Business Development

How Not to Network

I was flying back to San Francisco from the East Coast on Thursday night, and I sat next to a young woman who was, for me, a perfect example of how not to network. I thought it merited a blog post.

Basically, I sat next to her for about four hours, and despite three tries by me to initiate a conversation, she did not take the bait. Specifically, although I volunteered that I had been a lawyer, and was from San Francisco, she did not follow up at all and learned nothing at all about me. A few additional details will explain why this was such a mistake for her.

First, when we sat down, I noticed that she was reading (and highlighting) a casebook on securities law. I learned that she was a third-year law student at the University of Virginia, and she was going to the Bay Area for a Labor Day vacation with some friends. 

Now, it's a reasonably hypothesis that she is interested in a career in transactional law or securities law, given her choice of reading material. It's also a given that she's not easily finding a job, the market being what it is.

I make my living working with law firms. I know hundreds of them. In fact, in three days, I'm giving a talk at a partner's retreat for a firm that describes itself as "[R]esults-based counsel for financial institutions and funds. Innovative securities regulation and enforcement solutions", among other things. I would have been happy to connect her up with some of my clients. I could, and would, have really been an asset to her. But she didn't ask.

I am also, obviously, something of an expert in business development for attorneys. I can almost guarantee that coming straight out of law school, she knows nothing about this, nor does she understand how important it is to her career. If we had talked, I had gotten her to understand how absolutely critical it was to her career, and she had been sharp enough to start developing business her first day on the job, it would have been a major competitive advantage. But I didn't, because she didn't ask.

I also know a lot about San Francisco and the Bay Area. And I knew, for example, that the Bay Bridge was completely shut down this weekend for a massive seismic retrofit, which could have affected her weekend plans to go to Napa. But she didn't ask.

In other words, she unknowingly, and permanently, forfeited a lot of information and opportunities because she didn't even attempt to network in the most ideal situation conceivable. I don't think this was some kind of deliberate slight -- I think she just didn't know any better. Too bad.

One Thought For Better Networking On The Golf Course: Don't

Over at Ford Harding's excellent blog, one of his guest bloggers, Gary Pines, recently posted something I think is absolutely, dead wrong. The post was terrific, if you buy into the premise, which is that the golf course is a good place to network and develop relationships with potential clients.

No, it isn't. I look forward to the debate.

I have not played golf much lately, but in the past, I played a lot. I took many, many lessons, and spent more than my share of time hitting a hundred six-irons in a row for practice. I know what I'm talking about, and in my opinion, Pines overlooks three things:

1. Golf is hard.
2. Bad golf is embarrassing.
3. Most golfers are bad.

A golf course is designed to be played a certain way. For example, on a par 4, there is a section of fairway that, if a golfer is good, is where he will land his tee shot. A good golfer will do that. He'll hit his shot 250 yards, or whatever, and place it right where he needs to to position himself for the next shot, and so on.

A golf swing is a patently unnatural motion. It's very hard to do correctly. If you do it right, the result is magic. An unbelievable amount of power is released, and good golf swing is really beautiful. Look at the illustration of Tiger Woods above. He is in complete control of his swing -- it's balanced, graceful -- perfect, really. He can put the golf ball anywhere he wants. That's why he's Tiger Woods.

Most golfers aren't anything like this. They miss shots -- they hook, slice, shank and so on.  It's not much fun. And any decent golf course is designed to punish shots like this. If you slice a drive, you are going to spend some time in the rough, or the woods, or the water, or the sand, and you will hole out with an 8 on a par 4, or something like it. This is not the best environment for discussing business. A client who sets up for a pitching wedge shot, shanks it into the woods, and then yells out "Shit!" and pounds his club is not going to want to talk. Trust me on this. And with bad, or even mediocre golfers, this happens a lot.

Golf is also physical work. Even if you're using a cart, you still are going to be doing a lot of walking, in the sun, up and down hills, for 4 hours or so. You're going to be sweaty and tired. You're also going to spend a lot of time physically away from your client, as you hit your shot in one place and they hit theirs in another.

Finally, and I guess this is my real point, and kind of grumpy-old-mannish, golf is a very mental game, and requires a lot of mental and emotional discipline, and intense concentration. The absolute last thing I want to be doing on a golf course is chatting with someone.

The ideal networking environment is one in which there is a diversion, but not a distraction, if you understand my meaning. There is some interesting other activity going on, but it's something that isn't too intense, and makes conversation easy. A baseball game, say. A meal. An art exhibit. Not, however, a rock concert. Skiing. Or golf.

My father, who played golf for sixty years, used to have this theory about the ideal versus the real. He believed that when thinking about how well they played -- how far they would hit, say, a four-iron -- golfers always instinctively think of the best shot they ever hit, and then assume that's their normal shot. If just once, you manage to loft a flawless wedge over trees, drop it right onto the green, and then have enough backspin to stop the ball right next to the hole for an easy putt, you will believe you always hit wedges like that. You don't.

Similarly, the ideal golf round with a client is one in which the course is beautiful, you are both relaxed and having fun, the weather is beautiful, and there is time for lots of relationship-building chatting between holes, on the green, and so on.

Realty is different. Very, very different. And because of that, I would reduce Gary's ten tips to one: "Don't."

An Unwanted Education

I have posted, and Larry Bodine has, too, about the dismal job a lot of law schools are doing in training their students to develop business. An interesting facet of this was mentioned in Susan Cartier Liebel's Building a Solo Practice blog yesterday -- a kind of useless indentured servitude.

Guest blogger Edward Weist dissects the ABA rules that severely restrict law students' ability to work for pay, for real clients, while in school. As Weist points out, however, law school clinical programs have a tremendous bias towards hands-on experience for pro bono clients. You can work, but you can't get paid for it.

On paper, this looks great. However, in practice it's something completely different. When I was in law school, I had to fulfill a 40-hour pro bono requirement that I thought was so absurd it was actually offensive. I still feel that way. Under the guise of teaching us that we had a moral duty to provide free legal advice (this while paying around $100,000 for law school, and incurring a massive debt that took years to repay) law students were rented out to any manner of nonprofit groups.

As the saying says, power corrupts, and absolute power is really pretty neat. Law schools have absolute power. The students are racking up debt. They need grades, jobs and recommendations and a diploma. The schools can make them do whatever they want. Pro bono work is terrific PR for the school, creates contact with alumni, is politically extremely correct -- but does nothing at all to help the students eventually become successful lawyers.

I did not want to do this. I didn't have any choice. So I took the least painful option, and found the most businesslike charity I could. This turned out to be a partner at a huge Philadelphia firm, Duane Morris, maybe, who was helping the Boy Scouts of New Jersey sell a parcel of prime land to developers. They instantly became the richest Boy Scout troop in the universe; I got my requirement fulfilled and some developer in New Jersey got to build a bunch of houses.

This exercise did not improve my character. It did not give me a sense of my obligation to help the downtrodden. Instead, it wasted a lot of my time, while providing some Penn Law alumni with free labor.

A modest proposal: it would have been much more helpful to me if I had been able to spend those 40 hours working for a real lawyer, in a real firm, with real clients. If I had had the chance to be exposed to law as a business, and get some sense of what actually made it work. Summer associate programs are beauty contests, basically. But a real, clinical hands-on experience, including client contact of some kind and business development exposure, would have changed the entire experience, and would have taught me a great deal about something I was, and am, passionate about.

Hell, I might still even be practicing law.

Everyone Else Loves This Ad. Why Don't I?

In a post today, Gerry Riskin picked up on something Larry Bodine wrote a couple of weeks ago, praising an ad run by Luce Forward. I looked at the ad. I am afraid, again, I disagree.

There must be something in the water. I keep writing these posts disagreeing with people. Last week I criticized Seth Godin, which for a marketer, is sort of like being a priest and criticizing the Pope. Now I'm criticizing Greenfield/Belser. Next, I guess, I will criticize my mother. Both Bodine and Riskin are Major Dudes in legal marketing. I read both of their blogs, and I think they're both experts.

But, in another life, I was a creative in a pretty hot ad agency for two years, working for the amazing Peter Arnell, so I think I am entitled to an opinion, at least, and to my mind, this ad could be a lot clearer. It has two problems. First, it lacks the one big idea that all really good advertising has.

When you're creating advertising, you always have to remember that you have about one second (in print at least) to capture people's attention, and to get your message across. The reason it's so difficult is that you have to distill what is almost always a very nuanced idea down into a sentence and a picture, which is next to impossible. Figuring this out is where the creativity is -- and the challenge.

And the number-one requirement of all of this is that whatever you come up with has to be clear. Crystal-clear. Absolutely dead obvious to anyone and everyone, instantly. And this ad just isn't.

Okay, the nails represent the new attorneys. Pretty good. But the headline, and the copy, are sort of opaque.

"We asked our six newest attorneys to help you with your real estate development." I don't have a real estate development. Most readers won't. You asked all six of them? At once? And "help"? It doesn't get much vaguer than that. The sentence just doesn't conjure up much of a compelling image.

"(they said they would nail it.)" Wait a minute. They didn't actually nail it. They just "said they would." And what, exactly, does "nail it" mean? When I'm thinking of legal help on a real estate develoment, I think of a lot of carefully applied legal expertise, over time. I don't think of something that can be swiftly, and definitively, "nailed." The concepts don't fit together. The gears grind.

Also, the graphics don't really float my boat. It's a striking image -- light-years ahead of most legal advertising. For example, the image, thankfully, doesn't include a gavel/scales/law books/image of the Supreme Court. But the image of the nails in the block of wood could have been made much, much more interesting -- use of shadows, color, contrast, etc.

I'm currently reading Donny Deutsch's book, Often Wrong, Never In Doubt. Interestingly, that was one of my father's favorite expressions. Deutsch has come up with more than a few great taglines and ideas, and one of them is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The account was Monster.com, the job-hunting site. And the tagline was "Today's the day."

Deutsch explains: "When someone logs onto Monster, whether they're looking for a waitress job or a bump up to executive, they are making an emotional statement to themselves: "I am not putting anything off. I'm trying to better myself right now. Today's the day."

Second, the ad does not make the product it's selling the star. This is a classic, fatal mistake. Instead of being built around the actual people it's promoting, the ad is built around a clever concept. This happens all the time, even with award-winning consumer ads. Think about how often you see a terrific television commercial, but later, you can't remember what it was for. Same thing here. The nails metaphor is too remote from the idea of new lawyers, and I'll bet the former is remembered while the latter is not.

Simple, powerful ideas that are immediately understood, and that make the product the star. That's what good advertising is all about.

Seth Godin: Codependent Marketer

In a very unusual blog post today, Seth Godin wrote a very long explication of one of the dumbest ideas I think I've ever heard: that marketers are, ultimately, morally responsible for the impact of what they market. If you market guns, in other words, you're guilty of a kind of murder. And if you market soda, diabetes and obesity are your fault. What a crock.

Here's a quote:

"If you get asked to market something, you’re responsible. You’re responsible for the impacts, the costs, the side affects and the damage. You killed that kid. You poisoned that river. You led to that fight. If you can’t put your name on it, I hope you’ll walk away. If only 10% of us did that, imagine the changes. Imagine how proud you’d be of your work."

Now, a caveat. I worship Godin. I think he is, hands down, one of the handful of best marketing minds out there. In a discipline with an unbelievable number of fakes, poseurs and incompetents, Godin is head and shoulders above almost everyone there is, including me. I read all his books. I recommend All Marketers Are Liars to clients. I read his blog daily. But this time, he really dropped a brick on his own foot.

Marketers are powerful, unquestionably. But we're not The Wizard, and the market isn't Oz. The best marketing in the world won't save a product people don't want or don't like. Thousands of new, expertly-marketed products die every year because people just plain say "No."

And at the end of every single tiny piece of marketing is the customer, or in my line of work, the client, who is going to do what he damn well wants. If I'm marketing Pepsi, he may decide to have one can of Pepsi a day. Or he may have ten a day. He's going to do what he wants. And I have no control over that.

I specialize in marketing professional services. Once the client has decided to retain one of my clients, my impact decreases to almost zero. Marketing has no effect on two human beings with a working relationship.

"Responsibility" is a VERY loaded word, and a very slippery one. And, as anyone who's read Codependent No More will tell you, taking responsbility for what other people do, PARTICULARLY PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW AND HAVE NEVER MET, is a very, very dangerous, bad form of magical thinking, and also a kind of arrogance.

Marketing is about ideas. Ideas are not things, and although they may influence other people's decisions, ultimately, they are decisions, and they're made by other people, not by me. If one of my clients turns out to be a  liar, and incompetent, and defrauds one of his clients, I had nothing to do with it.

The day I can compel people to do what I want is the day I'm willing to take responsibility. But in the meantime, no marketer is good enough to be as responsible as Godin claims. Even Godin.

P.S. I'm happy to debate him about this anytime he wants. I think. The problem is, if I ever met him, which I never have, I think I'd really, really like him.

How to Network With People In Such a Way That They Find You To Be Kind of Creepy

In his usually excellent Legal Marketing blog, Tom Kane today referred to an article entitled "55 Great Questions to Ask Someone You Just Met". Having read the article and reviewed the questions, I can recommend that you should only use them if you want to strike people as intrusive, more than a little odd, and also kind of creepy. The key point that the article misses is that a good conversation, anywhere, with anyone, is not about talking -- it's about listening. You have to say things that demonstrate that you're paying attention. These 55 questions don't do this.

Here are a few of them:
"What's your favorite smell/thing to do on a rainy day/cereal/childhood TV show?"
"What was the first job you ever had/the best prank you ever pulled off/the last movie you saw?"
"Are you a window person or an aisle person?"

You get the idea.

The problem with these questions is not that they're especially intrusive, or that there's anything really wrong with them. The problem is that they are apropos of absolutely nothing. They're completely random. Which tells the person you're speaking with that you are not listening to them. Which is death to any conversation.

The number-one element in any great conversation is that someone is paying very close attention -- they're listening carefully. This has to be reflected in what they say, particularly the questions. Unless the questions are fueled by information gleaned by listening, the conversation will turn into something from Rain Man, fast.

Marshall Goldsmith has written about this. Here's his take on the question:

To learn from people, you have to listen to them with respect. Again, not as easy to do as you might imagine. It too requires the use of unfamil­iar muscles.
            Has this ever happened to you? You're reading a book, watching TV, or shuffling papers while your significant other is talking to you. Suddenly you hear, "You're not listening to me."
            You look up and say, "Yes I am." And calmly provide a verbatim play­back of everything said to prove that you were listening and that your companion in life is... wrong.
            What have you accomplished by this virtuosic display of your multi­tasking skills? Was it smart? No. Does your partner think more highly of you? Not likely. Is anyone impressed? Hardly.
            The only thing going through your partner's mind is, "Gee, I thought you weren't listening. But now I realize it's a much deeper issue. You're a complete jerk."
            This is what happens when we listen without showing respect. It's not enough to keep our ears open; we have to demonstrate that we are totally engaged.

The last sentence is the whole point. If you're going to have a conversation with someone you just met, you have to listen to them, and the things you say have to reflect that. You cannot just bomb away with random questions, as if it were a college admissions interview. You have to hear them, and prove that you hear them.

Business Development or Marketing -- A False Choice

In his Legal Marketing blog, Tom Kane opines thusly:

Although there are as many definitions of marketing as there are professors at business schools, for years I have defined marketing as the process of:

1. determining the firm’s legal services capabilities,
2. and the wants and needs of the marketplace/clients, and
3. bringing the two together utilizing the 4 “P’s”:
   1. Product (the specific legal service or services that will be provided to solve an identified client need),
   2. Price (what fee will be charged for the identified services; hourly, contingency, fixed fee, blended rate, or other alternative fee arrangement),
   3. Place (how the product will be delivered; i.e., via branch office, Internet, clients office, etc.), and
   4. Promotion (the tools and techniques used to land clients which is where the selling part comes into play and overlaps).

Lawyers do many different things in promoting their services. Whatever those actions may be, the bottom is that selling is the process of closing the deal with clients in order to become their lawyer.

Nah.

This is serious old-school marketing definition. What it really leaves out is technology. Thanks to Al Gore, and his invention, the Internet, you can have all kinds of interaction between the prospective client and the lawyer that totally blur the line between marketing and business development. The boundaries get all mushed together. And as far as this list:

1. is strategy, not marketing, unless it's marketing strategy, which is really positioning.

2. is market research.

3.a) Is kind of a legal issue. You know, is it a tax problem or a corporate finance one?

3.b) Negotiated with each client, but not really a marketing item. You're not selling electric skillets here, and holding sales.

3.c) Also not too negotiable, really.

3.d) Right. Everything happens here.

I have a big newsletter coming out with a lot of writing about the interactivity of legal marketing these days. Sit tight.