LSSO’s second annual Raindance conference concluded Wednesday (with our Coaching for Coaches workshop – more on that later). Acknowledging our potential for bias due to our sponsorship of the event, I will say flatly that the programming was unquestionably the best – across the board – that I have experienced at any law industry conference in the 14 years I’ve been around the biz.
Congratulations to LSSO’s founders, Silvia Coulter, Beth Cuzzone and Catherine MacDonagh, for their yeoman yearlong effort that produced such a credible and interesting faculty. I suspect that we also benefited from the fact that “sales” is a new category in law firms and, therefore, inherently a fresh topic. The program rooms were filled with early adopters and innovators in this “sales” category, which assured stimulating conversation, sometimes intense debate, and an overall sense of “intellectual comraderie,” if that is not too puffy an expression. It was fun.
For the first time in a long time I came home both abuzz and mentally tired. Damn – I had to pay attention for 2-1/2 days! I’m used to firing far fewer synapses during these things. My brain was tired. At the same time, I can’t wait to resume some of the rich conversations started with so many different people who brought diverse perspectives to our shared challenge. So much for the dreary old conference “follow-up,” eh?
Selfishly, we were particularly gratified with our Coaching the Coaches experience Wednesday morning. Typically, the 8:00 a.m. time slot on the last half-day of a conference is the Death Spot. Most people have gone home and the rest are partied out and disinclined to drag their bad selves out of bed to listen to yet more talking heads at Oh-Dark-Thirty. I admit that my partner, Pat Sweeney, and I were anxious at breakfast, wondering if we would outnumber attendees. Potentially worse, a revered client, Bob Reffner, Marketing Partner at Brouse McDowell (Akron, OH) had flown in Tuesday night to co-present with us. I dreaded the prospect of his having wasted his time on an audience of five.
At 7:45 we walked in to finish setup, etc., only to see a half-dozen people already seated at the table. Still, the other dozen or so empty chairs loomed large. By 8:00 the room was virtually full, and over the next half-hour or so I found myself repeatedly fetching chairs from a fast-diminishing stack in the corner and creating space around the table for the newcomers. [Hmm. Facilitating and chair-fetching. We law firm sales coaches are nothing if not versatile.] By 8:45 we were sharing what would otherwise have been a head table with late-arriving guests; it looked like there was a six-person panel presenting.
Now, don’t worry about our hat sizes expanding. We’re not deluding ourselves that we were sufficient draw to get 25-30 senior people to stick around for the final half-day and rouse themselves before the first SportsCenter aired. These people get it. Whether inside or outside, CMO or BDO, everyone is a coach, and coaching is the current and future big challenge in our game. A forward-looking topic was the draw for forward-looking people.
We had fun facilitating a very lively discussion and, at the risk of getting booted out of the Consultants’ Club, learned a few things ourselves. Bob Reffner surprised and delighted more than a few folks with his direct, candid, unvarnished view of the obstacles and opportunities we face – as seen from the law firm executive suite. Heads were bobbing like rear shelf car dolls.
OK, those are the well-deserved plaudits for Raindance 2005. Now I’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room and deliver a brickbat.
For years I have heard – and commiserated with – senior law marketers and biz dev folks lamenting conference programming that they found irrelevant or marginal. [LMA acknowledges that its biggest challenge is re-attracting senior people who have become disenchanted with the utility and value of its annual conference programming.]
I’ll confess that in recent years I have become one of those people who go to law biz conferences solely to make contacts, reconnect with old friends and be seen as still connected to the market – but have resigned myself to programming that will be a pleasant surprise if it’s any good. Usually, I pay the steep entry fee, read the session descriptions and blow them off as not worth the time.
In fairness, LMA programming is constrained by the organization’s legacy obligation to provide basic “how-to” functional instruction, cultural assimilation and operating context for the hundreds of new people entering the industry each year as law firm marketing and biz dev functions grow. However, there is no excuse for the disappointing caliber of programming found at recent Marketing Partner Forums, with 2005 being a particularly egregious example.
Mike O'Horo, The Coach Email
