Listening is a two-way street (but someone needs to engage first)
Listening to your clients and prospects by providing them relevant information that gets them closer to hiring you might seem like “day one, week one” stuff, so why do we still (on occasions) get it so wrong. Content Pilot’s Deborah McMurray and Keith Wewe take stock.
Listening is a two-way street (but someone needs to engage first)
Listening to your clients and prospects by providing them relevant information that gets them closer to hiring you might seem like “day one, week one” stuff, so why do we still (on occasions) get it so wrong. Content Pilot’s Deborah McMurray and Keith Wewe take stock.
In an article twenty or more years ago a New York Times writer said that we receive more than 10,000 messages a day. This was before smart phones, social media and the digital world as we know it.
As brand strategists and creators, we have quoted this many times – always following with, “The only way to manage this blizzard of activity is to consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously tune out those messages that don’t make it into our short- and long-term memory.”
Today the number of daily messages that bombard us is estimated at 30,000, with up to one-third of those being digital advertising. To preserve our sanity, we have an unconscious screening process, and only about 100 of these ads actually make it onto our attention wall. (That’s a paltry one percent.)
This unconscious screening is agnostic – our brain’s filtering process doesn’t sort the messages into categories, such as business, personal, family, fun, fashion, food, travel, client or prospect before it discards them. In a December 2018 Scientific American article, Steve Ayan wrote: “Research on the unconscious mind has shown that the brain makes judgments and decisions quickly and automatically. It continuously makes predictions about future events.”
Ayan continues: “According to the theory of the ‘predictive mind,’ consciousness arises only when the brain’s implicit expectations fail to materialize. Higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex can occur without consciousness. The regions of the brain responsible for the emotions and motives, not the cortex, direct our conscious attention.”
Why start a business article about listening with the science of our brains?
Because you must recognize that you are being ignored. (Ouch, we know.) Even important things you say, write and send are going unnoticed. And it means that you are also ignoring the messages your clients and prospects are sending. You can’t help it – nor can they.
So – we’re at an impasse. What to do?!
As professionals who serve a successful set of clients, we must challenge ourselves to work harder to connect and meaningfully communicate. And what we say, write and send must be smarter and more on-point to rise above the noise. Even how we communicate needs to be more attentive, targeted, polished and consciously not a timewaster. (When was the last time you asked, “Will this communication waste the recipient’s time?”)
Back to the title of this article – someone has to engage first. And, BTW, it’s you.
We have identified three fixable areas where listening to your clients (and others) can improve. And, with a few adjustments, we can help your communications have a chance of landing on your clients’ attention walls.
A. Knowing what the “short-list test” is and passing it.
Simply, for professionals, the short-list test consists of demonstrating your past experience that is relevant to what clients need today. It sounds easy, but only a small fraction of lawyers and other B2B professionals do this well. The most accessible tool to prove that you are listening to what clients need today is your firm website, with the highest trafficked pages typically being lawyer biographies.
There are two parts to this:
1) Displaying your specific expertise by answering the questions, what have you done? For whom and in what industry? Where/when did it happen? Currencies and amounts at risk? And describe the outcome to the extent your bar associations and governing organisations allow.
2) The second critical part of this is “…relevant to what clients need today.” Too many lawyers fail to curate their experience lists through a relevancy lens. Legal careers shift out of opportunity or necessity, and your website biography and practice/sector pages must be updated to reflect the work you want to do today and for the next 24 months. Say, “thanks for the good old days” and delete the now-irrelevant experience on your bio and all other pages that apply to you.
Know that your “dead” experience erodes your relevancy and dilutes the power of your current strengths. The more irrelevant your experience is to your buyer, the more that buyer’s brain can swiftly tune you out.
But wait – there is a third part that taps neatly into the region of the brain that directs conscious attention and motivation. Remember, this is where emotions and motives live.
“Open the cultural walls of your firm and sit down with each other to share some stories. Tell your story. You’ll learn that you have far more in common than you imagined - and you and your firm will be richer for it.”
“Open the cultural walls of your firm and sit down with each other to share some stories. Tell your story. You’ll learn that you have far more in common than you imagined - and you and your firm will be richer for it.”
In the early 1990s and for more than 20 years, research studies were conducted with B2B buyers of legal services. Year after year, person after person, the researchers found that buyers made their buying decision in two layers:
When forming their short-list, buyers were evaluating the firms/lawyers in a technical or intellectual way, identifying attributes they could check off a list. But when they were choosing the one lawyer or firm to hire from their short list, they made an emotional decision – do I like this person, do I trust them, are they relatable and accessible, will they have my back?
We have seen this at work our entire legal marketing careers: the most technically qualified candidate sometimes loses the competition. Why? One reason is that they failed to emotionally connect with the human or humans doing the choosing. This connection can be facilitated in effective ways by your website, other materials you produce – and, of course, via virtual and in-person meetings.
Lesson A: Listen to your clients and prospects by providing them relevant information that gets them closer to hiring you. Pass their shortlist tests with flying colours. Then show them how you will serve and care for them as people who have personal and professional goals that truly matter to you.
B. Understanding that “self-serve” as a part of the lawyer/client relationship is here to stay.
Self-serve enters into the lawyer/prospect and lawyer/client relationship in several ways. From the prospect’s standpoint, they want to learn about you on their terms and timeframes, not yours. In recent interviews with corporate counsel, they expressed a clear desire for their law firms to provide greater self-service access to data and materials that would help them do their jobs better. They said that few firms are doing this and that they must proactively reach out to their law firms and ask specific questions to get the answers they need (and they often view this as a timewaster). They’d rather start with a resource where they could find a trusted answer themselves and then follow up with their lawyer in a future phase.
Unless a prospect is actively in play for new counsel, their behaviour suggests – especially after the pandemic and social distancing – that they don’t want to engage with you in real time by phone, Zoom or Teams, or in person. But this doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested in discovering what you might uniquely offer. Create a sector or practice-specific portal with rich, current, curated information that prospects may not otherwise be able to acquire. Or create a microsite that targets specific types of buyers. At the very least, work harder on your existing website to identify and publish content that answers your prospects’ questions. Practice by practice, you should already know who your prospects are.
Lesson B: Listen to your prospects and clients and meet them where they are. By definition, a self-service portal is a website that offers information and resources to help users find answers and resolve their issues. If you don’t have the resources to invest in this technology, at least invest in the concept: flip your current content on its head and rewrite/redesign content that is engaging, memorable and unique. Find creative content delivery mechanisms and distribution channels to reach the ones who want to self-serve.
C. Believing that diversity, equity and inclusion is a driver of the soul of your firm that will impact the success of your firm and its people.
The largest global law firms are investing heavily in DEI programs, recruiting, management and education. Some leaders of these firms are openly and fervently committed, with many reinforcing their “top-down” commitment to it. However, by their actions, numerous firms of all sizes are reducing DEI to its lowest common denominator – counting faces: women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and potentially others.
Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Rule (now) 4.0 has done a remarkable job in a very short time of surfacing as a credible, thoughtful platform where firm chairs and managing partners can band together in solidarity and support. According to Diversity Lab’s website, 118 “major” firms have signed on to “… increase and sustain a diverse and inclusive workforce in our firms and beyond in the legal profession.”
The website highlights the collective outcomes and progress so far: https://www.diversitylab.com/mansfield-rule-4-0/
But, as a Law360 Pulse snapshot highlighted in 2021, diverse lawyers are still walking out the door and the recent diversity hiring hasn’t seen much of a net gain in total numbers. From 2019-2020, diversity numbers barely crept up and worse (as reported by Bob Ambrogi in his LawSites Blog), “In the seven years since 2014, the percentage of minority attorneys in law firms rose just four points, from 14.1% to 18.1%. The numbers of partners and equity partners rose even less, from 8% to 10.8% of all partners and from 7.1% to 9.7% of equity partners”.
And we are still counting faces, which places the focus on lawyers’ differences rather than identifying and spotlighting our beautiful points of similarity and intersection. We applaud the 118 law firms and the other non-Mansfield Rule firms whose leaders are investing in improving their statistics. But we believe that values are lived from the ground up and that shared values create the true culture of an organization.
How can firms truly change their from-the-ground-up culture?
By fostering a safe environment where life-experience stories can be shared and respectfully heard is one way. It takes a lot of courage to share a story about a difficult history; something that was harder for you than others, suffering a trauma or illness, struggling with a learning difference, being bullied or hurt by others. Few, if any of our world’s highest performers had it easy – we hear countless stories of them overcoming what seemed like insurmountable odds. But they did it.
Lesson C: Listen to your employees and to your clients who care deeply about the true power of DEI. Don’t assume that your top-down efforts are enough. Don’t assume that your statistics are contributing to lawyers’ sense of belonging. Listen to the high-performing diverse lawyers you have hired and other colleagues who may not “look” diverse but have remarkable stories to tell. Open the cultural walls of your firm and sit down with each other to share some stories. Tell your story. You’ll learn that you have far more in common than you imagined, and you and your firm will be richer for it.
Content Pilot LLC, a strategy, design, content and technology agency that serves high-performing law firms in the U.S. and abroad.