Biglaw, Bloomberg, In-House Counsel, Small Law Firms

What's Possible: How To Get Business In 30 Seconds Or Less (Give Or Take Two Years)

Maybe you dread making "cold calls" -- but it's far easier than you think to turn "cold" conversations into warm ones, according to columnist David Perla.

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David Perla

David Perla

If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance that you dislike the idea of business development. Most lawyers do. In the lawyer’s mind, business development means sales, and sales means cold-calling cheap leads for Rio Rancho Estates, with Alec Baldwin chewing you out at the blackboard. In short, it’s not a pretty picture.

If that’s your mindset, I’m speaking to you in this column. And I’m here to tell you this: first of all, yes, it’s true. Anyone who wishes to be effective in selling their services—even highly sophisticated lawyers—must have the ability to “cold call” prospective buyers in some sense. But second and more importantly, it’s far easier than you may think to turn “cold” conversations into warm ones.

Let me explain, by way of my own experience. Before I came to Bloomberg Law, I co-founded a legal outsourcing company called Pangea3. About a decade ago, vacationing with my family in Florida, I found myself at a holiday meal with the head of litigation at a global bank. He was the ideal prospect for our emerging company, and naturally I was eager for an opportunity to speak with him. I asked if I could call him at a later date. When I made that call and explained who I was, his first statement to me was plain and simple: “I’m never going to send my document review to India, but I’ll happily help you navigate our organization for other opportunities.”

He was not unkind about it, but from a sales perspective, his message was as cold as it gets. In other words – he’d be a coach, but never a buyer. Nearly two years later, just a few months after Lehman Brothers collapsed, he called me and said, “I know I told you that I’d never do doc review in India. Well, I’m under orders to cut our legal spend by 25 percent, and the only way to do that is to lower the cost of doc review. So never has arrived. Can you come meet with me and my team?”

I mention it here because with his help, the global bank that he worked for eventually became Pangea3’s largest client.

In that one anecdote—a cold conversation that turned into a warm and mutually beneficial relationship—lie many of the lessons about sales that I have learned in my career. Without exception, these lessons are relevant to lawyers, many of whom have great potential to develop business if they could get past their unfounded aversion to it. Many simply haven’t been instructed how to go about it from anyone other than Alec Baldwin. This is what I would tell them:

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Turn cold into warm in less than a minute: For most lawyers, the trouble isn’t identifying who their best prospects are. You don’t need to steal the Glengarry leads when you can search for general counsel in your target industry on LinkedIn. The trouble is opening up conversations with the targets you’ve already identified. When I approached the client prospect in Florida, I had it relatively easy. I had met his wife earlier in the evening, and so I asked her to make the introduction. She did, making the conversation far warmer than it would have been if I had approached out of the blue. Mutual acquaintances—from those you’ve just met to anyone in your network—can be helpful in creating warm introductions, and in most cases are eager to assist.

Of course, many times there is no mutual acquaintance. It can seem an arduous task to approach without an introduction, but the only thing it takes to turn a cold call into a warm one is a single commonality. Recently, we wanted to speak with a large Midwestern firm, but our team was unable to connect with the right people. Searching the firm’s website, I noticed that a member of the Executive Committee had gone to Penn Law, which I attended. I used this single commonality in an introductory email, and ten minutes later the committee member wrote me back. We spoke by phone the next day, and he began opening doors for Bloomberg Law at the firm.

Be genuine: Law school connections aren’t the only ones that warm up conversations. Common sports interests. Vacation spots. Children’s activities. Foods and restaurants. Even religion. Any commonality can work, and the more personal the better (obviously using judgment as to what is appropriate in the context of a specific conversation). Only one thing is out of bounds: topics in which you don’t have a genuine interest. For that reason, I rarely bond with people professionally over my undergraduate experience, which I feel less connected to, as opposed to law school, which has been the foundation of many of my professional relationships.

Follow up: Following up as promised is important for the health of any relationship, and it’s no different in business development. After the litigation head told me that he would never use my services, I accepted his response but asked if I could follow up with him every six months. That was April 2007. By December 2008, the financial world had collapsed and my prospect faced a mandate to cut his expenses by 25 percent. Because I had been following up with him as advertised—neither calling too frequently nor fading away—he invited me in to pitch his business.

Look for opportunities to build relationships: Developing business is less about sales tactics than simply being interested in other people. When they sense that you are, you have the trust in place to grow your relationship. I once knew an executive who truly cared about his bank’s public service effort to maintain neighborhood schools. Every year, the bank would invite its law firm partners to join it for a service day. Many associates, but few partners, came to these events. But some of my most valuable time with that executive—from both a personal and business perspective—came when I spent two hours with him painting a school building, talking about our children and our family life.

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I wasn’t thinking about making a sale. I was outside, contributing to the community, enjoying someone’s company, and talking about our favorite things in the world – our kids. It was almost enough to give business development a good name.

David Perla is the President of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal division. Perla plays a key leadership role in the continued growth of the company’s legal business, which includes legal, legislative, and regulatory news analysis and the flagship Bloomberg Law technology platform. You can reach David at dPerla@bna.com and follow him on Twitter at @davidperla.

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