Socializing Your Way To Better Client Relations

It doesn’t seem possible, but by the time you receive this issue of The Bottom Line, Dear Reader, it will be November, and plans start hatching for Christmas events.

It seems that they start earlier every year. Law firms holding a social gathering, Banks inviting you to lunch or dinner, even tickets to the theatre start to emerge again.

Whether it’s the Board of Trade’s flagship dinner in January or a small client who’s invited you to their office for a few drinks and a social gathering, these events are excellent practice development – and thus career development – opportunities for the properly prepared practitioner.

When you add the cumulative effect of attending these events over the year, the opportunity can be staggering – just how many people you have an opportunity to come into contact with.

Be they prospective clients, existing clients, good potential referral sources or just interesting people to spend some time with, always be on the look out for an opportunity to make a new contact.

Life is short and one can never have too many friends. So let’s see if we can make new friends of potential clients, eh?

Making business functions work for you

Just think about how many different business functions you and your partners and senior staff attend either as the host, or as guests.

They might be anything from a quiet drink after work with a client or acquaintance from the media, or a banker, to formal black tie dinners with hundreds in attendance. In a busy firm, six per events per month would not be unusual, and at Christmas time there seems to be one every night to attend.

If there were five senior people in your firm, that would give your firm 1,560 chances to raise its profile every year! Include middle management and the number could treble or more.

What, typically, happens at most of these events? We meet an old friend or colleague and spend most of the time talking to them or to others from our own firm!

Or worse, the firm’s Wallflower leans against the wall at the back of the room, admiring the shine of their shoes, when they could be ‘out there’ mixing and mingling and advancing both their career and the firm’s reputation.

Every gathering, either purely business or partly social, is an opportunity for you to meet new people and leave them with the right impression of your practice.

Start With A Simple Number

Look at it this way. When people from your firm attend a business function of any sort, they leave either a positive or negative impression behind. The number of times this is done over the year varies from firm to firm, but even in the smallest of practices, a sizeable number amounts.

Here's why:

Number of Partners in your firm (A)

Average number of business or large social functions attended by each per month (B)

Average number of worthwhile contacts attending each function (C)

Now let's do the Math:

A x B x C x 12 = (D)

And then the same for senior staff/managers/fee earners:

Number of senior staff/managers/fee earners in your firm (E)
Average number of business or large social functions attended by each per month (F)
Average number of worthwhile contacts attending each function (G)

And the Math again

E x F x G x 12 = (H)

D + H = ____________________________ Number of chances to create awareness and gain permission to stay in touch with worthwhile contacts generated by your firm every year.

An amazingly large number for most firms.

Hopefully you can now see more clearly, the need to devise a plan for dealing with such occasions.
Working the room can be seen by some as bad form, yet you can acquire the ability to be invited to join a group that is in full flight without coming over as pushy or self-promoting.

You can also learn how to get others to ask for your business card and ask you to keep in touch, whilst you gain their business card, and be thought of as a thoroughly nice person and a damn good accountant.

Above all, by becoming a Tiger instead of a Wallflower, you can learn how to plan a strategy for every event that you and your colleagues attend, for any occasion, involve everyone from your firm (who is attending) and end the evening having met all the valuable contacts you wanted to meet, leaving them with an excellent impression of you and your firm.

What a great opportunity to advance your career while also helping someone else. Isn’t that what business is all about?
Oh, how I love Christmas!

© 2004, MFA Group Inc