About time too? Bringing law firms and professional sales techniques closer together

It is well known that law firms hate the idea of ‘sales’ and will rarely consider incorporating what they perceive as sales strategies into their practice. However, Steve Jessop, a director at Quantum, uses his experiences of working with ASB Law to argue that lawyers could be missing out on a valuable lesson for business and practice development.

Most partners in the legal profession realise that developing long-term, trust-based business relationships with clients is the right way to go. There is more to be gained by both parties if a level of trust is built up over time through expert advice, professional consultancy and high quality service. In fact, most firms that are serious about maintaining growth are investing in this area.

Fewer partners appear to be considering:

How they attract these clients in the first place;
How they keep clients aware of service offerings as they develop.

The legal sector seems to have been fortunate enough to develop quite successfully by catering for businesses that have to make a ‘distress purchase’. Among the reasons for this is the lack of emphasis placed on developing professional and appropriate sales methods and behaviours. Let’s face it, ‘sales’ has traditionally been something of a dirty word with all-too-vivid images of greasy-palmed financial advisors, slick IT salesmen and disinterested telesales people who call just as you are about to sit down to dinner.

You can’t blame the legal profession for keeping well away from these kinds of practices. There is, however, an alternative. Changing the way professional services are sold leads to stronger relationships, which generate more business with existing clients, enables relationships to be developed with new clients and allows fee levels to be increased across the board. Such change can also help to develop your firm’s sense of identity, simply because being clear about what you stand for and what you offer your clients is one of the foundations of the sales process.

One such pioneer of professional sales practices is our client ASB Law. ASB Law provides a range of specialist legal services to businesses, private clients and the public sector in the South East. Its client turnover ranges between £500,000 and £100m and includes big names in the aviation and travel sectors and many other blue chip companies, universities, colleges and local authorities.

Our company, Quantum, has been working with ASB Law to bring about a change in its attitude towards business development. We were encouraged to see early results of this in new instructions and increased fee levels. It was refreshing to find a law firm talking our language and, given that many professional services organisations are uncomfortable with words such as 'sales' and 'selling', this was a good start.

ASB Law is organised around five market-facing businesses. During an initial short 'scoping' exercise, we recommended a tailored programme of development for fee-earners in two of these businesses: commercial litigation and employment. Of course, there were early reservations that people who had traditionally relied on their professional expertise to win business might not gladly embrace the new language and working methods or change their behaviour accordingly. However, such scepticism was soon overcome as ASB Law’s chief executive,Christopher Honeyman Brown, explains:

“The first group session was designed to introduce new selling approaches, dispel some common myths about what selling really is, and strengthen the skills needed when face-to-face with a client. This included introducing a specific structure to be used when meeting with clients and learning how to build the need for and highlight the value of what we can do for them.”

Stage two was the construction of a suite of ASB Law value propositions for each work-group to use in live client situations. A value proposition is very simply, what you offer, why your client should be interested in it and why that makes you different from your competition – all the sorts of things you would think about investigating if you set out to buy, say, a new car.

We thought people might not commit to these group development sessions, however the opposite was the case - people almost came to blows over who should be involved and a number of people even contributed remotely.

I think that this enthusiasm was due to a combination of factors. People immediately felt comfortable with this approach of ‘consultative’ selling that closely matches the traditional way lawyers and their clients interact. The use of a hands-on coaching approach demonstrated exactly how the selling process could be applied in our situation as did having things explained in plain-English and based on a real understanding of the pressures faced by our fee-earning professionals. I also think the offer of ongoing support as people applied these approaches in real client situations (and moved out of their comfort zone) was key.

The next stage in asb’s sales improvement process was to work on live client accounts. This was the key step of turning theory into reality. We helped asb to select a small number of major clients or prospective opportunities and then worked with the teams using our rigorous account planning processes and role-playing meetings.

One real-life example that had been used in the training came up trumps. Up to this point ASB had won only small pieces of work from the local branch of a (potentially much larger) client and expected any major work to go to one of the large London players. After some detailed research into what was really important to the client and who made the decisions, the team secured a first meeting with a key individual, someone that asb had not previously thought about approaching. The research and use of the new methodologies paid off. By using the approaches they had learnt, they managed to uncover a real and significant need that asb could address and they won a six-figure piece of new business.

This kind of success story has a real impact on the culture within an organisation. Once people have been helped out of their comfort zones and are shown that changing what they do has a measurable impact on the results they can achieve, their natural enthusiasm takes over and they become advocates for this new approach across the firm. However, to ensure that it becomes second nature, Quantum continues to hold regular practice workshops and review sessions, and, where protocol allows, might also attend client visits.

In our experience, most law firms are conscious of the need to improve their business development process. In reality however, many simply pay lip service to making it happen. We often see an over-emphasis on broader marketing initiatives, such as creating new brochures, rather than practical, focused sales activity. Also, we often see business development experts used to doing the selling rather than partners, senior managers and other client-facing staff recognising and believing that selling is part of their role too. In many firms there is reluctance to even use the word ‘sales’ - nevermind discussing how they can be more effective in this area.

For many law firms, the partnership and remuneration structure can encourage complacency at senior levels. Major change initiatives like these have to be led from the top. Even when one or two senior partners are keen to change their firm’s culture, the decision-making process often requires consensus across all partners, some of whom may be less comfortable with the mooted changes. It should also be said that selling does still have negative connotations in some parts of the legal world.

As law firms are dragged into a more competitive business environment, high quality selling will be critical. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 90 per cent of senior executives expect merger and acquisition activity to increase over the next two years. Today, the top ten law firms bill proportionally the same amount as the top 27 firms did five years ago. With these types of changes in the pipeline the pressure to generate fees can only increase. In future, the more sales-oriented firms will win key clients because their selling capability will give them significant advantage over their competitors. We expect a shift in the legal profession towards a more contemporary and professional approach to selling with those that start to build the skills and experience early-on being more successful in the long-term.

I’ll leave the last word to Christopher Honeyman Brown: "We have immediately experienced a sea change in attitude and a vastly improved approach to new business generation. I am excited about the prospects of growing our market once our ‘fledglings’ have practised a bit more and are ready to ‘fly solo’. I attach the utmost importance to developing the awareness and skills of the ASB Law team so we can continue to increase our market share through effective selling of first class services to appropriate clients."

Steve Jessop is a director of Quantum Sales and Marketing. He can be contacted at: sjessop@quantum-sales.com.