Tag Archives: Twitter

How to find an extra 1,000 hours a year

8 Replies

I have a confession to make.

The partners were surprised to see Fiona set fire to the firm's library in the name of productivity

I’m an information junkie. All my life I’ve been a voracious consumer of books, magazines and newspapers.

From burying my nose in novels as a child, through reading 3-4 books a week when commuting as a lawyer, to teaching myself to speed-read early in my legal career to keep on top of fast moving professional development, books have never been far away.

Indeed I wrote about how reading more widely can help a lawyer become more rounded and get a wider perspective that can enhance their thinking and advice (and I stand by that idea!).

So what’s the problem?

Well, the quantity, quality and ease of access to information  is so high these days, that reading can take up a disproportionate amount of time.

It’s possible to spend so much time reading, that experiencing life and reflecting on it can take a back seat.

I took some time to reflect on this challenge on a recent holiday, and realised that I was bombarding myself with information pretty much from the moment I open my eyes. Does some or any of this sound familiar…

  • Wake up. Check smartphone for urgent emails
  • Waiting for train – check news and sport headlines on smartphone, check twitter and facebook feeds
  • On train – read newspaper on Kindle, when done move onto ebook (usually business or personal development)
  • Work – check Google reader feeds, work reading, twitter while waiting for meetings, walking to get lunch etc
  • Train home – read ebook (business or personal development)
  • Before bed – read ebook or physical book (could be work or fiction)
  • Repeat.

Aside from the enjoyment I got from reading (an important factor not to gloss over in this discussion), it was apparent that my mind was whirring constantly from the moment the alarm went at 5am. My sense was that while this definitely had benefits in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge I was accumulating (much of which has been very useful), it was also draining a lot of mental energy and limiting the headspace I had for thinking and reflecting, and on balance the negatives were beginning to outweigh the positives.

As the Tao Te Ching says (verse 48) “learning is daily accumulating, the Way is daily diminishing”  (and yes I realise that’s a quote from a book!).

Sometimes less is more.

So I decided to do an experiment – I’d go on an information diet.

The first thing I did was cut out reading a daily newspaper. I’ve read a newspaper pretty much every day for the last twenty years. Give or take a few minutes, it takes me about 30 minutes to read the whole thing in my very methodical way. News headlines, sport, UK news, overseas news, business news, features and culture. Bish bash bosh.

Now giving this up might seem a small step, but psychologically I wondered what the effect would be – would it hamper my ability to hold conversations in the office? What about at social events? Would I go to meetings and find I didn’t know what people were talking about? Would this damage my personal competitive advantage? Would I become (perish the thought) less interesting?

The reality – important news found me. I didn’t have a complete news black out – quick checks on the BBC mobile news, trends from Twitter, and of course conversations have so far (four months and counting) brought me all the news I seem to need.

What I didn’t anticipate is that where I have needed to find out about something (and this has been very rare), simply asking the person who’s raised the issue to tell me what’s happened had led to some rich conversations and elicited opinions I might not have got if I’d already known the detail.

The other thing I noticed, is that when I pick up a newspaper, I now see how much news there is that really has no impact on my life (in any capacity), which is generally depressing, but which  I would have consumed anyway in my pre-information diet days.

On a similar note, a former journalist I met with last week mentioned that he was continually frustrated by his inability to block out which contestants are currently appearing on Celebrity Big Brother because despite his total lack of interest in the subject, it seeps into his consciousness through the media.

So far so good. I’d reclaimed three and a half hours of time per week (182 hours a year  sounds more impressive!). Assuming I used that time wisely, that was a real productivity boost.

The next step was to stop reading other books.

So for the last three and a half months, the only book I’ve looked at (which I mentioned in my post The Tao of Law Firm Strategy) has been the Tao Te Ching – the classic Chinese text which is best described as a cross between philosophy and poetry. Read for five minutes, ponder for an hour.

So for all intents and purposes, my reading has gone from say 3 hours a day, to zero. That’s over 1,000 hours a year. Or one and a half months.

Pretty drastic? Maybe.

Permanent? Don’t know.

One of the important points (in my eyes anyway) is that not only have I reduced the information I take in, but I’ve chosen not to replace that activity with another. It’s just white space and  I definitely appreciate the extra time I now have to think things through (work and personal) and also just be.

There are times when less is definitely more.

It’s also made me much more conscious of where I choose to focus – Davenport wrote a great book called The Attention Economy about the value of attention (related article  at Brainpickings if you’re interested), and having some extra time and space to allow you to step back and re-prioritise is surely a good thing.

So what’s the reading end-game for me?

Well, I think I will welcome books back into my life at some point, although I feel no rush to do it right now. When I do I think I’ll be more selective about what I read – to offer me greater benefit that the space I’ve freed up, it’s going to have to be quite a book!

So for busy lawyers, while I can’t free you from the tyranny of the timesheets (the market will do that in time…), by limiting the amount of information you take in outside the office, you might find yourself more productive.

Just don’t spend the time you’re freed up watching television. Please!

 

Related articles

The in-house law firm – the future of corporate law departments?

4 Replies

I’m a big fan of Tom Peters. Not just because he genuinely interacts with his followers on Twitter, not just because he’s passionate about what he writes about, and not just because he presents (presentations, books) in some pretty cool ways. I’m a fan because he has some great ideas.

Corporate counsel Sedgwick took his boss' advice to "be a rock star" seriously as he began to address the board meeting

If you look back to his book “Re-imagine, business excellence in a disruptive age”, which was written nearly a decade ago, so much of it remains fresh and inspiring (and you should buy a copy if you’ve not seen it – it was required reading by my General Counsel when I was an in-house lawyer!).

But there’s one concept, right at the heart of the book, that seems more appropriate than ever in the legal marketplace right now. Tom describes the principle as “From cost centre to stardom – the professional service firm (PSF) transformation”.

Let me outline some of the detail behind this principle, and then I’ll tell you why I think it’s SO relevant right now.

Tom starts by ranting (his words!) that aiming to improve departmental efficiency and effectiveness is no longer enough. Heard about effectiveness and efficiency in the context of corporate law departments recently? It’s the opening paragraph of pretty much every report about General Counsel these days. Hell, I’ve written about it myself!

He goes on to assert that working 50 hour weeks in a cost centre is not sustainable – rote work will be outsourced  and the core that remains will be the traditional domain of the PSF – the accumulation and application of creative intellectual capital. With the amount of publicity the legal process outsourcing business is getting these days, this shouldn’t seem far fetched for General Counsel either.

So what’s the solution? Tom breaks it down into the following four key parts, to which I’ve added a law department spin.

  1. Outsource it – if the work can’t be done economically or the law department isn’t demonstrably great at it, outsource it.
  2. Now in a legal department this might be “volume work” which can be systemised and done off-shore cheaply, or it might be more complex but the legal team doesn’t have the skills in-house to do a great job, in which case the work might be passed to a retained law firm (or even another internal department).
  3. Productise it – if the work can be done in-house, break it into a “product” that someone will pay for. Now for lawyers care needs to be taken here as while there are certainly plenty of tasks that internal clients will pay for (doing deals, litigating etc), there are some jobs where the key beneficiaries may be the shareholders who won’t have a notional budget to cross-charge. The key point to me however is that the work creates real, demonstrable value for the organisation.
  4. Web-ify it – Tom challenges us to put everything (policies, procedures, contracts) on the web. Now many lawyers will no doubt be holding up their hands in horror here, but the reality is that this concept is already starting to take hold in the more progressive corporate legal departments. Use up a lot of bandwidth drafting standard sales contracts for the business? Take instructions, do a first draft, internal client reviews and makes changes, lawyer reviews changes, lawyer clarifies, lawyer redrafts, internal client reviews….. you get the picture. How much time has that taken? What’s the internal client satisfaction score looking like? Never mind that of the lawyer or the external client. By contrast, how about this – automate the document, internal client follows online guidance and prepares good quality first draft, lawyer reviews and amends, internal client sends document out.
  5. If it’s great, celebrate it. This to me has two important themes. The first is about communicating value to the business. There are plenty of legal departments that are really good at this, and are highly valued by their business colleagues. But there are plenty who don’t communicate success and value, and in my view they need to start. The second theme Tom mentions is more interesting – if an in-house legal team can become genuinely world class, could they start to provide services outside their company?
This is the idea that got me starting thinking about this topic.
With the Legal Services Act allowing non-lawyer ownership of law firms, is it conceivable that some in-house teams might think of converting to a law firm?
At a recent conference for in-house lawyers, the very progressive GC of a company with a global brand indicated that he was thinking using this type of framework to provide legal services to the company franchisees. Another GC joined the debate and floated the idea of pooling compliance resources with other companies in the industry – sharing the overhead for work that was mandatory but provided the company with little competitive advantage.
This is a time when radical thinking is possible. Sure, there are undoubtedly regulatory questions to answer, and professional ethics issues to resolve, but what is clear is that the future can look very different.
The obvious question is how this might it affect your legal team? Tom talks about “Exciting [legal] departments selling their creative services far beyond the company’s border”.
The more interesting question is how might it affect law firms? Will they find themselves competing with their clients? What about collaboration opportunities.

As Tom would say – to improve is not enough, now is the time to transform.

Related articles

Why your lawyer’s not a social media ninja

2 Replies

Let me start with a confession.

It took me a while to “get” Twitter. The first time I tried it (which I think was 2008), I just used it to consume information. It wasn’t great for a number of reasons – firstly, I didn’t put a lot of time in to work out who to follow (and in particular I didn’t discriminate between those companies or people who had anything interesting to say online and those  I simply had an interest in) and secondly, at that time it wasn’t as widely adopted as it is now, so there were simply fewer good users.

Sam in IT security did not mess around when enforcing the firm's policy

The next time I tried, I switched to “broadcast mode” and used it as a one-way tool to let the world know about my blog. Of course, because I had nothing else of any interest to say (or to be more accurate, if I did, I didn’t say it on Twitter), I got very little traffic as a result and soon gave up.

The third time was when I got it. A bit of experimenting, understanding the world of hashtags, retweeting and trending, and soon I found a community of likeminded folks (two of which have been featured on this blog in the past).

This of course led to the critical step – engagement, which is where the value comes from.

Now I have an established community, the news I get is both relevant and extremely timely. In terms of sharing my content, whether it’s this blog or other work-related content, the community are generally much more receptive and interested than simply broadcasting to the world at large. And of course the more I engage, the more that community grows and the more I gain.

What I don’t pretend to be, is some sort of social media guru, but I absolutely see the benefit from it.

Twitter, Linkedin and my Blog have all provided very tangible positive benefits to my professional life (Facebook I keep separate for personal use), and given the user numbers for social media, the valuations of the main players, and the newsworthy status of the platforms (super-injunction anyone?), at first look it seems strange that more law firms are not using social media effectively.

Scratch the surface, and the reasons are obvious. At least to me.

Perhaps the reason that’s most often cited is the perceived risk involved.

Trained to be wary of defamation, and qualifying into organisations which are (rightly) protective of their reputations, the more risk-averse partners in law firms can often see huge potential danger in allowing individual lawyers to express themselves in an informal and opinionated way.

This can lead to social media being simply struck off the agenda (“it’s just a fad anyway”), or so sanitised any communication simply resembles a bland summary of the firm’s press releases. zzzzzzzzzzzz.

If you want to test this, firstly check out the more forward thinking media and look at the amount of their engagement. Are they tweeting, blogging and active on discussion groups? Is their engagement commensurate with their brand and positioning?

Or in fact do the lawyers have to engage without mentioning the firm? Or does all the comment come with the health warning “views are the personal opinion of the author” (meaning if they generate goodwill and thought leadership, the firm will promote the content and benefit, but if they step out of line, they’re on their own and we did warn the reader it was nothing to do with the firm!).

Some of the other reasons are perhaps a little less obvious, but I have some theories for you to consider.

The first is the very restrictive IT security policies than many firms enforce. While I’ve written before about the deficiencies in many firm’s information security, the need to be seen to have all systems locked-down means as well as restrictions on employee internet use (which are becoming less Draconian over time) there are pretty stringent controls on which applications can be used on mobile devices. In the age of the app, this seems to come at the expense of productivity – I certainly do much of my Twitter use remotely while walking around the building or waiting for trains. Without the ability to exploit these micro-chunks of time, the busy lawyer will find it difficult to contribute meaningfully to the marketplace.

The biggest unwritten hurdle is of course time. When the primary method of measuring lawyer performance is the chargeable hour, anything outside that category, especially something where the return on investment is less tangible, is heresy. While those who know how to use social media and can demonstrate the profile and connections they build for the firm may get some leeway to invest some time, those who are new to the game are often denied the time and encouragement to try, and it remains a mystery and missed opportunity.

The related point is the need for timeliness, and again, when lawyers are chained to Microsoft Office and their practice management system, with one eye on the clock, grabbing five minutes to check what’s going on in their network, and respond in a timely fashion to questions and comments can be doubly challenging, putting the pressure on even the most adept online legal ninja.

Now just for the record, I’m not for one minute saying that interacting with social media should take precedence over client work and critical deadlines. Holding up closing a multi-million dollar aquisition because you are engaged in a juicy debate on liability clauses on twitter is not a bright idea.

But, if law firms are going to make the most of the social media revolution, then they need to find ways to allow their best people to experiment and engage which in turn will allow their stars to shine.

I’ve no doubt as the demographics of firms continue to change and more lawyers who have grown up with social media join and have a meaningful presence, the culture will of course change. The question is, which firms can get ahead of the curve and reap the benefits before their competitors?

Related articles

The crowd in the cloud

5 Replies

These days, your knowledge is not enough to stand out from the crowd. But before I explain why that’s the case, and what you can do about it, let me quickly explain how this post came to be…

Charlotte, the senior partner in the Family law team spent hours gazing at the clouds trying to guess the weather for the department picnic

One of the benefits of Twitter is connecting with a whole heap of like-minded people, and one of those that I follow most closely is Julian Summerhayes who like me, is a former lawyer who continues to serve the legal profession in a different capacity.

Julian is also a prolific blogger, who posts great content on a daily basis, and (as with my previous mash-up post on law firm sales) I’m delighted to be able to add my thoughts to his recent post “what you know makes all the difference“.

The text in italics is Julian’s.

You know your area of law really, really well – that badge ‘Expert’ suits you nicely. The knowledge, wisdom and expertise that you have gathered would fill a small house (there may even be a best seller lurking somewhere beneath all that baggage).

Your clients, once they find you, are prepared to pay handsomely for your advice, and you have contributed, in your time, to some stellar billing at your firm. You would like to feel that you are one of the best in your field.

But the market doesn’t feel or look right. When you last did a Google search for your area of law, there were, surprisingly, quite a few more lawyers than you anticipated, espousing a degree of knowledge or calling in your specialist area.

Here’s where my take on the problem comes in. Communicating technical quality is pretty tough. In a crowded marketplace, an individual or firm trying to differentiate on quality can have a tough time being heard. For a start, as I’ve written before, the definition of “quality” is not always easy to pin down when we are talking about legal services.  However, putting that issue aside for a second, one of the big problems is that legal services really need to be experienced to be judged, and so simply telling prospective purchasers about quality is often not effective.

If a buyer strippers away all the generic language from the websites and brochures, how can they really assess quality without buying the service? Directories have their place, but having been interviewed by them (both while in private practice and in-house), I don’t think they are sufficiently placed to accurately assess the quality of legal services in any real detail.

What I would be more inclined to rely on, would be a personal recommendation from another in-house lawyer I trusted – perhaps the reason why word of mouth recommendations have long been the gold standard for law firm business development.

The Internet has been both a blessing and curse when it comes to communicating with prospective clients both. It  offers a multitude of ways to communicate cheaply with buyers all over the planet. Messages can be tailored, and a combination of traditional websites, social media and email communication allows the type of dialogue with prospects that even ten years ago would have been unthinkable. On the flip side, if all your competitors are doing the same, it makes standing out from the crowd in the cloud even more difficult.

And to you, what once felt special, now feels like every other area of law – a commodity. Of course, this is no different to the life-cycle of any product. You only have to look at the electronics industry to see a clear correlation. If you are feeling that you area of law is just another run of the mill service then the situation is likely to get a lot worse.

Commoditisation of legal services is another topic I’ve written about before. While working with the legal process outsourcer last year, the extent of this trend was very apparent. While we’ve seen certain areas of law like residential conveyancing move in that direction for years, what’s fascinating is that there are now plenty of  areas of commercial law which are starting to commoditise around the edges – due diligence (corporate work), discovery (litigation) etc.

As legal services become more commoditised, particularly where there is a blend of commodity and bespoke service (for example, consider a piece of commercial litigation where evidence is organised by some cool software from a vendor like Autonomy, the discovery exercise is largely undertaken by an offshore LPO, and the litigation strategy and trial work is run by a top-end commercial law firm), communicating the difference between service providers will become even more challenging.

For the commodity part, the difference may come from speed (faster!), price (cheaper!) or availability (24×7 online access to documents), yet for the bespoke part the competitive advantage may still come from the skill of the individual lawyer (better!). For the commoditised part of the service, there are likely to be hard metrics that can be used to describe the benefits of the service in clear terms, yet for the unique, more complex elements, we return to  the challenge of how to communicate this skill in such a crowded marketplace.

In a moment when more services are driven on line, the client will begin to disassociate the brand solicitor with the delivery of legal services. They will not assume that you know anything more than the legal portal through which they engage. Now is the time to consider how, and in what form, you should leverage those short-cuts and silver bullets that have saved your clients time and money.

Here I think Julian’s post highlights one of the differences between the business and consumer legal markets. In the world of commercial legal services (with which I am most familiar), there are some pretty well established brands which will be recognised and understood by the buying community the world over – Baker & McKenzie and Clifford Chance spring to mind as examples. The consumer market is very different, and much more fragmented. Other than perhaps Eversheds and Irwin Mitchell, I struggle to think of many domestic legal firms that have created a strong brand nationally that helps consumers identify them as a provider of legal services and also communicate the quality of their offering.

Your gut instinct is to keep things locked down: “These are my most prized pearls of [valuable] wisdom” but you are missing a huge trick. In Web 2.0 world, with the plethora of free legal information, you can expect that most clients will be informed to a greater extent than ever before, and what was once locked away amongst a secret cabal, is now out in the open.

As Carl Shapiro wrote in Information Rules (a book that applies economic theory to the information and technology industries – a good read) information (in price terms) tends to free. The combination of technology, globalisation and deregulation is making basic legal information far more widely available than ever before in history. Of course much of the profession’s skill is in how that information is applied and used effectively, but over time much of that knowledge will again become more widely available.

So, as Fat Boy Slim might say, “right here, right now”, what can you do about it?

If you truly want to steal a march on your competitors, and that includes your on-line bedfellows, then you need to consider how you can package your intelligence in such a way that clients feel obliged to stay with you or new clients instruct you. This means going beyond the ubiquitous free download that has become common place, the tired question and answer and understand that information would truly float your clients’ boat. It may be a White Paper, a survey or even some intelligence that repackages a case or two, but you need to consider the idea of giving away for free something that has true value.

My take on this would be to really put yourself in your prospect’s shoes? What is it you can do to help them? Is there a cost effective way you can provide them some benefit and also get them to experience your service? It’s not new, but I’ve certainly seen “free” workshops do this very well – the workshop itself provides some really useful guidance and helps identify and raise awareness of a problem. The remedial work requires support from external lawyers – surely those that ran the workshop are best placed to provide that advice? It’s not a guaranteed sale, but it’s a business model that management consultants have successfully used for years and can be adapted for many different scenarios.

Don’t lose sight of your knowledge and skill – that’s the price of entry to the game these days, but do think hard about how you communicate it in a crowded marketplace, and remember that the best way of communicating it is for the client to experience it for themselves!

Related Articles

The future of law firm sales?

13 Replies

Inspired by a recent dialogue on Twitter between Mike Ames (@Mike_Ames_Flair) and I (@intchallenge), I was struck by the similarity of some of our messages to law firms on the thorny subject of sales (talking about “client development” is much easier…). After posting some linked blog posts, we decided it was time to experiment with a social media-sales-mash-up.

James was not sure the practical sales training for lawyers was wholly relevant, but was willing to give it a try

Mike recently blogged about why lawyer’s don’t like the “S-word”, and I thought I’d add some of my thoughts to what I thought was a great post. It’s an interesting perspective, because while I’ve sold legal services, bought legal services and sold to law firms, I’m not an out and out sales person. Mike on the other hand has worked in business development for over 20 years, and has a history of both his own business development and coaching others to sell.

So, let’s mash (Italicised text is Mikes)!

Let me start by saying not all lawyers hate doing the “S” word. There are quite a few that I know who would prefer to do nothing but sales especially if meant getting away from all that tiresome law stuff and those impossibly demanding client-types. But, whilst business development is an acceptable alternative phrase for sales (but not real work apparently) actually getting down to doing it is not top of the to-do list for most lawyers, but why?

Based upon my own coffee-house investigations (OK some of them weren’t carried out in coffee houses) these are my top 5: –

  1. It takes too long – I just don’t have the time to fit it in. This is true, and the underlying cause is of course the tyranny of the chargeable hour. Maister talked years ago about the chargeable hour being today’s profit and the non-chargeable hour being tomorrow’s profit and nowhere is this truer than in the context of business development. How many other businesses would fail to recognise the importance of bringing work in to such a degree?
  2. It’s not my job – that’s what marketing are employed to do isn’t it? Sadly, the distinction between functions such as marketing communications, marketing strategy, pitch support and pure sales is often blurred in law firms, and thus the easy to understand link between sales and revenue often gets confused with other marketing-related activities that have much more difficult to calculate return on investment metrics.
  3. The law is more interesting – it’s what I was trained for and it’s what I want to do. This seems to me to be an entirely valid statement if you are working in a firm that can accommodate this approach. If not, then there may be a problem!
  4. I’m not sure what to do – I’ve had no real training or guidance. Definitely true at smaller and mid-sized firms. At the larger firms, I’d add a qualifier – the lawyers may well have had some training, but haven’t had the opportunity or encouragement to actually practice their skills and hone them. It might seem obvious, but selling is a skill – I remember first being taught Strategic Selling and SPIN selling as a circa 2 year qualified lawyer, but it wasn’t until I’d practiced them many times, often with an experienced business development professional at my side, that I began to internalise them and crucially, feel more comfortable using them.
  5. It’s just a bit grubby – I’m a professional not a used-car salesman. In my experience, while this attitude does exist, it’s dying out.

I’m not sure how close this to your own beliefs but they did crop up fairly consistently. By way of a response I would say: –

  • It is your job and is going to grow in importance. Accept it and move on. 
  • Sales is what makes the world go around – nothing happens until somebody sells something. If it helps consider yourself to be more of a facilitator. This is particularly true at the moment – you’ve cut costs, but revenues remain sluggish. Firms need revenue to grow. Of course it’s servicing the work that generates the revenue (and yes I know, managing WIP and aged debt are important too), but if you don’t sell effectively, the firm is unlikely to grow significantly – incremental growth of existing accounts in the current climate is unlikely to do the trick.
  • Like most things you can do it in a highly professional or decidedly sleazy way. You choose. This might seem like a no-brainer, but I’d go a step-further. If you are a lawyer with good client skills, the chances are you can be an excellent sales person. Professional, bright and good at asking questions, these are core selling competencies. Put some structure around them, season with a little theory, and then finish with a liberal serving of practice, and you’ve got yourself a rainmaker!
  • Once you have been trained it is easy and does not really take a lot of time. The sales cycle may vary depending on what you are selling, but importantly it will become a process that you can help shape, rather than just being on a treadmill of responding to client RFPs (requests for proposals).
  • It can actually be great fun, satisfying and very financially rewarding. Hell yeah. Closing a big piece of business can give a buzz that’s just as good as getting a deal signed, and you’re unlikely to have worked 48 hours straight to get it done!

I’m not a lawyer but I believe in the future the lawyers who get on most won’t necessarily be great at the law but they will be great at sales.

This I’d also agree with, but I’d also add some gloss. I think as more and more firms re-examine their business model, this will highlight the importance of the sales function. This may manifest as lawyers getting better at selling (more professional training, perhaps truly looking for sales skills and experience when recruiting), it may also result in the development of sales departments in law firms? Sounds a long way off? I’m not so sure. I’ve worked with firms who have business development managers who are very good sales people, and often accompany partners when they go out selling. This is a great model and it works very well. Where it falls short is of course scale, and for a large law firm (which is likely international), to have two or three really skilled sales people seems like an unnecessary restriction on revenue growth.

Now of course there are arguments that with professional services, clients are buying certain individuals, and to some degree I accept that. But even now there are challenges that can be made to that concept – when a partner pitches for work, will the client really be getting much of the partner’s time? The more efficient firms push work down to the minimum qualification level possible that will meet quality standards, and that will rarely be the partner. This of course helps keeps costs down, which translates into lower fees or higher profit margins, depending on the pricing structure.

In the IT industry, the concept of a pre-sales expert is common. This is someone with real technical knowledge who accompanies the sales force on prospect meetings to answer technical questions and demonstrate the company’s expertise. This model may need a bit of adapting for the legal profession, but I absolutely believe that the firms that invest in a highly skilled sales force, whether it’s lawyers, sales professionals or a mixture of the two, can really grow market share and win some serious business.

In that scenario, the losers? As Mike says, they’ll be those that turn their nose up at the S-word!

Mike’s website is here if you want to learn more about his approach to sales.