I was in-house I even had a group of clients and the partners who represented them ready to start a client survey program, but got turned down by top management. Actually, we weren't told “no.” We just never got an answer.

The obstacle is always a single influential partner who looks askance at the marketer's proposal, and says “we've never done this before,” “no other firm our size is doing this,” or “your proposal is flawed because you put a comma where it should have been a semicolon,” or some other nonsense.

You as the marketer or marketing partner cannot win an argument with this Superman lawyer. He/she will be way too skilled at fining a flaw, identifying a downside or raising an irrelevant question to which there is no answer.

Reach for Your Kryptonite

This is when savvy marketers reach for their kryptonite ' the irrefutable element that overcomes all lawyer objections to new marketing initiatives, the factor that cannot be argued with, the singularity that cannot be distinguished away.

The kryptonite is facts. Lawyers can argue the law and strategy until hell freezes over, but the facts are the facts. They have to accept them. And for marketers, the key facts to amass are financial data. Numbers are kryptonite.

It's always good to introduce a marketing initiative by saying, “this will help us get more business and make more money.” To back up the point, there are three sorts of data marketers must be able to present. You'll need the help of the accounting department, so treat the CFO to lunch, smuggle whiskey to the accounting staff, buy them ice cream and do what it takes for them to get you the data.

Sorting Clients

Crown Jewels, VIPs and 'Good' Clients

This is also known as stratifying your clients. Say you want to propose client teams for the firm's most valuable clients. You'll need a spreadsheet listing the top 50, 100 or 500 clients in horizontal rows. The vertical columns per client are:

• Net receipts (or billings)
• Percentage the client income is of overall firm receipts (or billings)

You'll quickly identify the crown jewel clients. Usually they will be the top 10 or 15 clients and they'll generate 30% to 40% of the firm's overall revenues. Then there will be a sharp drop-off in revenue, and the next step down I refer to as VIP clients. They are important, but the firm won't die if it loses one. The next level are like minivans ' not really sexy, but good, practical all-around clients. The idea is to grow good clients up to the VIP level, and VIP clients up to the crown jewel level.

The firm cannot afford to lose a crown jewel client ever. It would be devastating. You must keep these clients at all costs. Up to this point, the lawyer/decision-maker will be with you 100%. “We need to have a client retention program to keep these relationships going,” you'll say, and the lawyer should still be with you.

Now is your chance to say that these crown jewel clients need to be part of a lawyer visitation program, have a client team dedicated to them, should be a part of ongoing client satisfaction surveys, and should have as many points of contact with the firm as possible. Faced with irrefutable data, the lawyer will have to yield to the facts.

Client Watch List

A watch list is an expansion of the stratification list, to add data about annual client revenue over a three- or four-year period. In this case you are looking for trends. My colleague Steve Barrett would present this data to the top management of Drinker, Biddle & Reath, where he is the former CMO. He sorted the clients into colors:

• Green is growing ' these are happy clients spending more.
• Red is for clients who are leaving ' their revenues are going straight down.
• Black is new.
• Orange is shrinking ' their revenues jump around and end up down. The “red” clients pop off the page. Unless the client is going broke or its industry has tanked, an emergency plan must be devised to determine why it is using the firm less. There is more than meets the eye and the relationship partner must inquire what is going on with the company. The reason might be unhappiness with firm staff, or fees or service. Perhaps the partner is hoarding the client and the lack of multiple contacts has allowed the client to hire other law firms. Sometimes all that's needed is a personnel change or a series of free CLE seminars at the client's offices. Marketers can be invaluable in these situations by coming up with relationship-repair ideas.

Next, marketers want to prevent “orange” clients from turning into “red” clients. A number of factors could be at work here. The firm could be losing “wallet share,” meaning that the revenue is dropping because the legal work is going elsewhere. Now is the time to propose a “reverse seminar,” where the client addresses a room full of your lawyers about their company. Certainly the firm should find out what legal services the client is buying, who what law firms are doing the work. Often, a smart marketer can discover which person at a competing firm has established a stronger business relationship, and can recommend relationship-building activities to turn the situation around.

Cross-selling Spreadsheet

Cross-selling is the El Dorado of marketing ' often longed for and rarely attained. This is because most partners consider a client part of their personal book of business. They don't want anyone intruding who could screw up the relationship. Some partners aggressively hoard and defend clients. This is a tough attitude to overcome unless you can establish that clients are an asset of the firm, not the partner, and exist to be exploited by the firm.

Data can help depersonalize the resistance of partners, so they'll share their clients and introduce their partners. Simply create a spreadsheet like the one below, where the horizontal rows list your key clients, and the vertical columns identify the firm's practice areas. In each cell, the accounting department should put a dollar amount for revenue obtained from that client by each group. Numerous empty cells will appear, and they represent money that the firm is leaving on the table.

In the hypothetical chart below, we can see that Wal-Mart is well cross-sold. There are at least five partners working for the client and many points of contact. This is the ideal picture.

In this chart, the firm is doing a lot of securities work for AT&T, but nada for the other practice areas. This is actually a client at risk, because they are dealing with only a single partner. Research shows that single-partner relationships are the weakest ones, where the clients have the highest attrition rate, according to Redwood Analytics.

This chart is very impersonal. We're looking at clients and revenue numbers, not personalities. But the solution is compelling: The relationship partner has to spend more time with the client to find out about their other business needs, and see if there is an opportunity to introduce another client.

Conclusion

Therefore, I advise marketers and marketing partners to do what litigators do ' they assert that they are not making the point, the evidence is proving their case. This approach takes you and your status level out of the equation. There are facts to face, data to prove your point, and the chance for the firm to make some money. So buy that case of liquor for the accounting department today.

Larry Bodine, Esq., a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a business development adviser based in Glen Ellyn, IL. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and http://www.larrybodine.com/.