Episode #142: Lawyers As Salespeople

The legal profession is one of the last holdouts, still clinging to the misguided belief that being smart equals getting the client’s business. Big mistake.

Lawyers have spent a lot of time studying to pass their bar exams. When they graduate, they are the white collar galley slaves, shackled to legal partner’s teams, doing the grunt work for years, until they can be allowed on deck. As they move up the ranks they begin to interact with clients. After a few more years they actually have to go out and get clients.

Lawyers are proud of their achievements, their study, their knowledge of the law, their brains. They want the clients to appreciate all of this and as a consequence, give them work. This is the “I deserve it” school of sales in the law. Knowledge is valuable. I have knowledge therefore you need me to help you sort out these various issues you are facing.

Once upon a time that was the way of the legal profession. A bunch of lawyer nerds serving up legal rocket science to companies. Times change and now there are lots and lots of lawyers, all vying for their share of the pie.

Faced with such a proliferation of buying choices what do clients do? They do what they do for all the other purchases they make. They apply the “Know, Like and Trust” rule. To know the legal firm, means to have a trusted confidant provide some testimonial style advice on how they performed in the past, how reliable they were and their degree of expertise in this particular area. If there is no track record which the client can judge, then this “know” process is the equivalent of the “cold call” in sales.

The “like” part is the legal equivalent of a doctor’s “bedside manner”. This is a great metaphor for the legal profession. The diagnosis component requires two great skills: listening and questioning. Asking well designed questions to uncover the client’s needs. This is Selling 101.

The delivery of the solution requires great skill to engage the trust of the client. This is what we call explaining the features of the solution in the sales world. Many lawyers tend to stop there, believing their job is now done, but they are in grave error. Instead, the features of the solution require to have the respective benefits attached to them, the application of those benefits need explaining and so does how they will impact the business. Evidence of where this has worked elsewhere needs to be marshalled to sustain the argument and then we ask for the business, using a trial close.

Lawyers are all in sales, they just don’t know it.