Business development is the new
imperative, and every lawyer in practice knows that marketing is
critical to survival and success. And while marketing is usually simple,
it isn’t necessarily easy. This article explores some of the challenges
that lawyers often struggle with when it comes to marketing, and how to
deal with them. Here’s a rundown of common stumbling blocks.
No matter how diligently you apply yourself, the results will not be immediate.
Unless you have hit on a target with a pressing need, it is typical for
open files to take one to two years to materialize, and often much,
much longer than that. Accept the fact that success takes time, and
stick with it.
Results are not predictable. Although
conventional wisdom dictates that if you work long enough and hard
enough at something, success is guaranteed, that’s not the case when it
comes to business development. There are many factors completely outside
of your control that will impact on whether or not a particular client
or matter will land on your desk. Be prepared to accept the fact that
even if you’ve given it all you’ve got, you still might not get the
work. That’s not a failure — that’s just the
way business development works. It’s a numbers game. Although you can’t
predict or control whether or not you will land any given client or
file, the more targets you are actively engaged with at any given time,
the greater the probability of a win.
There’s a difference between thinking about objectives and writing them down.
Some lawyers think about marketing, but they don’t know exactly what
they want to accomplish and they don’t write anything down. Writing down
your objectives makes them concrete and specific. In addition, the very
act of writing your goals down makes you more committed to them.
Planning is different than implementing. It’s
amazing how many lawyers think that, once the plan is made, getting it
done is also taken care of. We think this despite everything in our
experience that shows us it simply isn’t so, and we make assumptions
that don’t reflect reality. For example, we assume we’ll always feel
highly motivated, we assume there will be no unexpected obstacles or
distractions to get in our way, and we assume that changing our
behaviour and developing new habits will be easy. We make these
assumptions even though none of them have ever been true. With all of
these factors threatening our best intentions, we need to be very
disciplined. But the level of discipline required is unfortunately
beyond most of us. Read on.
If you have structure, you don’t need motivation and you don’t need discipline. That’s
because, if there is structure, you no longer have a choice about
whether you are going to do something or note. The structure takes care
of the doing, because there is no “option” of not doing.
Business development is a long, long road. In
fact, it is a road that never ends. You won’t ever accomplish all that
you want to on the business-development front, and you won’t ever become
the best business developer that you can possibly be every minute of
every day. The most that any of us can do is to make a solid, consistent
effort. That is what marketing performance is really all about, and
when it comes to developing new habits and changing behaviors, we should
focus on the effort that we put into it. We have to be honest with
ourselves about how hard we are really trying. The implication of this
is …
There’s only one way to measure your progress.
It’s not about measuring your successes or marketing wins. As discussed
above, successes and wins are in part outside of your control. What you
need to measure is the part that you have complete control over — that is, your effort. In other words, how hard you are trying.
If you are using this approach to evaluate your marketing performance,
you won’t be able to excuse or deflect underperformance by saying that
you were too busy, too tired, or that someone else dropped the ball or
made a mistake. When you measure effort, it doesn’t matter how
challenging your circumstances are — the question is, are you doing your best regardless of the challenges and your circumstances?
Donna Wannop, LLB, MBA, is a practice-development coach (www.wannop.ca) who has worked exclusively with the legal profession for over 25 years. She can be reached at [email protected].
