Consultative selling for lawyers

Did you see in the news that Pfizer announced “unprecedented layoffs” of 2,200 US sales people, and over 20% of their European sales force (Business Week, 2/5/07, p. 30). It’s part of a trend, the article said, in which “pharma CEOs are questioning whether the hard sell even pays off.” Like many other companies, Pfizer will instead move to a consultative selling approach built around providing more value to doctors.

Why should lawyers care? Because when lawyers say they hate sales, it is the old-fashioned hard sell they are thinking about, the kind of selling that can be seen in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and at used car lots everywhere.

But the fact is that most Fortune 500 firms have abandoned the hard sell model, because it does not work with large and complex sales. Pfizer has joined the long list of companies that has substituted a kinder, gentler approach which does work for lawyers: consultative selling.

The world is full of self-appointed sales gurus who claim to have invented consultative selling, but in fact the term does not have a single founder or even a well-defined meaning. Instead, it is a group of approaches, all of which emphasize adding value, building relationships, and listening before acting.

In this approach, sellers focus first on helping clients by understanding their true needs and thinking about how, or if, they can genuinely add value. In other words, they work sincerely and aggressively to become a trusted advisor. Which, of course, is exactly what great lawyers and rainmakers have always done.

What’s new is that researchers and sales pros have spent the last several decades studying techniques to increase the speed and efficiency of consultative selling. These techniques are just starting to be adopted in the legal profession, and the lawyers who are adopting them first are taking away business from all the rest.

In the book Stop Telling, Start Selling, Linda Richardson distinguishes between three types of sales people: product, quasi-consultative, and consultative.

Product sales people are generally beginners who believe that selling means telling how good your product or service is. Almost every sales person starts naturally at this point. Richardson (p. 8) calls it “the equivalent of the terrible twos in childhood,” and says “Most of these salespeople either grow out of this stage in about six months or so, or they get out of selling. This is the stage of ‘slammed doors’ and no commissions.”

In my experience, lawyers often take far longer than six months to get beyond this, and a few stay with it for their entire careers. The reasons are simple: most have very little time to work on their selling techniques, and little help or guidance from successful rainmakers or coaches. So many remain stuck at this point, gamely heading to networking events, hoping for an opportunity to explain why their services are better than others, when they should be planning a consultative approach to meet people, listen, help them, and slowly and patiently build new relationships.

The next level up is “quasi-consultative selling,” and according to Richardson, the vast majority of professional salespeople fall into this group. These folks have learned some consultative techniques, but they don’t take them far enough. Although they start out each sales call to explore buyer needs, they jump too quickly to product solutions. The true consultative sales person is a partner who builds a long-term relationship to add value, even if it means talking at length on occasions when there is no sale to be made because the solution lies elsewhere.

To succeed at sales, you just have to be a little better than your competition. So as long as lawyers are competing with others who are “telling instead of selling,” that strategy can actually work. But as more and more lawyers begin to apply state of the art consulative techniques, the bar will go up, and lawyers will need to become more sophistacted consulative sellers to win new engagements.

Over the next few months, I plan to write a number of posts about the classic books on consultative selling, and how they relate to lawyers. Next week I’ll start with the system I respect the most, because it is the only one backed by extensive research data: Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling.

If you can’t wait that long and want to get a jump on the competition, you can start now by reading my list on Amazon of the top marketing and sales books for lawyers.