Business Development

Good Law Schools Make For Bad Marketers

Seth Godin posted something yesterday I've been chewing on. His point is that elite colleges are a marketing creation and something of a scam. I think the same thing, slightly altered, is true of law schools. Good law schools make for bad legal marketing.

First of all, I know what I'm talking about. I did my undergraduate work at Swarthmore, which is consistently ranked in the top three liberal-arts colleges in the country. I then went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, which is consistently in the top ten law schools in the country.

Godin writes that graduates of elite colleges do not do any better in life than anyone else. They're not happier, wealthier, healthier -- nothing. After spending a fortune, and working their tails off, they basically receive nothing -- nothing tangible anyway.

Law school is a little different. Top firms, the ones who pay $160,000 a year in salary, recruit like crazy at the top schools, and a J.D. from Yale or Stanford is an almost solid guarantee of a high-paying job at a big firm. That's when the problems start.

A kid who gets into, and out of, a place like Penn has made it to the top of the pile in an VERY structured, ancient system. Law school is all about grades. Period. Elite undergraduate schools tend to go for well-roundedness along with grades, which allegedly was a tactic created in the 1920s to limit the number of Jews at Ivy League schools. But I digress.

Success in law school is all about powering through your courses. At a place like Penn, you are competing with the absolute best of the best. Every kid who is president of Student Council, valedictorian, and was reading Sanskrit in the crib is there, and they're all gunning for the top, against you. For those of you who are reading this and aren't lawyers, law students are ranked. In other words, whether you get and "A" or a "B" depends on how you do competing with someone who may end up a clerk on the Supreme Court. It's relentless, and extremely tough, and really competitive. By the time you make it through, you have not only done well in some very tough courses, but you have also absorbed the idea that you are one of the elite, and you expect the world to recognize this, and reward it, as law school did. You have made it through a very long, complex maze.

Which is where the trouble starts. When these students are ejected out into big firms, first of all, they often have no idea how the "soft" part of a career functions -- interpersonal relationships, strategy, networking, etc. They're not used to being treated as cogs in a much bigger machine. And finally, they have absolutely no idea of how to market themselves, or, fatally, why it matters.

They've always done well. They've always made it to the next step through sheer performance. But as I've written many times, the real world, the marketplace in which they function, is not that way at all. It's chaotic, and requires skills -- like selling, and networking -- that they've never needed. The result can be trouble.

So, Seth's observation about the questionable value of a college degree sort of applies to law schools, and sort of doesn't. On the one hand, if you go to a hot school, you will get a much better job out of the gate, if "better" means big firm, big city, high salary. However, you will also have a harder time, I think, learning to market yourself.

In response to this, Penn, like several other schools, is putting together a course on what's loosely called "Professionalism." It's intended to be an introduction to the nonlegal aspects of practicing law, and I'm going to be lecturing on business development, along with a classmate, Wendy Beetlestone. A good time should be had by all, as well as maybe helping baby lawyers be better marketers.

$160,000 Per Year Is Not Enough For a Rock Star Associate

I got an email today from a friend. Her daughter is a 2L in a Top Ten law school. Her daughter is also being flooded with summer associate offers -- so far, she's got offers for the summer (and yes, folks, it's not even November yet) from SEVEN Major Firms, and she's got five more to interview with. These firms are all bending over backwards to get her, including allowing her to spend part of the summer in one office and part in another, and so on.

What is going on here? And what does this portend?

Well, first let's take a look at why this girl seems to have singlehandedly created an incredible seller's market for herself. In order of importance, here are the factors I think are at work.

• She's from a Top Ten school. This makes a huge difference. Law schools, like the Mafia and Hollywood, are divided into the stars, and everyone else. I would guess 80% of the people who are getting those $160K paychecks went to a top school -- they're proving grounds, really, and firms take that very seriously. At my law school, at the University of Pennsylvania, the admissions percentage was 12%.
• She's tough, and she's a machine for work. Among her extracurricular activities as a teenager was gymnastics, at a level just below what it takes to make the Olympics. This takes an unspeakable amount of work, and guts, and a level of ambition that makes a forest fire look like a birthday cake.
• She's blonde, and pretty. Sorry, but this is a blog about the real world.

I suspect, therefore, that when the partners at these firms look at her, what they see is someone who is going to work like a dog and bill a ton of hours, someone who's ambitious enough to stay with the firm for a long time, and someone who's charismatic and driven enough to eventually be a major rainmaker.

Which brings me to my second point. If these things are true, then the lockstep $160K base salary they're offering her is not enough. It's interesting to me that law firms operate like big labor unions -- they establish an industry standard compensation level, everyone hews to it, and nobody breaks ranks.

Which is kind of nuts. A major rainmaker is an incredibly valuable asset to a law firm -- worth millions. I wonder if we're going to see a situation soon where for real rock-star associates, with obvious potential to develop business like crazy, you end up with a professional sports-style free agent market. I don't know where the ceiling for someone like that is, but if right from the start, you position and groom and train them as big-time rainmakers, $160K isn't it.

Just a thought.

Marketing Begins With Getting Their Attention

Interesting post yesterday in Tom Collins' More Partner Income. The post also resonated with a fascinating little incident that occurred at the San Jose airport yesterday.

Collins' post is about the importance of advertising, as demonstrated by Ross Fishman's "Laner Muchin Challenge." The idea, basically, is that Laner Muchin is responsive, and the challenge invites potential clients to call Laner Muchin, and call another firm, and see who responds first.

This is smart for several reasons. First, it's based on something the client really cares about -- responsiveness. Second, it's built around a hook -- a small, intriguing, little hands-on demonstration or message that conveys the point. The message reaches the client in such a way that it has to be noticed, and perhaps considered. It's a lot harder to ignore something as tangible as this challenge than it is to turn the page on a print ad or turn off a commercial.

Which is exactly what occurred yesterday at the airport. I had spent several days in Philadelphia, meeting with firms, and then flew back to the Bay Area via San Jose. I had parked my car in the long-term lot, and upon returning to it, I found a flyer stuck in the drivers' side from a place called "German Motor Specialist" in Sunnyvale.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is brilliant marketing, and not unlike the Laner Muchin thing.

• I drive a 10 year-old BMW. The flier was targeted beautifully. I looked around the lot, which must have had a thousand cars in it, and non-BMWs did not receive a flyer.
• The flyer was in the door, not under the windshield. The means that I saw it as I approached my car, rather than getting in and then having to get out again, annoyed, to retrieve the flyer.
• The flyer itself was a nice piece of work.
• Tucking flyers into BMWs at the San Jose airport long-term lot is an incredibly cheap way to hit your target market.
• I received the flyer when I was not expecting it. I had none of the defenses up that I do when I'm opening my mail, or walking down the street.

Simple. Cheap. And about something that matters to the prospect. Great marketing, guys.

Marketing Is Not a Piece of Cake

Very busy day today, so not a lot of time to blog, but Seth Godin had a nice, Zen-simple observation today that resonated with me.

I went for a run this morning, as I often do, and as I also often do, I was thinking about business. I have a client who is driving me nuts. He's a new client, so I'm reluctant to do anything drastic, but I'm getting the sinking sensation that he's all talk and no action. After a few initial meetings, and the development of an initial, pretty vestigial plan, he has suddenly gone dark.

I have seen this before. He is reaching the point where he actually has to execute, and things get busy, and he thinks to himself "Hm. After all, I am a lawyer, and legal work is what I do, and so this marketing stuff is just going to have to take a back seat."

I am seriously considering firing him. I have seen this movie before, and if what he needs to do doesn't fit into his practice, or for whatever reason he cannot execute, I don't want to be responsible for trying to make him. That's what I was thinking about during this morning's run.

On the other hand, he's from an enormous law firm, who would make an excellent client. And he's a good guy -- I like him. He just has a hard time thinking of himself as a marketer which, of course, is exactly what he needs to be.

And the eternal tug of war goes on. And me being me, I keep thinking "Am I doing something wrong here? Is there something else I should be doing, some different way to approach this problem? Why is this so hard, so often?"

Well, as Seth reminds us, it's hard because it's hard. As he puts it, "Ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard." That's exactly what this client is grappling with, and exactly what I need to always remember. It's just plain hard.

Thanks, Seth.

We Have a Close, Personal Relationship Because You Pay Me

Interesting post in David Masiter's blog today, on techniques for building trust with clients. People are already starting to chime in with comments, suggestions, and so on.

Here's mine: don't bother.

Let me amend that. I did a seminar at a firm in Florida several weeks ago. And at that seminar, I analyzed everyone's billings, and learned that for almost all of the parters, three key clients accounted for 70% of their billings. In some cases, it was 90%.

Think about that -- NINE OUT OF TEN dollars that lawyer brought in came from one client.

This is classic Long Tail stuff. A handful of contacts are the source of a vast amount of revenue.

These are the ones you need to build close relationships with. The rest? Eh. Later, if there's time.

Building personal, trust-based relationships with clients takes a huge amount of time and effort. Because it's interpersonal, because it involves a lot of emotional intelligence, and because you are a human being, it's very easy to think too little and feel too much about this.  Bad, expensive idea. Don't do it indiscriminately. Before beginning, cast a cold, hard eye on which clients are financially how important, and focus on them.

This doesn't mean you're rude, or a jerk, to smaller clients. It also doesn't mean you don't consider potential, growth, and other information when deciding Which Clients Really Matter. It does, however, mean that you recognize that some clients matter more than others, and that your time and attention are precious, and not to be squandered. The rest is a simple matter of logic.

The Problem With Books

In a post from last week, Amy Campbell lists the results of her unofficial survey of legal marketers' favorite books their profession. The list contains the usual suspects -- David Maister, et al. -- and got me thinking about the whole topic of books.

I have my own list of favorite books. However, there are also a lot of books that I think are vastly overrated. And, there are some amazing books that are completely ignored, and that simply sink beneath the surface without a ripple.

The overrated books frequently suffer from what I call the "One Big Idea" symdrome. In this scenario, someone writes a book that basically boils down to one concept. Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point is a perfect example. It's got one idea in it. Granted, it's a really interesting idea, and not unimportant, but it doesn't really help me that much with my work. However, the marketers' Campbell surveyed listed it as their number one business book. This is nuts.

What's going on here is a kind of positioning. The book has an idea that captures people's imaginations, and Gladwell shrewdly has marketed the daylights out of it. He has a blog, does a lot of speaking and lecturing (like at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference) and has built a nice business around his ideas. That is admirable. But is it the basis for making his book the single most important resource for legal marketers? No. No way.

So what books do I prefer/recommend? Well, my favorites tend to have a couple of traits. First, they are NOT about legal marketing. Let's face it folks, the best strategists and marketers in the history of commerce are not in legal marketing. Except, maybe, for David Maister. They're writing about business in general. And rather than having One Big Idea, they tend to have done an enormous amount of research, or have a lot of experience, and they use that as the basis for their writing.

As an example, one of my favorites is Mahan Khalsa's book Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play. This is a book about business development for consulting firms. It doesn't have One Big Idea. What it does have is a detailed, fairly hard-nosed analysis of the entire process of discussing a project with a prospect, with a particular emphasis on the discussion of price. Khalsa breaks it down into components, and is relentless about the idea that the consultant needs to keep checking with the client, all the way along the process, to insure that he doesn't misunderstand what the client wants or needs.

It's a terrific book, primarly because it's so specific and factual. Khalsa has obviously been there and done that, and it shows.

Coaching

One of the incredible things about law school is that it has almost no connection with the profession for which it is supposed to be preparing you. I went to the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. It's one of the best in the country -- last time I checked, it was ranked sixth in the nation, in a tie with the University of Chicago.

Intellectually, I loved law school. I found it incredibly engaging, and a lot of what we studied was fascinating. But it had almost no connection with actually practicing law.

This is the gap that I make my living filling, and Tom Kane has a nice post on the use of coaches for this purpose. I work with a coach myself -- John Delmatoff, of Pathfinder Coaching. John's work with me is focused on broader, more entrepreneurial issues. The coaching I do is more focused on helping lawyers bring in new business.

The fascinating thing about coaching is that it's not really about transferring knowledge. I don't teach that much. What I do do, often, is work with my clients to help change their beliefs. Law is a very regimented profession. That's part of the beauty and fascination of it. But that gets very much in the way of business development, which is fundamentally about what is possible, rather than what is.

Or, to put it another way, business development is about spotting and pursuing opportunities. Law is about facts. A good coach, and I have one and like to think I am one, spends a lot of time and effort helping his clients dispense with their own limiting assumptions about what they can do, and how they can do it.

Lawyers are very, very smart people, usually. The fun of coaching is helping them understand that they're capable of far more than they realize, that in marketing, rejection is not a big deal, that there's a large dose of experimentation in business development, that it's okay for things not to work -- in fact, most things won't. I help them open up. It's a great way to make a living.

I Guarantee Nothing

David Maister has a nice post this morning on the pluses and minuses (mostly minuses) of firms attempting to build business by hiring senior people laterally. The idea is that these senior hires arrive with their own book of business, which is what the firms are really paying for. This strikes me as yet another version of a question I get a lot: "What kind of results can you guarantee?"

The answer is "None."

One of the most difficult things for a lot of my clients to grasp is that I guarantee nothing. I do not guarantee results. I do not promise anything. It's quite possible to spend a lot of time and money working with me, and not acquire a single new client.

Why is this?

Because the business development equation is complex. Bringing in new clients, or expanding the revenue you're getting from existing ones, involves time, other people, and a host of other variables. You have to work at it. You have to think about it. You have to master a set of skills that may be unfamiliar. And ultimately, the new client you're pursuing has to participate in the process. If they don't, no matter what I teach or my clients do, there will be no new business.

This is really difficult for some of my clients to grasp. The bottom line is that in the short term, there may be a tenuous connection, or none at all, between business development effort and business development results. You can go to a dozen events, network your brains out, sow a lot of seeds, and see no results at all. Then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, you land two new clients.

Over the long term, of course, the connection is profound. The laws of probability see to that. If you do no business development, you will see no results.  And over time, business development always pays off.  It's just the link between business development input and results is erratic and unpredictable. This is the nature of all sales, and it's true here, too.

And as Maister points out, firms that attempt to buy business by hiring senior laterals are simply trying to avoid this fact. And as Maister further points out, it usually doesn't work. In business developments, there are simply no shortcuts. Believing otherwise can be a very costly mistake.

Business Development and Pimping

Robert Greene is an author who is sort of a modern-day Machiavelli for rappers. The name of his blog, Power, Seduction and War, says it all. His expertise is in exploring and teaching the principles of influence, whether exercised the hard way or the soft way. He is currently writing a book entitled The 50 Laws of Power with rapper 50 Cent, source of lyrics like this:

To the hood I introduced her
She feisty every now and then she wanna fight me
People saying if I get knocked she ain't gon write me
The sick part is all that bullshit excites me

Uh, okay. And all this has what to do with business development?

Well, one of Greene's recent posts is about Iceberg Slim, noted pimp and author. Mr. Slim died in 1977. Greene says this:

Lately I have been rereading Iceberg Slim, one of my favorites. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, becomes an artist in the game.

The emphasis is mine. Business development is all about the art of indirection. And a lot of what Greene says Slim says about being a huster rather than a sucker is Business Development 101. A couple of examples:

"No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that." A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It's part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about. They represent opportunities for new angles, new hustles. The sucker cannot stand the unknown and so either fouls up by getting impatient and over anxious, or retreats to a false world of security and the known.

Bingo. Every time you approach a new client, you risk rejection, failure, a snap kick to your ego. This is not something to be avoided -- it's something to use. Often, if you're paying attention and in the right frame of mind, a rejection can also be a stepping-stone to another opportunity. Or a container for valuable information. Incorporating the unknown into a strategy is often hard for professionals, such as attorneys, to do, but it's an incredible source of opportunity.

"I went to the phone to call the Goddess. I walked away from it. It was a sucker play to call her so soon." Impatience is the hallmark of the sucker, and it is never clearer than in matters of seduction. He can't wait to call, spilling out his guts with a confession of love, or trying to reveal how eager he is to impress and please. Emotion trumps strategy. Patience and time is the hustler's creed. "I play for time and see what happens," says Elizabeth I, the great hustler Queen of England."

"Patience and time is the hustler's creed." Exactly. The worst business development mistake you can make is expecting results too fast. Remember: relationships, not transactions.

Greene's post is good, and a lot of what he has to say is an excellent reminder for those of us who develop business. Check it out.