"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

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.