Developing your legal business can seem daunting and time consuming, but is ever more essential as straitened times continue. Help is at hand in the expert form of Nick Davies, former barrister and specialist trainer in business development for lawyers.

Why definite?

You must have a defined target market.

When first setting out to win business; it’s tempting and some how more reassuring if you tell yourself that there are loads and loads of people to whom you could be selling. This, however, is a false sense of security and will have you doing lots of activity but with little reward. In other words if you try and target everyone, you’ll spread your activity too thin and achieve nothing.

Far too many people, in particular, those becoming self-employed, are so eager to get sales going that they take a scatter-gun approach to winning business and struggle as a consequence. They don’t target their networking, their advertising, sales calls, or promotional material; taking the view that if they tell as many people as they can about what they have, they are bound to make sales.

Why flexible?

‘Flexible’: because whilst you need to set out with your eye on a specific target, you also need to be flexible enough to adapt if you’re not getting the results you need or had anticipated.

At the end of the day, you sell to make money and if you aren’t making money from your target market, you need to pick another one. And sometimes, although you set off in one direction opportunities in an area you had never considered arise, in which case grab them!

I’ve been self-employed 4 times in my life, which means that I have woken up on a Monday with absolutely no income other than that which I can generate. This must be the urban equivalent of being dropped in a jungle with nothing but what you learnt at ‘Survival School’.

It’s frightening and yet incredibly exciting and makes you feel alive.

When in this situation, you are faced with two choices: go bust once the money runs out or get very good at developing business, very quickly!

Even if you are employed, there is still pressure to bring in more work. Indeed, in order to advance in many of the professions – law, accountancy and engineering – you have to ‘show them the money’ if you are to stand a chance of partnership.

So, whether you are sitting at a desk in an office or at your kitchen table in your house, you need to get busy and pronto, but where to start?

The first thing you do is make a list: a physical list.

Your target list

Those people who are ‘HOT’ should be at the top of your list because you’re going to approach them first.

‘HOT’. This market is made up of people and organisations that already buy your services or products and with whom you have an existing relationship. They trust you and therefore they are more likely to buy more stuff from you: new products, a different service etc.

I’d also include as hot, those people with whom you’ve never dealt but have made a very definite enquiry and indicated they are in the market for what you are providing.

WARM – you work for a large organisation. You work in one particular division, team or department. Your organisation has many other customers apart from the ones with whom you have a direct relationship. These are the people in your warm market.

For example; I’m an employment lawyer working in a partnership that offers many different services; construction, corporate, banking real estate etc. I already have a portfolio of loyal clients. Before attempting to win brand new clients (i.e. those that have no dealings with any part of the firm) it makes sense to approach those that already use the firm’s services but don’t yet use those of the employment department. Why? Because they already trust the firm and know how it works and what working with it is like.

This is an obvious point and yet one I see being neglected in virtually every professional services firm I have ever worked with.

TEPID – I like the word ‘tepid’. It’s fallen out of fashion of late, being replaced by the ever present ‘luke-warm’ Tepid, harks back to a more innocent age, when things we measured in ‘tbs’ and ‘oz’ and ‘tsps’, when mum’s would dip their elbow to test the temperature of the water in the bath to make sure it was ok for their infant.

I regard as those people in my tepid market being people who have never heard of me but my name has been mentioned to them buy one of my clients; a referral.

Referrals are people who would otherwise be cold but for the recommendation of your client, who has, in effect, ‘warmed them up’.

COLD – 

I reckon that there are cold calls and freezing cold calls.

For me, cold calls are calls to organisations that are in the market that I am currently operating in and know loads about.

I do loads of work with lawyers, so I have loads of experience and a detailed understanding of how they work and how law firms function.

When I started out developing a training business and had plumped for the legal profession as my target sector, I tackled the City first but once I secured some work, phoning firms in the north-west and north east became a bit easier, although they were certainly ‘cooler’ because they were less likely to know the heads of L&D I had relationships with in The City. Although not entirely ‘freezing’ because at least they were in the same sector and recognised the names of the law firms I was working with down south.

The same was true in the recruitment business. Once you’ve had meetings with firms in one city, it’s so much easier to secure stuff in another one (cold; not freezing)

If you are working in a relatively small market, in a relatively small geographical area, then the chances are that your existing clients or customers will know people within the same sector, which is indeed the case in law – the community of learning and development managers within the City is a small one.

So when I contact firm without the benefit of an introduction to warm them up (more on cold-calling later), I always mention the names of firms I already deal with and more importantly the names of the individual L&D managers, working on the principal that there’s a fair chance that they’ll know them!

You should name drop too because it’s very effective at persuading people to do things, like meet you. The phenomena is known as ‘Social Proof’.

Before listing those firms in your cold, as opposed to ‘freezing’ market, ask yourself these questions:

In which markets or sectors do I work at the moment?
Do I make money in those markets?
Do I like working in those markets?
Do I work with everyone within those sectors?

If the answer to number 2 and 3 is ‘yes’ but it’s a big fat ‘no’ to number 4, then that’s where you want to be targeting.

Freezing cold

Those people who have no idea you exist because they operate in a market completely outside the one in which you are established fall in to this last category and are, therefore, the very hardest to tackle.

If you are targeting properly, in other words approaching existing customers, using referrals and building your profile within those markets, as well as tackling your cold market, then dipping in to the freezing bit should be totally unnecessary. Unless, of course, you are brand new to a new market, in which case you are going to do some serious cold-calling.

Once you become established and assuming you are doing a beltin’ job, you should find that you make very few calls to drum up business because word of mouth takes over and people are recommending you to others all over the place.



Nick


Nick Davies is the author of "How to be Great at Stuff You Hate" and really enjoys his coffee.