Two companies have the same legal need. Both companies end
up speaking to the same lawyer however they came to that lawyer through two
different paths. In the first situation, the company searches for the lawyer to
solve their problem. They do an internet search, find the lawyer and hire her almost
immediately to solve their problem.
In the second situation, the lawyer seeks out the company
who has the problem that they can solve. He speaks to his connections and
referral sources, gets an introduction to the company, secures a meeting, and
makes a very well-received presentation to the company’s decision maker.
The first situation, in which the company searches out the
lawyer, results in a new engagement roughly 30 to 40% of the time. The latter
situation, in which the lawyer searches out the company, results in a new
engagement less than 10% of the time. The problem is the same, the needs are
the same, the solution is the same and the lawyer is the same. Why does the
success rate differ so much between these two situations? What does this tell
us about what is wrong with selling legal services?
Conventional business development training programs follow a
familiar path: Make connections; build relationships; identify needs;
differentiate your service; overcome objections and close the engagement. The
process begins and ends with the assumption that identified legal needs lead to
engagements.
As popular as this process is, it can’t explain fundamental
challenges that we see so often in our business development pursuits. For
instance,
·
why a prospect stalls or disengages from the
selling process
·
why lawyers with a strong company relationship
are not always selected
·
why some engagements get signed quickly and some
take months, and
·
why some prospects recognize a legal need but
don’t solve their problem.
These situations are the source of frustration for anyone
actively engaged in selling legal services. Without a good explanation for this
seemingly erratic behavior we conclude business services buyers are, at least sometimes,
‘irrational’ - a characteristic of buyers of consumer goods, but not
corporations. Businesses are anything but irrational.
Unknowingly, we have adopted certain assumptions that obscure
the fact that our process, and not our lawyers, is fundamentally flawed or,
more accurately, incomplete. We assume
that:
·
When companies recognize a legal need, they are
inclined to find a solution.
·
The selling process is linear (think sales
funnel) and follows specific steps that, if followed skillfully, will advance a
prospect to an engagement.
·
Selling is a numbers game. The more contacts we
make, the better our chances.
·
Buyers do business with people they know and
like. As such, relationships are a required context for the opportunity of new
engagements.
·
There is one decision maker. A key to success is in appealing to this person.
·
There is a single sales method that works for
all selling situations, practice areas, industries, buyer types, buying
circumstances, etc.
Conventional business development methods ignore an
important part of the legal services selling process: the legal services buying
process. Companies have buying processes just as we have selling processes. And
those buying processes are the source of much of what frustrates us. It include
much more than simply the recognition of a problem and the selection of a
provider. It includes a unique, internal process that prioritizes, builds
consensus and project outcomes for the array of possible solutions. This
internal decision process happens before a company can find a solution or
provider. And so far, we’ve ignored that part of the buying and selling
transactional process.
We can’t fully understand how buyers buy until we have
insight into how buyers decide to buy.
We think carefully about what we should do to persuade a prospect,
differentiate our services and negotiate the best terms and yet nothing about the
company’s receptiveness to our proposed solutions. If a company does not have
internal consensus on a solution, no amount of selling, relationship building
or negotiation skills will move them.
When a company is ready to buy and has decided on the
provider, the only thing to do is to negotiate the terms of the engagement. If
the buyer is ready to buy but not set on the particular provider, consultative
selling skills can help you to identify needs, differentiate your service, and
close the engagement. But we currently don’t have a way to know where the
company is in their buying decision process and whether they will be receptive
to lawyers educating them about a problem and selling them on their solution.
To illustrate this point further, consider when a company is
slapped with a large, bet the company-type lawsuit. In that situation, the
company needs to fix their problem and the internal decision to proceed is made
quickly. Companies typically know the best lawyers for these problems. The
well-known lawyer that fixes those problems won’t need to sell that much. The
buyer knows what they need and that the lawyer fits their needs. The lawyer
simply has to negotiate the engagement terms and price.
In other situations, the company recognizes that they have a
need but haven’t yet determined the best solution or the best provider. Internally,
they’ve decided on a course of action, they just haven’t determined yet the
specific steps to take. For example, think about a company which has undergone
strategic planning and determined that it needs to find a company with whom to
merge. The company has aligned behind the need but not the particular solution
or provider. The lawyer in this situation can use consulting skills to
influence the selection in her favor.
Lastly, let’s imagine you are pitching a financial
technology company to redraft contract language for new regulations. In order
to be ‘ready to buy’, the bank will first need to answer a host of questions to
determine the implications and impact of these changes and align internal (and
sometimes external) stakeholders behind a solution. They have technology
considerations, human resource issues, legal questions and budgets that all
must be addressed in order to come to a ‘Go. No go’ decision. Without a
decision in how to proceed, the lawyer is selling a solution before the bank is
ready to buy.
It's not hard to understand why addressing the internal
buying decision process has been left out of the selling process. Your lawyers
are on the outside of the company. They are not privy to the internal politics,
the relationship dynamics, the cultural norms and values, the history and
hard-fought lessons that determine how the company operates, how it makes
decisions and how it selects providers. It’s hard to see how they could
influence decisions.
But they can help facilitate
the decision process from outside by helping their contacts inside the
company ask better questions, get better information, understand all the
stakeholders and more clearly understand the resistance to the changes some
legal solutions will cause inside the company. As the example illustrates, not
all legal selling situations need buying decision facilitation. So, a system to
know which do and which don’t will help you know which skills are best for each
situation.
Expanding our definition of the selling process to include
the company’s buying-decision process sheds light on the internal dynamics,
motivations and time frames companies have about solving their legal problems. This revelation led to a new business
development process called Decision-Strategy Selling™ that provides lawyers
with a framework to evaluate where the buyer is in their internal buying
decision process and presents a new set of skills to help find the quickest
path to an engagement decision. It complements existing sales training because
it helps lawyers know the situations in which selling skills will be most
effective and which opportunities are truly worth pursuing. And it builds
relationships more quickly because the lawyer starts the relationship as a
trusted advisor and not a sales person.
It’s time to start thinking differently about what works and
what doesn’t work in legal sales. Most importantly, we should ask why our sales
methods used on a qualified prospect with a specific legal need fails nine
times out of ten. It’s because we are not selling to where the buyer is going
to be. We wouldn’t accept such a low success rate in our legal work. And we
shouldn’t accept such a low success rate in our business development efforts
either.
Eric Dewey, MBA, is the Founder of eLegal Training,
which creates, produces, manages and hosts short form ‘eLearning’ courses
for the legal services industry. Contact eric@eLegalTraining.com or
visit www.elegaltraining.com.