Business Development as a Sport – Part 3: The Cheerleaders
Like any sport, business development is always better if you have cheerleaders. It’s nice to have people who are on your side cheering for you and helping you to win. In the law firm, the individuals dedicated to marketing, business development, technology and research can actually be some of your most devoted and helpful cheerleaders.
OK, so maybe they aren’t on the sidelines with pom-poms yelling at the top of their lungs and doing backflips. That type of behavior can tend to be frowned upon in the hallowed halls of the sophisticated law firm.
But your law firm cheerleaders actually serve a much more subtle and important a role: they support you in all of your efforts to help you succeed at business development,
Business Development as a Sport – Part 2: The Goal
So if we are thinking of business development as a sport then, of course, we need a goal. So what would the goal of business development be? Actually, there would likely be more than just one.
One of the most important goals would be to keep the ball rolling: reach out, make connections, set up meetings. In short, get out of the office and go see the Clients and prospects. While those balls are rolling, you would also need to be able to keep multiple balls in the air. You will need to juggle the work and other demands of a successful law practice with the responsibilities inherent in business development –
Business Development for Fun and Sport
If you were to think of business development as a sport, what kind of sport would it be? Football, with all of its intensity, competition and rivalry? Hockey, with its emphasis on hitting the goals? Basketball, with the excitement of making and scoring on a long shot? Baseball, where you have to ‘touch base’ or you are out of the game? Soccer, with the strategy of advancing the ball – and sometimes having it hit you in the head. Tennis maybe, with all of the volleying back and forth that goes on? Golf, with all of its emphasis on focus and concentration – not to mention the occasional frustration?
The Door to Business Development
Writing, speaking and other reputation-building or marketing activities are a great way to open the door for business development, but to be really successful, you have to walk through it. This door may lead to a lot of places, but the one place it should almost always lead you is out of the office.
That’s because the most effective business development is done face-to-face. To be a successful business developer, you have to get out from behind your desk and go see the Clients and prospects. Sure, there are other ways to develop business, but absolutely none more effective.
Building Blocks of Business Development Success
When it comes to developing business, the goal is to make it habitual – and that requires finding activities that you enjoy. Fortunately, there are so many options that there really is something for almost everyone. The key is to find the activities that are right for you.
For instance, some people are good at developing business by leveraging speaking opportunities at conferences and events or in front of Clients. But public speaking isn’t for everyone. In fact, it’s not for most people. This may be due to the fact that almost half of all people have a fear of public speaking.
Having a Happy New Year
The New Year is an excellent time for a lot of things: celebrating, planning, making resolutions you’ll break a month later. But it’s also a good time to ask yourself this question: what are you going to do to make sure that your Happy New Year really is, well…happy?
Yes, happy. Face it, the day goes by faster and work seems less like work when it makes us happy. In a perfect world, most of us would like to do interesting work for loyal Clients who value our services and pay us fairly. And if we can do less work and have more free time for ourselves,
‘Tis the Season for Peace, Equality – and Providing Value
This is the time of year for celebrating (or at least aspiring to) things like peace on earth and equality for all. In that spirit of the season, I’ve included this week’s holiday business development quote with a message from Hanukkah.
May the lights acts of Hanukkah business development usher in a better world for all humankind your Clients.
This slightly embellished quote from an unknown author shows the similarities between the spirit of the holiday season and the spirit of successful business development. To summarize the sentiment: To develop business, find ways to help your Clients and give first before you ever expect to receive.
Nailing Events with CRM
There is often no better way to develop business than getting face-to-face with Clients and prospects– your CRM contacts. This may explain why so many law firms spend so much time and dedicate so many resources for events.
While the types of events are diverse – lunches and dinners, cocktail parties, seminars, roundtables, golf outings, sports events, political mixers, charity projects, open houses – the challenges are the same: distributing the event details, sending invitations, gathering RSVP’s, assembling attendee lists, printing name tags, scheduling follow up and, in a perfect world, tracking business development progress with prospects who attended.
Every Day ‘Tis the Season for Business Development
“Peace on earth Plenty of Clients will come to stay, when we live Christmas business development every day.”
This is a great (and slightly modified) holiday quote from Helen Steiner Rice – and it couldn’t be more applicable. To be successful at business development, we have to focus on it literally all the time – even during the holidays.
Every day, we have to make the time to build and maintain relationships. One of the reasons that business development requires such a consistent and continual time commitment is that research shows that it often takes more than seven interactions to turn a prospect into a Client.
‘Tis the Season for Business Development
As the holiday season kicks off, the sounds of the season are in the air and everywhere (including the almost unlimited commercials that make me want to hug my Tivo). After being subjected to a multitude of mundane messages and monotonous Hallmark moments, I started to wonder if some of them might actually have some value for helping my Clients to develop business. So for the rest of the month, I’ll be looking at a few of these little ‘gifts’ to see how they might be helpful for improving our business development efforts and keep on ‘giving’ all year long.
A Bucket of CRM Nails
Law firms often have buckets of issues that are particularly ‘pointed’ and for which there may simply never be a substitute for the trusty (or some might argue rusty) old CRM hammer. These types of issues come in many varieties, but they almost always involve communication, coordination, collaboration, Client service or, most importantly, business development.
Over and over again, I hear marketing professionals and attorneys complaining that they invested a significant amount of money in this or that CRM system and all they got was a mailing list or a ‘glorified Rolodex’. To address this complaint,
Taking U Out of Your Cross Selling Alphabet
There is probably no objective that law firms put more emphasis on achieving – or that they fail more frequently at than cross selling. This may be because many law firms or lawyers don’t really understand what cross selling is all about.
Sure, some attorneys will do the work to figure out who could help them. They will identify other attorneys in their firm or professionals outside the firm whose Clients could be excellent potential sources of business for them. A few will even pick up the big, scary telephone and call these people. The real go-getters may even set up a meeting to talk about what they do and how the other person may be able to help them do more of it.
Betting on Your Referral Sources
Obviously focusing on referral sources is a really smart bet, but if you want to improve your odds for success, you have to be willing to up the ante and invest the time to educate them.
To really improve your payoff, you need your referral sources to say great things about you. Not just broad generalities, like that you’re a really smart lawyer who works with really great companies and who went to a really good law school. While all of that may be nice, it doesn’t set you apart – and it’s not likely to get you hired,
CRM – Alive and Kicking
And yet, despite all the challenges in the past, people are still investing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in CRM systems. In fact, in recent years, the worldwide CRM market revenue has actually grown 12.5 percent, according to leading technology research firm Gartner. Based on this, CRM still seems be very much alive and kicking.
Why is this? Perhaps it could be because CRM is the essential tool for enhancing communication, coordination and client service. Despite all of the new technological developments, when it comes to managing the myriad relationships that are essential to developing – and growing – your business and practice,
Focus on Referrals
So why would you take the time to focus on referral sources when there are other business development activities you could be spending your time on? First, it’s often much easier to get business from a referred prospect. In fact, research suggests you are almost twice as likely to get business from referred prospects. This is because they have essentially been pre-sold on your services by someone else who presumably had nothing to gain by making the referral.
Leveraging referrals may also be the most cost effective way to get business. Some business development experts have suggested that it may cost up to 400% more to get business from a prospect who has not been referred.