By Debra Bruce
Recently I celebrated a business development victory with a lawyer. I asked him what he thought was the most important ingredient in his success. “Persistence,” he replied. “I just kept following up.”
That’s where many of us fall down. We attend networking events, give speeches, join organizations, and do other things to be at the right place to meet prospective clients. We succeed in meeting what appear to be some good business prospects or good potential referral sources. Hooray! Now what do we do?
Some of us take their business cards back to the office, put them in our desk drawer, and that’s the end of it. Perhaps we are hoping they will germinate in there. Perhaps we hope that we are so memorable and our services in such demand that the prospective client will soon call us.
Many of us manage to enter their contact information into our database and send a “nice to meet you email” before we peter out. We would do more, but we just don’t know what else to do.
Some of us get bold enough to call the prospect. We exchange pleasantries, tell them about what we can do for them and offer our services. Usually that results in a polite brush-off, and that’s the end of the road for us. We mark that prospect off the list.
Follow-up is one of the most crucial, yet most neglected or malpracticed business development skills. That’s probably because it requires so much delayed gratification. It requires making repeated investments that may not pay off for a long time, if ever. Some of us are too impatient to make that kind of investment. We take our shot, and if we miss, we move on. Others of us get discouraged too soon, taking the lack of action by a prospect as a sign of rejection.
Some of us are willing to make the investment, but we are afraid we will be nagging or pestering the prospect. We have all been the victims of inartful follow-up where someone did make a pest of himself.
If you found yourself in any of the above categories, here are some tips on how to make your follow-up work.
1. Try to go beyond superficial conversation when you first meet the prospect. Learn a little about her interests or her challenges. You will have more fodder to work with in your follow-up.
2. Do some preparation before you follow-up. At a minimum, check out her company’s website and Google her. If you learned about some concerns she is facing, do some brief research into possible solutions.
3. Look for ways to benefit your prospect when you follow-up. Share some current information that might be useful to her. Offer to be a sounding board or to give her some “off the clock” advice about any of her challenges that you discovered. Offer to make an introduction that is valuable to her. Send her an article or news clipping that relates to something you discussed with her.
4. Have a genuine interest in and curiosity about her and her business. You can find something interesting or intriguing to you about every person and every business on this planet, if you approach them with curiosity. Expressing a desire to learn more about something specific about her experience or her opinion may be just the ticket that gets you a follow-up lunch. We are all attracted to someone who genuinely finds us interesting, aren’t we?
5. Listen for her needs or worries that you can help with. Don’t just listen for legal needs that you can address. Listen for needs that other lawyers in your firm can handle. Listen for needs that have nothing to do with the law, but for which you may be able to make a referral or provide a resource.
6. Focus on building a relationship and filling needs. Most unsuccessful follow-up has its focus on what you can get from the prospect, instead of what you can give. If you make yourself a good resource for your prospect, she will want to stay connected to you, and won’t find your calls a bother. She will want to repay your favors with business or referrals, if she understands what you do and how you can help.
7. Have a system for follow-up. Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks just because they don’t have a need for your services at this moment. Set reminders on your calendar to touch base periodically. Months can slip by before you realize it. Perhaps you will want to set aside a specific morning each month to review your list of prospects and dormant clients to reach out to.
8. Track your contacts with a prospect. Sales research shows that most salespersons make 7 to 10 sales calls before closing the sale. Many lawyers give up on a prospect after contacting them only 2 or 3 times. At least for a little while, try recording each time you have a phone call with, send an email to, have a meeting with or just bump into a prospect. You can use Outlook, your case management software, contact management software like Act! or Sales Logic, an Excel file, or even a chart on a piece of paper. When you do get some business from her, look back to see how many times you connected before you actually got the business. You may be surprised to see that even with a “hot prospect,” you connected more than a dozen times. This information will give you the encouragement to persist with other prospects when progress is slow.
Armed with these tips and a giving attitude, you can confidently persist in building relationships that ultimately result in your business success.
Debra Bruce (www.lawyer-coach.com) practiced law for 18 years, before becoming a professionally trained Executive Coach for lawyers. She is a member of the Law Practice Management Committee of the State Bar of Texas, and the co-founder of Houston Coaching Network, the Houston Chapter of the International Coach Federation.
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