Lawyers must offer something more than legal services to win new clients

Yet another call from somebody trying to explain to me the benefits of changing my electricity supplier. I sympathise with the poor guy in the call centre and don’t want to be rude, but still hang up as soon as decently possible. I know that, if I gave him a chance, he might have a deal that could save me a bit of money. But I have a perfectly good supplier already, I am busy and it is a hassle to change to another company.

Even law firms are now using call centres as we, as a profession, realise that we have to use modern sales techniques. The poor man on the phone could have been trying to sell me a will-writing service or was hoping that I had suffered an accident recently.

It didn’t use to be like this. In the good old days, we sat behind our big leather-covered desks while a client tugged his forelock and asked if we possibly had time to help him and how many guineas it would cost. Now every firm should be investing in sales and marketing.

Marketing is tough. Many of us have had little or no training in sales and we did not spend years reading law books in order to sell professional services. But we are getting better and are becoming more businesslike. However, I believe that many of us still fall into some very basic traps.

Is buying a stranger a decent lunch going to get you work? You will get a better reception than the man cold-calling me and will probably have a very pleasant time.

But why will this recent acquaintance decide to instruct you? You may be personable and have a great knowledge of the law. But, if your new friend had a long-term relationship with another firm, why should he sack that firm and give you work, any more than I would sack my electricity supplier?

The problem today is that charm is not generally going to be enough and legal competency is a given. What will catch the eye of a potential client is the offer of something extra.

Too many lawyers assume that the relationship with a client is a one-way street: the client gives you work and you do it for them. In today’s brutal market, a prospective client will be impressed if you offer something more than legal services. The lunch should include an offer to, say, create a business opportunity by making an introduction to another client.

A problem with enjoying many years of prosperity is that, come the slump, we are slow to understand that the relationship between solicitor and client has changed. For many years, we have been able to tell the client what they needed to buy from us. We had our stall of products and knew which one the client needed.

Now that it is a buyer’s market, clients can shop around. So, a pitch for work needs to be about the client and not about us. It may be jolly interesting that the firm has been around for hundreds of years and that you can list every senior partner, but a client will prefer to talk about his business. He will want you to engage with his problem.

We must change our mindset so that we sell the client what he wants to buy, not what we want to sell. We are getting better at selling our services, but still have a lot to learn.

What do you think? How can we get better at selling?