Following on from my CRM/ACR post, it struck me that I had completely missed an important segment of the potential sales target audience – the clients you don’t have but would like to snag. I’d instead concentrated on the potentially viral effect of using this medium among existing clients. While that remains an extremely important part of any practice development strategy there is a finite limit on organic growth, largely dictated by the profile of your portfolio. Sooner or later you need to find fresh meat. How but more important what will you go prospecting for?
Most partners take the least line of resistance and go through intermediaries – their peer networks of lawyers, bank managers and so on. This is OK up to a point but is heavily dependent on their having an image of you that closely reflects your aspirations, abilities and achievements. The reality is that you will have built up years of relationship atrophy (hat tip to Vinnie for the A word) that may not reflect how you are running the practice today. It’ s your history of working alongside these people and it means you are frequently pigeon holed in some way. How often have I heard people say of me – ‘Oh, that’s Dennis H, the enterprise apps hack who beats up on everybody’ when that’s far from the truth. (I beat up on those that tell porkies, try and over manage my thinking or who over-complicate simple things to make them sound ‘cool’ when they’re not.) Using existing relationships therefore is not necessarily going to get you through the door of that prize client. Here’s a different view.
Partners are nearly always time poor. They don’t read websites, (sanity check – is there an audience for this? I hope so) struggle to skim the FTs headlines and are usually up to their necks in practice management issues. What makes you think your prospective client is any different? Some of the most successful business people I know are in exactly the same position. When a sales guy turns up at your office, do you give them the time of day? How much time do you reckon a sales person has got to make an impression on you before you start switching off? I’d say about 20 minutes, 30 minutes max.
That means you’ve got to have done a huge amount of upfront work before making your pitch. Perhaps as much as 10 times the amount of time you’ll get in front of the prospect. It also means you’ve got to have a very high success rate to make this type of pitch stick. That’s what research is all about. It’s about intelligence gathering and making sure the service fit is as close as you can guesstimate to the prospect’s needs but presented in a unique and differentiated way. Fixed fees ain’t it though that can help sway a deal. It is a very good reason why you should consider appointing a keen senior to the position of client relationship manager. Someone you know is hungry for partner status but who has a bit to go and who has the potential to be a quality rainmaker.
His/her principle role is to keep the existing client base happy with judicious yet relevant information while adding to your store of knowledge about the types of client with which you feel most at home. In my practice that was the Yorkshire hill farmer for whom we knew we had a cracking proposition. In my case it was nursing home and club operators, engineering shops, house builders along with a smattering of entertainers and sportsmen. It’s an eclectic mix but I’d spent a number of years in one or other of those industries. I knew we could snag a good share of these client types because we understood their businesses very well. But in addition, we knew how to put an attractive proposal together. We were not always successful. Far from it. But the wins far outweighed the losses and were worth the effort in non-billable hours. By the way, I’m a rotten salesman compared to many I know but I’ve always been a good negotiator.
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