Cross-Selling (Part 4 of 5)

Lawyers are not the only ones who have ever tried cross-selling, and they are not the first to fail.  Has your bank ever approached you about adding a credit card or a retirement account to your checking and savings?  Chances are that if they did, you said yes only if you saw direct and immediate personal benefits. 

In a Huthwaite white paper entitled “Why cross-selling fails,” Matthew McDarby argues that campaigns are often built on “flawed business logic”:  vendors want to take advantage of the high value consumers place on existing relationships.  But consumers often don’t value the relationships as highly as their vendors think they do.

So one key to cross-selling success is to understand the situation from the client’s perspective.  Cross-selling should not be approached as a way to generate more business for your firm, it should be a way of helping your clients to run their businesses.

How can lawyers identify the best opportunities to help clients run their businesses?  By listening.  By asking about the problems and opportunities that face the client, and considering how the firm might help.  When lawyers ask the right questions, and actively listen to the answers, they often uncover legal needs that the client is not even aware of.

Larry Smith of Levick Strategic Communications recommends that cross-selling should be integrity-based and always put client needs first.  He suggests that lawyers begin evaluating each new opportunity by asking themselves three questions:

• “Would you hire the guy you’re pitching?
• If so, can the client still do better elsewhere?
• Do you know enough about the client’s situation to presume that the cross-sell will be valuable to the client?”

And when lawyers decide to approach their partners to cross-sell services, they must  ask not just what’s in it for the client, but also what’s in it for the partner.

Like every other kind of selling, cross-selling is ultimately based on personal relationships, which must be built slowly, one person at a time.  So a lawyer must first identify a partner whose capabilities could fit well with his own, take her to lunch, and gradually follow up to build the relationship and find joint opportunities.

Marketing staff and administrators can help lawyers understand that the most effective strategy is always to give before you get.  They must focus first on what they can do for partners, and expect to have benefits come back later.  This won’t work every time, but it will work more often than anything else.  Here are a few questions lawyers can ask themselves to get started:

• Which partners are most likely to be interested in exchanging client leads?
• Which of our firm’s capabilities are the strongest?
• How could these capabilities help my clients?
• Which of my clients are most likely to be open to more help from our firm?
• What’s the benefit to my client of giving more work to our firm?

Once a lawyer decides to approach a particular partner, the next steps include all the things they should do in selling to a client:  ask lots of questions, listen fifty to eighty percent of the time, genuinely look for mutual opportunities, and then offer help.  Ideally this will lead to a meeting to introduce the new partner to the client and listen some more (not spend the time telling them all about the new lawyer’s qualifications).  Listening for opportunities is the best way to get a foot in the door, even if it’s a very small matter

Once they’ve gotten some new business, most lawyers will reciprocate and introduce others to their own clients.  And when cross-selling works, firm management can have a major impact on future efforts simply by getting the word out.  Nothing succeeds like success.