Is selling tacky?

Last week, I wrote about the legal profession’s overemphasis on marketing to groups and underemphasis on selling to individuals.  Here’s one underlying reason: many lawyers think that selling legal services is at best a little tacky, and at worst downright sleazy.

Everyone likes to buy, but no one likes to feel sold to.  In surveys of occupational prestige, the sales profession often ranks dead last.  And the history of sales includes plenty of reasons for this bad image.  Walter Friedman’s book Birth of a Salesman includes several hundred pages of examples ranging from the unethical (the tricks used by 19th century lightning rod salesmen, p. 30), to the downright silly (the Fuller Brush company motivational song, p. 227):

   Selling yesterday

   Selling the day before

   Going to sell today as I never sold before

   For when I’m selling

   I’m happy as can be

   For I’m a member of the Fuller family

But in recent years, leaders in the sales profession have developed new and different models of selling based on honesty, and on building long-term relationships by genuinely helping people.  Books like Stop Selling, Start Partnering, High Trust Selling, and Selling with Integrity explain how this high road approach works over the long term and is the only way to succeed with complex products and services, including legal counsel.

There are no magic tricks in these books; the approach takes hard work and consistent effort.  You’ll need time to find what works best with your clients, and what doesn’t work at all.  But by studying how successful sales people operate, these authors and many others provide a powerful source of ideas, examples, and advice that will help every lawyer who wants to bring in new business.  You don’t have to use the word selling, but to survive the next few decades, lawyers will be required to put more effort into sales.

So, to answer my question from above:  Yes, selling is sometimes tacky.  But it doesn’t have to be.

Are you too busy to learn about these positive new selling techniques?  Don’t worry.  In a few years, you’ll have plentry of free time, after more nimble competitors take away your clients.