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  • Four Reasons Why Legal Marketing Has No Future: Part III

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    Posted on December 2, 2011 at 11:59 am

    Reason #3 Failure to Respect the Buyer

    Our research, confirmed again and again over 20 years, tells us that buyers wear their industry hat when looking for legal services. In other words, buyers have no interest at all in dealing with a law firm’s internal organizational battle over specialties. They want industry expertise. They want advisors who know their industry, know its vocabulary, its trends and its challenges. Accounting firms figured this out 30, 40 years ago, creating enormously successful consulting operations. In the meantime, law firms fuss around with the practice group concept and miss the boat entirely; shame on them and their ‘management’ advisors. What’s the Solution? Organize into agile industry teams, scraping the practice group thing entirely. Lawyers care about practice groups because it is a natural extension of the solo silo.

    Legal is a fragmented industry. Research shows that no single firm has more than 4-6% unaided name awareness in any category (i.e., litigation, telecom, antitrust, energy, etc.), in large part because law firms are maneuvering to win battles (practice specialties) that aren’t being fought. Clients, meanwhile, are doing battle within specific industries.

    All of this behavior is me-centered. Understand this: marketing focuses on the needs of the buyer; selling focuses on the needs of the seller. “Hey, Ms. Client, I’ve got hours to sell. Want some!” is the type of selling, ineffective as it is, generally practiced in the legal community since lawyers are so often not the best salespeople and understand client needs so poorly, they focus almost pathologically on ‘building relationships.’ This has real value, of course, but is the single most inefficient model of selling a law firm and its lawyers can adopt. When marketing and business development work together, it’s a powerful thing to see, when one or the other is dismissed (or, in some instances, both are pushed out the door), then the firm operates at a fraction of its potential.

    This is an excerpt from “The Future of Law Firm Marketing” as published in InsideLegal Thought Leaders Digest – COLPM Issue.

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    Comments

    Comment from Mike O’Horo December 5, 2011 at 1:06 pm

    Burkey,
    I completely agree with the criticality of industry focus, without which a lawyer is irrelevant to prospects. I’ll strongly disagree, however, with “selling focuses on the needs of the seller.” If you append your later phrase, “as generally practiced by lawyers,” then we’re back in agreement. Just because lawyers sell that way doesn’t make it a legitimate description of selling.

    Selling is about decisions, i.e., facilitating aware, sustainable decisions that reflect buyer self-interest. As such, it’s no different than practicing law ethically. When practicing, lawyers help clients make good decisions without regard to the lawyers’ interests. That’s exactly what professional salespeople do. The whole idea of pitching, persuading and “closing” is hopelessly outdated, and buyers find it offensive.

    The critical skill now is the ability to facilitate decisions among multiple stakeholders. Twenty years ago, you shared a statistic with me that’s still essential: In 30% of selling situations, nothing gets purchased; “no decision” wins. Since that percentage is a multiple of the 4-6% unaided-awareness percentage you published (which, presumably, correlates to market-share in some degree) the most important thing to learn to eliminate is “no decision.” “No” is more valuable than “no decision,” because, while “yes” begins a revenue stream, both “yes” and “no” end cost-of-sales and free up the lawyer’s limited sales bandwidth to be applied elsewhere.

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Brand Thinkers

Burkey Belser

 Burkey Belser

Burkey Belser, president and creative director, pioneered legal services marketing. He has been quoted on brand design topics by dozens of industry publications and is highly rated as a speaker on topics from branding to information design.

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