Training Premise
What has been missing for a long time in law firm marketing is the recognition that, while proactive marketing is an essential part of maintaining and expanding business in today’s competitive legal environment, marketing activities alone do not land new clients. The failure to grasp this reality leaves many law firm managers unable to explain why, despite substantial increases in business development efforts, the additional efforts are not rewarded with a growing list of new clients and a steady increase in gross revenues. They don’t understand that continuing to do good legal work, promoting the firm’s visibility, and the regular “wining and dining” of existing clients are not enough to ensure a healthy influx of new business. Yet, year after year, law firms invest their hard-earned money and their attorneys’ time in promotional activities that do not yield the growth in business they want.
The key insight is this: no matter what your firm does to gain recognition and attract attention in the marketplace or to keep existing clients happy, ultimately, it is the individual ability of each attorney to communicate effectively and deal well with people that converts prospects into clients and wins new business. Investing more time and money in promoting your firm to existing and prospective clients makes little sense if you are not also training your attorneys how to “sell” the firm’s services. Despite all marketing efforts, the fact remains, people seeking legal help hire lawyers and not law firms – a prospect’s decision to engage an attorney is typically made on a one-to-one personal basis. Similarly, an existing client’s decision to use more of the services you have been providing, or to use other services that your firm offers, is not made in an impersonal vacuum. Until attorneys learn how to artfully elicit the wants and needs of prospective and existing clients and to influence them in making positive decisions to engage the firm’s services – which is what “professional selling” is all about – the return on law firm marketing efforts will not substantially change.
A Note About Skills Training
To put skills training in perspective, assume for a moment that your firm decided to “re-tool” ten seasoned transactional lawyers, with little or no courtroom experience, to become solid litigators. It’s unlikely that anyone in management would expect that this could be accomplished simply by sending these individuals to a three-day program on trial advocacy.
To the contrary, you might start by having them attend refresher courses on pleading practice, discovery, federal and state procedure, evidence, and the art of persuasion. Beyond that, basic training for the would-be trial advocates might include “hands-on” sessions dedicated to developing their skills in voir dire and jury selection, opening statement, direct examination, cross-examination, offering expert witness testimony, presenting/defending evidence on damages, and delivering effective closing argument. Perhaps, you might even send them to a weeklong ATLA or NITA program where they would be videotaped under mock trial situations and critiqued by top-flight, experienced trial lawyers. Even then, your attorneys would be far from “skilled litigators.” Putting their new knowledge to work and applying and honing their skills in a variety real-life discovery and courtroom situations — jumping into the ring, making mistakes, and losing and winning some cases along the way — would be an obvious part of their re-tooling process. So what’s the point?
Training Attorneys to Develop New Business
The point is simply this: like re-tooling the transactional lawyer, turning attorneys, who have had little or no previous education in how to build strong personal relationships or how to influence others effectively in a business development setting, into solid rainmakers requires more than a few hours of training. The learning process involves increasing knowledge, improving skills and gaining experience over time. That’s why, in our verbal and written communications with all of our clients, we repeatedly emphasize the following message:
“Basic sales training is essential and valuable, but not, in itself, sufficient to convert good lawyers into rainmakers. To succeed, there must be unwavering management support and a commitment of significant time and resources for ongoing education and the development of effective systems of reward and accountability. In addition, strong individual motivation on the part of your attorneys and a substantial effort to learn new information and enhance interpersonal communication skills are required.”
Don’t Waste Your Money — Go For Behavior Change
Many firms put their lawyers through a one-time marketing program, much like the average one- or two-day continuing legal education (CLE) class. Other law firms take a long-term approach to educating and training their attorneys how to develop new business. The first approach, in most cases, is a waste of your money.
The right approach to training starts with management’s recognition that teaching attorneys how to sell their services effectively involves much more than just delivering some new information by a motivational speaker. That’s not going to change anyone’s skills or behavior. To get the results you want, you need to ensure that the sales strategies and tactics presented in training are “learned” by those attending the program and then put to work. The new information presented to your attorneys has to be continually reinforced. Individual and group practice sessions, as well as critique, should be incorporated as part of the skill-improvement process. Assignments should be given that require training participants to use their new skills repeatedly and they should be held accountable for completing those tasks. Even then, as the changes you want start to occur, it’s important for management to remember that your attorneys’ success in winning new business depends upon their expanding and strengthening relationships over time with colleagues, networking contacts and existing and prospective clients. The improvement of skills, the change in behavior and the building of relationships simply cannot be achieved overnight.
Develop a Common Lexicon and a Model for Practice Development
Marketing and sales training are often presented in a structural vacuum. This is another fundamental mistake. In the re-tooling analogy, it’s like sending someone who has no understanding of the rules of evidence or trial procedure to take a course on cross-examination of expert witnesses. It’s not that nothing will be learned — it’s that there is no context for the learning. As a result, much less value will be gained. For this reason, we believe it is critically important that the various courses of instruction comprising a comprehensive marketing training program (1) adopt a common lexicon and (2) build upon a proven paradigm for practice development.
What you want to avoid is a disjunctive approach where your attorneys undertake marketing communications and related sales activities (presenting, writing articles, networking, interviewing clients, cross-selling, account management, etc.) as if each was an unrelated function. You’ll end up, like so many law firms, with lawyers moving in diverse directions and you’ll have a much harder time managing a unified sales effort. In contrast, you will get a far better return on your training investment if you “institutionalize” a sales language (so, for example, everyone knows what is meant by the “client’s drivers”) and work from the same business development model, just as the efficiency of litigation is enhanced by having established trial procedures and a vernacular for the process.
Help Your Attorneys Strengthen Their Skills
From years of habit, many attorneys go on a “mental vacation” when they attend CLE programs. They sit in an environment where information is thrown at them and there is no accountability for learning. Frequently, lawyers take these courses just to log mandatory CLE credits. In this fashion, law firms waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorney training every year.
In contrast, most attorneys who attend ATLA or NITA seminars, where participants are put into mock competition and videotaped and critiqued on their performance, exhibit a much different attitude towards their training. A similar shift in attentiveness and learning behavior occurs when lawyers pursue specialty certifications or enroll in master-degree courses in various disciplines. In these situations, you find attorneys actively studying and preparing for class. Typically, the self-motivation to attend such programs is much higher, as is the learning curve. Interestingly, in competitive environments of this type where individual performance is on the line, there is also much less criticism by participants of the instructors and the course content. Obviously, it’s important that any training you provide be structured to ensure that your attorneys don’t go on a mental vacation while your firm is investing in their business development education.
Elicit Commitment from Your Attorneys
The importance of training participants being personally committed to the program cannot be overemphasized. One option is to require course participants to pay tuition for the course and to purchase their own training manuals and supplemental reading materials. Another approach is to require agreement from attorneys entering the program that they will personally pay for their proportionate cost of the training if they fail to complete specific client development assignments or otherwise fail the course. Along the same lines, we strongly recommend that attorneys who request personal help in their business development endeavors be required to pay for, or at least substantially contribute to, the cost of their individual coaching assistance.
Provide a Strong Follow-Up and Support Program
Promoting legal services is not something the vast majority of attorneys love to do. In fact, most would rather not even think about it. Your lawyers’ general aversion to marketing will not change simply because they participate in a basic “Selling Skills” course. To achieve the shift in attitude and behavior you want, you have to remind your attorneys continually that they have business development responsibilities to attend to, in addition to the legal matters at hand. To this end, it’s essential that your firm establish a strong follow-up mechanism to whatever initial training you offer. The follow-up program should systematically reinforce the new knowledge gained in training, require participants to use their new sales language and motivate them into actions that will produce the improved interpersonal skills and returns in new business that you seek. Educational reading material, advanced skill-set training, personal coaching, and effective systems of reward and accountability are important elements to a strong follow-up and support program.
Protect Your Training Investment
In addition to a strong follow-up program, depending on the size of your firm, you may want to develop the capability of delivering attorney sales training through your own in-house staff. In all cases, forethought in planning and organizing your training and follow-up activities will help to ensure positive returns on your training investment.
For Further Information
Please contact — Peter Jenkins, Esq., President, LawPartnering, Inc.; phone (928) 776-4600 or email peter.jenkins@LawPartnering.com.
