DemandTrigger

Associate Salaries – Insight From Seth Godin

Lately we're seeing a lot of blathering in the legal trade press and blogs such as Above The Law, among others, about what many people feel is an imminent rollback in salaries for newly-minted lawyers.  The press is fixated on BigLaw firms' leaders' reluctance to be first to do what seems fundamentally sensible.  If you read BigLaw associates' comments in the blogosphere, you'd think that the firms were considering a capital crime.

While digesting all this drama, I came across a blog post by Seth Godin, the author of Permission Marketing (among many titles) and IMHO just about the most sensible commentator on modern marketing strategy, tactics and behavior. 

In his March 23, 2009 post, Seth skewers the marketing failure exhibited by exorbitant salaries.  He begins with Wall St.'s lament that unless they can pay someone eight figures, they can't recruit.  Law firm associates' salaries come under his lens, too.  Here's a taste:

“...The top firms competed with each other to recruit a too-small pool of talent from the top law schools. Unable to muster up even a mite of marketing insight, they chose to compete on only one axis: salary. So, 24-year-olds were given jobs at $120,000 a year, when their peers from college were making 20% of that. The firms could have found great people at half the price, except that with only one axis, they had to be at the top if their peers were.

If you were a law student, the choice was easy...You didn't have to know anything about the firm, apparently, other than the fact that they were top tier, and the way you knew that was because they paid a lot.

There's no real effort made to market the jobs, just to race to the top (or the bottom, depending on your point of view) with the easiest marketing signal of all. Price. Yes, it's exactly the same as a retailer trying to improve business by being the cheapest."

The message to angst-ridden BigLaw managing partners paralyzed by the fear of being the first to do what they all know they have to do:  Don't worry.  The only candidates you'll lose are those who only view your firm through the simplest lens, price.  The irony is that these elite firms don't compete for clients on price.  Why compete for talent on that self-defeating basis?

You've seen the way the American public reacted to what they consider obscene pay for non-performance.  How confident are you that your clients aren't reacting similarly to you paying $160,000 to newly-minted lawyers who can't yet do anything of value, yet for whom you'll ask clients to pay $250 an hour for what is essentially on-the-job training?

Stop worrying about how law students will react to you making a (belatedly) sane decision and pull the trigger on the salary reduction. 

Now, you still have to recruit first-year lawyers every year.  Here's how.

Start by thinking like the serious headhunters you use to lure seasoned talent away from other firms.  They're not recruiters; they're marketers.  They're selling your firm's opportunity. 

To change your mindset, change your vocabulary. 

You're not "recruiting"; that's an HR function.  You're marketing a professional career opportunity.  HR's mindset is “I need...,” as in “I need X, Y and Z qualifications.” 

A marketer's mindset is, “If you're qualified, you'll want what we have here...,” as in “Here's why someone like you will want to work here.” 

Sell more than the salary.  If a big salary is all that a talented lawyer will get out of working at your firm, no one should work there, including you.  Close the doors today.

Think of these associate opportunities as you would one of your firm's services.  Profile the characteristics of those who will be most successful and fulfilled in that job, and most appreciative of the opportunity to have it.  “Who wants to be here?”

Target those people with a message that aligns with their career goals and personal aspirations.  Communicate that message in trusted channels that reach your profiled audience.  If nobody wants it, it's time to change your firm to make it sufficiently attractive to the talent you need. 

A Shot Across the Marketing and Sales Bow

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.

Laying people off to save the equivalent cost of an iPhone

I read with interest an article in today's NLJ.com, "How Much Do Law Firm Layoffs Save?  A Lot."  The core of this argument seems contained in one sentence:  "Law firm leaders and industry consultants say a firm cuts costs by an average of $250,000 for each attorney let go. For each legal assistant or other staffer laid off, a law firm saves about $100,000."

Maybe, maybe not.

According to an American Lawyer magazine article, "the average Am Law 100 firm has 778 lawyers, 183 equity partners, gross revenue of $645 million, revenue per lawyer of about $828,000 and profits per partner of $1.315 million."

So, using these figures, simple math suggests that in the average AmLaw 100 firm, the average equity partner (making more than $1 million a year) personally saves $546.45 for each staff person he puts out on the street and a whopping $1366.12 for each attorney colleague who suffers a similar fate. 

Doubtless, at least in part, firms are using the downturn as an opportunity to pare the dead weight that most firms accumulated during boom times and didn't have the stomach to deal with then.  That's certainly prudent. 

However, to the degree that these layoffs are positioned as a necessary short-term cost saving response to the downturn, they're disingenuous because they don't actually save all that much money.  As the NLJ article continues, “severance packages that firms are giving to pink-slipped lawyers vary, but [one] firm chairman said that, in general, every $10 million saved in compensation is offset by $7 million paid in severance.”

So, reducing the previously calculated savings by the 70% severance cost brings us to putting colleagues and staff out on the street for a net saving per equity partner of $409.86 and $163.94, respectively.  So, at least on a per-equity-partner basis, it seems we're laying people off for the cost of an iPhone.

Intended or not, the current debate also makes law firms sound like helpless victims of revenue decline, trapped in their fate, unable to do anything about it.   Please.

There is a far more effective solution available, but it would require the partners to take personal ownership of the firm's future and expend real effort:  Engage in serious, focused sales activity and generate more revenue. 

In every downturn there is opportunity.  It's not easy, and can't be discovered or captured using the passive, wait-for-it-to-come-over-the-transom mentality that takes deep root during boom times such as characterized the past ten years. But it can't possibly be as difficult as looking people in the eye and telling them that they no longer have a job with the firm for whom they've sacrificed nights, weekends and family time for so long.

Flat Demand for Legal Service in 2009

According to law firm leaders quoted in a story in today's San Francisco Business Times, demand will be flat this year.  I'm sure that doesn't surprise anyone who hasn't been in a cave for the past six months.

On the surface, this is pretty straightforward.  After all, companies and consumers alike are tightening belts in ways that haven't been seen in many years.  However, we would be wise to take a closer look at what we mean by "legal service."  Usually, that means "the legal services we've been buying for years."  As in, "same old, same old."

In any downturn, companies take advantage of the cover provided by macro conditions to eliminate waste, whether that's unproductive employees, unneeded facilities or superfluous purchasing.  Mature categories of legal service are easy targets for cost-saving, either by shifting them to lower cost firms or geographic regions (read: India), bringing them in-house, automating them, or by eliminating the underlying business function that no longer produces meaningful business impact.

It's time to review your service portfolio.  How many of them are no longer particularly important to the clients they putatively serve?  Here are some reliable indicators:

• Price pressure
• Diminishing levels of executive access
• Slow response to your calls or email
• Fault-finding over minor issues

Demand for unimportant services is always flat or declining.

On the other hand, as these companies try to figure out where their profitable future lies, those who can help inform and guide those decisions are always in demand.  Do you demonstrate sufficient knowledge of your clients' business and industry to contribute to this critical conversation?

"Show Me (More Than) The Money"

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:

1. investigate what business problem drives demand for the optimal service relationship to which the lawyer aspires (DemandTrigger™),

2. help the client assess that problem’s relative operational impact on a scale of irritant-to-imperative; and thereby

3. determine which problems obligate them to take action because the cost of not doing so is unacceptable;

4. offer solution options and explain the ramifications of applying each;

5. make solution recommendations based on understanding the business situation;

6. ask the client to decide which he favors; and

7. 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.”

Rudderless Ships

The volume of debate and activity around law firms’ evolution into sales organizations continues to ramp up.  There are lots of opinions – and accompanying solutions for sale – around every aspect of this emerging business function.  Want to look into sales training, client teams, coaching, sales planning, sales support, associate training?  Pick an industry event and there’s a good bet that it will be on the agenda.  More simply, a Google search will produce more results than you could read in a lifetime.  Law firms have invested or will invest in many, if not most, of these.  And most either will fail or will fall far short of expectations because of a recurring and glaring omission:  management oversight/leadership.

Where the hell is law firm management in this mission-critical sales evolution?  Too often, in my view, they are embarrassingly absent.  MIA.

Oh, they get involved in the sexy part, i.e., evaluating the potential solutions and –providers, deciding on the cash commitments, the visible program launches and kickoffs, the declarations of grand aspirations.  Then comes the hard work: making sure – every week – that those expected to generate the business that sustains the firm are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. 

For the most part, they have almost completely abdicated their responsibility.  This lack of oversight (unintentionally) communicates that it’s OK not to do what you committed to do.  As former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner wrote in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, his book about the IBM turnaround, “What gets measured gets done.”  Given that most lawyers have more obligations than they can reasonably fulfill most days, it is human nature to prioritize according to what gets measured.  What gets measured in a law firm?  Primarily, billable hours. 

What doesn’t get measured?  1) Volume and appropriateness of marketing and sales activity, effectiveness.  2) Pipeline and progress.  3) Use of coaching and other invested resources.  4) Cost of sales.  5) Adherence to and progress against sales plan.

Lawyers in our ResultsPath sales training/coaching program establish a weekly time budget to execute their plan.  Most say they will commit 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 hours per week to the specific plan we’ve created together, with 3 being the statistically dominant choice.  How many do so, every week?  We have some idea, but I’ll bet that few of their firms could answer with any confidence because they don’t check.  All the action items that lawyers “commit” to in their biz dev plans:  How many get done?  Once again, we have an informed guess, but we’d also bet the ranch that the firms haven’t a clue.  Why?  Because few leaders check up on the lawyers in whom they’ve invested money and expectations.  They seem to hope that somehow the partners will make sales a priority and follow through.  Or, worse, they delude themselves into thinking that writing a check for training will solve the sales problem.

Law firm leaders, unless you remain visible and continually make it clear that sales is important enough for you to check on all the time, your sales programs will remain rudderless, compromising your firms’ results, your lawyers’ development and, ultimately, your credibility with the next generation of lawyers.

Sales Organizations-To-Be

Slowly, law firms are evolving into sales organizations.  Ready or not psychologically, that’s where they’re heading.  However slowly (agonizingly to some, perhaps), it’s going to happen.  Why?  Because they have no choice.  The immutable laws of the market demand that all products and services mature, which means that eventually, they all get so good that there are no meaningful differences among offerings.  When everyone’s “product” is great, who gets the business?  It comes down to the relative effectiveness and impact of their respective sales forces. 

In every mature category, every company has good products.  Look at the new car category.  The least expensive, bare-bones new economy car has the whole package – power, steering, suspension, braking and overall performance, and fit and finish – that 20 years ago were found only in elite European luxury cars.  Despite the demonstrable excellence of virtually all automotive products, a lot of manufacturers are hurting.  They have proved that no product, no matter how good, sells itself, and the best product doesn’t always win.  (Remember Beta, acknowledged by engineers to be the superior video format?  The “inferior” VHS made them extinct because they marketed and sold VHS better.)

Professional services are different, you say?  Let’s see. 

Whenever lawyers or legal media put together “Best Of” lists, the implication is that there is a meaningful difference between #1, #20 and #50 in a category.  Take M&A, for instance.  In terms of legal capability, what AmLaw 100 firm couldn’t handle 90% of corporate acquisitions or divestitures?  I’m not trivializing anyone’s skill, dedication, focus or commitment.  I’m merely recognizing the fact that we have lawyers in our ResultsPath training program in firms of virtually every description throughout the U.S. – not just in financial centers such as NY, Chicago or Boston – that have been selected by Fortune 500 companies to assess, guide and execute those transactions. 

Even if you argue that above a certain transaction value, say $50 billion, the list of firms that are legitimately considered for such work is small.  OK, let’s call it a half-dozen.  Within that elite tier, buyers know that if they had to, they could throw a dart at the list and use a randomly chosen firm without worry.  So, where’s the product differentiation, the basis for buyer preference?

Let’s look at the four remaining Big Accounting/Consulting firms.  What does PwC know that Deloitte or KPMG doesn’t?  Is there any actual risk in selecting KPMG instead of Accenture? 

That lawyers have escaped this harsh reality for a little longer than accountants, bankers, IT consultants, etc. has merely been accidental good fortune – emphasis on past tense.  It is arguable, however, that the day of reckoning is nigh, if not already here.

The only controllable, sustainable basis for differentiation is the excellence of your sales force – and by extension, your sales support functions, e.g., marketing, research, intelligence gathering, data mining, etc.  Yeah, you have to keep up, quality-wise, but it merely keeps you in the game.  To win, you better get serious about creating a sales force that can make a difference.

So, what do you think?

Raindance 2005 Now In the Rearview Mirror, Yet Still Resonating

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

Law Firm Sales? You Betcha.

June 12-15 in Boston, a couple of hundred nascent law firm sales types (more on that definition in a bit) will gather for the second annual Raindance conference, which bills itself as “the legal service industry's only leadership conference exclusively focused on driving revenue and building client loyalty."  [Full disclosure: My company, Sales Results, Inc., is a sponsor of this event.] 

The inaugural event last year was populated by a heavy dose of like-minded sales folks who’ve known each other for years within the law firm industry, plus an equal number of other early adopters.  It will be interesting to compare this year’s group to last year’s, e.g., size, profile, reason for attending, etc.

Last year we learned that despite the historical revulsion that lawyers have had for “sales,” events have finally forced the law profession to bite the bullet, swallow their bile and accept (kicking and screaming in some cases) that it’s necessary – and not a necessary evil, as some hidebound law firm elders might continue to sniff.  Raindance 2004 was populated with adherents to the view that Sales is a core business function for every enterprise worldwide, so why would law firms be an exception?

From the conference, and the year since, it is obvious that how firms approach the whole “sales” thing is as varied as the policy-makers and practitioners who embrace it.  Some argue that the lawyers must do all the selling, a position that warms our hearts, since we’re in the business of training lawyers to sell.  Others argue that, ultimately, we’ll see a professional sales force in law firms, whether made up of lawyers who no longer practice law or non-lawyer sales professionals.  This argument, particularly the non-lawyer part, scares a lot of people, so I guess it has merit if only for creating that welcome effect.

We think that both camps are right, in a hybrid sense.  We believe that law firm sales will resemble technology sales, in which a decision process expert who provides the sales credibility teams up with a topic expert who provides the technical credibility.

What do you think?

Mike O’Horo

The Coach

Introducing Demand Trigger – and DemandTrigger

Welcome to DemandTrigger, our new blog.  The name refers to our belief that that concept (explained below) and its many applications serve as the central organizing principle in both marketing and sales, and as such should serve as grist for a robust and sustained conversation with those of you invested in the emerging “sales” debate, either from within law firms or from the perspective of having law firms and lawyers as clients.

The Demand Trigger concept was born by accident ten years ago.  I was advising a firm’s Product Liability practice group when the head of the Banking/Finance practice asked if he could spend a few minutes telling the PL group members what the B/F group was doing these days.  [This is what passed for cross-selling in 1995.  Hmm, I guess not much has changed, really.] 

The B/L head explained four or five recent developments, the expectation clearly being that the PL lawyers would respond with, “Oh, I should intro you to client XYZ.”  Unfortunately, at their conclusion, his remarks were met with silence from his colleagues.

I was seated immediately to the B/L lawyer’s right, and was feeling uncomfortable on his behalf, sort of the way you feel when an earnest, likable comedian bombs.  My innocent attempt at a rescue prompted a naïve question:  “I don’t know anything about banking/finance or product liability.  How would someone like me recognize who needs your services?”

Off the top of his head, the B/F lawyer immediately cited a handful of business problems or circumstances that, if present, reliably suggested the need for a B/F lawyer.  To my pleasant surprise (and his, I’m sure) the PL lawyers around the table began chattering, mentioning this client or that, to whom they now recognized they should introduce the B/F lawyers.

Thus was born the Demand Trigger, i.e., the underlying business problem, circumstance or opportunity that triggers demand for your category of service.  [The run-together form, DemandTrigger, is our brand and trademark.]  We now had a simple way for lawyers to recognize opportunity within their clients for other practices in their firm, and to quickly qualify a sales Suspect and eliminate dry wells:  No Demand Trigger, no sales conversation.

Some of our clients now organize all their marketing decision-making around the Demand Trigger, leading us to conclude that this may be a beneficial basis for the vibrant sales conversation that is just picking up steam in our industry.

We will use this forum to vent, opine and occasionally provoke stimulating responses from others in this biz.  Please join us, and take the opportunity to do so, too.

Mike O'Horo

The Coach