“Client At The Core” by Bruce Marcus & August Aquila

Today I submitted the following book review to my friends at ALM Media. No telling if they’ll publish it, but the loyal readers of Adam Smith, Esq. deserve a look no matter what

Full disclosure: I count Bruce Marcus a friend (although I have never met or spoken to August Aquila). Even if I’d never heard of Bruce, the book is still terrific.

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Think that "marketing is just common sense?" Think again;
it’s both a discipline and an art. Aquila and Marcus will guide your
hand at both.

This
book is full of cogent, jargon-free, and street-smart things to say
about what it’s really like to try to market professional services.
An unusual blend of clear and lucidly stated theory about marketing,
and real-world insights into obstacles clients can pose—not to mention
the high barrier of internal resistance that "professionals" instinctively
erect when asked to be marketers—this book belongs on your desk if
you’re facing the complexities of marketing for a law firm in the 21^st Century.

A major theme of Client
at the Core is that as a result of both the increasing importance
of technology and the reaction to the corporate and accounting scandals
of the past several years, the world lawyers face has changed and so
has the way they must practice. Where once the profession was at the
core of the practice, now the client is at the core of the practice. We
have come a long way from the days of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who (apocryphally
or otherwise) is reported to have said that “half the time, the best
advice a lawyer can give is to tell his client he’s a damned fool.”

This “client-centric” orientation has both a positive side (delivering
compelling value in clients’ eyes) and a negative side (accommodating
the client as a default choice), which a clear-eyed law firm leader
needs to constantly re-evaluate with discernment and sensitivity to
striking the proper balance. The authors provide a roadmap.

Who are Aquila and Marcus?

Aquila was inducted into the Accounting Marketing Association’s Hall
of Fame in 2003 and is a leading consultant on M&A and succession
planning, primarily in the accounting industry.

Marcus is the author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles
on marketing, and publishes the Marcus Letter on Professional Services
Marketing, with a worldwide readership of nearly 25,000.

The authors pose the challenge of professional services marketing
upfront, and make it clear how radically it differs from conventional
methods of selling a product. “If you sell me a vacuum cleaner, the
vacuum cleaner stays and you go. If you sell me a service, you stay
to perform that service.” The dilemma gets worse.

For example, whereas you might not be thinking of buying a motorcycle,
an effective marketer can plant that seed in your brain; but no one
has ever woken up and thought, “What I need today is a really well-drawn
contract.” Moreover, when the day comes that a potential client does
need a contract, your asserting “our firm writes better contracts” is
an utter waste of breath. How, then to distinguish your firm?

Many firms make the mistake of starting with a wish-list of objectives
or an inventory of their skills, and then try to map those objectives
and skills onto a hypothetical market that may or may not exist. Instead,
start with a concrete marketing plan, consisting of: (a) a definition
of your target market; (b) a definition of your firm; (c) a definition
of the marketing tools you will use; and (d) concrete expectations
about how you will manage those tools.

Defining the firm is surely the hardest part. If you run your practice
predominantly with the needs of the firm in mind, you are engaging
in “an exercise in imminent disaster.” Rather, you must shape your
firm to meet the needs of its prospective clientele, which is “an exercise
in growth.”

Reflect again for a moment on the book’s title: The single most important
message is build a client-centric marketing culture at your
firm. As Peter Drucker wrote: “The aim of marketing is to know and
understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and
sells itself.” That culture rests on several supporting legs, including
the heartfelt, genuine, and enduring commitment of senior firm management
to the marketing effort; an understanding that nonbillable hours spent
on marketing are an investment in the future of the firm; and the employment
of top-flight marketing professionals within a formal structure at
the firm.

Then and only then, with that predicate laid, can you deploy the classic
tools of marketing. Helpfully, Aquila & Marcus outline the uses
and abuses of these tools, including:

• articles
• the firm brochure
• public relations and dealing with the media
• advertising
• networking
• seminars
• newsletters
• direct mail; and
• the website.

For professionals whose livelihood depends upon effective written
and spoken communication, lawyers are, in general, atrocious in dealing
with the press. “When in doubt, ‘no comment,’” seems to be the operative
mantra, but this approach guarantees that the story reported in the
media will omit whose point of view? Yours. Aquila & Marcus specify
precisely how lawyers go wrong with the press:

• Reporters can’t be trusted: No, their job is just different
  than yours. The more often you work with a reporter, the more likely
  they’ll get it right
• Mergers, moves, and hiring laterals are news: Only to your
  mother.
• Advertising and PR are the same: They could not be more
  different: With advertising you pay expressly to put a pre-packaged
  message out there; with PR, a third party creates the message for
  free and with minimal input from you.
• Everyone reads the article as closely as you. Not a chance. Unless
  you “say what you’re going to say, say it, and say what you said,” don’t
  count on your message surviving translation.

While the first two-thirds of the book is devoted to marketing strategy,
tactics, and guidelines, the authors realize that the best-laid plans
are for naught if the firm is just paying lip-service to marketing. The
patient, in other words, must actually be willing to take the prescription.

So the final third of the book changes gears.

It addresses the overall cultural and managerial mindset, the gestalt, required
if the marketing effort is to gain meaningful traction within the firm. What
will it take?

• A more corporate managerial model, complete with CEO, CFO,
  and the equivalent of a board of directors. And while you’re at
  it, “overturn the anachronism that there is no hospitality in a law
  firm for a nonlawyer.”

• Understand that you’re managing knowledge workers, not drones. As
  the authors put it, your professionals must:
• know what the firm is about—its objectives;
• know how the firm is trying to accomplish those objectives;
• know why, and most importantly
• care why.
• Recruit and hire the best; provide training immediately; demand
  the best and be frankly intolerant of the rest; and demonstrate a
  sincere conviction to performance feedback.

• Make sure your internal communications are functioning and
  robust. Don’t assume that just because you sent the memo, everyone
  actually “got it.”

• Pay for what you want people to do. Use your compensation
  system to shape your firm’s culture rather than having your firm’s
  culture shape your compensation system.

• If you are serious about providing compelling value to your clients, abandon
  the billable hour. Heresy, you say? Consider:
• The billable hour begins life with “cost of production,” and
  is divorced from “value to client.”
• A focus on billable hours rewards individual effort and not collaborative
  team performance.
• Hourly billing shortchanges investments in the firm itself, including
  recruitment and development.
• Lastly, it encourages a technician’s mentality, which
  is a world away from that of an outstanding client service professional.

Finally, one must ask, does all of this sound too mercantile, too
expedient, “unprofessional?”

To the contrary: By refocusing firms on the client at the core, Aquila & Marcus
restore the missing ingredient lost in preoccupation over trends such
as globalization and consolidation, the ever-increasing importance
of “profits per partner,” and the regulatory-not-principled approach
to firm governance exemplified by Sarbanes-Oxley. They call for a
return to the highest standards of the profession:

“What seems to have been lost in recent years is a measure of the
independence of the professional that was so powerful in building the
professions in at least the first half of the twentieth century. As
recent events have shown, it’s been supplanted by accommodation to
the clients’ wishes. The culmination of those same practices has been
the scandals of the past decade. The firm of the future cannot be
built on this foundation—it will not survive. Independence, one way
or another, must come back in full force and with integrity, or else
chaos will.”

Client at the Core, then, promises to provide a roadmap to
the new landscape of law firm marketing. It delivers more: A comprehensive
vision of the 21^st Century firm built on integrity and performing
to rigorous standards.