Recently, a colleague forwarded me an email from a legal headhunter friend who was seeing major cutbacks in Marketing and BizDev staff, putting CMO searches on hold and doing without a CMO entirely. It seemed to him that firms saw a quick and easy way to cut a half million dollars or so in personnel costs by either firing their CMOs, or failing to replace those who have left.
While I'm sympathetic to anyone who has lost a job, this headhunter's observation affirms my view that, despite a two-decade-plus history, law firm marketing and sales both remain in their infancy, characterized by amateur, random activity with no standards or business discipline.
Marketing and sales -- strategically core business functions in every other industry -- remain grudgingly tolerated by law firms, no matter occasional claims to the contrary. For proof, examine what the most advanced firms are doing in either category. Close examination exposes an embarrassingly hollow approximation of the real thing – after 25 years of increasing expenditures, the bulk of it too often wasted on narrow promotional activity.
I don't blame individual practitioners, many of whom struggle mightily to bring marketing civilization to their firms' shores, but the law firm marketing/sales support industry and, by association, its primary trade group, the Legal Marketing Association. (As a longtime member, I must share this blame.)
As an industry, we have allowed our law firm clients to remain ignorant of the full definition of marketing, enduringly expressed in Neil H. Borden's 1964 article, The Concept of the Marketing Mix, in which he argued that marketing decisions generally fall into the following four controllable categories, known ever since as “the 4 P's.”
* Product
* Price
* Place (distribution)
* Promotion
Show me firms where marketing has a voice in anything but Promotion. Or, for that matter, where anything but Promotion is even part of the marketing conversation.
This categorical ignorance is not the fault of our lawyer-clients. It is not their job to know about this, but ours to make it known in a way that lawyers will find palatable.
That said, I'm empathetic, to a degree.
If, throughout our entire business history, and that of every person whose words or writings we've been exposed to, neither sales nor marketing were ever really necessary because we had always lived in a seller's market in which demand exceeded supply, would we have taken either marketing or sales seriously? Doubtful. I'll argue that this precise scenario describes virtually every lawyer in a firm larger than, say, 50 lawyers.
Whether we're guilty of professional negligence by failing to educate law firms about marketing's totality, or individually we've tried like hell to do so but the lawyers have been completely unreceptive, is a larger discussion for another forum. What is inarguable, however, is that as an industry we marketers and sellers have done a terrible job of communicating the value of our respective categories to our buyers.
Think not?
Business history overwhelmingly demonstrates that cutting back on marketing during a recession is counterproductive. Here are just a few examples of multi-decade studies covering a number of recessions:
- Marketing Your Way Through a Recession
- The History of Advertising During a Recession
- Marketing During A Recession: A Survivor’s Guide For Tough Times
Despite this, law firms are making serious marketing cutback decisions – cutting internal marketing departments' headcount and budgets for external consultants – that business history overwhelmingly says will hurt them both during and after the recession. Why? Because they feel they can. Which can only mean that lawyers perceive that our absence will have no significant negative effect on their businesses.
Most are likely ignorant of that history because, as an industry, we have been silent. While promoting our individual brands and value propositions to law firms, we have completely neglected to promote our category, with the result that, when the economic chips are down, many lawyers view our category as discretionary.
If you doubt this, I offer the recently-concluded Legal Marketing Association annual conference. In each of the past five years or so, this conference consistently attracted well over 1,000 professionals. This year they claimed 500 attendees, but anyone scanning plenary sessions or the Thursday night social event (a must-go event that was opened to local non-attendees this year) isn't buying that claim.
Why the precipitous drop?
Did half the profession suddenly decide they no longer wanted to attend a conference that they've probably attended since they entered the business? Maybe, but more likely half the profession couldn't get the fee/travel expense approved. Our funding sources appear to perceive the value of attending as lower than the cost of attending.
We had better recognize this as the shot across our bow telling us that if we don't want to remain in the dangerous position of “nice to have when things are going well," we'd better get serious about engaging lawyers in a long-overdue dialog to position marketing and sales as mission-critical.
