Your law firm is a business and according to Drucker, the job of a business is to create a customer. Sales is about searching, understanding and finding how you can be useful to the marketplace.
Simply put there must be a sales function, a marketing function, a client management function. You do the work of securing the business and when you get it, you make sure you keep it, keep the client satisfied and the relationship mutually profitable.
Since lawyers love to practice the law, actively looking for business may sometimes seem like a distraction from the true calling. We hope you do not fall into this group. As stated elsewhere in our writings, the law firm is a business and without customers or sales, it is a dead business so this work must be done and done well.
Successful marketing is about developing a great product and presenting it in the best light possible. Michael Jackson had a work schedule that was insane(this is developing the great product) then his presentations at his shows always blew people away as there was always something awesome and magnificent to see and talk about.
It will not do to have great legal services and not put it out there. Neither will it do to put out a heavy campaign for poor legal services as according to Ogilvy, this just reduces the market for your services faster, faster, faster.
What some firms have done in other jurisdictions is that they have created full-time sales units that are dedicated solely to this business of legal sales. This role works with the resident lawyers and helps to introduce the lawyer to ethical and massively productive means of legal sales and also leaves the lawyer with some time to do actual fee-earning work.
This model is one way to go about it and you can evolve something that will fit your current reality but your long term plan or hope cannot be to muddle along in the hope of the special boon from the goddess of fortune. You can set your sails so when the wind blows in you will be pushed ahead.
Another means is to bring in outside professionals to design legal marketing programmes for the law firm which will be put into play as a joint venture. This is really because the spirit of the marketing programme must be followed or else the habits of the law firm tend to smother its successful Implementation.
You can also do it on your own as the knowledge is widely available, you just have to provide the force and energy to put it into practice and to stick with it until you, your people and your law firm have actually made intellectual and financial progress.
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