A Marketing Lunch that Worked

Last week we were invited to lunch by counsel who are working with us for the first time. 

How to get Legal Business – Step 3

More on getting legal business.  This time: Get your message out.  Demonstrate your successes.  You’ve got credibility . . . show it.

Why Charge for Seminars?

It’s not that we’re cheap but, well, ok, we are cheap, but we can’t understand the firms who want to make a connection with new and existing clients, and then charge them for the privilege.

How to Get Legal Business – Part 2

More on getting legal business. This time: Identify your strengths and weaknesses.

How to Get Legal Business – Part 1

So you want legal work from our company? You have to get past the gatekeeper. Who is the gatekeeper? It’s not who you think it is.

The Marketing Lunch: Why yes, it IS all about me

As a GC you get lots of lunch invitations from lawyers who want to start a business relationship. I turn most of them down because they’re generally a waste of time.

The other day I had lunch with a lawyer I used to work for when I was with The Big Firm(TM). It had been a while since we had talked. We hadn’t been particularly close, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, with all his experience, I could (for once) have lunch with a “pro” who knew how to make it rain. It would be fun to admire an expert in action, and share some of his better techniques in this blog. Unfortunately it didn’t work out so well and it was another wasted afternoon.

This lunch, like so many others before it, was the “blue plate special” of marketing lunches.

• Small talk before ordering
• How big the firm is
• Where our offices are
• Our practice areas
• My practice area
• Is there anything we can do for you? We’d sure like your business.

What’s missing from this list? Oh. Right. How about a question about MY company? What’s going on with MY industry? What’s on MY stay-awake list? Is MY staff sufficient to support the increasing demands from our internal customers?

That’s right, it IS all about me.

Let me let you in on a secret: We love talking about our company, our challenges, our successes, and our industry. Simply put, we like talking about ourselves.

Your job is to fill my needs. How will you know my needs without asking? Better yet, how will you help me discover my needs unless you probe the periphery? You should be doing no more than 50% of the talking.

Ask me about me, and then listen.

Brochures Stink

A show of hands, please. Who has ever considered hiring a law firm after reading an unsolicited brochure? That’s what I thought: nobody.

Yet these tired warhorses of “legal marketing” report dutifully to the in-box daily. Why? So that law firm marketing departments can point to an “accomplishment” at budget time. I don’t mean to pick on the marketing departments. In fact, we get most of our unsolicited brochures directly from lawyers, most of the time with nothing more than a business card stuffed in the little cut-out slot.

We’ll be writing more on how to market legal and professional services (at least to our company). But let us start with one very simple recommendation: dump the brochure. They all say the same things, and they all stink. If you think you’re distinguishing your firm because you “seek cost-effective solutions to difficult challenges,” or if you’re the “go-to firm for ‘bet-the-company’ litigation,” get in line. Everyone else thinks so too. Even fancy Wall Street firms seem to have hired the same advertising/marketing consultants as the mid-Western regionals. Remember, $200/hr insurance defense lawyers can say they represent “Fortune 100® companies” if they get a case or two from an AIG subsidiary every now and then. Avoid generalities.

There are other channels that will be much more effective. Yes, more work is required, but you already knew that.

More on what works next time.