Motivating Fee Earners

Why is it so hard to get the fee earners in a law firm (or any professional services firm for that matter) out getting new clients and bringing in work – consistently.

Of course, we all know some people are naturally great at finding business (the so called ‘rainmakers’). A few anyway. Most try very hard. A few just never seem to get the hang of it. Some don’t care anyway.

But as marketing / BD professionals, we’re often in the position of helping ‘make’ everyone good at business development. And how often do we come across fee earners who have all the ingredients of a great marketer (they’re nice, smart, empathetic and can hold a pleasant conversation with people not in the same profession as themselves), but they just can’t seem to convert contacts to clients. Or identify opportunities. Or manage them when they stumble on them.

It’s the conundrum that has reallocated marketing budgets annually, and spawned thousands of sales and business coaches, training sessions, motivational speakers and internal reviews and restructures.

As marketing or BD professionals, we are often tasked with helping fee earners market themselves and the firm. The reward for their cooperation (in theory) is that they will increase billings – which makes the firm happy, and makes them personally richer (via some kind of bonus or rewards scheme, and the prospect of promotion).

This rewards system – bonuses for great performance – or percentage of fees brought in allocated as a bonus as it arrives – is extremely common in firms. It’s supposed to be a ‘win win’ for everyone – but it can have senior leaders and partners tearing their hair out because it just doesn’t seem to play out as planned.

Partners say: It worked for me. Why doesn’t it work for the rest of the fee earning mass on staff? These are smart people we employ. They do great work. They can make more money. Why won’t they? What’s wrong with them.

And HR and marketing teams get to wrestle with the levers we have at our disposal to make it happen. Coaching, training, cajoling, planning, benchmarking, ranking, communicating success.

There is another way to think about this process – and a very neat little on-line presentation with Daniel H Pink* outlines why sometimes our rewards processes don’t fit the motivation profile of the very people we’re there to assist. Pink’s theory resonates – he talks about why people in ‘thinking’ jobs need to have a different paradigm in order to get the best performance – and it’s not about the money. A paradigm most professional services firms would struggle with in reality – but probably aspire to.

Watch the vid here http://www.wimp.com/surprisingmotivation. It might just change the way you run those coaching sessions or frame up and present a marketing plan – and answer that question from partners about why some fee earners are pretty relaxed about bringing in more fees, even when they get a cut of them.

*Author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.

 This article was provided by Alicia Patterson of House Consulting a legal marketing & communications specialist. Go to www.houseconsulting.com.au – where you can find other (potentially useful) articles.