Not that we make a practice of promoting anyone else’s products and services, but Jim Hasset of the Legal Business Development Blog has developed the “Legal Biz Dev Success Kit,” and reviews—all positive—are popping up on a variety of sites, such as this one by Tom Kane on the Legal Marketing Blog, and this one by Kate Daisley on Amid the Noise and Haste. A demo of the modular course is available here. Check it out.
December 20, 2007
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June 26, 2006
Shock and Awe at LSSO
Posted by Margaret Daisley
Well, that’s the way marketing consultant Larry Bodine put it in his take on two presentations at the recent annual Legal Sales and Service Organization Raindance Conference. His first shock was in response to a panel of GCs who conveyed the message, Bodine says, that “diversity doesn’t matter.” We beg to differ, as he did, but that is a discussion for another day and venue. (See my review of this years Diversity Scorecard, published in the current issue of the Minority Law Journal in the May-June issue of ALM Research NewsLine, our bi-monthly e-newsletter).
The second shock was his response to the presentation in which Kate Daisley of ALM Research and Sue Stock Allison of the Brand Research Company shared some of the results of our 2006 Business Development Survey. As he notes, ALM Research surveyed 157 law firm marketing directors and CMOs from November 2005 to January 2006, for the second year in a row to probe into the trends in business development practices and resources in law firms. The one data set Bodine focused on was the fact that, among eight business development strategies tested, “sales training for the lawyers was the least effective factor contributing to the firm's revenue growth.”
This finding also shocked, or at least awed, Jim Hassett, founder of LegalBizDev, a Division of The Advertraining Group, Inc. “which offers business development workshops, coaching, and in-house presentations to large and mid-sized law firms,” according to his web site. As such, Hassett found the data relating to sales training especially interesting – “that glass can be seen as half-empty or half-full,” he says. More than half the participating firms had provided sales training to some of their lawyers, especially partners, and the great majority used an outside consultant. That’s the glass half-full part. But then comes the “shocker”: firms have not found sales training to be especially effective as a business development tool. Ouch! How do you justify your services in the face of a finding like that?
Hassett is writing an article for Law Firm Inc. (an ALM publication) about this result and will be interviewing experts from Akin Gump, Bingham McCutchen, Day Berry & Howard, Drinker Biddle, Fish & Richardson, Goodwin Procter, Ropes & Gray, Schiff Hardin, and Womble Carlyle.
And yes, we had noticed this rather weird finding about sales training ourselves, and wondered about it. So we had already started a file called “Next Year’s Survey.” At the top of that list is “more exploration on the topic of ‘sales training’.” We do need to ask more questions about it, find ways to establish some ROI metrics, find out – as Hassett points out – what firms actually mean by “sales training.” What approaches are used? Do some work better than others? Is standardization an inevitable part of the process? Please send us your comments and stay tuned.
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