You Can Be Replaced

“Sometimes people get real comfortable, and forget that they can be replaced.”           -Beyonce

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 out there about how this process works (or doesn’t) and almost all of it, slightly modified, works for marketing legal services as well.

For instance, let’s take the topic of client retention. Law firms are often oddly uninterested in this — on some level, I think, they believe that their sheer legal brilliance will retain clients forever. Uh, no. Attorneys and firms have this unfortunate tendency to grossly overestimate how strong their relationships are with their clients. This is a major mistake, which they often make repeatedly. Every firm in your competitive set would love to pick off your key clients, and your clients are far from immune to being wooed this way.

You have to work at keeping your clients once you’ve got them. The good people behind the Solution Selling approach, which is one of the really big, proven and significant sales methodologies have written a refreshingly tactical, realistic blog post on how to make sure that you’re as wired into your clients as possible. It’s here, and it’s highly recommended.