Lawyers shouldn't sell

By Paul Brent, Marketing Director, Boyes Turner

In law firms, lawyers are the prime revenue-generating assets. Using them in non-fee-earning roles when there are more effective and cheaper alternatives makes little commercial sense.

Over the past two decades, law firms have been recruiting professionals to run and manage their core functions. However, sales has been left to lawyers on the premise that law is a relationship-based business and that those delivering services are best placed to develop these, especially where advice is complex and technical.

In industry, it usually requires six-months’ training to turn a graduate into an effective salesperson. Law firms commonly invest a fraction of this time in developing their senior lawyers’ selling skills – usually a three-day short course and perhaps one or two half-day refresher sessions at most.

It is little surprise, then, that lawyers are at best enthusiastic amateurs, with results to match. That said, if sufficient time is invested in learning and practicing sales skills, lawyers can become effective salespeople. However, for this approach to be effective requires an investment in infrastructure and systems to coordinate sales activities across practice groups, offices and countries.

Most law firms are nowhere near this point, which is probably due to the size of the investment required and also the cultural difficulty of taking lawyers away from client-facing work. That said, sales can be made to work firm-wide in this way but client acquisition will be very expensive.

A new approach

A solution to this is to engineer a sales process specifically for law firms. Starting from scratch, the process should:

• reduce lawyer involvement to a bare minimum, enabling them to focus more of their time on fee-earning; and

• be structured in such a way as to remove the need for expensive training.

So where exactly in the sales process should lawyers be involved? Quite simply, in as little as possible.

However, lawyers are a key part of the process and it is very much a case of using them as cost effectively and strategically as possible, namely:

• working with marketing and finance to help identify the most potentially profitable targets where their firm has a real and definable competitive advantage;

• having these targets managed by a trained sales specialist, but keeping the attending lawyer fully briefed on what is expected; and

• following up on meetings – this is often shared with marketing, but it is essential that a strong relationship is built between the lawyer and client to close the sale.

Outside of this, all of the other parts of the process – including research and appointment making – should be done by marketing or outsourced. 

Reaping results

The proof is in the pudding. Law firms that have used this approach have seen a dramatic increase in their number of sales meetings with blue-chip organisations and subsequent new business, much of it multi-service work. Clients are created far more cost effectively.

A key benefit of this approach is that return on investment is easily measurable. This enables an evaluation of sales against other marketing and business development activities, which helps prioritise resources and maximise value for money.

Leverage marketing

Law firms need to rethink how they market themselves. The textbook model of using lawyers as a frontline sales force simply does not make commercial sense.

Marketers should be used properly as they are in other industries, with their effectiveness measured by the revenue and competitive advantage they create. This means ending marketing’s role as a support function and putting it at the centre of the business.

Achieving a good return on investment for the resources used is absolutely vital. Marketing should take direct responsibility for direct sales, account management, cross-selling, websites (revenue/client generating, not brochure-ware) and new product/service development. The return generated from all of these is measureable.

The other focus for marketing should be on differentiation and using communications and PR to develop competitive advantage.

From a client’s perspective, most law firms look the same, provide the same services, deliver them in similar ways and use similar charging structures. There is also an aversion to discussing strategy and performance, which makes objectively comparing law firms in any way very difficult.

Law firms should be building an armoury of statistics, case studies and new stories about what their firm is doing better, faster and more successfully than competitors. This should then be used as ammunition for their sales teams and in the press to make it as easy as possible for clients and potential clients to choose the right firm for their needs. Again, this can be measured.