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Sales Speak:Stop 'Selling Stuff '

BY Bruce Alltop
November 30, 2014

Although this dynamic is changing, external business development activity at most law firms remain the sole responsibility of the firm's lawyers. The vast majority of firms, with a few exceptions, do not have experienced sales professionals on staff and deployed into the marketplace. As such, the lawyers continue to be relied upon to be the “sales force.” Given that lawyers are not sales professionals and only spend a small amount of their time focused on business development, and given that they already have a full-time job, it's important to keep the business development approach as simple as possible. Some ideas related to keeping it simple follow:

  • Use as little “marketing jargon” as possible when communicating with lawyers.
  • Reference real-life examples of successes and lessons learned from failure whenever possible.
  • Focus the vast majority of the business development effort on existing clients.
  • Be externally focused, but not to the exclusion of having an internal marketing strategy.
  • Take an industry, client-centric, approach to the market.
  • Understand your client's business.
  • Don't “pitch” ( see the article titled “Pitch Meetings: To Present or Not to Present, That Is the Question,” in Marketing the Law Firm , June 2014; available at http://bit.ly/14GnsJb).
  • Stop “selling” stuff.

Talking the Talk?

A common theme that I've heard over the years, both as a chief marketing officer and in my current role as consultant, is that marketing professionals use a lot of marketing “jargon” as a natural part of their interaction with the lawyers. The more that you can reference real-life examples of success and lessons learned as you coach the lawyers, the more responsive they will be.

Using marketing terminology as you provide guidance to the lawyers only serves to confuse and, in many cases, frustrate them, minimizing their inclination to be “return customers” and removing any chances that they'll “tell their friends” about what a repository of meaningful knowledge the marketing department is. So, limit your use of the marketing buzzwords to the lawyers who are only the most advanced business developers and with your marketing and business development professionals.

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