|
EVENTS
IMC-Oregon
Get it Write: Creating & Publishing Strategy to Grow Your Practice
Michael McLaughlin,
Guerrilla Consulting
10/21/08
Mult. Athletic Club
Portland, OR
www.imc-oregon.org
- - - - - - - - -
Legal Marketing Association
Inside the Mind of the
Client
Kent Zimmerman,
The Wicker Park Group
2 Locations, 2 Dates
*10/29/08
Seattle:
1111 Third Avenue
*10/30/08
Portland
1211 SW Fifth Avenue
www.Legalmarketing.org/events
- - - - - - - - -
SMPS - Oregon Chapter
Is the Sky Falling?
Economic Forecast
Breakfast
10/30/08
Ballroom River Place Hotel Portland
www.smpsoregon.org
|
 Book of the Month
I've just pulled David Maister's True Professionalism off my bookshelf and begun to re-read it. "What is true professionalism? His answer is clear: It is believing passionately in what you do, never compromising your standards and values, and caring about your clients, your people and your own career." Like all of Maister's books, this roadmap to professionalism and professional success is a worthy read. | |
|
|
Are You Telling or Teaching?
Empower Excellence with Masterful Teaching
"To relate in detail; to give utterance to," is Webster's definition of tell, while teach means "to cause to know something; to cause to know how." Telling then, requires nothing on the part of the audience. In fact, it doesn't require an audience at all. Teaching, by contrast, requires learning. Thus, teaching requires both a teacher and a learner.
Why does this matter? If you're in the habit of telling without assuring learning, you might be diminishing your effectiveness in multiple ways:
- Your assistant requires multiple instructions, when one slightly longer and more thoughtful discussion would have conveyed your intent fully the first time.
- Your assistant makes mistakes based on misunderstanding, requiring corrected or additional instruction.
- Your associates don't gain all they can from your experience and expertise, limiting and delaying their growth.
- Your associates experience unnecessary frustration, causing retention and profits to suffer.
- You and your colleagues don't exchange knowledge fully, limiting your ability to collaborate and leverage your individual expertise for the greater good of the firm.
Is it the responsibility of your assistants, associates and colleagues to listen and learn when you tell? Of course. However, it is perhaps your responsibility and most certainly in your best interest to increase the odds of their learning by improving your teaching techniques. How can you do that? Thoughtful telling, powerful questioning and active listening are fundamental to good teaching. Apply them along with - and as part of - the following three techniques and you'll greatly improve your teaching effectiveness:
Combine visual and verbal instructions to increase the odds of effectively conveying information. Thus, if your assistant or associate sees you when you provide instructions or if you include a diagram or some kind of visual guide with instructions, your intent will be clearer and more powerful. Is this necessary for every interaction? Of course not, but keep it in mind for your most important instructions or first-time instructions for a new task or project. Similarly, if your associate observes you delivering instructions to an assistant or an opening statement in court, he or she will learn more than if you simply tell him or her how it's done. Your behavior is your most potent form of combining visual and verbal instruction, so be conscious of it. Be sure the message you convey with your behavior is the one you want others to learn.
Provide experiential learning to speed and deepen learning. Creating the opportunity to learn with all available senses, known as experiential learning, is the most effective method of teaching. It requires interaction with the learner. Thus if you prepare in person with your associate for a client meeting, attend the meeting together and debrief at the close of the meeting, your associate will learn more fully and rapidly than if you just tell him or her about part or all of the meeting process and/or its outcomes. Again, you must judge when this is appropriate and cost effective, but do so with the knowledge that it will have the fastest and greatest impact on your associate's knowledge base.
Demonstrate your willingness to learn. We all have the opportunity to be master teachers and learners. The key is to do both consciously, to teach and learn what we choose and to recognize that teaching is not limited to a top down hierarchy. We can learn equally well from our assistants, our associates, our colleagues and our seniors, if we allow ourselves. Applied to your partnership, if you share research both visually and verbally, ask questions of each other and actively listen to multiple layers of seniority in the course of preparing for a sales meeting with a prospective client, you can learn more fully about your prospect's firm and industry and about your own colleagues' experience and expertise.
Whether you measure results by satisfaction, time, cost or revenue, it's worth the effort to elevate your telling to the level of masterful teaching. |
Client Sources: The Path to Your Door
Do you know how your best clients arrive at your door? You might be thinking, "Why does it matter, as long as they're here?" If you track your client sources, however, you'll know where to most effectively spend your marketing resources - your money, but more importantly, your time - to get not just more clients, but to replicate your best clients.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you determine the source(s) of your best clients:
- Who are my top three clients by total revenue?
- How or from whom did I acquire them?
- If different from #1, who are my top three clients by hourly rate?
- How or from whom did I acquire them?
- If different from #1 and #2, who are my top three clients by ease or enjoyment of working together?
- How much time do I spend, on average, on marketing every week?
- Where/how do I spend my marketing time?
- What are my results?
With the answers to these questions, you can pinpoint the source(s) of your best clients, focus your efforts on targeting those areas, and stop wasting your time and money on non-productive activities. |
Audit for Success
A marketing audit will help you identify how you and others in your firm are spending your marketing resources. More importantly, it will help you identify the source(s) of your very best clients. See Client Sources: The Path to Your Door, above. For a free marketing questionnaire or to discuss a marketing audit for yourself or your firm, contact me at 503.234.5044 or josmith@josmithassociates.com. | |
|
|
|
