Do today's attorneys need to be better salespeople?
An interview with Tom Nener at Pinsent Masons
As Madonna famously sang, we are living in a material world and that includes lawyers! After all, there is little point in having a law firm with an array of expert lawyers who provide phenomenal service to clients if you don't have any clients.
Whether your job title includes sales or not, it's important to recognise that we all need to be better salespeople - and in a law firm where career progression depends almost entirely on revenue generation, it's a skill worth polishing.
We asked Tom Nener at Pinsent Mason what advice he would give young IP attorneys who wanted to become better salespeople:
"I always think that the crucial factor is in recognising the basis on which you are trying to sell to a client. What are the buying factors and metrics that they care about? By what criteria will they judge them?
There are 3 main elements to consider from the client perspective:
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Price - which is a relatively easy thing to judge
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Good quality - this can be tricky. The quality of the service they receive is client perception and can really only be accurately assessed when it comes to enforcing your IP rights some time after registration. So, it's difficult for clients to assess the quality of work that you might offer versus another firm.
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Service - clients can judge the service and the service level that they receive from a law firm with relative ease and it is something that law firms can use as a differentiator.
In my opinion, this is where an IP Management System like RightHub comes into its own. Because it is transformative in a number of ways.
Yes, it helps to reduce workload from both the law firm and client side. And it reduces some of the costs for the client which can also be one of the buying factors that are important to them but fundamentally, it changes the type of service that they are receiving from their advisors.
That is the critical element that clients really want and lawyers need to sell to them - offer them an improved level of service and a different service than the one they've currently got. It's difficult to offer that without the right tools to support it."
From RightHub’s perspective, this advice aligns strongly with both the experience of co-founder and CCO, Jeppe Hudtloff Viinberg and the company ethos which centers the client experience and the collaborative working relationship that we want to help build between them.
To see how the end-to-end IP management system developed by RightHub might enable you to transform the service that you offer to your clients, get in touch here.