What do women need to know to develop new business?

Wherever I go lately, I keep hearing about initiatives and planning committees for groups of women lawyers who are interested in learning how to increase new business. So when I got an email from the Legal Sales and Service Organization (LSSO) about a survey of women rainmakers, I dropped everything to read the results.

After analyzing the results of an online survey of 426 women lawyers, Marcie Borgal Shunk of BTI Consulting Group and Catherine Alman MacDonagh of LSSO and Day Pitney described “four guiding principles of success” for female rainmakers:
1) Have the right attitude: “a certain optimism, an element of persistence, and an ability to be resilient.”
2) Take the lead: women lawyers with leadership positions inside the firm and in outside organizations generated more new business.
3) Invest time wisely: “Every hour dedicated weekly to developing existing clients and attracting new business yields female attorneys nearly $30,000 in additional origination revenue, regardless of category (equity partner, non-equity partner, counsel or senior associate).”
4) Know the power of client service: Women lawyers who agreed with the statement “client service has no impact” on new business reported far lower annual originations (less than $600,000) than those who believed that “client service differentiates” (over $800,000).

Interpreting these results takes me back to my days in academia, where critics dissected the causes behind every correlational survey. Did the fact that lawyers put in more hours result in more new business? Or did they put in more hours because they are more successful? Or did a third critical underlying factor – such as a personality trait of persistence – increase both the hours and the results?

In all my years as a psychologist, I never saw anyone fully resolve one of these arguments. But as Tom Snyder of Huthwaite likes to say “this is marketing, not a science experiment.” If your goal is to bring in business, you just have to take your best guess, give it a try, and hold a party when you win.

I believe that Shunk and MacDonagh are right: In today’s legal environment, there IS a causal link. If you put more time into business development, you will have a good chance of getting more new business. But I believe you must do it soon, because this is a temporary phenomenon in a rapidly changing competitive environment.

I do not think that more time produces more business for sales pros in other industries. It’s easy to find insurance salespeople and financial planners who put in longer hours selling than their competitors, but don’t produce more results. Why is that different from the law? Because insurance and financial services sales techniques have been perfected for the last 100 years, and the level of sales competition is much higher.

When I speak to groups of lawyers, I often tell the story of the first lawyer I ever coached who got a multi-million dollar engagement by offering a one hour free meeting. In all my years working with sales pros, I never heard of this working in another industry. Would you be impressed if your insurance agent offered to meet for free? How about your lawyer?

To win at selling, you just have to be just a little better than your opponent. Every time she learns something new, the bar goes up. So the sooner you start, the more low hanging fruit you will be able to pick.

And when you do, work on that “right attitude” that Marcie and Catherine found. Many lawyers are better at pessimism than optimism, because their primary job is to anticipate and prepare for all the things that can go wrong. But researchers have consistently found that optimism is linked to sales success. (For more on this, see my post If you can’t be optimistic, pretend.)

Is optimism more important for women than men? I don’t know.

When I talk to female rainmaking groups, they always seem to ask about female coaches. The salesman in me believes that I should sell what people are buying, and that the client is always right, so I immediately start describing female LegalBizDev coaches. But the psychologist in me would like to know: does it really make a difference whether female lawyers are taught by a man or a woman?

When I asked Marcie and Catherine what they think about male/ female differences, they replied: “Whether there are real differences between males and females is just the question on our minds and where we hope to take the next phase of our research. Our hypothesis is that from the perspective of what makes a rainmaker, the differences really are not that significant. That is because proven business development techniques work for both men and women. As far as whether firms could be doing more to support female attorneys, we'll let you report on our next article due out in an upcoming issue of Law Journal Newsletter.”