From solicitor to salesman

UK firm Vizards Wyeth was determined to discover whether lawyers could sell when it embarked on an ambitious business-development skills programme earlier this year. By Alan Bannister, business development partner, Vizards Wyeth

If accountants are bean counters, then solicitors are box-tickers: process-driven automatons. Or at least that’s what was revealed about 11 of our fee earners and partners, who underwent psychometric testing as part of a ‘makeover’ to turn them into salesmen.

Vizards Wyeth is not alone among solicitors for spending significant sums on marketing initiatives without producing a calculable return. Marketing and PR can do its job by creating the right atmosphere, profile and, after long enough, the brand. It might even lead to an enquiry from a potential client, but it’s what happens after that where it all starts to fall down. We couldn’t understand why our efforts were not translating into new business. The missing link was ‘selling’.

This is a huge problem for lawyers who are usually proud to assert (correctly) that no part of their training gave them any insight into selling. Anyway, they consider themselves temperamentally unsuited and isn’t selling a bit ‘inappropriate’? Well, it may be, but unless you sell yourself and your firm, all your marketing spend will be wasted because you are not going to get to ‘yes’ with a prospective client. Anyone will tell you that law is still a people business, so what’s so odd about engaging with people, not just to be personable but to sell the skills you have?

The trick is to appreciate that selling itself is a considerable skill and it can be learnt (although some will never master all the intricacies). I know because I’ve been there. I’ve scratched my head as to what the missing link was between good marketing and getting a result. Vizards Wyeth has a good profile, organises well attended, innovative events for clients and prospects, provides good publications and has introduced a customer-relationship-management programme. I had to face the fact, however, that we were not selling more.

So I searched for a company to work with us to encourage our fee earners and partners to sell themselves and our firm. There was plenty on offer. I didn’t go for the highly structured corporate machine or the two-day ‘everything you ever wanted to know about selling’ course, as neither seemed appropriate for a firm like ours.

I came across Inquiring Minds, a boutique consultancy specialising in ensuring professional firms stay externally focused on clients. Most business-development programmes seemed to primarily look at teaching the techniques and the processes around selling but not on an individual’s comfort level with ‘selling’ and their personal impact and presence. This was Inquiring Mind’s starting point. Their objective was to develop the potential of each individual.

The business-development programme was different in that it was an all-encompassing (for those who shy away from the word ‘holistic’) approach to working with real people – recognising feelings often impact on behaviour more than logical thoughts. They start from the premise that lawyers are intelligent enough to learn sales techniques but there are usually other things stopping them. Those involved may see themselves as temperamentally unsuited to selling and feel uncomfortable with the whole idea. Or, even if they accept the idea, they have a hundred and one reasons why they can’t fit it in – from work pressures, lack of confidence and a perceived lack of support, to how they believe we really reward success.

Inquiring Minds took a team of eleven of our fee earners and partners, and began this holistic makeover over five months. The programme created a structure that included introducing new business-generation processes, developing broader skills, increasing personal awareness, building confidence and generating new business activity.

Client rules
Once upon a time, professional services were sold via old-boy networks and based on the individual’s skills. Relationship building with clients centred on very structured interviews from one side of a desk to the other. The client presented his, or her, problem and the lawyer stroked his chin(s) and provided a solution. These days the difficulty is getting to this stage. To get work, firms have to go looking for it.

The insurance market is a case in point. Work in this sector has always been steady, fed passively by third-party referrals. But now this market is undergoing a huge transition, becoming more commoditised. Even small changes in this market will have a large and negative impact on the firms, unless partners are willing to recognise that they need to get out to find more work.

Business-development skills now need to be part of the skill base for all professionals at a senior level and even at some junior levels – and it’s not a natural skill for lawyers.

Introverted and lacking in social skills
The business-development programme commenced with the challenge of 360-degree feedback from clients and colleagues for each participant.

Each participant gained feedback individually on their current attitude to, skill levels and knowledge of, business development. In addition, the participants took OPQ and MBTI psychometric tests to reveal personality traits that would impact on their comfort level to sell and their ability to generate new ideas. The aim of the programme was to utilise and develop who they are, not to make them into something that they could not sustain. As they went through the programme, each person worked one-to-one with a performance coach, using the coach’s feedback to enhance their learning and focus their efforts to deliver results.

The initial work showed that many of the participants had a lack of business-development skills in that they were introverted, had little client-development experience, had not developed their people skills, were process driven and struggled to think outside of the box. According to Jilli Warwicker, the programme facilitator, this is not unusual for lawyers due to the nature of their work, but it no doubt contributes to the lack of confidence felt by the majority when it comes to presenting themselves and the firm.

All of the participants, unsurprisingly, had strong personalities and herein lay one of the biggest challenges: how to balance one’s own personality with getting along with others in order to build rapport. Learning to be responsive to other people and to understand other people’s perspectives is an essential skill that feeds directly into the ability to ask clients the right questions and take a brief.

Fighting back
A major hurdle was participants digging in their heels about this ‘fluffy bunny stuff’ – as was to be expected. On signing up for the programme, the majority of the participants quite incorrectly anticipated coming out with a seven-point checklist and a superficial skills set. At the beginning of the course when scepticism ran at its highest, comments such as “we don’t work like that”, “we don’t write proposals”, and “this isn’t our business”, were common.

Several participants struggled with the concept of selling a lawyer. They couldn’t understand why it isn’t simply a case of presenting an individual’s or firm’s skills. Unlike selling competing washing-machine brands, with lawyers you can’t boast new and differing features, or competitive prices.

Discussing personality and character traits is also uncomfortable for most people, and few firms have a culture of these sorts of conversations. Yet, personality is fundamental to rapport and relationships. People buy people in professional services; there’s an underlying assumption that we all have the skills to do the job. Initially, the participants didn’t appreciate that this was about selling a lawyer. What the client buys is you as an individual they can trust, get along with, who relates to them and can understand their problems. Participants were taken through the results of the personality tests with a personal coach – a separate individual from the course facilitator – to identify specific areas to work on.

Attitude, professional image, clothes, handshake, personality – all add up to a personal ‘brand’: what a person is known for and as. This inward-looking analysis was important for the participants to understand how they performed in these areas. In particular, participants found it difficult to present themselves and the firm. How do you say something other than: “Hello, I’m a lawyer”? It was an uncomfortable experience but the result was increased confidence in interpersonal skills.

Participants also cringed away from telling the client how much they wanted their business. All the participants, myself included, felt embarrassed by making such a direct appeal, but it’s what the client wants to hear and working individually with a personal coach enabled us to work out ways of showing a bit of passion without wanting to put a bag over our heads and hide.

Initially, participants were very negative about this aspect of the course. After the first two of the three coaching sessions only 50 per cent had bought in to the idea. But by the end of the course eight out of the eleven participants felt they had made good progress.

Course structure
Going into the course, only a couple of participants had any previous formal training in selling and presenting. Within the firm there were few structured processes to target clients, understand issues and develop proposals. There was little innovation or time for ideas generation and the pressure of work commitments made most activities ad hoc with minimal impact. All the participants hated networking as it made them feel uncomfortable, and it felt false. These were some of the barriers we were seeking to resolve.

The business-development programme comprised five half-day modules:

The targeted business-development module focused on structuring a business-development process for identifying target markets based on individuals’ skills, prospective clients and intermediaries, targeting the right people, setting goals, and making the most of networking events;
The two personal-identity modules were probably the most challenging for the participants who were required to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, work on their impact and presence, as well as interpersonal skills;
The business-development and skill-building module introduced selling but with a focus on questioning clients for real issues and listening in order to understand the brief;
Client-relationship management looked at cross-selling opportunities and building client relationships. As a culmination of all the training, this module pulled all the participants’ learning together to tackle a case study working in teams. Teams took a brief and developed it into a proposal that they presented. The objective was getting to that ‘yes’ from clients.

The course covered all the usual sales skills in half-day sessions, including targeting clients, networking, selling skills (telephone calls, issues, talking benefits, getting the business), writing proposals, presenting, rapport building, impact and presence, client-relationship management, cross-selling and team working.

Business clubs
Our people have often attended courses and after an initial burst of enthusiasm they find it difficult due to business pressures to implement what they have learnt. This is where our monthly business clubs have come into play – the really practical and active part of the learning process for individuals to identify and pursue more work opportunities.

The business clubs were scheduled between the monthly training sessions and continued for three months after the end of the course. They focused on identifying niche markets and new approaches, proposal and tender development, converting opportunities and trying out techniques in a safe environment.

Participants would bring a new lead opportunity to the meeting and talk it through with the group, answering questions such as: “What can I say to this client?” and, “I’ve got to write a proposal, how should I structure it?” Business development has traditionally been pursued in the firm on an individual basis. This was the first time many of us had employed a team approach.

Not all participants on the course embraced the lessons, learnt the techniques or developed at the same rate. An added benefit of the business clubs was that laggards were able to pick up tips from others in the group who had progressed further in their one-to-one coaching sessions.

Building momentum, generating new contacts and business, sustaining activity levels, and bringing in business has become part of our culture.

Achievements
Vizards Wyeth pitched to give advice to a group of professional-indemnity brokers (architects and engineers) on a collateral warranty scheme. As a result of the course, we had a much better appreciation of the client and felt far more confident in our ability to take the client’s brief and prepare a six-page pitch document in response – presenting our services and skills in a way that was relevant to the client and that they could use as part of their marketing strategy to clients. Vizards Wyeth won the business in a competitive tender that we certainly would not have done before this course.

The client said that our proposal “met precisely what they were trying to achieve”. This proves that we had learnt a principal lesson from the course – find out and anticipate what the client wants, don’t assume you know. These comments arose as a result of feedback on the tender process given by the client at our request. We would not have asked at one time but would have merely been happy to get the job.

This first success came shortly after the course finished. However, the next success – for a major public-body regulatory panel with very specific requirements – followed quite quickly. There is no doubt that these successes were materially assisted by the attitude of those preparing the tender as a result of attending the course.

As a result of this course, the partners and fee earners have a much more positive, active rather than passive, attitude to business development. Confidence has grown. A structure is in place to make contacts and follow them up. The networking philosophy is clearer, and partners and fee earners have a much better appreciation of where business development leads both for the individual’s practice area and in terms of introducing new clients to the firm as a whole.

It has been good fun and hard work but now when we create new opportunities with our marketing programme, we have a team of professionals focused on converting those opportunities into business. This is in addition to their fee-earning activities – they understand their role, and are now working with and making far more demands of the marketing team now.

Before the course, Vizards Wyeth partners were going out to clients and telling them what we could do for them. We didn’t ask questions, let alone the right ones. This programme has put people along the right lines and the shift in thinking is fast becoming second nature. As a result of the business-development programme we are already delivering new business wins. So if your marketing is failing to get you business, rather than measuring your marketing outcomes, I suggest you start by looking at how comfortable your fee earners are in making the sale.

Alan Bannister is business development partner at Vizards Wyeth. He can be contacted at ab@vizardswyeth.com