Business Development

Selling: Get Them To The White Board

During a conversation about sales this week with my extremely smart friend Chris, he told me about a sales idea that is both simple and brilliant. It's one of those "Why didn't I think of this?" concepts.

Chris sells extremely large, complex technical consulting projects. As part of this process, he makes very sure to use a whiteboard for any presenting he does, and insures that his prospective customers use it too. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what closes the sale.

Think about it. There's Chris, up at the front of the room. He is at a whiteboard, and he begins do diagram . . . something. It could be the architecture of the network itself. Or the business processes and logic behind it. Or the financial impact of the project. Whatever. Regardless of the subject, he is careful to start building a diagram on the whiteboard with lots of little boxes and circles and arrows and stuff.

And as he works away at this, at some point, he invites one of the prospects to come up to the whiteboard and contribute to the diagram.

This is the Big Moment. First of all, nobody ever says "no" to this. Second, once they're up there, and start adding little boxes and arrows of their own, the entire dynamic of the meeting changes. It is no longer Chris trying to convince them of something. It's Chris and the prospect, working together to solve a problem.

This is a huge shift. Suddenly, the prospect is invested in the situation, and in the proposed solution to the situation. It's now his solution, too.

Whatever you're selling, get the prospect to participate in both defining the problem and crafting the proposed solution. A white board is an excellent way to do this. Once they do, the entire dialogue goes from whether they should work with you to how.

A New and Improved Elevator Pitch

 Nice little post from Seth Godin today, which made me think of the content of the elevator pitch.

In case you're not familiar with it, the elevator pitch is your self-introduction, in which, in thirty seconds or so (the time it takes to talk to a stranger in a descending elevator before arriving at the lobby, hence the name) you tell who you are, what you do and why it matters.

 Godin's point which, as usual, is dead-on, is that we tend to tell the same stories over and over without revising or updating them. Mistake.

My business is markedly different than it was a year ago, as are most people's. Therefore, simply repeating the same pitch isn't a good idea. It's not really accurate, and it's probably not that compelling, either.

Thanks, Seth.

The best business development habit(s) you can have

Of all the things you can do do elevate your BizDev game, the most valuable is this: follow up. Whenever you make a new contact, or reestablish an old, important one, in many ways the original meeting is less important than how you follow up. The idea is to make sure they remember you. Here's how you do it:

Immediately after the conversation, fire up Outlook (or whatever contact management system you use) and take notes. Do a core dump, and get everything you can recall about the conversation down. Otherwise, you will forget almost all of it very quickly, which drains 80% of the value from the meeting. In particular, get down the personal stuff. Next time you meet him (or her) being able to mention one very small, very personal detail from your previous conversation will have tremendous impact. Also, within 24 hours, follow up with a quick "I really enjoyed it/let's do it again" email. This helps fix you in their memory, which is equally important.

A week after the conversation, send a second, equally quick "thought you'd be interested" email that refers to something in the original conversation. If you need to do a little research to come up with something, do it. It won't take more than ten minutes, and if you spent two hours setting up, going to, engaging in and returning from a meeting with someone, it's a trivial incremental effort. For example, if the person you met with talked about her love for collecting early Barbie dolls, send her an article about the Mattel lawsuit over Bratz dolls. The idea, again, is to reinforce your presence in her memory.

A month after the conversation, email a third time. It can be a "thought you'd be interested" email, or a "why don't we have lunch again?" email -- either is fine. The point, again, is that by following up, you make sure that you're remembered, which is the entire point.

Remember -- it's not what you do. It's what you do after you do what you do. Or something.

An Open Letter to Barton J. Winokur, Chairman of Dechert

Dear Mr. Winokur:

I read in todays WSJ Law Blog, and elsewhere, that due to the slowing real estate market, Dechert initially decided to lay off 13 associates in your real estate practice group. According to stories in the press, you then announced that instead, they would be reassigned to other practice groups instead. I think this is a very bad idea, and I think I have a better one.

First, rest assured that I know personally what it is to be laid off. It's traumatic for everyone involved. I understand that, and the attorneys involved and their families have my empathy. This is hard.

I make my living teaching attorneys how to market. The biggest single obstacle, and critical factor, in this is the attorney's mindset. Many lawyers (and remember, I am a lawyer -- in fact, I practiced in Philadelphia, where Dechert is based) are trained to believe that marketing is beneath them, that good attorneys do not need to market themselves, and consequently, are often extremely reluctant to engage in business development. Sadly, this point of view is typically the exception rather than the rule.

This, of course, is a mistaken belief. Marketing is an essential part of every lawyer's toolkit. A lawyer is an entrepreneur, and is basically his or her own small business. Every business must have customers. And the lawyer must do whatever needs doing to keep business coming in.

Your firm now has thirteen associates who have learned this lesson the (very) hard way.  This presents an extraordinary opportunity for your firm and the lawyers involved.

These lawyers have been exposed firsthand to the market.  They are personally experiencing the consequences that arise when a firm (or for that matter, an individual lawyer) fails to develop business.  Although in one way or another every lawyer is affected by market conditions, these people are seeing it firsthand.

Consequently, they have an enormous incentive to become business developers.  My suggestion is this: rather than simply assigning them to new practice groups, work with your business development department to train him and then get them out there developing business for Dechert.  Some will not make it.  But those that do will be incredible sources of new business for the firm far into the future. Your firm can certainly afford to do this. Your business development and marketing professionals are first-rate.

The alternative you seem to have chosen - reassignment to other practice groups - sends exactly the wrong message.  The firm is telling its associates then they are not responsible for developing their own client base.  Someone else will take care of it.  All a good lawyer needs to do is practice law. 

This is not true, and a management team that sends this message is doing a disservice to both the firm and the attorneys involved.  Rather than simply reshuffling your org chart, consider this situation an opportunity to train and motivate a unique, focused group of business developers that will be an asset to Dechert for years to come. They can still practice, and can still be attached to other practice groups. But having seen what the market can do, with some support and help from the firm, they can and will become great sources of new clients. Use this to your advantage -- and theirs.

Very truly yours,

Peter Darling

A Great Christmas Card

While the WTH Awards represent the worst of the annual holiday card donnybrook, the best arrived in my mailbox last week in the form of a holiday card from the Philadelphia firm of Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin. Larry Bodine's written about some great holiday cards he's received. Here's my submission.

Now, writing about a holiday card is sort of like writing about music -- as Laurie Anderson is said to have said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture -- it's a really stupid thing to want to do." Nevertheless, on I press.

The card is actually a poster, which is artfully laid out and printed so that what you're originally presented with when you open the envelope is card-sized and card-shaped. The only image you see is this:

However, you open it, and then keep unfolding and opening until you're holding what is about a 2' x 3' poster, featuring all the attorneys of the firm, in small, sepia-toned images. There's a charming little poem in the middle, which is keyed to the images, and makes the entire object into a sort of game. It's fun to hunt through the images to look for the attorney you know there.

This card is GREAT. It's fun and engaging. It has none of the Ten Deadly Images law firms sometimes use in their marketing. It's really nicely designed, and demonstrates time, work, thought and real design. In short, it's a terrific piece of work. No WTH Award for Hangley -- just a wish that I get a card from them next year, too.

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The Uses of Surveys -- Talking, Listening and Showing

It's been a while since I've written about the uses of surveys for business development, but the awesome Seth Godin mentioned it today in a post, and it reminded me of something. Surveys are about talking, as well as listening ... as well as doing.

Godin wrote:

The traditional understanding of a survey is that the goal is to LEARN from your population and that you will ask a scientific sampling, not everyone.

You can TEACH people with a survey, though, simply by asking them questions that help them notice things they never noticed before. "Do your prefer option A or option B," might just be a way of getting people to notice that you even have an option B. 

The very act of asking a question may change the experience for the customer. One small firm I know shows prospects a book of testimonials. Then they say, "I hope that when we've completed our job for you, you'll be willing to write one too." That seed increases the likelihood that people are going to be looking for something good to say, which increases the likelihood that they'll enjoy the event.

And in a proposal I wrote for a Washington law firm for a client survey project, I said something very similar. Surveys are as much about talking as listening. I wrote:

First, simply by asking an important client to share his or her perceptions, the firm is sending a powerful message. It is explicitly demonstrating that client satisfaction, which many firms honor only in the breach, is something it views as essential. The firm sets itself apart simply by asking the question: “How are we doing?”

 Second, in the process of interviewing clients, the firm will uncover an enormous amount of strategically valuable information. Much of it, of course, will be about the firm’s relationship with the client. But much of it will also be about industry competitors, new areas the client believes are important, and the performance of other law firms. By conducting the interviews professionally, creatively and attentively, the firm will create a valuable channel for enhancing its knowledge.

 Finally, following through on the survey with a response, and with action, is critically important. Learning about a client’s issues, and doing nothing, is a fatal mistake. It is actually better to be ignorant of a client’s unmet expectation than to know and do nothing.

So, I guess I'm seeing Godin's analysis, and raising him one. The impact of a survey comes in three parts:

You talk, by asking people questions, which educates them and demonstrates that you are keenly interested in their perceptions of your firm.

You listen to their perceptions.

And finally, you show them your commitment, by doing something.

Rock, Paper & Scissors, LLP

Seth Godin and Freakonomics tell us today about an amazingly brilliant promotion run by a D.C. area fast-food chain: beat the cashier in a game of rock, paper scissors, and get a dollar off your meal. Why don't law firms do this?

Just kidding. Sort of. But, as always, there's a lesson here.

Being a cashier at Burger King, or whatever, has got to be one of the worst jobs in the world. The work is repetitive. The clientele is not always gracious. You often have to wear a stupid hat. And as a result, the cashiers, the front-line people, often develop this protective interpersonal shell. To the customer, they're bored, or disconnected, or just could not care less.

I saw this last night at, of all things, a Pep Boys. I was having dinner with some friends, and the husband-friend had to go retrieve his car after having some work done. It was around 6:00. Everyone who had gotten off work had arrived to get their cars, so the lines were really long. And the people behind the counter had been there for ten hours. They were tired. The customers were annoyed. The line moved slowly. And so the mood of the place was absolute, complete indifference to what the customers were going through.

Law firms sometimes do the same thing, although not as obviously. Instead, lawyers tend to adopt this professional persona. Humorless, dry, low-key, serious, a little pretentious. If you're from a really big firm, this can come across, and maybe actually be, arrogance. It's understandable. If you have to bill 1,600 hours a year, or whatever, you work like hell, you don't have a lot of spare time, and emotional involvement is not exactly a valued commodity.

But in one of the seminars I teach, on client service, I discuss the concept of Above the Line, and Below the Line. The idea here is that there are two kinds of client contacts. Imagine an imaginary vertical line cutting a client's organizational chart into two segments, and you'll get the picture.

Below the Line is where the day-to-day work of the client gets done. For these contacts, client service is all about consistent, efficient execution of the basics. These are the people who spend the budgets.

At the top, however, the view is different. The senior people, Above the Line, are the ones who set the budgets. They are concerned with strategy, and the big, long-term picture. These people are the ones who can open up the wallet and spend serious money if they think something's worth it. These are the ones who will not pressure you to lower your rates if they see value in your work. These are the really important contacts.

And the key to keeping them is developing, and strengthening, a personal relationship. Which means, over time, dropping the facade -- working to move beyond the role of Lawyer, and moving them beyond the role of Client. You need to reveal your human side, and let them see yours. You need to get to know them as people.

This has all kinds of benefits. First, it allows you to service them more effectively. You will know, for example, whether they prefer phone calls with questions returned immediately, or whether they want you to figure out the answer and call back when you've got it. Second, it allows you to cut through the crap and ask direct questions. If a proposal bombs, you can simply call your contact and say, "Donna, what was wrong with our proposal?" and get a straight answer.

Playing rock paper scissors with a cashier accomplishes this instantly. In ten seconds, your perception of them, and the restaurant for which they work, will change. It has to. Change the timeframe from seconds to months, put some zeroes behind the size of the transaction at issue, and humanizing your relationships with key clients operates exactly the same way.

I've got a white paper on this topic. Email me, and I'll be happy to forward it.

Your New Client Just Called You a Liar. Now What?

One of the most interesting, and difficult, situations professionals encounter is the new client who tells you, to your face, that you're a liar, a fraud, a cheat, or just some kind of hustler. It happens more than you think.

In his blog, David Maister addresses this situation in a post from Wednesday. I have actually had this happen. Most recently -- and this was a couple of years ago -- I was sitting in a conference room with a brand-new client, a lawyer, who looked me right in the eye and said something like "You know, I think all consultants are basically frauds."

There's something about professional services that seems to invite this kind of statement. Perhaps it's because what we sell is our time and our expertise which, because it's invisible, is therefore suspect. When I practiced law, I remember that there were always cartoons around the office making fun of lawyers. A lot of them were just plain insulting. I remember being amazed by them. A secretary would have a cartoon on her desk saying something really nasty about the people who paid her salary, and everyone would just sort of accept it.

Maister reviews a lot of possible responses, but to me, they basically boil down to two options: Flight or Probe.

Flight: Stand up, collect your things, and calmly walk out. The engagement is over. There is some kind of line, and in the rare situations where someone is offensive enough to cross it -- overt racism, they make a pass at you, or they say something that is really, no-kidding offensive, you simply leave.

This tactic only makes sense if you are truly willing to walk away from the business. And sometimes it can have surprising benefits. My friend Chris Burry tells a great story he heard once about a Major IT Consulting Firm that had a very big project going on at some kind of investment banking firm -- Goldman Sachs, maybe, or Lehman Brothers. The client was being a jerk, and had been a jerk for some time. Finally, he was too much of a jerk, and the consultant managing the engagement called his bluff. He told every single one of his people to pack up and leave the site, immediately.

This amounted to a couple of hundred people, and brought the entire project to a complete stop. What followed was a brief, testy meeting with the CEO and the jerk. Basically, the CEO told the jerk to shape up, significantly increased the project's budget and let it be known that he was not going to tolerate anyone harassing the consultants. Problem solved.

This kind of result is rare, of course. Usually, if you walk, you're not going to come back. In some cases, though, that's much better than continuing to tolerate abuse.

Probe: This is really just objection-handling. Respond with something like "What do you mean by that?" or "Why do you say that?" or "That's interesting. Would you like to talk a little more about that?" In each case, you are trying to calm everyone down, defuse a confrontation, and get the discussion focused on the issue rather than on you.

As Maister also points out, it is almost impossible to figure this kind of discussion out on the spot. Take fifteen minutes, and think through the most likely objections, along with your response. Plan it out in advance. Be ready. It doesn't happen often, but if it does, you do not want to be caught unprepared.

How to Work A Room in The Matrix

A long, long time ago, I wanted to be in publishing. So as part of a summer program, I got professional training in how to attend a cocktail party. I'm not making this up. At the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures courts, every afternoon we had a little soiree called Sherry Hour, where we drank and chatted, which was excellent practice for being an editor in New York. Guy Kawasaki, on Friday, blogged about the same topic, and nicely done it is.

The fascinating, and frustrating, thing about working a room is that almost everyone thinks they know how to do it, and they're almost all wrong. They think about it as a casual, social event when it's the exact opposite. They focus on the obvious facet of what's going on -- a group of people standing around chatting -- and completely miss the much more strategic, critical stuff that's going on underneath. I was watching the second Matrix movie last night, The Matrix Reloaded, and there was a great monologue in it that made this point beautifully:

Look, see those birds? At   some point a program was written to govern them. A program was written   to watch over the trees, and the wind, the sunrise, and sunset. There   are programs running all over the place. The ones doing their job, doing   what they were meant to do, are invisible. You'd never even know they   were here.

The thing about effectively working a room is that ilooks easy, and natural, and totally spontaneous. The rules operate invisibly. But they are very real, and unvarying, and that's what Kawasaki's post is about. He reviews a book entitled, well, "How to Work a Room", by Susan RoAne. Kawasaki's post provides ten of RoAne's tips for working a room or an event, and they're worth reviewing. None of this stuff is rocket science, but it is essential. Working a room is all about two things, executing the fundamentals, and remembering a sort of waterd-down version of the Law of Large Numbers.

This law states, basically, the the more you do something, the more pure probability comes into play, and the more your results will hew to the statistically predictable result. If you throw a dice ten times, it's quite possible you will not roll a three. But if you throw one six thousand times, you will roll a three a thousand times, or very close to it, which is exactly what the laws of probability dictate. With a large enough sample size, statistics never fails. Which is why Las Vegas exists.

And what does this have to do with working a room? Simply this: if you are working a room in search of client prospects, the more people you speak with, the greater your chances of finding one. If, statistically, one out of twenty people are a reasonable client prospect, then if you talk with twenty people, you're much more likely to encounter a prospect than if you only talk with five.

Professional salespeople know this. They know that the sheer number of people they meet with is at least as important as your skill at selling. In fact, this has been reduced to another equation, which doesn't have a catchy name. Let's call it the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 rule.

If you're a salesperson, 1/3 of the people you meet with are not going to buy from you, no matter what. They just aren't. 1/3 are, no matter what. They just are. And there's 1/3 who may or may not -- it depends on how good a salesperson you are.

Therefore, just meeting with more people will have at least as much impact on becoming a better salesperson.

The great thing about learning to work a room, though, is that it does both. The reason people either avoid events, or stand in corners mute at them, is apprehension. They're almost always afraid of walking up to people they don't know and striking up a conversation. This is a very human, very irrational reaction.

The best way to deal with it is to prepare. Anxiety typically appears in the absence of facts. By thinking about how to work a room, the entire experience is demystified. It makes sense. It has rules. It's not as scary. So not only are you going to be better at it, but you're actually going to be more likely to do it. And the more you do it, the better you get, which brings the Law of Large Numbers into play even more forcefully.  The key is getting it to work for you instead of against you, which will happen if you let it.