Chameleon partners: How to help partners to get better at business development

Meirion Jones discusses the four skills that BD professionals need to nudge partners into effective client development behaviours

Are senior marketers strategists or behaviour change agents; sales gurus or psychologists? Sales and marketing activities don’t come easily to a great many fee earners, so helping them to adopt more effective client development behaviours is the key challenge for marketers.

Even the most conceptually brilliant, market-driven business plans rely for their success on the fee earners’ willingness to turn words into actions. When business developers forget this – or file it in the ‘too difficult’ category – their impact on the firm’s client development objectives are severely inhibited.

How, then, can fee earners be induced to change their behaviour? They’re not, after all, the most receptive subjects. This article suggests a set of practical steps for doing just that.

Key account indifference

Do you recognise the following scenario? We are sitting in a board room of a large law firm. A progress review meeting of the key account management team is underway. The client account plan has been circulated in advance by the energetic key account manager.

The lead client partner chairing the meeting is determined that progress be made in implementing the plan. He intends to invite each team member in turn to provide an update on what they’ve done since the last meeting. Ten minutes after the scheduled start time, half of the team hasn’t arrived and it is obvious that even those who are present have little to say.

For the key account manager (who joined the firm recently from a frontline sales role at a large advertising agency), the lack of engagement is baffling. There are one or two risible ‘dog ate my homework’ types of excuses but, in the main, the partners are unembarrassed to admit that the meeting they were supposed to arrange has yet to be diarised, the training programme leaflet has still to be drafted, and the feedback questionnaire still hasn’t been sent.

Resistance to change

The challenge of encouraging partners to modify their behaviour so that client development disciplines become habitual – thus ensuring that client development activities becomes an integral part of a firm’s culture – is one of the thorniest and oldest topics in the book.

At any gathering of professional services BD professionals, you’re never more than a few feet and a few minutes away from a conversation bemoaning the lack of partner engagement.

An outside observer might be forgiven for thinking that BD professionals see partner resistance to behaviour change as an irreversible force of nature – like an aggressive bacteria from which there is no immunity. Happily, it’s not. Getting partners to do things differently is a simple challenge of learning to develop and apply more effective influencing strategies.

Personal influence

Veteran business developers at law firms often fail to realise what a specialist skill set they have. Few other industries are as testing on an interpersonal level and, if they are at all effective in their roles, BD professionals will have developed strong interpersonal influencing skills, often without realising it. The challenge lies in bringing these skills to bear in a concerted manner.

The key skills of BD professionals can be distilled down to four key qualities: self-belief; strategy; sensitivity; and storytelling. Together, they create an irresistible force for change.

Every successful senior BD professional – highly regarded by their senior partnership, occupying a senior management position, looked to as a strategic change agent – exhibits most of these qualities in abundance. The challenge is not to see them as standalone, but to use them in combinations when interacting with fee earners or with others who need influencing.

1. Self-belief

Self-belief is the alpha and omega of influencing skills and is under almost constant siege from gruelling interaction with fee earners. Self-belief is knowing what the right thing to do is – even if the prevailing opinion runs against it – and having the tenacity and courage to push ahead, despite setbacks.

Self-belief is the starter motor and the fuel of a concerted drive to change others’ opinions and behaviour. Many admirable BD professionals – clever, insightful, charming people – have been brought low simply by lacking the self-belief to resist the continual attrition that dealing with fee earners often leads to.

2. Strategy

Strategy is the ability to recognise which fights are worth winning and which require calculated retreats. While self-belief fuels a passion for change, strategic mindedness helps you to focus your efforts where it will have most effect.

This includes building alliances with sympathetic influencers and using your relationships with them to marginalise some of the troublemakers. It will help you to identify the agendas that different individuals have and to play to them, encouraging them to support you in return for your support of their particular goals.

3. Sensitivity

Sensitivity is a broad term for a subset of skills that enable strong influencers to take and navigate the emotional lie of the land. It includes skills in emotional intelligence that help to build rapport and tailor an approach to match individual perceptions and concerns. It includes facilitative questioning skills that help to direct a fee earner’s thinking or to uncover concerns they may have.

Sensitivity is emphatically not to be equated with having a thin skin. Rather, it includes the ability to stay emotionally neutral – not allowing yourself to take personally the confrontations that will inevitably arise, and not interpreting others’ feelings and motivations as projections of your own. BD professionals with particularly well-developed sensitivity are great coaches, able to encourage and challenge '¨fee earners to great efforts.

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is the ability to create compelling reasons for action. It may simply be a good illustrative case study to provide practical evidence of the reasons for doing something. It may be the ability to present client feedback or describe what the competitors are doing. Whatever the context, by appealing to the heart and mind, a good storyteller is able to persuade his audience that the status '¨quo is not an option.

How these qualities are used in practice is the next question. To answer that, we should turn to a most unexpected source: the arcane workings of central government.

Nudging change

One of the most interesting examples of concerted, institutionalised behavioural change is to be found in the work of an eight-strong government taskforce called the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT).

Over the past few years, UK governments of different political complexions have struggled to persuade the population at large to behave differently. The realisation has gradually dawned on them that if you want the public en masse to do something – such as reduce alcohol consumption, submit tax returns earlier or increase their use of donor cards – ordering them to do it will have little effect. It may even be counterproductive.

Using a combination of economics, social science and behavioural psychology, the BIT has developed a range of initiatives to ‘nudge’ people into changing the way they behave. Nudging uses less directive and more suggestive forms of communication:

• rather than threatening people with the consequences of non-compliance, it emphasises the benefits of change through positive examples;

• nudging uses modest, simple rewards to leverage changes in behaviour – a newsworthy example is the initiative to reward early submitters of tax returns with money drawn from fines to late payers; and

• rather than being presented as unchallenged edicts from a central monolithic authority, messages are disseminated through a range of community channels – local organisations and voluntary bodies offering accessible, practical '¨guidance to help individuals to '¨make the changes.

The elastic mind

The final point is a simple but, in its way, profound one: everyone has the capacity to adapt their behaviour. Nudging starts with the assumption that individuals can make whatever changes they want to make, rather than being imprisoned in inescapable habits.

There is a growing body of research – in areas as diverse as top-level sports and orchestral excellence – to show that humans have an almost limitless capacity for adaptation and continual improvement. In this light, there is simply no such thing as being innately ‘bad’ at something.

Why is this relevant to professional services? Well, how often have you heard a partner say that he is simply not very good at something (such as selling or networking) as if it were a simple fact, rather than self-serving – albeit sincerely believed – rubbish?

A lot of inactivity on key account teams can be traced to the irrational conviction that partners lack the ability to do something. In truth, what they lack are well-developed skills, and this is a very different thing indeed. What is often described as innate talent or genius is usually, under greater scrutiny, revealed to be the results of years of application, hard graft and advantageous circumstances.

This means that one of the major inhibitions to more effective partner behaviour – lack of skills – can be addressed through a tailored learning and development or coaching programme. This is the perfect opportunity for the key account manager to position himself as '¨a coach/mentor – using a combination of the four skills above – to improve fee earners’ skill sets.

Let’s return to our key account manager. It is three months after the previous meeting and he has been hard at work. He has identified a couple of influential partners in the larger team and worked hard to build their trust and confidence – helping them intensively '¨with pitches and credentials preparation – and learnt about their motivations (using the strategy and sensitivity elements of '¨the 4s-skills).

Both partners are keen to be seen to be doing well and he reminds them a number of times about the importance the firm’s senior management places in KAM (using the storytelling skill). He asks for their advice in overcoming the indifference in the wider team, subtly coaching them on a range of small but impactful adjustments to their own behaviour. They in turn respond by energetically implementing the simple, easily accomplished, actions allocated to them.

As a result, at the follow-up meeting, the client partner applauds their efforts. The key account manager points out in classic nudging fashion that the partners concerned have adapted the standard process to suit the individual needs of the client team. At the next full team meeting three months later, there is even greater progress to report as an increasing number of the team buy into this ‘lo-fi’ approach.

There are always balances to strike and, in a fast-moving demanding legal environment, there is not always the time to lavish on this calculated approach towards change management. However, '¨if the alternative is busy unproductivity, then the true and final test of a change manager is whether he has the self-belief to commit to the key priorities.

meirionjones@me.com