Recently, a friend emailed me David Maister’s article Doing It For The Money, which takes law firms to task for using money as the sole or primary motivation to drive additional sales/marketing behavior.
I agree with David that economic monomania is counterproductive – as with any form of monomania, it lacks perspective. I also agree that people need a reason to do anything, and that that reason has to be their reason, not yours or mine. In the case of business acquisition, the firm functions a marketer and seller of an idea, i.e., the idea that “limiting our business-generation engine to a handful of rainmakers is short-sighted and dangerous.” Marketers of anything who fail to learn prospective buyers’ motivation are doomed to fail. My assuming that you share my motivation, whether economic- or psychic, is just an ego-centric way for me to avoid doing the hard work of learning what you value.
During the individual planning component of our ResultsPath™ sales training program, we ask each lawyer to describe a recent engagement that they would walk through fire to replicate, i.e., that satisfied all three categories of need: 1) Practical – the work itself was stimulating and rewarding; 2) Economic – the fees were sizable, paid willingly and timely, perhaps with a bonus or premium; 3) Emotional – the client “gave the love,” i.e., expressed appreciation and respect for the lawyer’s work product, commitment and contribution. We then analyze the origin of such desirable engagements and assess which industry segments are more, rather than less, likely to exhibit such demand without the problem already having matured to the point of price sensitivity. Over the past 15 years of training and coaching more than 3500 lawyers, we’ve learned that unless the “carrot” (as defined by the lawyer) is sufficiently attractive, the likelihood of the lawyer expending effort in pursuit of it is virtually zero.
Now, I would like to challenge one bit of language in David’s article that doesn’t resonate.
Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard for me to be sensitized to this, but when David (and many others) refers to “selling,” there seems to be a pejorative tone, intimating that selling behaviors are somehow anathema to the relationship principles about which I’ve already agreed. While the sales concepts of legacy trainers such as Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins and Brian Tracy reflect what I consider outdated “seller-acting-upon-the-buyer” language (targeting, prospecting, qualifying, presenting, closing, overcoming objections), conducted professionally, selling is almost never a negative experience for buyers. On the contrary, we argue that the “lawyering” skills that partners already trust and that reliably produce positive interactions between lawyers and clients are precisely the skills that professional salespeople use when managing executive-level, business-to-business opportunities of consequence. Ironically, perhaps, and certainly from a different perspective, we end up agreeing with David’s assertion that firms do need to “find out, partner by partner, what kind of work turns each partner on and what kind of clients each partner could actually get interested in,” and further that firms “do not need to teach (their) people how to sell.” They do, however, have to teach their lawyers how to apply their trusted skills to the realm of business acquisition. Otherwise, they will struggle to bridge defining desirable work/clients and getting them; that requires a reliable process.
We believe that the reliable process is to apply their “lawyering” skills to:
- investigate what business problem drives demand for the optimal service relationship to which the lawyer aspires (DemandTrigger™),
- help the client assess that problem’s relative operational impact on a scale of irritant-to-imperative; and thereby
- determine which problems obligate them to take action because the cost of not doing so is unacceptable;
- offer solution options and explain the ramifications of applying each;
- make solution recommendations based on understanding the business situation;
- ask the client to decide which he favors; and
- help the initial stakeholder achieve alignment among all stakeholders to allow decision and action.
This is our definition of professional selling. To date, every lawyer exposed to it has agreed that it is identical to the ethical practice of law and is an interactive process with which they are already familiar and comfortable. They merely need to apply their lawyering skills before they get hired – at which point it’s called “selling.”
