Small Law Firms

Power Niche Marketing: Why Should I Hire You?

If you don’t have a strong, powerful, unreserved, confident answer to this question, you have completely blown it.

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Get ready for your business pitch.

Pitching for legal work — or any kind of work — has a lot of subtleties of course. This includes establishing trust and rapport and much more — but ultimately you have to be able to answer a simple question that the prospective client is asking you overtly or impliedly:

WHY SHOULD I HIRE YOU?

If you don’t have a strong, powerful, unreserved, confident answer to this question, you have completely blown it. And I mean completely blown it.

That is what the prospect wants to know. That is what the prospect wants to take away from the meeting and if you don’t have an answer to that question you have missed your chance.

So now I ask you a question: When you prepare yourself for a pitch, do you sit down with a colleague and have the colleague ask you flat out:

WHY SHOULD I HIRE YOU?

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And then – play-acting — do you answer it? I don’t mean saying to your colleague, “what you would say,” but actually answering it exactly the way you would say this to the prospect when the prospect asks you this question at the pitch.

If you don’t do that, why on Earth not?

I guarantee that if you do the foregoing play-act, you will be disappointed in how awkward you sound at first. But if you play-act a few times, or a bunch of times, or even a lot of times, you will be impressed with yourself and how incredibly good you sound.

And of even more importance, you might be puzzled at first and wonder why the prospect would in fact hire you. Maybe at first you can’t think of a reason and you will have to really think about it until you do come up with a reason.

In any case, without belaboring this point too much, one way or another you need an answer to this question that is — as I said — strong, powerful, unreserved, and confident.

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You may be thinking at this point, I have been to a bunch of pitches and no one has ever actually asked me this specific question, so, Bruce, what are you talking about here?

That is a good question and there are two answers:

The first answer is that the prospect is thinking about this question even if she isn’t actually asking.

The second answer is that the process of figuring out how to answer this question is going to underlie and overlay your pitch meeting anyway. And if you have a strong answer it will come out one way or another during the pitch and resonate strongly to your benefit.

So, to conclude, never — ever — go to a pitch without a great answer to the question:

WHY SHOULD I HIRE YOU?

Bruce_StachenfeldBruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With more than 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

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