TOP 3 TIPS FOR DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS

Years ago, I mediated a conflict between two partners in a law firm. Peter was ten years senior to Jim. They had worked together as partners for five years and over that period, it had become extremely difficult for them to have a civil conversation about anything.  Once they looked back at their history working together, they identified a root of their conflict. 

The root was anchored in Peter’s exertion of seniority to block Jim’s desire to fire his assistant immediately. Both had good reasons for wanting what they wanted. The assistant had been gone from the firm for at least three years.  It seemed like a disagreement of three years earlier, over how best to manage a subordinate, was still alive and affecting the ability of Peter and Jim to work together. Over the years, Jim’s resentment grew as did Peter’s certainty in his decision and exercise of power. They avoided talking about their feelings and instead empowered them.

Why is it easier for professionals to give clear direction and bad news in the midst of of a time-sensitive, critical emergency than have an open and honest conversation about feelings? The words for conversations to resolve a conflict or misunderstanding between two lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, and consultants, making sense of an uncomfortable situation or finding the right words to say and knowing what do are blocked by emotions.

While some emotions, like excitement and anger can feel energizing and bring clarity, others, like humiliation, embarrassment, guilt and shame can be paralyzing. The latter feel so uncomfortable that they block, what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2 thinking – deliberate, logical, and analytical thinking. Instead, they nudge into play the easily accessible options - acting too quickly and paralysis in an attempt to escape these feelings. The end point is the same - unintended consequences.  

The triggers for difficult conversations that trigger System 2 thinking often involve the readjustment of roles and responsibilities or the resolution of conflicting values.  Succession planning, compensation, or the business model are often a source of agitation.  Conflict and misunderstanding are often consequences.

If you are facing a difficult conversation arising out of conflict or misunderstanding, keep these three tips in mind.

1.     Acknowledge emotions and thoughts.

It’s a mistake to ignore emotions.  Doing so, empowers emotions to cause blocks and missteps and impairs good decision-making. Instead of ignoring emotions, notice the signs – the knots in your stomach, a headache, a racing heartbeat, or an increase or decrease of sensation within your torso or limbs. Then ask yourself questions about what you are feeling. Name the emotion if you can. If not, google emotions to expand your vocabulary and your ability to name emotions. You may have heard the phrase with regard to emotions, “name them to tame them.” The power of emotions over thought processes and decision-making lessens with acknowledgement. Emotions are easier to spot than the hidden narratives and thoughts, but know that unconscious thinking also affects emotions.

What are you telling yourself about the difficult situation and conversation? Expand your self-awareness and expand your options for managing a difficult conversation effectively.

Why do you expect an upcoming difficult conversation to be difficult? What are you expecting to happen during the conversation? What emotions do you expect others to experience? What do you imagine they expect? 

After acknowledging your emotions and thoughts, consider the overall message and specific information you really want to convey and how best to do it, so that it will be heard and processed as you intend. Focus on your main message and a good outcome for the conversation so that collaboration for a solution becomes possible. Be clear about what you want, don’t want, need, expect, or prefer. Know your mind and then you’ll be better able to help others, who can’t read your mind, understand where you need help.  

Noticing isn’t just personal.  It’s about noticing the emotions of others and adjusting what you say and how you say it, to keep the conversation flowing productively. Emotions, just like the content of a conversation, provide important information.

2.     Listen.

When your stress level is too high, you may overlook important information and limit the meaning of what you notice and hidden opportunities.  Instead, slow down.  Take a breath. Do nothing other than listen carefully. Listen for content and emotion. What’s being said and how? It’s easy to assume that you understand another person’s position; however, conflict is often not about different positions as much as it is about emotions, interests, needs, and wants that go unnoticed and unacknowledged. The only way to understand another person is to listen to understand. Asking good, open-ended questions will give you content worth your time and effort to listen carefully.

It’s often easier to engage in a targeted listening.  Listening for information that supports or undermines an existing position is easier than listening to understand what matters most to the person communicating an idea or emotion. Instead, if your goal is to resolve a conflict productively, listen without judgment.  Listen to understand. Assume whatever you hear is true for the person saying it instead of trying to correct what you believe is a misunderstanding. 

If you listen to better understand the other person’s interests and concerns, you may find options to resolve a conflict without damaging relationships.  One of my clients put it this way, “R before T.” Relationship before task.  The team and organization falls apart if relationships are not built and solidified at every opportunities. Without relationships, the tasks that can be completed are extremely limited.

3.     Demonstrate that you care.

Even the best listener and the most astute observer and analyst conveys unintended messages by skipping over the opportunity to demonstrate understanding and compassion.   Digest what you hear and observe and share back your summary. Then, ask if you captured everything the other person wanted you to notice and understand. Include emotional tenor and not just content.

Active listening, empathic listening, or reflective listening all suggest the importance of being aware of the inadvertent messages you send by what you do and say during and after the other communicates. During any conversation, especially one with an element of conflict, the opportunity to convey intentional messages to improve relationships exists. If your goal is to strengthen the bonds of a business or personal relationship, take advantage of all such opportunities.

Demonstrate that you care about the other person by asking open-ended questions. Then, acknowledge their feelings, demonstrate concern, and summarize and paraphrase what you hear and then asking if you understood their meaning.

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Legal Innovation: The Biggest Myth or a Path Forward?

By Susan Letterman White

Faced with the discomforting threat of disruption to their business, many lawyers react with fear.  They struggle to innovate and instead end up seeking to sustain profitability by working harder instead of smarter.  Their anxiety reduces their cognitive ability and that leads to a reliance on the skill sets and mindsets that are comfortable instead of those that are useful. 

One example is the number of law schools that are responding to a shrinking applicant pool by cutting costs instead of tackling the problem that what they are selling isn’t delivering as expected. Too many students are not getting a chance at the career path they had expected. Another example is the array of law firms that seek out mergers (read acquisitions of partners and practice groups with very large books of business) instead of addressing a shrinking demand for services at the organization level. 

Most of my clients are leaders. They are leading themselves or others in efforts to innovate. They are solo practitioners or leaders at mid-size and smaller firms. In contrast to firms that can maintain their profitability by optimizing performance through project management, cost-cutting, restructuring their talent management system or any other process aimed to make incremental improvements (like being acquired), my clients need to innovate. They are seeking to attract new clients with new brands and value propositions. They are successful when they evaluate and improve the robustness of their business strategy functional disciplines instead of merely their business strategy.

There are four functional disciplines in a business strategy: (1) Inquiry; (2) Design; (3) Execution; and (4) Adjustment. I’ve named it the IDEA Strategy Model. Each has its own set of skill sets and mindsets that make it possible to carry out the function effectively. Inquiry and Design are closely aligned with innovation, while Execution and Adjustment are closely aligned with sustaining and increasing profitability. If an organization is experiencing an ongoing drop in demand for whatever it is supplying, sustaining profitability isn’t an option in the long-term.  Demand is the cyclical driver of revenue and profitability across a sales cycle and while it is dropping, no measure of cost-cutting and increased efficiencies will offset a dwindling demand. 

When marketplace disruptions threaten an industry, industry practitioners experience rising anxiety levels and react by falling back on the skills they already know.  These tend to be those in the functional disciplines of Execution and Adjustment.  This leads to the legal innovation myth, which goes something like this: 

If I work harder and longer, cut costs, and use existing technology to improve efficiency, my profitability will increase.

However, the reality is more like this:

If I work harder and longer, cut costs, and use existing technology to improve efficiencies, my profitability will initially increase even though I’m not innovating and growing my business. In reality, nothing will really change…except that I’ll be unhappy and exhausted.

Execution and Adjustment will not help you adjust to disruptive change with a new, competitive position in the marketplace. Inquiry and Design do that. A deep dive into these disciplines is the path forward.

The IDEA Strategy Model 

The IDEA strategy model distinguishes the functional disciplines related to innovation and a core focus on marketplace relevancy from those related to incremental adjustment and a core focus on sustaining and increasing profitability.  The model has a red-dotted line to separate the two vastly different skill sets, mindsets, and functions. Many lawyers are more comfortable with the skill sets and mindsets on the right side of the red-dotted line. 

IDEA is an acronym for the four functional disciplines:

• Inquiry

• Design

• Execution

• Adjustment

Each functional discipline has its own core questions a/k/a function, skillset, evaluation criteria, mindset, and role in marketing and business development. The skill sets and mindsets of most lawyers are better suited for sustaining and increasing profitability of an ongoing business endeavor rather than responding to the discomfort of a diminishing market for services with a new idea. The good news is that those left-side skills can be learned and developed through practice.

Inquiry 

The functional discipline of Inquiry is the creative, unconventional process of exploring and theorizing. The core question of this function is: 

What new and as yet unknown “thing” (X) could we create or do that an existing or new target market would want or need?

Unpacking this question reveals the challenge inherent in this discipline. 

1. What are “we” capable of creating or doing now or with practice in the future?

2. How are the boundaries of and criteria of our target market and its sub-segments defined?

3. What does our target market want, need, expect, or prefer today? 

4. What might our target market want, need, expect, or prefer in the future?

5. What might be the right “thing” to attract a new target market?

The skillset for this functional discipline is heavily steeped in curiosity, wandering-with-intent-to-notice, and leadership of self and others. These skills are often associated with resilience, mindfulness, strategic thinking and communication, changing when change is hard, personal development, and branding. They are frequently dismissed as less important by lawyers as they prioritize their use of time. That said, when the tipping point is reached - when the level of fear and frustration leads a lawyer to try something completely new and different –  most of my clients rise to the occasion. Formal training, followed by coaching is usually an integral part of the path forward. Evaluation of performance under this functional discipline is measured by the target market’s willingness, if not eagerness, to expend the time and money to buy the idea, product, or service that is being offered for sale.

For lawyers, the most challenging element of this functional discipline is the archetypal mindset of the creative, unconventional, explorer and theorist. It risks being overshadowed by the skeptical mindset that lawyers are trained to master. While there is a clear benefit for any start-up team to retain a lawyer in a supporting role; one, who will encourage a comprehensive risk-analysis by questioning assumptions and probing for more information and analysis before making any decision, there is a grave problem when the lawyer also owns the analysis and decision-making functions. The mindset overshadows the theorizing function that is central to Inquiry. It’s what moves the process forward. It’s not that lawyers can’t think and behave congruently with the Inquiry functional discipline; it’s that when under stress, it’s much harder for anyone to integrate less preferred ways of thinking and behaving into any strategy work. Therefore, it falls on the leader to include a plan and process to address this reality.

The functional discipline of Inquiry is the combination of brand exploration and development, target market analysis, and developing a value proposition. Much of the leg-work is consumer research discovered through curiosity, exploration, and keeping up with current events. The aim is to uncover an unmet need, tension, discomfort or problem among a target market that you, as a lawyer or law firm, could possibly resolve – an “X.”

Design 

The functional discipline of Design is the tenacious, persistent process of pioneering and experimenting. The core question of this function is:

What are possible ways we could create and/or deliver X to our target market?

This question is answered through trial and error.  This means that mistakes will be made and new lessons learned as a result. Often, it is mistakenly assumed that a lawyer’s natural aversion to making mistakes is the obstacle. The real obstacle is that innovation comes from a deep dive into purpose and learning new skills.  More often than not, my clients are more willing to experiment and less willing to ponder identity and purpose questions about who they are, what they do, and their purpose in the marketplace.

What is the purpose of a lawyer? Lawyers essentially contribute to creating, interpreting, and applying laws. They lobby for or against the creation, elimination, or application of laws. They interpret laws and advise clients or make decisions as a judge or arbitrator.  They use existing laws to advance their clients’ interests. 

With that purpose in mind and the fact that innovation is about adding something new; what new product, service or experience will you offer to resolve your target market’s X? Is there a new law that opens up a new area of practice for you? What are the different possibilities to create and deliver the X better, faster, and more tailored to the exact preferences of the sub-segments of your target market than anyone else? What new skills could you possibly need?

One skill for this functional discipline is the ability to imagine possibilities and experiment with new products, services, or experiences. Be a first class noticer.  Voraciously seek out and notice the novel - new laws, new technology, and new problems for people. Never forget that your business is a community of people serving a community of people. Be curious. How has the “new” created new problems and opportunities for people in their relationships, ability to achieve their goals, feel safe, and satisfy their basic needs for food, water, and shelter?

Another skill is the ability to design and test a hypothesis. When you come up with an idea for something new, design an experiment and test the marketplace interest in a small, cost-effective way. Publish an article about a new law and measure the level of interest in your target market. Try a new way of reaching your core consumer and measure engagement. Play with technology to enhance your speed for delivery and improve your design of X. Every time you experiment, you learn something new about your target market, about your brand, and about the possible ways the two fit together in a mutually beneficial way. Measure performance under this functional discipline by what you learn. What worked? What didn’t? Why? In this endeavor, two heads are better than one. This means that working in teams with the appropriate team leader and team member skills will make a positive difference in the outcome.

The archetypal mindset is of the tenacious, persistent pioneering experimentalist. Failure is to be expected.  Mistakes are to be expected. The struggle is not with resilience in the sense of fearing failure nearly as much as it is with managing frustration and persevering despite extreme conditions.  It’s the climber’s mentality of loving the challenge to get to the top in the face of extreme conditions because the opportunity to learn more about the context - route, mountain, weather, physical ability, and mental ability – feels almost as good as achieving the summit and most certainly reaps highly valued beta toward that end.  The drive to achieve is the hallmark of the Design mindset, while curiosity is the hallmark of the Inquiry mindset.

In this half of the model, you are discovering and testing your relevancy to the marketplace. The functional discipline of Inquiry is the combination of brand exploration and development, target market analysis, and developing a value proposition. Designing is all about testing options for the fit between your brand’s value proposition and the target market you’ve selected. 

Execution 

The functional discipline of Execution is the nurturing and building process of settling into a routine and refining it. It’s doing what you need to do after you have figured out what to do and how to do it. In this second half of the model, you take the X you created and often the associated production and delivery processes and make them better. What can you add to make X even better? What can you do to improve the client experience? What can you do to reduce costs and improve efficiencies? What can you do to reduce the cost of production? Improving a process that already works isn’t disruptive in the same way that changing a brand, value proposition, or target market is. What must you do to keep your clients happy and return your technical skills? 

The skillset and mindset is related to project management, including providing clear direction and coordination of efforts and managing the budget. The goal is to increase and sustain profitability. The measure of success is whether you are doing that.

Adjustment 

The functional discipline of Adjustment is the conventional, methodical process of surveying and measuring. It’s the analysis of outcomes and the decision of what to do next.  While always looking for improvement, the art and subtlety of this functional discipline is knowing the evaluation criteria to use.  If you use Execution evaluation criteria to measure the progress or success of Inquiry or Design efforts, you will always conclude the efforts were worthless and a waste of your precious resources – time, talent, and money. What’s worse, you’ll never learn that innovation is much more within your reach than you had thought it was.

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Four Steps to Successful Recruiting and Hiring

By Susan Letterman White

One of the milestones along the journey to a successful and profitable law firm is reaching the point where you need to hire employees. The need often arises quickly when the warning bell of too much work and too little time rings loudly. The biggest mistake is hiring the first person with a reasonable resume. The better course of action is to consider the processes of recruiting and hiring in the context of your business strategy. Talent strategies are used to attract and select the right people. Even if you are an organization of one person, you need a plan to recruit, hire, develop, and retain the right people.

Here are the four steps to developing such a plan. 

Step One: Identify your business strategy and then distill it into specific tasks.  

Every law firm business strategy can be broken into three parts: (1) The collection of tasks to get requests for the legal services you are offering; (2) Doing the legal work; and (3) Collecting revenue for your legal services. There are myriad tasks associated with each of these parts, including creating the conditions to make it possible to focus on these three core parts of the business.  All of these tasks require people with the right competencies to complete them. 

What’s your business strategy?  Specifically, what are the tasks that you need to be completed for your strategy to be effectively implemented? The answer to this question depends on what you can do and want to do and what you cannot do and would prefer to have someone else do. For example, perhaps you love the marketing aspect of your business in addition to doing the legal work. If that’s the case, then you may need only help with your legal work and the day-to-day firm management work. 

An easy way to think about this is to go back to your list of start-up costs or your annual budget and for each item, ask the question: What management, core work, or marketing tasks are associated with this item? Then, make a list of every task, the necessary capabilities to complete the task, the frequency of occurrence, and importance of the task to your business strategy.

Step Two: SWOT Yourself and Your Environment

SWOT is an acronym. A SWOT analysis is the collection and analysis of data concerning the Strengths and Weaknesses of you and your firm and the Opportunities and Threats in the external environment (everything else) in terms of capabilities to complete the specific tasks you have identified. Determine who is available to do which tasks. This means listing the people in your firm and their capabilities. Then take inventory of what you are missing. Make sure to ask yourself what you will do and what you want someone else to do? Consider the tasks that you enjoy and those you would prefer to delegate. Consider how the competencies related to the tasks you will delegate must be demonstrated and measured?

Step Three: Create your recruitment and candidate evaluation plan.

The way to attract the right candidates and evaluate the candidates you attract is by describing the tasks and competencies you are seeking in a job description. Be clear and specific with your description. You will use the same criteria to evaluate candidates, whose resumes you scan and those you interview.  Next, consider your budget and decide what you can afford to pay to attract the right person. Then, start recruiting and evaluating.

Step Four: Check your management skills. 

Expect to delegate. First, know your specific performance expectations. What will you be looking for when you informally and formally evaluate your new hire? Then, share those performance expectations. Many lawyers assume that anyone they decide to hire will know what is expected of them.  They may not. If you expect a certain style of writing, provide samples. If you want delivery of a project by a certain time and date, convey that. If you want to see the level of progress before the final product, provide a check-in date and time. 

Delegating with specificity, directing others, delivering feedback, and explaining to your new hire how their contributions fit into the bigger picture are all important skills.  Where do you need to improve your skills? How will you do that? Frequently, the need to direct and develop employees is higher than most lawyers expect. 

Expect to develop your employees. The best people present with the right technical and core leadership, communication, and strategy competencies and the opportunity to develop good competencies into great ones and to develop new competencies. You can offer mentoring, solid positive and constructive feedback, stretch assignments, and formal training. Don’t lose a good person because they could be better with developmental opportunities. Instead provide those opportunities.

Now that you know the four steps to getting the right people in the door and deploying them to help you out, you are ready to begin!

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4 Steps for Post-Merger Integration Strategy

By Susan Letterman White

Resistance to change is always a danger even in small projects and promising innovations. But when a whole company is about to change its shape, to transform itself into something entirely different through a merger, emotions can run rampant. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Supercorps)

Perhaps there is something inherently wrong with most of the advice suggesting a merger as a sensible strategic move. ALM research suggests  that five years after a merger is announced, 30% of firms experience a drop in gross revenue, 73% of gains are actually less than peer firms experience, and 93% of firms see an increase in cost-per-lawyer despite the argument that mergers are a way to gain efficiencies and reduce expenses.  Or, maybe there is another reason for these strategy failures.

When the financial analysis supports a decision for a merger or acquisition and the ongoing financial plan enhances financial stability, there is no reason for a merger to fail, yet they do. The same research references above suggests that disruption is commonly experienced following a merger. Mergers at the organization, group, and interpersonal levels are vulnerable to failure without a plan to address the to-be-expected resistance to change. 

Recently, I worked with a large firm on a post-merger integration project aimed to reduce resistance at the group level.  The combination of two firms resulted in friction among teams at the Chiefs, Directors, and Managers level. The old ways of doing things were not working effectively in the new firm. This is a common experience in any organization after a merger. 

My sponsor within the firm and I worked together to design a program to reduce resistance. She recently reflected on that work and said, “teams are working more effectively than a couple of months ago.  Whenever you can have folks communicate effectively and candidly about integration and discuss the concerns that people have, it reduces the anxiety that many may feel when firms initially merge.” That was our goal for a two-part pre- and post-lunch program at a two-day retreat. 

In most combinations, success depended on people understanding what the combination means. How will the new puzzle pieces fit together to create a new firm? How will their piece of the puzzle fit? Are people at risk of losing their jobs? It is not an overstatement to say that a merger is a significant change process. During the early stages of any significant change processes, namely for the first year after the event, anxiety is high and confusion abounds.

In my client’s situation, each legacy firm had its own way of doing things – its own culture. Culture isn’t something people talk about. In fact, they usually do not notice it. Culture is the behavioral norms that results from shared, yet hidden and undiscussed assumptions and beliefs about how people should interact with each other and what is valued most and least. 

When two cultures merge into something new and different, it’s a bumpy transition for many reasons. Some of those reasons are about the logistics, the actual organization dynamics change. Other reasons fall under the category of psychology – how human beings think and feel about change. People need to figure out how to navigate their differences and work together effectively and efficiently in the midst of changes to the law firm’s structures, processes, and resource allocation. 

As is common in a merger, in my client’s situation, many people affected by the merger were on the same team and yet had never met. Even among those, who had communicated with each other, most did not know each other very well. They came from different organizations with different workplace cultures and had different work styles and processes.  Superimposed over that, they had different, undiscussed assumptions of how they should be working together until they met at a two-day retreat. Merging the organization dynamics was as important as merging the cultures. 

In a successful merger, different individuals, groups, and organizations with necessarily different identities and cultures are becoming a unified whole and if done correctly, the new organization develops into a fierce marketplace competitor. Done incorrectly, it’s may be a mistake from which the firm will never recover.  

Key integration steps include the following.

1. Select the right people, groups, and firms. The group selected for the initial project included, Chiefs, Directors, and Managers.  These individuals were responsible for working together and supporting the work of the overall firm and attorneys. The specific small working-groups were designed with the “right” people – people that needed to work together and solve their problems that were interfering with their ability to work together effectively and efficiently.

2. Demonstrate concern for people and respect for their feelings and situations. The two day-retreat created the time and space for people to talk about the merger and its effects. A significant component was a portion devoted to explaining the logistics and psychology of the merger and providing time to discuss individual experiences of these effects. 

3. Integrate while acknowledging different identities and by choosing inclusion. Encourage new ideas and ways of thinking. Encourage people to challenge old ways of doing things. The retreat was part of an ongoing effort to acknowledge the differences of the two legacy firms, while also developing shared ideals and co-creating a shared future. The retreat included time for these firm leaders to collaborate as problem-solvers. They learned about the different legacy cultures driving how work was done effectively and efficiently and then began co-creating a new culture of new ways to effectively and efficiently working together.

4. Provide the space and time. Busy people need reasons and scheduled time to get to know and develop trust for one another. The two-day retreat did this. They were given a shared task to figure out how to improve their experience of working together and were also given time for informal networking to get to know each other better.

Mergers and integrations have the potential to jumpstart a new growth cycle for your law firm when leaders plan in advance to address the resistance that inevitably follows. That means paying equal attention to the logistics and the people affected and their wants, needs, expectations, interests, and concerns, and responding effectively and innovatively.

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Everything You Need to Know About Unique Value Propositions

By Susan Letterman White

What is a value proposition?

A value proposition is what you are offering to provide in exchange for your fee.  Your value proposition is your service, product, and/or the experience of working with you. It’s not about your personal brand – your identity or values. It’s not about how able you are to create trusting relationships, where clients have confidence in your legal acumen and ability. It’s not even about how people feel when working with you, although that is important. 

Rather, it is about the perception held by a prospective client, client, or referral source of the unique value you offer to people – the meaningful difference you can make in their lives and in helping them with their problems and goals. It’s about their point of view, the problems they care about most, and whether you offer a different and better solution to those problems.

The operative word is value, from your client’s point of view. There are three categories of value from your client’s point of view. You can create new value, protect existing value, or restore value lost for clients. If you find ways for your clients to do what they want to do, then you create value.  If you find ways to help your clients preserve what matters to them most, then you maintain value.  If you find ways to make your client whole after being physically, emotionally, or financially limited or harmed, then you restore value. 

A good value proposition quickly tells clients the problems you will solve for them, the leverage you will provide to make attaining their goals easier, and the benefits that will make their lives easier and better.

Why are some value propositions better than others?

Let’s take a look at two service companies to see what works and what could use a little improvement. 

As a ride-sharing company, Uber appeals to drivers and riders with different and persuasive value propositions.  On its website home page, you will find this:

Very quickly, I know how Uber can be of value to me, whether I am a rider or a driver. 

Boston University is a private university. Its campus is the city of Boston. Its competition for undergraduates is stiff. There are many similar universities in similar locations – even within the city of Boston. On its website home page, you will find an old-fashioned landing page and center stage is a picture and story of neuroscientist Rahul Desikan, a “pioneering neuroscientist” who “was attacking ALS. Then, ALS attacked him.” This may be an interesting and moving story, but it doesn’t tell me anything obvious and persuasive about the value of attending Boston University as an undergraduate.

Underneath and in small font are four categories: headlines, research, community, and alumni. Each category offers more information.  Under headlines is news about BU today. There is an article on E-cigarettes, managing information overload, and getting to know Dorchester. BU is not in Dorchester, so I find this very confusing. The information under the other headings is similarly aimed at a narrow audience of people, who might find the specific topics of interest.  Nowhere on the homepage of this website does it tell a prospective student why BU is a better choice than any other university. There are thirteen information links at the top of the page, many with drop-down menus. Each menu has too many additional topics.

Even if I select “ABOUT,” I’m told that “Boston University is no small operation…our three campuses are always humming, always in high gear.” These clichés tell me nothing at all. I could choose to click on any of several additional links, including to “meet the people and places that keep the University running smoothly,” but it’s difficult to find meaningful information at first glance about why Boston University is unique and worth the tuition and estimated expenses of $69,668 per year.

Clarity in a succinct message of the unique value to your target market is what makes a value proposition good. 

Why create a value proposition?

To a client, your value proposition is the value they conclude they are receiving in exchange for what they give you? If they do not conclude that they are receiving more value as a result of hiring you, they will opt to live with a problem or attempt to solve it in other ways. Clients give you their time, money, and emotions. In exchange, they want a problem to disappear and a solution to move into its place. They have needs and interests, none of which are the details of how you will use your legal expertise. When you can convey precisely, which factors or aspects of the service or the experience you offer will solve which of their specific problems, you give your prospect the information they need to decide whether or not your unique value proposition is of sufficient value to them.

Some people say that your value proposition is the most important piece of your overall marketing messaging. It’s a catalyst for transforming prospects into clients when it tells them why they should hire you, rather than another lawyer. It clearly conveys the benefits of working with you. The most important element is that it connects to the conversation about a problem or desire already happening in your prospect’s mind. 

How to create your value proposition

Many value propositions are drenched in trite, meaningless, weak, and ambiguous words. An effective value proposition explains how your services address a specific need experienced by your ideal client. A value proposition is also called a unique selling proposition because by using the language of the prospect, not the lawyer, and talking about the prospect’s problems begging for solutions, you transform a prospect into a client. The way you speak about your services to other lawyers or legal staff or even your family should differ from how your clients describe your services and how you describe your services to them.

Creating your unique value proposition is a five-step process.

Step One: Describe your ideal client or prospect. Is your client an individual or an entity? If an entity, who is the decision-maker? What does that person care about most? What makes this client or prospect ideal?

In a for-profit corporation, your client cares about creating or preserving value – their profit or competitive advantage.  They may also care about restoring value that they feel has been unfairly taken or not paid when due. Individuals may care most about their family member’s health and well-being, what others think about them, or restoring value that they feel has unfairly been taken. Non-profit organizations care about creating value through fundraising and relevant acquisitions and actions, helping their stakeholders, growing their members, and keeping their existing members happy. 

Step Two: Do you create new value, maintain value, or restore value for your client? 

Step Three: Describe the value in detail from the prospect’s point of view. What unique experience and value are you offering?

Step Four: What problems do your prospects have that keep them awake at night? Come up with as many problems as possible. 

Step Five: For each problem you identify, which specific factors, qualities, characteristics, or defining features of your service, product, or the experience of working with you respond to each problem?

Step Six: Put this information together to write a short, easy-to-recall, value proposition in the language of your client. Make it persuasive and distinguishable from competitors. What problems will you solve, or situations will you improve? What specific benefits will you deliver? Why are you better than the lawyer down the hall? 

You may need to analyze your competition to discover where they fall short.  Their weaknesses are your opportunities to distinguish yourself. What do you do better than your competition? There are three ways to differentiate yourself. You might describe the features – the facts or characteristics of your service; the advantages – how a feature can help the prospect; or the benefits – how a feature or advantage meets a prospect’s explicit needs. Research shows that benefits are the most persuasive way to describe solutions.  

Your features are what you offer – notify of new lawsuits soon after they are filed, explain the risks of different strategies, file all documents related to a trademark request, etc.  Your benefits solve your prospect’s problems – early notification of lawsuits, sleep better at night, knowing someone is on the lookout for lawsuits against your company. Your advantage may be your price point or speed.

Start with one short sentence about the end-benefit of your legal services. Then in 2-3 sentences, specifically explain those services and why they are useful. List three key features, advantages, or benefits of your services with bullet points.

Conclusion

Your value proposition should be read and understood quickly in less than 30 seconds. As long as you are not trying to sell something that few people want to buy or trying to sell to someone who doesn’t have purchasing power, your value proposition will transform prospects into clients and clients into brand advocates.

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INCREASE YOUR CLIENTS AND REVENUE: MAKE IT RAIN!

Not everyone who needs a lawyer, accountant, consultant, or coach wants one. Not every prospective client, who wants professional services, can afford to pay your fees. The three steps to increasing your firm clients and revenue are: (1) define your target prospect; (2) tailor your marketing messages to what your target prospects want; and (3) master the sales-cycle conversation.

1.     Define your target prospects

Too many lawyers and other professional service providers fish in the wrong pond or use the wrong bait.  They do not know whether there are sufficient prospects who want the solutions they offer at the price they need to generate sufficient revenue for their business model. This may be a consequence of a practice area already supersaturated with other lawyers or productized services that are too similar or aiming at the wrong geographic or demographic target market. Alternatively, your price point may be too high, but could be reduced with the introduction of process efficiencies.

The first step is to research your target prospects to better understand what they want, what they are willing to pay, and where they are likely to notice you and what you are offering. Understand them demographically and psychologically.

2.     Tailor your marketing messages to what you target prospects want.

 Not all prospective clients, people who want the solutions you are selling, will develop an interest in your brand of solution.  Your value proposition is your solution combined with the experience of working with you. It is the client’s point of view on what they want and what they think will make them feel better, less anxious, happier.  It is how close you get to giving them what they want, not just what they need.

 There are three categories of value that lawyer’s offer clients. You can create new value, protect existing value, or restore value lost. If you what you offer leads to ways for your clients to do what they want to do, then you create value.  If it leads to ways to help your clients preserve what matters to them most, then you maintain value.  If it leads to ways to make your client whole after being physically, emotionally, or financially harmed, then you restore value.

 A good value proposition quickly tells clients why working with you will make their lives easier and better. That spikes curiosity and interest in your brand of solutions, rather than that of your competition.

 3.     Master the sales-cycle conversation

 When a prospective client is curious about you and your firm because they want what you are offering, the next step is to have a conversation. Instead of thinking of this conversation as an opportunity to tell the prospect what you will do and how you will help, think of it as an opportunity to develop a relationship and demonstrate that you understand what they want.

 The key to converting a prospect into a client is communicating in way that first engages the prospect. Different people are more receptive to different communication behaviors – the “how” of communication.   Once engaged, influencing a person to become a client is a matter of saying the right things at the right times. Our Rainmakers Incubator Workshop is where you’ll have an opportunity to learn and practice these techniques.

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5 Tips to Notice More Business Opportunities

Are you a good noticer? You won’t notice business opportunities if you aren’t good at noticing. If you spend more time noticing what’s happening in the external world or if you spend more time with the thoughts rattling around in your brain, you are probably missing a lot. We need to develop the discipline to do both. Maybe you study your surroundings like you were taught in college to study a painting. That puts you ahead of many people, and yet, you likely miss a lot that could help you notice more business opportunities.

Noticing clearly and communicating effectively seem like obvious, straightforward skills, yet our psychology seems to suggest that we’re prone to make a lot of mistakes. Why is that? Let’s start with an experiment.

Choose a colleague, client, friend, spouse, person-in-case-of, or neighbor. Close your eyes and try to recall the last time you saw that person. What were they were wearing? What was their emotional tenor? Can you recall their tone of voice, body language, and what they said and did? Perhaps you “saw” them on Zoom.  What was hidden from view?

If you aren’t good a noticing what is in front of you, you’re going to miss the next, best opportunity that comes your way. It probably will not appear like an opportunity at first glance. It may seem like too much effort, not right for you, or not interesting. If you want to notice more, you’ll need to change your habits and learn new behaviors.  Changing old habits and forming new ones is never easy. Put these 5 tips on a Post-It or Smartphone Note, in your calendar, or do this with a buddy for mutual accountability “check ins” until they become new habits.

1. Stop and Notice.

Notice, using every sense available. See, hear, feel, smell, taste, and the others.  What others? We have a sense of space and time, movement and position. How about noticing how awake and alert you feel or how tense or relaxed your muscles are? Add in expanding your awareness of emotions in yourself and others. There’s a lot to notice and most of us notice little.

Practice expanding your perception of what “is.” Maybe start with the room you are in. List what you notice and what you remember noticing with your eyes closed.  Practice regularly, until you notice more.

One of my trainings is problem-solving for leaders. It starts with noticing one’s internal context.  I ask people to notice feelings in their body and expand awareness of emotions. It takes practice and an expanding vocabulary for your emotions.  If the only words for emotions you know are anger, happiness, joy, love, and sadness, you may not feel contentment, pride, excitement, peace, satisfaction, or compassion.  If you don’t know what compassion feels like, you may miss out on a business opportunity to empathize with a prospective client. Also, it’s easy to have your cognitive, analytical thinking skills hijacked if you aren’t noticing when you’re feeling anxious.

2. Notice the “big picture” in addition to the details.

The patterns, relationships, concepts, and connections that we call the “big picture” in contrast the details are less noticeable to some people than to others. Perception tendencies or preferences, like communication defaults and preferences are part of being human. Maybe you pay attention to the strength and style of a handshake, the tenor of a voice, the scent of a person and a room. But, do you also look for patterns and relationships? The connections between people, people and resources, or people and power? Culture and power dynamics show up in patterns of behavior, not in the employee handbook. Do you notice who gets attention and who seems invisible in a group? Maybe there’s a business opportunity hidden there.

3. Be curious.

Think like a journalist, psychologist, anthropologist, artist and so on. Our ability to be curious, depends on our history of experiences and what we know. Everyone has binoculars and microscopes in addition to blindspots. Leadership of oneself and others requires a big dose of curiosity – the desire to be open and keep learning. Experts in innovation point to the combination of curiosity and hard work as the catalyst for experimentation, innovation, and intentional change. Changing up routines, acting spontaneously, shaking up your thinking is how to find new connections and opportunities. It’s how to notice gaps to fill with your expertise and effort. It’s how to notice the human side of problems. These are the ingredients for finding new business opportunities.

4. Avoid assumptions.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you know the answer or have collected all the data that matter. Innovation intelligence and noticing more means testing your assumptions and reaching conclusions much more slowly. It doesn’t mean hesitating to reach a decision when the data is incomplete or ambiguous. The nature of complexity is that systems often have incomplete and ambiguous information. Living with a lot of complexity should not stop us from making decisions and experimenting to find solutions to problems. It does mean developing a heightened awareness of your unconscious assumptions. Everyone has them. It does mean knowing the difference between perception and data on the one hand and judgments, assumptions, and conclusions on the other. Suspend your judgment until the time is right to make a decision.

5. Change intentionally.

If you are stuck and not finding more business opportunities, it’s time to change what you are doing, how you are doing it, and when you are doing whatever you are doing. Let’s say you are right-hand dominant. In that case, you prefer to write with your right hand. With practice, you could learn to use your left hand, but it would take time, more concentration, and the early results wouldn’t be as good as with your right hand. It’s the same situation with intentional change. Do you prefer to notice and collect data or reach conclusions? Do you prefer to notice the details or the big picture? Do you prefer curiosity or making decisions?  If you have ever explored your personality using the MBTI, then you know that expanding what you notice, how you make sense of what you notice, and the way you decide and act are preferences that have become habits.  We can change our habits, expand into new habits, or replace old ones with new and better habits. If you are not getting the business opportunities you want, it’s time to change.

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