Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog

This is the lead article in the January 2010 issue of Originate! -- the business development newsletter.   Check out the additional articles including: The Creative Brief: 5 Easy Steps towards More Effective Marketing Tactics Advertising and PR agencies often try to distinguish themselves by how they guide you to successful marketing activities. Their fancy versions of what Andy Havens calls the “creative brief” will work, and they will cost you. Or you can apply the basic version he gives here and get 80% of the results for about 5% of the expense. Measure for Measure: Getting More Bang for Your Marketing Buck Larry Bodine, Esq. underscores three key ways to get more out of your marketing, especially with your client base, building on important lessons learned from his survey of marketing leaders: the power of measuring success and what to measure; the least and most effective marketing methods; and the most critical roles for both marketing leaders and individual lawyers. It’s Time for an Awkward Conversation with Your Client A recent LexisNexis poll found a huge gap in thinking between private-practice and in-house counsel about billing rates and perceived value. In response to client pressures, you could punt, says Darryl Cross, and just cut rates. Or you could seize the opportunity to better the relationship through a simple awkward conversation addressing these seven key questions. Rainmakers Are Not Born, They Are Trained What makes the difference between those lawyers who can bring in business and those who don’t? In a recent survey, Larry Bodine, Esq. found that lawyers feel poorly prepared for the personal marketing they must do. But the ones who make the effort to build their skills prove much more successful...and here are some of the tactics they like most. Getting Down to Basics: Three Simple Relationship Skills for Better Business Development There is a lot of fear and confusion among lawyers about marketing because learning what to do comes late in most careers. While you’re assessing where your business building stands in this new year, you can boost your success by adopting the three basic skills of relationship building underscored by Thom Singer.

By Michael G. Cummings, a founder of Apollo Business Development, a firm that trains and coaches attorneys to market, sell, network and manage relationships. He is the co-author of Best Practices in Legal Marketing and Best Practices in Building Your Personal Network - for Attorneys. He can be reached at mcummings@sageprofessional.com or 630-572-4798. For more information, see www.ApolloBusinessDevelopment.com.

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At this time of year, most attorneys set ambitious goals and identify new marketing thrusts to realize these goals.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and what typically happens? In most of these cases, attorneys end up producing pretty much more of the same results.

Now, I contrast these traditional results with a group of 6 attorneys that I just worked with at a law firm for the past year. Each of the attorneys generated an increase of $400,000-600,000 in fees.

What makes this even more remarkable is that all of these attorneys were young and certainly not accomplished business developers. And the firm was located in Michigan – a state facing some dire economic times in the past few years.

What I have found in this work is that individual attorneys almost always have a wealth of business development opportunities. The obstacle to realizing this potential is the attorney, not the practice area, market or marketing programs.

Attorneys are either not recognizing their opportunities, lack the skills to convert them or are not putting in the work to get the business.

For those 6 Michigan attorneys, there were a lot of improvements and actions they took that led to these results. But the foundation for their success really came done to their mindset.  In each case, they were:

• Entrepreneurial: this means that they wanted to put their success under their own control.
• Humble: they knew that they didn’t know how to do business development – so they were teachable and open.
• Action-oriented: change requires that you take different actions on a consistent, systematic basis.
• Willing to take a risk: typically, this requires that attorneys have direct and clear business development discussions with clients, prospects and referral sources – and ask them for their business or introductions.
• Disciplined: they executed their plan on a week to week (and day to day) basis.

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