In today's highly competitive legal services market, building an effective 'sales culture' is seen by many law firms as critical to the long-term success of the business. Selling is no longer a dirty word in the legal profession; in fact, selling is such a priority for so many firms that the market is awash with consultants and trainers eager to transform a firm's partners into successful salesmen.

In the rush to teach partners about consultative selling, the development of a sales pipeline, the use of filters and funnels, effective closing strategies and many more sales techniques, it is worthwhile stopping to consider the rather obvious point that without fully understanding what it is that individual clients are buying, it is virtually impossible to develop an effective sales strategy for each client.

Those firms that systematically build an understanding of their clients' and prospects' businesses, and hence their legal advisory needs, will be in a much stronger position to sell their services than those that do not. In my experience, however, most law firms are weak at gathering and acting on 'intelligence' about the buying patterns of their sales targets. This article aims to shed some light on how this situation can be improved.

Why clients change legal advisers

When trying to understand the buying behaviour of clients, it is important to recognise why clients change their legal advisers. Most clients – individual private clients as well as organisations – already have lawyers in place and the sales challenge will often be to devise effective strategies for displacing these incumbent advisers. On the whole, users of legal services tend to be pretty loyal to their advisers, only thinking about changing them if they deliver poor service and/or their fees are perceived to represent poor value for money.

Effective selling in this situation requires a lot of patience while waiting for the incumbent to slip up. You can still be proactive, by ensuring that the target is fully aware of you or your firm's capabilities and by pointing out the added benefits of switching to use your firm – but essentially you have to play a waiting came. Good salesmen know this and will always have a large number of leads that they are pursuing at any one time, as it will often take months, or even years, to cultivate a relationship with a decision-maker to the point where they will have sufficient trust in you/your firm to give out an instruction. All too often, I meet partners who do not recognise that selling is a numbers game and end up putting all their eggs in too few baskets by having a very short list of personal targets.

Our research shows that the main reason why clients appoint new legal advisers is not because they are dissatisfied with their existing lawyers, but because they need specialist advice. This advice is often in an area that is new to them, and their existing advisers are either not able to provide this, or another law firm is more capable in this field. From a sales perspective, this represents a much better point of attack than trying to displace an entrenched incumbent.

Understanding what your clients are buying

The first rule of selling is to start with your firm's existing clients. However, 'cross-selling' has become a rather discredited term in the legal market; mainly I suspect because it has become associated with crude attempts to push services onto clients, regardless of need, thereby endangering long-established, stable client relationships. In reality, few clients would turn down the opportunity to hear about another service that one of their law firms could offer, provided it was relevant and would provide benefits, particularly if these benefits exceeded those being obtained from another law firm for the same or similar advice.

With existing clients, you are already in a strong position to sell additional services because you/your firm are/is already a known quantity – you are already trusted to provide legal services to the client – and you have relationships with the key decision-makers who are buying the services, or you are at least in a position to be introduced by your contacts to the relevant buyers.

The other huge advantage that you and your colleagues ought to have through your day-to-day workings with the client is a tremendous understanding of the client's business activities – present as well as future plans – and hence their associated legal advisory needs. Pooling this intelligence within the client service team to identify the client's needs – what they are looking to buy in the way of legal advisory services – is key to developing effective sales strategies with existing clients.

Researching client buying patterns

However, pooling this intelligence internally within a firm can be a very patchy, unreliable process which often does not produce a clear picture of a client's needs. Fortunately, there is an easier way. Increasingly, clients see the benefit of encouraging a fair degree of competition between their various legal advisers. They recognise that it is in their interests if their lawyers are always looking for ways to improve their service, are innovating, and are being proactive about identifying other service/product areas where they can add value to the client's business. To achieve this added degree of competition, most clients are prepared to divulge which lawyers they are using and which services they are using them for. In the past, clients used to be fairly secretive about which lawyers they used.

We are capitalising on this new openness to undertake research exercises for firms that seek to identify their clients' buying patterns for legal services. Through in-depth, face-to-face or telephone interviews we are able to identify the following:

- which legal services are being used by the client;

- a client's total spend on a particular legal service, say, real estate advice;

- which law firms are being used for these services and why;

- why they are not using our client for that service, and whether they even knew if our client provided that service; and, finally

- an indication of what our client would have to do in order to be instructed in that area of work in the future.

Armed with this accurate and comprehensive information on how the client buys legal services, the client team are in a much stronger position to plan their sales strategy for that client. They know where their competitors are providing an unsatisfactory service and hence where the best opportunities exist to displace incumbent advisers; they can identify those service lines where they need to do more to educate the client about the firm's capabilities; and, they can exploit opportunities where the client has said that they would be interested in hearing what the firm could do for them in a particular area.

By adopting this research-based approach, firms can systematically build an understanding of their clients' legal advisory needs, thereby putting them in a much stronger position relative to those law firms that lack such an understanding.

Kevin Wheeler is principal of specialist consultancy Wheeler Associates.