As always, the Legal Sales and Service Organization hosted a superb gathering of some of the top sales and service minds in the legal services industry on June 6-7 in Chicago, and as always, there were plenty of useful takeaways.

Here are some of the things that stuck in my mind from this year’s RainDance conference:

• The people at Design Build Legal are using their design-thinking experience gained from working with clients like Nordstrom to help law firms adapt to a fast-changing competitive landscape. With their help, some leading-edge firms are moving from “Here’s what we make – want to buy some?” to “What are your problems? We’ll design and deliver the solutions?” They facilitated a workshop in which audience members built models for solutions to actual problems presented by a senior legal officer at a Fortune 500 company in less than one hour – awesome.
  
• Data-masters at Intapp explained how marketing/sales professionals can help their firms to choose the right strategic direction, and get better buy-in from all key partners by focusing on key data that is available in most every firm. Loved a quote they presented by a managing partner: “If we have data [evidence] let’s use that to make decisions. But if all we have is opinions, then let’s go with mine.” Among many data “heuristics” they presented was the “Rule of 3” which says that a client is much more likely to stay and grow with a firm if that client is buying three or more types of services (litigation, corporate, real estate, etc.). They also revealed that clients who seek increasing discounts on bills are likely to jump ship soon if changes in service are not made.
• We learned from David Ackert of the Ackert Advisory that tracking data indicates that most prospects don’t become clients until an average of 14 impressions or touches are made (meetings, calls, content consumed, etc.). He also explained how important it is to have clear objectives for every interaction with a prospect prior to meeting or speaking with them. Thus, “winging it” is far less likely to produce a successful “impression” on which to build.

About the Author

John O. Cunningham is chair of the LSSO Editorial Board. He is a freelance writer, editor and marketing/communications consultant. Learn more here.