I was flicking through Peter Rush’s columns on Legal Marketing the other day when I came across this passage which I thought worth sharing:
Build relationships before you tender and stop fantasising with your partners’ cash. Would you award a tender for millions of pounds to people you had never met or worked with before? Of course not. Firms who enter into a costly bid process for legal tenders publicly advertised because there is a requirement to do so are nearly always wasting their partners’ money and the business development team’s time and patience. Incumbents win eight times out of ten and when they don’t their replacements will know who they are and almost certainly have already successfully supplied legal services to one of the key decision makers.
A sobering thought, whichever line of business you’re in. Yes, it’s exciting when a tender from a previously unassociated multinational lands on your desk. But is it worthwhile responding to it, or would you be better off sticking it in the shredder and directing your attentions on other less exciting, but more attainable goals?
Strangers, perhaps, rarely ever dole out sweeties. So what’s the answer?
If Peter Rush is to be believed, there’s no substitute for networking platforms and growing relationships organically after seizing whatever low-level fruit’s on offer.
I was in Australia recently, where I met up with an old friend who runs a marketing services company. His view has changed considerably over the years. He used to believe it was all about being better – winning pitches with original ideas and platforms at the bleeding edge of the communications matrix. Now he bothers a lot less about all that fancy stuff, preferring a strategy that is all about reliability, proven experience and client testimonials. ‘At the end of the day the potential client doesn’t want to be different. They’re scared of that. All they want to know is that their partner is a safe pair of hands, so they can go home unworried, forget all about it and give the dog its supper.’
A famous business adage used to be ‘No-one ever got fired for hiring IBM’. Does this thought still hold currency, I wonder?
