When Should You Fire a Client?  Some clients are more trouble than they're worth.  The revenue and profit margin on the account does not justify the time, energy and resources that the client demands, and that you and your firm put into it.  

"There is no market for pitches." This wisdom appeared in "The Cluetrain Manifesto," one of the first free e-books, published during the late '90s dot-com era. Its truth has remained constant to the present. Legal service buyers find lawyer pitches tedious and a waste of time. At about the 2:15 mark of this video you'll read and hear verbatim comments from buyers, whose loathing is unambiguous.

If you're not a good listener, you can't be a good salesperson.  Here are nine bad listeners inside your mind, who will destroy your sales call:

Why is cross-selling so difficult? For starters, it's "selling squared." Before you can sell anything to the client, first you must sell the relationship partner, who controls the client, on granting you access.  The question on that partner's mind is "What's in it for me?

What keeps good salespeople from achieving better results has little to do with techniques or the service you sell. You must spot the "sales killers," i.e., actions and attitudes that result in dead deals, wasted time, discouragement and making excuses for unacceptable performance. 

What keeps good salespeople from achieving better results has little to do with techniques or the service you sell. You must spot the "sales killers," i.e., actions and attitudes that result in dead deals, wasted time, discouragement and making excuses for unacceptable performance. 

You know you have to let potential business referral sources know about your service so they can open doors for you.  But have you given them what they need so they'll reliably recognize WHEN to refer you, and to whom?  Unwittingly, we saddle referral sources with the burden of figuring out how to help us, when it's our job to make it as simple as possible.   

Talking about your product or solution creates obstacles to getting business. Talking about your prospect's business problem creates a path to a hiring decision. Unless you're completely in the wrong market, enough of those hiring decisions will go your way.

The difference between technical legal work-product writing and letters, memos, articles and other communications is that legal writing is crafted to withstand the scrutiny of other lawyers trying to exploit any weakness. 

The rules for written communication with your market are very different from those you apply to your legal work product. Whether you're writing articles, speeches or blog posts, or updating your clients about work in progress, here are some things to keep in mind.