Keys to Understanding the Needs of Clients and Prospects
In addition to asking clients and prospective clients the right questions in
the right way, you must be able to hear the answers—in all their
manifold meanings. This requires active, empathic listening that picks up on
the nuances of the conversation—the implicit as well as the explicit
content. Read on for more information. Ostensibly, you are listening in order
to discover the client’s legal needs, but such needs are
inextricably bound up with other acknowledged or unacknowledged
personal or organizational desires or necessities. Successful business
development is premised on an understanding of these differing
needs and the ability to discern them in client conversations.
Those needs include:
- Active Needs: These are the client’s
legal needs that you and your competitors may currently be servicing.
Typically, these are matters that the client has hired outside
counsel to address and they usually involve a preexisting condition.
Often, the client already has a price in mind when hiring. The
client also usually has a buying process in place such as a short
list, or a formal request for proposal (RFP) process, or competitive
presentations from firms being considered. This recurring and
possibly routine work can vary from the highly complex to commodity
legal matters.
These kinds of needs are often made explicit at
the outset. A franchiser, for example, may simply say, “We’re
about to move aggressively into your geographic area and we need
an experienced, reasonably-priced firm to handle all of our real
estate closings there.”
- Visionary Needs: These are legal needs that
the outside counsel is not aware of and which have not yet emerged
as active needs. Confidential and client-driven, visionary needs
might take the form of a refinancing, a bankruptcy, or an initial
public offering (IPO). The client’s buying criteria are
usually well-developed in advance of hiring outside counsel to
address these needs.
These needs may be stated more or less explicitly
by a long-time client. Prospects, however, may be reluctant to
reveal these needs quite so explicitly on first meeting and may
be quite circumspect, especially where the information is highly
sensitive from an investment point of view. The prospect may
simply ask you to talk generally about your firm’s experience
with large organizational and financial issues, or they may be
interested in your work with specific clients along those lines
without telling you exactly why they’re asking.
- Latent Needs: These are legal needs that clients
or prospects do not realize they have, yet you, as outside counsel,
clearly recognize. Typically, if you discover these needs in
a face-to-face meeting, the client will be less price-sensitive
to them than to active or visionary needs and may hire you at
the time these latent needs become apparent.
- Ego Needs: These are clients’ personal
or psychological needs, such as the need to feel that they have
been listened to. Buying your legal services is something that
they may enjoy and understanding their ego needs facilitates
the growth of the relationship. Behind what they explicitly say,
you may detect them saying, in effect,“ I need to feel
important,” or “I need to be consulted about major
decisions.”
- Organization or Company Added-Value Needs: These
are needs that you go the extra mile to meet even though the
actions that you take to identify and fulfill them are not billable.
Examples of such actions include helping them find people, money,
customers, suppliers, deals, referrals, and the like.
- Job Needs: Clients or prospects may need to
look good to their immediate superiors. These needs, if they
are met or exceeded, may result in a promotion, a bonus, or some
other recognition for the client. From the client’s point
of view, these may be the most important needs of all. In effect,
they are saying, “Make me look good” or “Your
legal work, done well, will get me a larger annual raise.”
- Implied Needs: These are needs that lie behind
another need. You must uncover them in your discussions with
clients. For example, a client asks you for a discount off your
standard rates. Does the client need to achieve lower costs,
or is there something else going on? Through further conversation,
you may discover that the real need is not economic but the client’s
need to show her superiors that she was able to win a concession
from you regarding fees. Or suppose a client asks you if you
have an office in Austin, Texas. Rather than trying to sell some
solution against an unknown need in Austin, you should find out
exactly what their needs in Austin are. The appropriate response
would be, “No, we do not have an office in Austin, Texas;
however, what are your needs there?”
As I have noted, these differing needs can be combined in ways
that require a sophisticated weighing of motives, business conditions,
and legal considerations. A new CEO contemplating such a visionary
need as a major restructuring may be as driven by an ego need to
take a bold stroke as by business necessity. An active need for
routine legal services may also be driven by the decision maker’s
job need to hold the line on costs.
Through solid research, careful preparation, acute interpersonal
skills, and active listening, you have by this point developed
a sense of the organization’s operating environment, the
personalities, and their decision-making styles. Any number of
things might happen next. You may meet with other key executives.
Ideally, you will soon be asked to prepare and present a formal
presentation, written, verbal, or both—the next steps in
the business development process.
More information about the book The
Lawyer’s Field Guide to Effective Business Development |
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