There is a class of top level professionals who don’t have to quibble about fees and hourly rates, don’t jump at shadows when a competitor makes a pitch, and don’t worry about whether their firm we’ll be the adviser chosen for the next project. They’re relaxed and quietly confident knowing that for as long as they are active contributors to the client relationship, behave with the utmost integrity and always put their client’s interests first, they will be called on for wise advice and counsel on many key issues and decisions.

This holds true among professionals, accountants, engineers, architects, management consultants and more.

Draw on your wider professional background
Early career exposure to a range of professional specialties and sub-specialties is something to relish. Strong on-going interest in technical developments beyond your core brief is a great foundation for general counsel.

Take a broad management perspective
Experience in general management roles will help. Welcome portfolio responsibility for a series of diverse activities in your firm. A programme of reading will take you a long way. Formal management education can make a big difference. Simply thinking beyond your silo is the first step. Frequent interaction with enlightened managers from many disciplines is the next.

Consider organisational dynamics
Be vigilant for impacts of management decisions and changes on the client’s organisation and how each constituent part interacts with others. Take into account effects on individual and group power, prestige, and status. Be mindful of financial impacts for individuals, teams, and business units.

Communicate clearly and forthrightly
Avoid technical jargon and adopt the preferred vocabulary and communication style of your client. Use anecdotes and vignettes to bring home important points. Make your point unmistakably.

Negotiate skilfully
This is never far from top of the list.

Maintain confidences
Be aware of the sensitivity of information shared with you and always respect confidences.

Be politically aware
Unless you’re an expert with all the time it takes to play to win, avoid politics. But always be aware of the political environment in which your counsel will be received.

Develop gravitas and use it
Play the wise counsel role for long enough and one day you’ll earn the title. Be accepting and non-judgemental. When clients “confess” their sins and shortcomings, avoid any temptation for a witch hunt and blame game.

Exercise business judgement
Advise and recommend what is, overall, in the best interests of the client. Correct judgement calls are predicated on understanding those interests. Gaining that understanding is worth you investment of time and intellectual engagement.

Show the courage of conviction
If you have important advice, give it fearlessly and clearly. Don’t shy away from things your client may not want to hear.

While there is no neat recipe for transitioning to the privileged and powerful role of general counsel and valued adviser, if your objective is to break out of a functional silo or narrow transaction-by-transaction relationship , this checklist will take you a long way. Become the expert professional whose counsel is sought, valued, and relied on by the top echelon of client organisations.

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

Many a lawyer is deeply delusional. They say “I’m in control of my practice”, mistaking balance sheet ownership and full partnership with control.

In truth, you’re not really in control of your practice, your business, or your life until you’re ready with - and adept with - attitudes, behaviours, and techniques which mean that you exercise choice in the direction and development of your practice.

Taking control of your practice is about making choices.

Take an existential perspective on relationships with clients and interactions with prospective clients, and you’ll soon open the way to a better professional future.

Going with the flow may appeal - often much easier in the short-term - but there’s nothing like the satisfaction and long-term pay-off of making choices, taking action, and accepting the consequences.

Copyright 2006 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

It is within the power of professionals who aren’t downright delighted with their current careers to re-invent themselves.  Maybe you’ve noticed others who’ve morphed into strong performers in more appealing areas of professional practice.

You, too, can discover a second wind - even well down your career track. Here are some tips to get underway.

Take a little time for serious reflection. Ask yourself:
• What would I most like to do if I had a couple of additional hours available in each work day ?
• If I didn’t have to keep the practice I have going, what work would I most like to do - what would be most attractive to me ?

Enlist some help. Talk with other professionals who work in your sphere of interest. Get some objective advice, sensible input, and maybe expert support.

Be courageous. Fear of failure may limit your potential - be brave if you want to achieve your true ambitions. It’s far better to try than to spend the rest of your days wondering what might have been.

Market test your idea. Determine to give your new professional interest a try for a limited time to see how it feels and whether there are signs that it might succeed. Dip a toe in the water !

Challenge your assumptions. Don’t assume that, having proceeded down one professional path, it’s too late to embark on another. Even if you’ve had a long commitment to one professional course, you can choose to change.

It’s never too late to re-invent your professional persona when you can see the right balance of benefits over obstacles to make a more attractive future for yourself and your practice.

Copyright 2006 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

Niche business development strategies are hardly new, but too often they’re overlooked in a rush to sell professional services to well-known, large, popular, ready-made market segments.Taking a niche focus is the antithesis of scattergun, broad-brush marketing.

Niches which are small, specialised, low volume, or poorly understood may not yet have drawn large or strong competitors.

By focusing on niches which are:
• clearly definable
• closely matches for your skills
• good candidates for specialisation
• suitable for the economics and resources of your professional practice
• large enough to be profitable and sustainable
you may enjoy the many benefits of strong competitive advantage, including premium prices for your professional services.

Focusing your business development efforts in this way will:
• give you rapid traction in a niche
• help you to develop clear, appealing messages to prospective clients you’re ideally positioned to serve
• reinforce your reputation and profile among your established clients in this niche
• allow you to carve out a position of strong perceived advantage
• give you opportunities to enter larger markets from your niche toehold.

Put possible niche opportunities to these tests:
• Does the niche really exist ?
• How many participants and who are they ?
• Where could we source data to assemble a list of participants ?
• Is this a niche where participants meet through professional bodies, industry associations, or interest groups ?
• What specific professional services will you offer to this group ?
• Can you make a distinctive offer which will appeal strongly to this niche market ?
• Is there an opportunity to achieve premium price for your services by focusing on this niche ?

You’ll discover niche markets through a deep understanding of how markets segment and consumer participants behave.

The best starting point will be some of those clients with whom your professional services already achieve the strongest resonance.

Copyright 2006 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

As I write eTips each week, it’s often the product of business development challenges and behaviours I’ve observed among our clients, or learned second hand. Now, I need your input on the eTips topics you find most relevant, how eTips can improve, and what you’d like more of.

This week, please take this brief, three to five minute survey, and tell me, and the whole JMA team, what you think.

As a thank you, you will be entered into a draw to win a bottle of fine wine.

Of course, if you have any queries or other comments, do get in touch.

Thanks for your support and important feedback.

Linda and the team at Julian Midwinter & Associates

Much marketing wallows in a sea of sameness. Enormous efforts are expended searching out small advantages in the quest to create differentiation among many apparently qualified, capable, and often similar professional service firms. Pursuing the holy grail of differentiation is often much less effective than going for the end game: impact.It’s an equation: insight + ideas + innovation = impact.

High impact is the product of:
• drawing on deep insights
• bright ideas
• lots of innovation.

You’ll gain great business development advantage when you:
• actively draw on deep understanding you’ve accrued about significant problems and business issues before your clients and target clients
• take a hard (and fresh) think about their challenges and opportunities to which you might make a positive contribution
• brainstorm to formulate some big ideas in response
• experiment with what may prove radically better ways to tackle the problem or work
• show the positive and measurable results your client can expect from your well-conceived and innovative service.

Rather than endlessly pondering minor points of difference which are unlikely to resonate with clients and prospective clients - or, worse, be meaningless and valueless to them - invest your efforts in increasing your impact, using our formula. We’ve proven it over and over.

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates Pty Ltd

Clients have needs: some recognised, others unrecognised. Among the needs they recognise, some clients may have unmet needs - needs for which they have not yet found a professional service solution. Unmet needs present business development opportunities for an expert professional.By implication, unmet needs can be classed as:
• those which are unsatisfied - no satisfactory service has been availed
• those which are unaddressed - no solution has yet been sought
• those which are unrecognised - they don’t yet know they have a need.

Unsatisfied needs are great business opportunities since the client understands what they need and is likely to be open to a well-conceived solution.

Unaddressed needs yield the myriad benefits of greenfield opportunities for an imaginative and persuasive professional.

Unrecognised needs only become worthwhile opportunities for professionals prepared to do the groundwork to create need recognition with an action-oriented client.

In the legal services sphere, our research reveals several clusters of unmet needs. These include:
• intellectual property
• commercial dispute resolution, without recourse to litigation
• information technology services
• communication and entertainment technology services
• compliance awareness and training for front-line client personnel
• streamlining multi-handled processes involving internal and external resources and expertise
• workforce risk reduction and legal support for best practice in human resources
• financial risk reduction
• small business structuring and risk management
• family financial arrangements, estate planning, and intergenerational wealth transfer
• part-time outsourced general counsel.

Rather than battling for market share among clients whose widely understood needs are already being satisfied by others - and possibly with a long queue of aspirants jockeying to competitively displace the incumbent - why not create business development leverage by pursuing unsatisfied, unmet, or even unrecognised needs ?

Copyright 2008 Julian Midwinter & Associates

When we’re selling services, we’re mostly on a mission to persuade a client to our point of view, taking only minimum time essential to hear as much of their point of view as necessary to help us advance our sales argument and win the moment.

But if you really want to develop long term business, and your practice, take time to listen and learn.

Absorbing how your client thinks about issues, then understanding how they feel about the direction of their business and its challenges, is a precursor to tuning in closely to their feelings and ideas about and future professional services needs.

It’s hard to juggle sales persuasion with the kind of listening which builds the intelligence base to underpin long term business development.

Gently exploring the big issues before your client, their challenges, and their future expectations for professional services may take considerable time and attentive listening.

Fact is, many clients don’t yet know it, but will appreciate support and encouragement in sharing their ideas, fears, concerns, musings, and schemes with an interested and engaged trusted professional who supports, encourages, probes, and gently challenges them.

After such conversations, clients often report a “counselling” effect - how refreshing it is to interact with a professional whose mission is to help them get to grips with their choices and increase clarity around their objectives and preferences.

And, by leading and supporting your client along this path, you’ll help break out of the narrow pigeonhole of a professional intent on selling.

Don’t commingle selling with deep and meaningful interchanges. Listen intently to learn. Use these learnings to plan future services, relationship strategies, and sales activities.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates

Make sure you set yourself on a course for successful business development in the new financial year.

Listen - especially to unwelcome news. Listen to what your clients say. Listen to unpopular views, and listen extra carefully to what you don’t really want to hear.

Do the research - make sure you gets much input as possible on a subject. Disparate input will help you come to terms with the issues. You need a wide range of information from disparate sources to form a sound basis for the decisions you must make.

Make a business development plan write it down and stick to it. A written plan communicated to everyone is much more likely to succeed than any amount of talk. Review progress against your plan.

- take responsibility for tough decisions. Good decisions are often lonely, and sometimes unpopular. You can’t depend on consensus to make the right decisions in marketing. You will be constantly faced with new opportunities - you can’t pursue them all. So, be prepared to be tough enough to let an opportunity pass

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates

Every so often, take stock of your client base and work out whether it’s still right for you and your firm.

Evaluate clients against factors including:

Is this a good strategic fit for my practice ?

Is this a profitable relationship ?

Is this a client going somewhere - that is, on the ascendancy ?

Does this client help me and my firm to use and develop skills which will be appealing to other desirable clients ?

Is this a client which I can grow through further services ?

Is this client a good commercial proposition ?

Do they pay well, on time, and absorb only reasonable amounts of resource for the fee return ?

Does this client introduce me to new opportunities and refer work ?

Do I like working for this client ?

Am I doing a really good job for them, and getting good outcomes for them,and am I truly valuable to them ?

Is this a satisfied client ?

If you can say “yes” to several of these, then this is a client you want.

More than a couple of “no’s” and it is probably a client you don’t want.

Copyright Julian Midwinter & Associates