Don't Blow The Prospecting Meeting

          You know you need to put your best foot forward.  If only someone could tell you which foot to put out first.  This article, the first in a series on how to conduct prospecting meetings, illustrates the most common mistake service providers make in initiating these meetings.

         A Senior Counsel at an international consumer products company receives a call from a law firm partner.  The partner is calling to invite the Senior Counsel to lunch.  The partner and the Senior Counsel had been law firm associates together five years earlier.  They have not spoken since then. 

         The above true scenario was described to me recently by the actual recipient of the phone call.  The Senior Counsel went on to tell me how he felt about receiving the call.  “I know he just wants to get business from me.  I tried to get out of going to lunch on the grounds that I was too busy but he called every three months or so.  Finally I had to accept the invitation out of politeness.”

         Getting a meeting with a potential client can be difficult.  In the given example, the partner had to make several calls over a period of three months before getting the meeting.   Not only did this take time, but it may have felt embarrassing and even painful for the partner.  And that was the easy part.  The partner now has to go into a lunch meeting with someone who doesn’t even want to be there. That, unfortunately, is the reality of almost every prospecting meeting. 

          Given this reality, what can the partner do at the lunch meeting to initiate a lasting professional relationship with the Senior Counsel?  What can the partner do to maximize the results of his limited business development time?  This was the question I explored with a group of law firm partners at a recent workshop.  We conducted the workshop as a series of role-plays where one person played the role of the Senior Counsel, another person played the role of the partner and the rest of the participants watched and gave feedback.  Together we explored different approaches and discussed what worked and what didn’t.  The results of this exploration are the subject of a series of articles of which this is the first part.

Displaying Your Chops

            The most common initial approach used by the partners participating in the workshop was to find a way to display the partner’s legal chops.  The way this typically played out was that the partner would steer the conversation to a legal issue.  The partner would then lock into the legal issue by asking a long series of probing questions.  At the end of these questions, the partner would offer a solution to the legal issue. 

The intent behind this approach was to show the Senior Counsel that the partner was knowledgeable thereby enticing the Senior Counsel to hire the partner.  The instinct behind this approach is a good one.  Unfortunately, the impact of this approach on the Senior Counsel was the opposite of what the partner intended.  What we discovered in the workshop was that this approach actually distanced the Senior Counsel from the partner.  One of the participants playing the role of the Senior Counsel described the experience like this:

  “I felt like I had walked into a doctor’s examining room and I was being diagnosed.  It     was impersonal.  Not only that, I felt like the partner was trying to show me he was smarter than me.  It felt competitive.”

The partners that used this approach in the workshop did so early in the mock conversation with the Senior Counsel.  At that stage in the conversation, the parties to the conversation had not yet  established a common ground.  Another participant who played the Senior Counsel in one of these role-plays expressed it this way:

“I don’t even know who this guy is yet.  Even more importantly, he has no idea what I do, what my status is at the company, where my career is, what my concerns are.  It’s like the partner is throwing darts without looking and hopes that one lands.  It makes me feel invisible.”

The preceding comment is critical to understanding the first moments of a prospecting meeting.  First,  as the comment makes clear, it is an issue of developing a rapport with the Senior Counsel.  Just as important, it is an issue of understanding what role the Senior Counsel can play in the partner's business development efforts.  Is the Senior Counsel a decision-maker?  Is he someone who can influence a decision-maker?  Is he someone who can give you access to a decision-maker?  This critical information can only come to light if the partner expresses curiosity about the Senior Counsel's professional life.  Interestingly, expressing this curiosity also makes the Senior Counsel feel like he is being taken into account as a person.  As the preceding comment about feeling invisible makes clear, this is an important step in developing an initial rapport. 

What emerged from the role-plays and participant comments as a general theme is the priority that clients place on relationship over expertise in the initial stages of a prospecting meeting.  Recall for example the participant who stated that the partner's probing questions "felt competitive."  With no pre-existing rapport between the partner and the Senior Counsel, the probing questions seemed intrusive and ill-intentioned.  When questions feel intrusive, the person being questioned will generally react by resisting responding.  This creates a counter-productive interpersonal dynamic.  On the other hand, if the relationship is one of trust, then probing questions are more likely to be seen as an effort to provide assistance.  In interpersonal relations, context is everything. 

None of this is to say that expertise and knowledge are not valued by clients.  Quite the contrary.  The point is that in the initial stages of a prospecting meeting, a client is searching above all for signs of trustworthiness.  For one thing, the client may already know that the lawyer is knowledgeable based on hearsay or press.  But even if the client is unsure of the lawyer's knowledge and expertise, the client will likely put off that evaluation until after the client has determined he can trust the lawyer he is meeting.

All of this raises the following question: How can a law firm partner come to be seen as a trusted advisor during the course of a short prospecting meeting?  It seems like a tall order.  We explored this next in the workshop.  What we discovered will be the subject of Part II of this series.