If you’re a lawyer who wants (or has to) to become better at selling legal services, or a business professional who supports those lawyers, stay with me while I tell the story of a malfunctioning desktop printer. There are law firm sales lessons in it.
Three years ago, the printer failed. I read the user manual, called the tech support line, searched Google, and still couldn’t get it working. Eventually, I shoved it into a closet and forgot about it.
A lot has changed in the last three years, including the arrival of generative AI that acts like a personal assistant. While purging unneeded belongings recently, I happened upon the printer. As I stared at it, I remembered that AI could walk me through the repair process in real time and help me through the inevitable glitches in the instructions. I pulled the printer out, plugged it in, turned it on, and asked Claude AI to help. In a few minutes, it was working like new.
That’s where this becomes a story about law firm sales or, perhaps more broadly, about managing growth.
Perhaps, at some point in your career, you have struggled to find sales success and, after dabbling at making it work, stored the whole effort in an allegorical closet. If that’s the case, today’s AI can help address the challenges and get you up and running successfully.
Think of it this way. Sales, even in professional services, is not, as some would have it, magic, nor is it the exclusive product of some mythical rainmaking personality. Rather, it is a process: a series of steps that are discernible, documentable, teachable, learnable, and replicable. As with fixing the printer, those who take the steps one at a time, in the correct order, with at least a modicum of urgency, and a little assistance from AI will find success. The process does most of the work.
It isn’t difficult to identify your own, or your firm’s, successful sales process. An earlier blog post, “How to Install a Sales Process at Your Firm,” describes how to do so. Start by identifying your own and your firm’s best examples of sales wins and client expansions, then reverse engineer how they happened. While each individual’s and each firm’s process will have variations, most sales processes come down to something like this:
- Understand your own and your firm’s strengths.
- Determine where in the market those strengths fit (target).
- Research the target companies and the executives who make buying decisions.
- Initiate new relationships.
- Stay in touch over time, no matter how many touches it takes, so that you are top of mind when an opportunity arises.
- Develop and present the best possible tailored solution.
- Upon receiving the first engagement, deliver world-class client service and fastidiously manage the client’s experience with you and every touchpoint at your firm.
- Continue making regularly scheduled, value-added contacts and deepen relationships so that additional assignments emerge and the relationship becomes institutional.
- Repeat the cycle with additional targets.
My printer sat in the closet for three years because a user manual and a tech support line could only give me generic steps and then leave me on my own to understand and apply them. AI, however, walked me through the repair in real time, adjusted its guidance whenever something didn’t work, and had the printer running again in a matter of minutes.
When I think of my printer…well, sometimes, at least…I think of law firm sales.
To understand your strengths and your firm’s strengths, AI can study your bio, your firm’s website, ratings services, and other sources of information. It can then describe where you and the firm shine and, if you wish, evaluate you and your firm against competitors.
Based on that information, AI can help by developing ideal client profiles and producing lists of targets — prospective client companies along with the names of likely buyers within them.
Once you know where to focus your sales energy, AI can conduct business and competitive research that helps you accomplish what today’s buyers consider mere table stakes: understanding the client’s business.
The next step is initiating relationships and staying in touch over time. That’s where most lawyers hit the wall and then put the whole effort in a closet, just as I did with the printer. With the right prompts, however, AI can make excellent suggestions for how to address this difficult step, which is perhaps the most challenging one for lawyers. Remember, you’re always in control. You can choose the suggestions that make sense for you and discard those that don’t fit your personality or operating style.
Recognizing that a single outreach rarely creates a new relationship, AI can develop a sequential, multi-pronged game plan. It can draft situationally appropriate emails, phone scripts, conversation guides, and other materials that answer the continual questions lawyers ask themselves and their sales advisers: What do I do now? What do I say now? Not every pursuit will result in a new relationship, but with professional persistence, supported by AI and a sound sales process, many will.
AI also makes staying in touch much easier. It can monitor prospective clients, their industries, and their competitors for what sales professionals call “signals,” events that suggest an opportunity or risk that warrants reaching out. Signals give lawyers a reason to contact prospective clients in ways that feel less like pestering and more like adding value.
To help develop a tailored solution, AI can analyze your firm’s engagements, pricing history, financial information, and lawyers’ experience, then help draft proposals and model pricing options.
These are only examples, and only thumbnails at that, of the utility of a sales process and the ways AI can support it throughout the cycle. Human interaction remains at the core of selling legal services, but AI now supports those interactions in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.
One final observation. Very few of the steps in the law firm sales process actually need to be performed by lawyers. Business professionals can handle much of the work, allowing lawyers to enter the process only when their education and training, judgment, experience, and relationships are indispensable. That’s a topic for a different blog post.
The printer episode reminded me that AI can do more than fix technological issues. It also can help solve sales problems. My printer didn’t need to be replaced. It simply needed someone (or something) willing to walk me through the process one step at a time, adjusting along the way.
Many lawyers’ sales efforts may be pretty much in the same boat – in need of a restart with the addition of a little process and AI enablement. Is it time to take a look in your sales closet to see what can be put back to good use?
Steve Bell is a principal in the Sales, Business Development & Growth Practice of LawVision. He helps law firms generate and implement disciplined sales processes enabled by AI. Call him to chat about how process excellence and AI can help your firm grow faster, more predictably, and more profitably. He can be reached at sbell@lawvision.com or 202.421.5988.
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