Sales

If you’re a lawyer, it’s likely that you have no idea what it means to do “business development.” That’s no knock against you—after all, law firms don’t know how to teach you either.

The truth is, many of us didn’t go to law school only to end up in sales. However, the legal profession is becoming more business-focused. So the lawyers who know how to sell end up being more valuable. Law firms were never really meritocracies, and this trend has made things worse. Because if you’re not a rainmaker, you better hope that you’re one of the “chosen ones” who get valuable training and access to clients.

Me? I definitely wasn’t one of the chosen ones. And I didn’t know how to sell until 2016, when I left the practice of law to become a legal tech salesman. As it turned out, I was pretty good at it. Ended up spending the next five years successfully selling technology to a skeptical audience of lawyers. 

Somewhere along the way I started creating humorous social media content as a way to generate more conversations with potential buyers. When the pandemic hit, I went viral among the legal community and quickly built up an audience of over 250,000 followers. Seven years into this journey I’ve started to see the big picture when it comes to sales, marketing, and business development.¹

That’s when I decided to start sharing my insights in this newsletter. For example, my articles about how to grow your book of business and how to sell to lawyers ended up being two of my most widely read articles. Their popularity led me to start writing deep dives on specific topics.

If you’d like to learn more, I highly encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription to Off The Record. What do you get? Well, access to premium articles about business development, including:

• How To Create Repeatable Sales For Your Legal Startup (free)

• The Four Steps Behind Every Sale

• Simple vs. Complex Sales

• How To Generate Sales Pipeline

• Intro to Outbound Sales

• Discovery, The Secret Behind Effective Sales Pitches

• The Right Way To Do LinkedIn

• Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile Page For Marketing

• Going After The Bad Guys

• Overcoming the Timing Problem

• The Right Way to Sell At A Conference

• Why Lawyers Are Bad At Business Development

• Creating Effective Marketing Content

• How to use LinkedIn for Business Development (course)

• How to create compelling content on LinkedIn (course)

I’ve tried to set the price so that you can reimburse the paid subscription with your firm or organization. If you’d like to access these articles, please subscribe below!

1. For more on my unusual career journey, check out this article from the New York State Bar Association about what I do at my day job.