First draft of my book is complete!

It's about how lawyers in business development roles can turn their meetings into revenue

Some of you may recall a few months ago I announced that I’d be writing a Sales 101 book for lawyers. After lots of fits and starts, I’m excited to share that the first draft is finally complete!

The book is called Talk Less Win More: How Lawyers in Business Development Roles Can Turn Meetings Into Revenue and comes in at just under 10,000 words.

Originally I was far more ambitious and wanted to share everything I could think of about sales. But after getting some feedback, I realized that it made sense to scale back my ambitions. And keep it succinct to make it easily digestible.

I’ll share with you the introductory chapter below, which explains my motivations for writing the book and who I think will benefit most from it. After that, I’ll share a Gumroad link that contains the table of contents, and how you can gain access the whole draft (spoiler alert: it’ll cost you $5).

Finally, I’d like to give a special thank you and shout out for the many of you who provided high quality valuable feedback over the months. Lots of people volunteered to review the draft, but only a few left comments and constructive feedback—which I truly appreciated.

Shout out to everyone who put in the work to help me get this draft finished.

Without further ado, here’s the intro!

Introduction

When I first left the practice of law to join an e-discovery startup as a sales rep, I didn’t think I needed help with my business development meetings. All I needed to do was to explain my background as a highly credentialed former Biglaw lawyer, and come across as a subject matter expert on our e-discovery product. It would only be a matter of time before I started closing lots of deals.

Right?

Well, no. I’d have all these meetings with prospective clients, and come out of them feeling pretty good about how the conversation went. But afterwards, they’d all ghost me. Not only would I *not* close the deal–my prospects would ignore all of my emails and calls afterwards. All of my follow ups would go unanswered.

What the heck was going on?

It took me a few weeks of running my head into a brick wall before I decided something needed to change. Like any good lawyer, the first thing I did was to do my homework and read as many sales books as possible. Then, I went out and talked to all the sales veterans on my team.

This process taught me a ton about sales and business development. I began to work these tactics into my routine.

Problem was, most of the things I tried didn’t work. It seemed that most sales books and veterans are used to selling to a general audience–not lawyers. So some of the advice I got that sounded really good in theory simply didn’t work on a legal audience. The lawyers were too skeptical and impatient.

Undeterred, I kept trying different things and running mini experiments in my meetings. Eventually, I learned that while most things I tried didn’t work–a few things did. In fact, these tactics worked *really* well–especially when I combined them. My numbers began to tick up, and I started outperforming my peers–all of whom were seasoned sales professionals.

At one point, I closed a software deal with a law firm partner without even having to show him a product demo.

Management took notice. I was immediately promoted to a leadership role to train a group of new sales reps. After about a year, I left that e-discovery startup to join a contract AI startup as its head of sales and was able to replicate my previous success. Interestingly, my training was especially helpful to the former lawyers on the sales team.

So what exactly was this new approach that changed everything for me?

Basically it boiled down to this: I stopped trying to impress buyers with my resume or knowledge and instead focused on positioning my offering as a specific solution to my prospect’s specific problem.

This is all much easier said than done. Especially for lawyers who are used to heavy research and preparation. It can be very difficult to anticipate what your prospect cares about. How do you prepare for a pitch when it’s impossible to know what their top challenges are? Do you just guess? How do you know if your pitch actually landed? And how do you do it all without coming across like a used car salesman?

Questions like these are exactly why I decided to write this book.

My target audience is any lawyer who wants to be able to effectively sell products/services to other lawyers. That’s who I am and what I’ve done over the past decade, so that’s what I know best. I have firsthand knowledge of how hard the transition from practicing law to pure biz dev can be. Especially when you’re selling to other lawyers.

However, I hope that the lessons I share in this book are also helpful to anyone who sells products/services to legal buyers.

The book is designed to be succinct, and filled with tactical advice. I use stories to help illustrate my broader points. My goal is to put all of my ideas in a short guide that you can refer back to quickly whenever you need–even if it’s 5 minutes before a client meeting.

Here’s what I’ll cover in this book:

• How to quickly identify the most urgent problems facing your prospect. You should spend most of the time in your meeting listening, and probing for what’s most important or pressing to your prospect.

• Why it’s important to always “make the ask” at the end of your meeting. If they say yes, you’ve won the deal more quickly than you otherwise would. But even if they say no, that is valuable feedback to enable you to pivot or move on to a different prospect.
  

• What words or phrases to use to advance the conversation. Maybe you already know exactly what to do, but you’re hesitant because you don’t know how to say/ask it without making things weird. I’ll share examples of how to phrase these statements/questions.

A few things to keep in mind as progress through the book:

1. Some tactics may not work in your situation. My professional experience has been as a lawyer-turned-sales executive at companies offering products/services to other lawyers. I have never been a partner at a law firm. If that’s you, I’m sure things work differently in your world vs. mine. Keep an open mind about what you read, because maybe some of it is applicable.
   

2. Some of my suggestions will feel awkward the first few times you do it. That’s to be expected. If these tactics come naturally to most people, then everyone would do it too–and there would be no way to separate yourself! Being a strong revenue generator requires you to do things outside your comfort zone. Embrace it! It all gets easier with practice.

3. Don’t worry about implementing 100% of the advice all at once. I added each of these individual tactics to my skillset over the course of months and years. If you could just implement 1 or 2 of them in the short run, you should feel an immediate impact–even if the revenue doesn’t materialize immediately. Over time you’ll develop habits and start to see an impact on the revenue side.

Gumroad Link

If you’d like to see the full table of contents, please visit the link here.

You’ll also be able to access a PDF copy of the entire draft (for $5). Thank you all! I truly appreciate everyone’s support.