tender

Which would you prefer: the customer you attract, or the customer you pursue?

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This blog post is based on a #2020futureoflawthought I posted last week on social media – ‘Who pays you better, the client you attract or the client you pursue?’.

It occurs to me that law firms are much more willing – and even better resourced – to pursue customers than they are to attract them. We have dedicated pursue customer resources to hand – such as bids, tenders and pursuits teams. And we are willing to offer discounts and other ‘value adds’ to new customers that we would never think of offering to existing and loyal customers.

And what do we get for throwing all these resources and efforts in to pursuing customers?

If we are honest, and have a really good bid/tender/pursuit team to call on, somewhere between 50%-70% win conversion rate! Which is not to say that conversion rate is profitable, because in many cases to get us across the line it isn’t!

Create distinction

Recently I started listening to Scott McKain’s daily ‘Project Distinction‘ podcast. It’s a great podcast that lasts around 10 minutes; around the same time as I made my social media post, Scott ran a week long series on how the ‘hard sell’ had had its day (the $55 million dollar ‘lost’ sale is a funny listen and a serious lesson in to why the 7 touches sales method is dead IMO).

Scott is also the author of ‘Create Distinction’, a book I have just started reading on the back of his daily podcasts that I have really enjoyed.

Anyhow, both Scott’s podcast and what I have read of his book so far have made me come to the realisation that the traditional law firm approach of pursuing a customer is actually the wrong way of doing things. Instead of pursuing customers with great value adds and discounts, we need to get much better at attracting customers – to our areas of expertise and to our superior service delivery.

Become a person of interest
Timely Andrew Sobel – one of the greats in my opinion – also touched on the issue of attracting versus pursuing customers in his blog post last week: ‘C-Suite Strategies Part IV: Become an Irresistible Person of Interest’.

In the post Andrew asks:

What if, however, the situation were reversed, and senior executives were *drawn to you*? What if, instead of you waiting in the long line outside their office, they were waiting in a line to meet *you*?

Fair question: what indeed?

Andrew then sets out six ‘strategies’ (more like ‘tips’ in my opinion) on how to become a person of interest, that include:

Sharpen your expertise while expanding your knowledge breadth
Develop your thought leadership
Be seen as someone who is at the crossroads of the marketplace
Become a person with interests
Build an eclectic network
Develop, manifest, and communicate your core beliefs and values

Something to think about this week then: would you prefer to be attracting or pursuing customers?

As always though, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.

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Pitching: ‘Show me don’t tell me’ – is video tendering the future?

Happy New Year to all and welcome to 2018!

One of the more interesting articles I read over the holiday period profiled a Dutch company called Pitchsome.

Heard of them?

Maybe, but I doubt many have.

But they may just end up being a catalyst for of one of the biggest changes to the legal industry in 2018 – namely, how we tender for work in the future.

Under the tagline, “Show, Don’t Tell,” Pitchsome’s business model is a simple one: Show me how your product works in a video and don’t write reams and reams of marketing bluff and expect me to read it in order for me find out what you can do for me/help me fix my problem.

Supporting this business model, the article states that:

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index says video will account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2019.

And that got me thinking:

80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2019 will be Visual Networking + pretty much 100% of Government and 70+% of ASX Top100 companies have legal panels in place

so, how long will it be before these government departments/agencies and companies decide to replace the long and tedious word/excel document tender responses with video tenders that ask law firms to:

profile key team members,
white-board how the law firm can assist the client,
evidence how Legal Project Management can be used,
visually explain the steps in the pricing,
have client referee testimonials,
have video of the pro-bono and community activities the firm is involved in, and
have other examples of how the value adds being offered are being implemented by other clients in the tender’s industry sector?

Will never happen I’m hearing many in Australia reading this say. “It’s not professional”. “It’s nothing short an advert”, etc., etc.

But I’m left feeling: what, just what, would have happen to the industry if those of us who started down this path in 2008 (and those of you who were involved know exactly what I’m talking about) continued the journey?

It very well may have been disruptive. And that word is a real catchphrase at the moment.

So maybe, just maybe, we will be seeing video tendering by the end of 2019 – and that leaves me asking: what are you doing now to make sure you can met this need?

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Survey: The role pricing specialists play [or don’t] in RFP responses

Last week the USA’s J Johnson Executive Search, Inc and the UK’s Totum published their combined ‘RFP Survey Responses: U.S. and U.K. Data 2016‘.

A fairly evenly distributed demographic of large (defined as being 600+ lawyers), mid-sized (defined as being 100-600 lawyers) and small (up to 100 lawyers, for the U.S. only) law firm respondents, insights from the survey include time spent responding to RFPs, persons within firms charged with project managing responses, as well as tools and expertise made available to responding teams, in both the U.S. and the U.K.

As with most surveys of this nature however, it is the role that pricing plays that typically grabs my attention and given this survey’s combined U.S. and U.K. perspective even more so in this case.

Given ongoing market pressures, it should surprise no one that responses of “strong” from the U.S. (58%) and the U.K. (64%) to the question of what current “price pressure” for proposal & RFPs were fairly similar.

A little more surprising to me was the difference in responses between the U.S. (40%) and the U.K. (60%) to the question “when developing proposals and RFPs, I have easy access to” the answer was “pricing guides/professionals“.

Now don’t get me wrong, even these days I think it is particularly progressive and somewhat comforting to know that 60% of my colleagues in the U.K. have access to some sort of “pricing guide/professional”.

Until, that is, you get to see who actually gets to sign-off (i.e., the “decision maker”) on the all important issue of pricing in RFPs in the U.K.. Here, and I kid you not, the response in the U.K. of “pricing specialist” (that same person who 60% claim to have some form of access to – either via guides or in person) was 5%.

I think that is worth repeating – 5%.

Put into context, that means in the U.K. pricing in your RFP is more likely to be signed off by Marketing & BD (9%) or Finance (14%). Indeed, in the U.K., “It varies” is likely to have more of a say on final pricing in the RFP response than the so-called pricing specialist.

I’m not so sure why the results of this particular survey so surprise me. After all, time and time again survey results show that we typically say one thing about pricing, but do quite another.

What I will say though is this: if you have access to a pricing specialist, and pricing by your pricing specialist is being determined in 5% or less of your RFP responses, my guess is going to be one of two things: (a) you have no idea if you are making money from your RFP “wins”, or (b) more likely, you are leaving money on the table big time!

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* images should be enlargeable, apologies if they appear a little blurred.