I was having a conversation earlier this week with the CMO of an AmLaw 100 firm, and for some reason, I asked him why and how he brings in outside consultants (like me) to help his marketing team. His answer was interesting. “We almost never hire them. 95% of them are totally slinging bullshit.” That…
You Have To Provide the Thrust
Sometimes I think business development consists of about five concepts, repeated over and over. I was reading a printout today of a Powerpoint presentation that was part of a sales training program. One of the bullet points on one of the slides included a sentence that really struck me: Do not assume the prospect will…
When You Blog, Here’s How to Not Be Like the Chinese Hermit Poet Who Scratched His Poems Into the Sides of Cliffs
Not making this up. In the 9th century, deep in China, a man named Han Shen wrote incredible poetry that he did not intend anyone to ever read. To quote his Wikipedia entry, no one knows who he was, or when he lived and died. Little is known of his work, since he was a recluse…
Your Firm’s Big Data is Neither Big, Nor Especially Useful
One of the Truly Great Things about living and working in Silicon Valley is that an awful lot of the technology-related claims made by law firms and legal marketers get held up to the sometimes cold, harsh light of people who really know what they’re doing when it comes to technology. This doesn’t always negate…
82015Sep
By Peter Darling
In Branding and Positioning,
Marketing,
Sales,
Sales and Selling
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Ten Seconds
All of your marketing matters for about ten seconds. They’re incredibly important seconds. Today, out there in the universe somewhere, someone is going to have a problem. You don’t know who. You don’t know why, or exactly when. But at some point today, someone is going to look up from a computer screen, or stare off…
You Can Be Replaced
Today is Beyonce’s birthday, in honor of which we here at Repechage present the following: One of the best approaches for legal marketing and business development is to go outside the still somewhat insular world of legal marketing. Human beings have been selling each other things for 10,000 years. There is a lot of expertise…
Here Comes Blake
Sometimes, just to get their attention, I show lawyers I’m working with on business development the Blake speech from the film Glengarry Glen Ross. Blake is the ultimate two-fisted, hard-driving salesman in this script by David Mamet, and this speech to a group of failing salespeople may be the best work Alec Baldwin has ever done….