This week we’re thrilled to have a guest post from Maria Granovsky, who works with lawyers to help them generate business. She provides some great insight on not missing the “gold bricks” that are sometimes right at our feet. – Five Minute Law
Are you stumbling on gold bricks in your search for copper deposits?
“No one is litigating!” My friend, Emma, declared during a recent coffee chat I had with her. “I’m so sick of marketing, and networking, and keeping in touch, and being top-of-mind. All people want is compliance training.”
“Are you going to offer them compliance training?” I asked.
Emma harrumphed in irritation. “Maria. I. Am. A. Li-ti-ga-tor,” she enunciated each syllable.
“I know you’re a litigator,” I responded, fighting the urge to mimic her. “But I also know that, for most of your potential clients, litigation is a rare event. Which means that, if you’re going to stay wedded to being a pure litigator, you do have to keep marketing and doing all these other things you don’t much like in order to catch them at the precise moment when your services will be needed.”
I could see I had her attention now, so I continued. “Your potential clients are offering you an alternative – a way to get paid and become a trusted advisor at the same time. If you offer compliance training, you’ll showcase your expertise in this area, and you’ll be able to sprinkle your training with references to your litigation successes, all while getting paid! And it’s almost always easier to expand your service offerings for an existing client than acquiring a new client.”
Emma said nothing for a while. She squinted in concentration, and I could imagine the cogs whirring in her brain as she considered this new angle.
“You’re right!” she said at last. “This could be a very lucrative opportunity, and I’ve been throwing it away for months now.”
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Emma is a good example of a blindness we all experience from time to time. It’s not a visual blindness, but rather it’s our inability to perceive new ideas or opportunities because they don’t fit with what we’re concentrating on at that moment.
If we’re prone to this perception deficit, we can miss what our market is telling us, to our business’s detriment.
An easy way to overcome this perception deficit is to practice asking open-ended questions and listening to the answers. For example, if you know that new regulations will soon be imposed on the industry you serve, ask industry people what challenges they think they’ll be facing in implementing these new regs.
As an experienced professional, you probably already know some of the challenges that industry will be facing, but the people in the trenches may have a very different view of that pain that’s coming their way – a view that may afford you an opportunity to provide a service you didn’t know was needed.
There’s an added bonus to this strategy: by asking and being genuinely interested, you’ll leave your conversation partners knowing that they were heard and understood. And in today’s shouty world, where many of us feel like no one is listening, that’s a surefire way to make a lasting impression and keep yourself top-of-mind.
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Maria Granovsky, Ph.D., J.D., helps lawyers generate new business and get more clients with innovative business development strategies and high-impact copywriting.
In her work, she relies on her background as a scientist, a lawyer, a writing teacher, and an author. She has a Ph.D. in medical and molecular genetics from the University of Toronto and a law degree from Georgetown. While at Georgetown, she taught legal research and writing to J.D. and foreign L.L.M. students. A decade-long patent-litigation practice followed.
Maria has written scientific papers and book chapters, law review articles, and general interest articles (which appeared in HuffPo, Ladders, and Fast Company). She has written the copy for the websites of several law firms, and has advised many lawyers on content development. And she wrote and published a legal thriller.
Download her free guide, titled The One Thing That Will Transform Your Legal News Alerts Into New-Business Magnets here.
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