Don't Blow The Prospecting
Meeting
You know you need to put your
best foot forward at a prospecting meeting. If only someone could tell you which foot
to put out first. This article, 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 three 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 many a 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.
In this article I will focus on how to start a prospecting meeting
on the right foot.
Displaying Your Chops
The most common initial
approach used by the partners participating in the workshop was to
find a way immediately 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 Senior Counsel was dealing with
and ask a series of probing factual questions to try resolve the
legal issue on the spot.
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 I was. 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, the very
first thing that needed to happen at the prospecting meeting was for
the partner to develop a rapport with the Senior Counsel.
Remember, the Senior Counsel didn't want to be there in the first
place. Also
important, was for the partner to uncover the role the Senior
Counsel could play in the partner's business development efforts.
These two objectives are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they
can be accomplished through the same approach: inquiry. The
partner can ask the Senior Counsel about himself and his career.
The questions can be casual. "What are you doing these days at
Consumer Products Company? Did you always do that?" And
the partner can react to the responses. "That's an interesting
area of business" or "I hear there have been lots of developments in
that area of the law." This kind of inquiry and
responsiveness builds rapport by
making the Senior Counsel feel he is being taken into account as a
person. It can also ultimately help uncover whether the Senior Counsel
is a decision-maker
in law firm hiring or whether the Senior Counsel is someone who can
give the partner access to, and influence, a decision-maker.
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.
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