Addressing attitude is key for business development

Too often business development is maligned for not delivering. Everyone knows that they have to do ‘it’, but very few people consistently, and with the necessary zeal, make much headway. The work always gets in the way.

When you think about it, business development has become a numbers game – doing more stuff is the order of the day. I believe though that the marketing telescope is wrongly inverted.

Some of you may recall in a previous article a reference to one of the most influential writers in the marketing space, namely Seth Godin (see https://www.sethgodin.typepad.com). Very few lawyers it seems knows who he is, but I think that will change in time, particularly as more people seek out his seminal work on permission marketing (the heart and soul of social media). However, on this occasion, what I want to draw to your attention to is a blog post he wrote on 14 September 2009 (you will find it on his site) called The Hierarchy of Success. Like a lot of his posts they very often get overlooked for their import by dint of the fact that he is so prolific: he writes a daily blog post and last year successfully published four books. The point of the post was to challenge the established order viz (marketing) success. ?I think it looks like this:

• Attitude

• Approach

• Goals

• Strategy

• Tactics

• Execution

Hopefully you can see where this is going, but ask yourself how much time you spend on execution – organise this event, place this advertisement and go to this networking event. The point is this: why is your attitude to business development, often, so negative? Just imagine if you applied beginner’s mind and saw everything as an opportunity to create, engage and earn attention. Attitude impinges directly on leadership too. It requires those with their hands on the tiller not just to talk up business development but give everyone the opportunity to fail over the long-term (yes you heard correctly – hopefully with a softish landing). We all know there are no certainties in business development, but if your attitude is only informed by past history, chances are you will quit even before you get going on the basis that someone will come along and throw cynicism at your efforts: “We tried that and it didn’t work.”

Commit to the long term

Assuming that you applied a new attitude, what about your approach? The best advice I can give is assume that what you pick today – lead generation, lead conversion and client fulfilment – will be something that you will be doing brilliantly in the next seven to ten years. Yes, you heard right. Not something that you throw out with the bath water as soon as you don’t get the ‘snap, crackle and pop’ results you expect. But of course that impinges directly on goals. What are they? Let me guess. PEP, PEP and PEP some more.

Ask yourself though, in these more enlightened times, are people prepared to commit to the long term without more in the hope that one day they too will be able to climb the lofty pyramid? The more innovative models appear – the second generation of virtual law firms perhaps – will anyone want to stump up the blood, sweat and tears or will they simply disappear off into the sunset? Maybe you can shoehorn everything around PEP but chances are, so far as business development is concerned, you are going to have to think much more carefully about your goals and how you articulate them.

Sitting right below goals is strategy. Do you have one? In most cases, I would wager there is no overarching plan but rather each unit is doing its own thing. Of course that might work for a while but when you realise that your biggest asset is your client base, how on earth are you going to generate the correct mind-set to wean the firm off of one service line?

Tactics will tell you what to execute, but very often the tactics are hit more than miss as everyone works in fits and starts to do no less than last year, never stopping to ask if they are generating sufficient feedback to consider the return on investment.

Elephant in the room

And finally we come to execution. Of course, this is the most comfortable part of the hierarchy. Who after all can’t do something? Even at this stage though things go awry as people lament their lack of skills – “I’m a lawyer for heaven’s sake, not a salesperson.” Back to square one of course: the wrong attitude.

Perhaps the answer is to start with a blank sheet of paper and rather than focus on yet another SWOT analysis, consider how difficult it would be to change the attitude of everyone in the firm.

Don’t expect though to get much buy in until you have reconciled the elephant in the room, namely the recognition of red time over green.

Until you start a grown-up conversation that rewards and encourages business development no amount of exhortation or training is going to make a jot of difference to the outcomes.