Business Development

The Entire Secret to Business Development

Remember all that other stuff I said about how to develop business?

All that difficult marketing stuff?

Forget about it.

I just learned that bringing in more business is actually quite easy.

How do you do it?

Be better-looking.

Really.

The Wall Street Journal says so. Here.

Marketing and The Little Black Dress

Two recent blog posts have decried the tendency of law firms to rely on "me too" marketing. I want to take this a step further.

Bruce Allen got there first, in his excellent Marketing Catalyst blog, with a post about just as how women at a holiday party would not be caught dead wearing the same dress -- even if they're simply wearing variations on the classic Little Black Dress -- as another attendee, law firms should, but don't, similarly strive to avoid marketing that resembles that of other law firms. Instead, they seem to seek to have their marketing resemble the other guy's.

Thom Singer, in Some Assembly Required, then added his two cents, making the point that good marketing takes time, money and effort, and law firms need to commit to making their marketing as unique and stylish as possible.

My turn. This is pretty much the exact topic of my November newsletter. Which reads as follows:

This month’s newsletter is about the tension between two facts

• I typically work on behalf of some of the most talented, valuable, highly-compensated people on the planet.
• More often than you would believe, their marketing is terrible. 

I just finished a fascinating book entitled The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen, by Michael Ruhlman. It’s a series of profiles of some of the leading chefs in the

United States, one of whom is Grant Achatz. Achatz runs a restaurant in Chicago called Alinea, and specializes in extremely creative cooking. The food he creates is often close to sculpture, or performance art.

Here’s an example:

For more examples, he has a gallery of images of his food here.

He was trained at The French Laundry, in California’s Napa Valley, under Thomas Keller, who’s widely considered one of the best chefs in the world. Achatz’s menus incorporate a great deal of food chemistry, and cutting-edge techniques. For example, an appetizer will arrive underneath an inverted glass filled with aromatic smoke. The smoke will flavor the appetizer, and will also permeate the air around the diner when it’s lifted.

 Okay – so what does this have to do with marketing?

 A full meal at Alinea costs less than what most of my clients bill in an hour. Yet, people like Achatz work at a level of creativity and excellence that vastly outstrips much of the marketing I see.

This makes no sense.

Attorneys who are good enough to even think about legal marketing are some of the most talented, driven people in the world. They have degrees from CalTech, Princeton, Harvard Law School, Stanford. They are major assets to their clients, highly paid, and absolute experts in their fields.

Yet, it’s usually the case that more money and thought goes the marketing behind an iPod, a cell phone or, for that matter, a stick of deodorant, than behind marketing them. The material and the communication prospective clients receive doesn’t begin to convey how special these lawyers are. And yet, I see examples every day of extraordinarily creative, brilliant work, in all kinds of other fields.

Gary Achatz is one example. Another is Howard Schatz. Schatz is a photographer who’s done a great deal of fine art, fashion and advertising work. His specialty, however, is fine art photography taken underwater. He has discovered that shooting underwater gives him effects of light, and of drapery that are simply incredible, and it also allows his models, literally, to float. I’ve never seen anything like it. Take a look:

Not to mince words – this image is incredible.

Let’s look at one more example: the lowliest product of all – the vacuum cleaner. You can probably guess where I’m going with this, but James Dyson, the British inventor and entrepreneur, has raised the vacuum to the level of sculpture.

All around us, then, are endless examples of people who have taken everyday, prosaic objects and activities – food, photographs, vacuum cleaners – and made them extraordinary. And here we are, with some of the most pricey, in some ways, exotic, items to market – attorneys – and so often it makes me grind my teeth, the best we can do is a picture of a bunch of white guys in suits standing around a conference table.

Why is this? And what can be done about it?

First, the “why”. There’s an old, old saying in advertising, attributed to David Ogilvy, that clients get the work they deserve. If a law firm doesn’t get good marketing, it’s because they don’t value it. And they don’t value it, because, ultimately, they don’t know any better. Last time I checked, law schools didn’t offer courses in marketing.

 As marketers, then, we have two jobs. The first is to push relentlessly for better work – better, more innovative strategy, better design, better writing, better everything. The second is to simultaneously educate our clients about why it matters.

Which is easy. The universe abounds with examples of companies marketing in brutally competitive markets, and emerging victorious because of great marketing. Apple is an example. So is Nike. So, for that matter, is Dyson. Virgin Airlines. (I mean, how would you like to be running an airline these days? Does it get any tougher?) Columbia Sportswear. The list goes on and on and on.

Mediocre marketing is an almost complete waste of money. Although it arguably doesn’t make things any worse, it also doesn’t really make them any better. It’s just sort of there. Oh, yeah, that’s a brochure. It also gradually drains the enthusiasm and the spirit out of the people producing it.

 Great marketing, on the other hand, is transformative. It gets results. It focuses people’s thinking. And it’s just plain more fun to create. And to return to Ogilvy’s point for a minute, clients do deserve it. They just don’t know it. Yet.

Fact-Based Positioning At Fox Rothschild

When law firms market themselves, or rather, when they attempt to describe their attributes to potential clients, they always say the same thing, with minor variations:
1) We're great lawyers
2) We're cost-effective
3) We're responsive

It's uncanny. A couple of years ago, I did a survey of thirty law firm web sites, and twenty-eight of them had these three pseudo-points in their materials. In a post on the 24th, Tom Kane wrote about how Fox Rothschild, a Philadelphia firm, did something completely different -- and very effective.

As almost everyone is well aware, the big firms have recently raised their associate starting salary, again, to an astronomical $160,000 per year. This is a LOT of money for someone with no experience and many clients are understandably not too pleased by this news, given that they're ultimately going to be the ones paying for those salaries. On the other hand, the ever-interesting Philalawyer.net blog makes a case that $160K is actually too low a salary in a recent post.

And in the face of this news, Fox announced that unlike these firms, they were not going to be increasing associate pay. As Kane points out, this information conveys a very powerful set of messages to both clients and associates at Fox. It tells the associates that Fox actually cares about the quality of their lives, and is not going to attempt to grind them into dust at work in order to recoup their costs.

It also tells the clients that Fox is not going to try to get them to foot the bill for training new associates. Secondarily, it also sends the message that Fox thinks that paying someone $160K a year is kind of ridiculous, and that the firm understands, and perhaps shares, the client's irritation at this number.

Fox's response to this trend is brilliant marketing for two reasons. First, it's a powerful differentiator. It really sets the firm apart. Additionally, it is also great marketing because it's fact-based (I love that term). So much legal marketing is just baloney -- vague, abstract statements that can't be measured, proven or quantified. Fox, by contrast, has done something specific and real, and  has put their money where their mouths are. The absolute bedrock foundation of good marketing is credibility, and Fox has just created a lot of it for themselves.

Good work.

A Brilliant Post About Strategy Written, Unfortunately, By Someone Else

I have no problem criticizing someone else's blog post. Example. I also have no problem praising a great one, and I read one of those today.

Yesterday, Bruce MacEwen, author of Adam Smith, Esq., wrote one of the most trenchant, insightful articles I've ever read about strategy. And his point, which I wrote an entire article about for Law Practice magazine last year (and won an award for, by the way) is that people in general, and lawyers in particular (although those two categories aren't mutually exclusive) tend to think about strategy sort of sideways. They think about static strategy, rather than dynamic strategy. The focus on the way things are now, rather than they way they're going to be.

In his article, MacEwen extensively quotes a guy named Richard Rumelt, who's a professor at UCLA's business school. Rumelt, and MacEwen (and I) believe that the fatal flaw in a lot of strategic thinking is that it's reactive. People get all hung up on the current state of the competitive landscape, and do not take any time to think about what's coming. Lawyers are particularly prone to this, because, as an intellectual discipline, law relies almost completely on an analysis of the past -- that's what precedent, for example, is all about.

However, laws, and cases, keep changing. Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, didn't exist a decade ago, and I've heard it described as the "Lawyers and Consultants Full Employment Act." The lawyers and consultants who got in early, and now have big, thriving SOX practices are perfect examples of the rewards of dynamic strategy. If you want to develop a competitive advantage, there are two ways -- the hard, and the easy. The hard way is to muscle your way to the front by overpowering your competitors. The easy way is to spot a trend, or a change, or something new or different before anyone else, and to go after it.

The easy way works, and examples abound. Steve Jobs doesn't try to overpower Microsoft or try to win a war of attrition through execution. To quote Animal House, "We could fight them with conventional weapons. that could take years, and cost millions of lives." Instead, he waits, and watches, until he spots a change or a trend that creates an opportunity, then he goes after it.

Jobs noticed that music downloads were incredibly popular, and  -- this is a big "and" -- he also realized that something that was done illegally on such a massive scale would sell like crazy if it was legal and reasonably priced. Result: iTunes, and the iPod.

iTunes and the iPod are examples of another brilliant concept: value denial. Or (heh) "VD" for short. VD occurs when there is a product or service that customers, or clients, clearly would pay for, but aren't being offered. In the music business, it was a clear value denial that it was impossible to buy just a few tracks from an album. You had to buy the whole thing. Apple fixed that.

In law, an example of this is e-discovery consulting. Fenwick & West, among other firms, has created a thriving practice in advising clients on the ins and outs of computer forensics as they relate to potential litigation and risk management. Thanks to a few key appellate court decisions, a lot of warehoused data -- even data that has been "erased" has become admissible evidence. Which data you retain as backup, and which you destroy, is no longer simply a question for the IT director -- it also major, and increasing, legal implications. Fenwick saw this coming, addressed it, and is reaping the rewards.

I am willing to unconditionally guarantee that in the next two years, some new area of law is going to spring up. It will create a lot of revenue for the handful of firms who were paying attention to the signs everyone else ignored, and got in early. They will take the lion's share of the money, and everyone else will be slugging it out for what's left over, which won't be much.

Someone has to get there first. Why not you?

Social Networking and Professional Marketing

I make my living helping professionals market themselves. And lately, I've been thinking about how the whole Web 2.0 movement, and the concept of social networking fits into that.

Traditional marketing is a speak/listen model. You construct a product, you price it, you create a brand for it, and then you tell the marketplace about it over and over and over and over and over. There isn't usually much cross-talk between or among the members of your market. Housewives don't usually sit around and talk about which laundry detergent they buy, and why. First of all, your product is a commodity, which makes it sort of uninteresting, and second, it's hard for enough housewives to get together. They would like to -- witness the success of Tupperware parties in the old days, and multilevel marketing today. But it's logistically really hard.

Enter the Internet. Suddenly. you have communities springing up all over, online. Whatever you're into, from SpongeBob Squarepants to kites, there's a group of people out there who are into it too, and you can connect. This has been accellerated by social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

In one of the marketing blogs I subscribe to, MarketerBlog, this issue was discussed recently. The key part of the post is as follows:

So if you’re not Google and you can’t pony up $900 million to ensure your access to MySpace users, what should you do? Find ways for your brand to become part of the conversation in the community. Understand first and foremost that you’re entering a community, not placing a media buy. Be respectful and transparent. Get to know the sensibilities of that community and make sure that your brand presence fits. If you’re targeting teenagers on Facebook your brand presence should look and sound like something a 14 year old would dig. (And yes, I’m told “dig” is back.) If you’re trying to reach professionals to raise awareness of a political issue, then use appropriate creative and copy for that community.

However, this trend has been somewhat slower to catch on in the business world. And part of the reason is that nobody can find the damn community. I have been in discussions with two new clients in the last week -- one is an enormous, monolothic law firm, and one is a small web design shop. In both cases, business development requires dealing with something of a pickle. On the one hand, since these firms are marketing relationships, they can't just concoct a brand and start making a lot of noise, as in the old days.

On the other hand, there isn't a preexisting community for either of them to plug into, either. The
Web design shop doesn't know, yet, who its clients will be, and as for the law firm, there aren't really online communities full of general counsels for international companies that are willing to pay $500 an hour for tax advice on offshore Real Estate Investment Trusts.

So does that pretty much end the analysis? Not quite. Because although the specific community you are seeking probably does not exist, people who would qualify for it are almost certainly members of a larger community, where you and your service can have a voice, and a presence, and an identity in the conversation. The trick is to look for a larger, less specific community, and stake out your identity within it. Be less specific, and within the larger community, you can own the more defined topic you are marketing.

So for the law firm, although there isn't an online community that exactly fits the bill, there is one of general counsels, where they may be able to own the offshire REIT space. Similarly, there are online communities of marketers where the small web design shop may be able to thrive, if they can define themselves in a meaningful way within that group.

Strategy When The Tide Stops Rising

Interesting post today in the More Partner Income blog. Bottom line: if you're running a law firm, you don't really need a strategy when things are going well. True. A rising tide sure does lift all boats. And, emotionally, everyone's kind of invested in acting as if the tide will rise forever. It's much easier to believe that you're getting a lot of business because you're a genius, rather than because you're lucky.

The need for a strategy becomes painfully clear when the tide begins to ebb. At that point, you begin to encounter pricing pressures, real competition from firms that previously were content simply to feed from the other end of the same big trough, and so on. At that point, it's a little late to start evaluating your options. Even if you develop a strategy, you're going to have a very hard time implementing it. The tide that so effortlessly lifted you may now be heading down the drain.

One of the baseline tools for developing a strategy is the SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats" and precisely 50% of your work in this matrix is devoted to Bad Things That Might Happen. The very first thing any strategist worth his expense account thinks about is where the landmines are, and what might set them off.

Yet, in a lot of environments, people absolutely hate to think about this stuff. I read a piece yesterday in Salon that illustrates this perfectly. It was the autobiographical story of a guy who borrowed a lot of money to buy a typesetting company. In 2000. The piece was largely about the impact of outsourcing, which is what rapidly killed his business. But as I read it, I couldn't help but wonder why on earth someone who had a strategy would borrow millions of dollars to compete in a market where, basically, he was obviously soon going to be unable to compete.

Strategy is all about what's going to happen, not what's happening at the moment. Law firms need to remember this.