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Steve Fretzin: The Taboo Surrounding Sales in the Legal World

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Have you ever wondered why sales seem to be taboo in the legal world? In this episode, our host Ben Chiriboga is joined by Steve Freztin, President of FRETZIN, INC., to explore why many lawyers and law firms view sales as unethical.

Ben Chiriboga (00:01.165)
Okay, hello and welcome back everyone. This is Ben Chiriboga, the Chief Growth Officer here at Nexel welcoming you to another Nexel Fireside Chat. I’m sitting down with my new friend Steve Fretzen today. Steve, welcome to the Nexel Fireside Chat series.

Steve (00:18.558)
Hey, good to be here, Ben.

Ben Chiriboga (00:22.413)
It’s amazing to have you here. We got connected by another friend of Nexel, Ben Paul, who recommended you all around the world of sales and legal sales. So I’m really excited to be chatting with you. We’re gonna actually talk a little bit about the taboo of sales and the S word in legal. Why don’t you sort of kick us off with your background a little bit? I know that you’re a consultant, really business development consultant.

For lawyers, you also have your own podcast as well. Yeah, set the table for us.

Steve (00:56.534)
Yeah, so I’m not an attorney by profession. I got pulled into the legal space in 2008, 2009 with the big recession, mainly because I had been working with entrepreneurs on non-salesy methodologies for growing business. In fact, I came up with, my first book is entitled Sales-Free Selling, and what that’s all about is how we can take sales and sort of kill it and move into things like

asking questions, being a good listener, empathy, qualifying, walking a buyer through a buying decision. So what resonated with lawyers was the idea that I’m not teaching them sales, I’m teaching them the soft skills of how to grow business without being salesy, and it really, really gelled. And so about a year to 16 months after I started working with my first attorney, it just got out of control in a good way, and I decided to push my chips in and be a specialist in an industry

a desperate need for coaching and training around business development. And we don’t use the bad word sales, Ben, because it’s scary to people. We call it marketing, we call it business development, anything that helps the snowflakes and the dandelions feel good about doing client development, another one that we use. But that’s really my background. I’ve written four books, I’ve got the podcast, and my goal is to really kinda change the way lawyers think about.

Ben Chiriboga (02:05.813)
Sure.

Steve (02:23.298)
growing business in a non-salesy way.

Ben Chiriboga (02:26.833)
Yeah, totally. So what were you doing before? Tell me a little bit about the world before that. Yeah, and nobody ever picks legal. It sort of picks them in a weird way. But yeah, what was life before legal?

Steve (02:41.29)
Yeah, before legal, I’ve had a very long sales career. I started selling shoes when I was in high school and just loved the customer service side of it and helping learn about what people’s needs are and fulfilling needs and kind of work my way up the food chain and just continue to learn sales and become a student of the game and a student of, how do I make the best possible career for myself? And ultimately ended up starting my own sales consultancy in 2004.

mainly focused on entrepreneurs and sales teams. And then again, you know, transitioned over to legal in 2008, nine. But it, again, I just, I always was taught to be pushy and to be aggressive and to be a salesperson. And I always felt raw about it. I never really enjoyed that part of it. And I think it was an old school Saturn commercial. Saturn’s a car that existed in the nineties, everybody. And it was, no one likes to be sold. It’s fun to buy, but no one likes to be sold.

Ben Chiriboga (03:36.802)
Yeah.

Steve (03:41.138)
And that’s so true, and I think so, why not come up with systems and methodologies that are non-salesy as a way to accomplish goals without ever feeling bad about it?

Ben Chiriboga (03:52.785)
Yeah, what um, let’s just take a let’s just take a global view. You know, you’re a student of sales. You’ve been in the game for a while. You’ve written books on it. You think about it deeply. You know, what is the state? What does, what is the state of sales and you know, for, for putting aside the lawyers and the words that we use for, for all of that, and then we’re well acquainted with that, you know, sales and.

in my world of tech world, in tech sales is a great word. You know, it’s fantastic. I mean, it’s really a lever to be pulled. And yeah, we wholeheartedly embrace it here. What’s the status of sales do you think today in the world as we sit in 2023 though?

Steve (04:34.151)
I think it’s become much more normalized. I think that for many people sales was a default.

profession, you know, something wasn’t working out, well, I just go into sales, right? You work in retail, you sell cars, you sell whatever you can sell to try to make some money. You know, if you have the gift to gab or you enjoy people, you go into sales. And I think now it’s been understood and recognized that it’s one of the top ways to make money. It’s one of the most wonderful professions if you can do it with integrity and find the right company and the right fit. And so while I think that, you know, lawyers, you know,

in maybe one of the most, if not the most noble profession, sales can be seen as a negative. Hey, there’s a salesman at my door, but I really don’t like that. We’ve all been sold to. So it does have a negative connotation, but I think it’s changing. And I’m trying to be a part of that. I’m trying to be a part of that change in how people feel about it, because what sales really is at the core is about bringing people together to solve a problem.

I mean, that’s really what it is. And so, you know, my job is not to sell my services. My job is to evaluate people to see if there’s a fit for us to work together. And so that’s a very different model than I need to hit my quotas. I need to jam a square peg in a round hole and do whatever I have to do to get someone to say yes. That’s why people are so turned off by sales.

Ben Chiriboga (05:41.993)
Yeah.

Ben Chiriboga (06:02.013)
Yeah, let’s flip it on its head just a little bit, but still keeping with this idea of where is the world of sales in 2023. There’s a lot of discussion around this idea that really we have such educated buyers now that sort of come to us. They typically know everything about us, everything about the company.

content is abundant out there, word of mouth referrals, regardless, you know, regardless of where you’re at, the point is, is that people know a lot, lot more than used to be in. Would you say that that’s kind of a contributing factor to this kind of shift in sales of where it’s going?

Steve (06:42.218)
Yeah, 100%. So back in the day when I started selling, you know, things, services and products, no one had any information. So it was sort of like, you know, if they believed in you and they needed this, the product or the service they would buy and, and that was sort of it. And sometimes it worked out and sometimes people felt raw about it or felt screwed over by whatever they bought, whether that was insurance, whether that was a car, that was a lemon, whatever the case was, that’s kind of the way it was.

Now that there’s so much information out there and the internet obviously being a huge part of that, buyers have a lot more control than they used to have. So when you walk in to get a car, you’re not like, well, I don’t even know anything about like what this should cost. You have a ton of information.

Right? You know what a law firm or a lawyer may charge compared to others, because a lot of that stuff is easily available. So what’s happened is the buyers have taken control, which then hurts the seller because the seller ends up becoming someone who just presents and gives numbers and then gets kind of run around and kind of like jumps through hoops to get business. And so what ends up happening is a little bit of a, of a, of a, of a.

confrontational type of a situation where the buyer is out for the buyer, the seller is out for the seller, and no one’s really working to cohesively find a fit. And so that’s sort of what’s happening. So what I’m trying to do again is change that model. So allow the seller to take control, but make it all about the buyer so that it’s a mutual conversation about the problems and the potential solutions and how they fit together versus it being someone trying to

get the cheapest price and the other person trying to get the highest price and it’s they’re not really meeting where they need to meet.

Ben Chiriboga (08:24.657)
Yeah, you know, you know, a salesperson that I really respect one time sort of said that modern sales today is kind of like going down like a like a river rapid together. So the salesperson might be at the at the end sort of the river guide kind of knows the past along. But you know, at the end of the day, they’re rowing together with other people who might

you know, the buyers, let’s say in this case, trying to all basically get down the rapid, because while there is a lot of information, there’s also a lot of missteps and a lot of complexity, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that analogy? Does that land for you?

Steve (09:03.006)
Yeah, I think it does. I think, you know, again, the goal is, I mean, let’s say an attorney comes to me and I’m a business development coach, you know, with, you know, doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t have any method of how to develop business, just kind of running around, you know, going to conferences and speaking here and writing there. And it’s just like random acts of marketing and, you know, and if I identify those problems and the solutions that I have sort of fit those, to solve those problems, and it’s gonna end up making that lawyer a lot more money, which is the case.

because they’re not wasting time and they’re not spinning their wheels and they’re not doing random acts of marketing, then there’s an investment of time and money and energy to be placed in that. But we need to come together to find the problems, find the solutions. And I think that getting down a river with rapids where there’s good communication and you’re on the same team versus it’s you against me, I mean, that’s going to be a much better way to get down safely without cracking a skull.

Ben Chiriboga (09:59.333)
Yeah, totally. All right, so we’re gonna talk today, I think the subject of the conversation was really going to be around the taboo of proactive, let’s call it sales if we want, let’s call it client development if we want, let’s call it business development if we want, but really what we’re talking about is kind of proactively going and having conversations with clients. So…

You’ve now been in this game for about almost 15 years, I’d say 2008, I don’t know if I did the math right, but pretty close. I had a former life before getting into tech, I had a former life as a lawyer myself, and the first thing I could say is, nobody ever taught a lawyer in law school anything remotely like business development or sales or even client development skills.

But even more so, even deeper, there is still sort of a taboo around this idea of being proactive with your business development and developing business, et cetera, et cetera. So let’s maybe just start out, why is that the case? Why do you think that that’s sort of the middle mainstream view right now, if you agree with that?

Steve (11:11.958)
Well, I mean, if you think about how law school works, and I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve worked with and spoken at a number of law schools, and there’s even one or two that have picked up my most recent book and are using it as curriculum. So they are slowly coming around, slowly. However, they’re preparing you to be a lawyer, they’re preparing you to think like a lawyer and to handle the ins and outs, but they’re not really…

Ben Chiriboga (11:26.033)
Nice.

Steve (11:39.778)
thinking about marketing, business development, and teaching you how to be a business person because they don’t know if you’re gonna go in-house, they don’t know if you’re gonna go in private practice. Is it really their responsibility? That’s gonna be a question to be answered at a later time. But ultimately, when a lawyer thinks about their future, especially in private practice, there is absolutely nothing more important other than maybe being a great lawyer.

than having your own clients. And again, I can’t tell you how many lawyers come to me, they’re looking for another job somewhere else, and they’re totally unplaceable because they don’t have a client base to bring with them. A portable book of business is an insider’s kind of verbiage about it. And so I think that we’ve gotta figure out a way to start letting lawyers know early on, maybe even before law school, in college, and then in law school, and…

in the first couple of years out about the importance of developing a network, the importance of maintaining relationships, developing relationships, because the person to your left or right, I think in law school they say, look to your left and look to the right, those people won’t be here in two years, right? And what they should be saying is, right? What they should be saying is look to your left and look to your right, one of these people could be a general counsel at a major corporation in 10 years, and you need to stay in touch with that person, right? So it’s a very different mindset.

Ben Chiriboga (12:45.988)
I remember this.

Steve (12:59.49)
that needs to be had in order for lawyers to start to realize the importance of client development as a function of control and freedom and enjoyment of a career. And that’s just not the past of the legal industry and of law school.

Ben Chiriboga (13:15.953)
Yeah, so I want to take, you know, I do think culturally it’s sort of ingrained in some part because there’s no training, so sort of the light isn’t shined on that in some respects. On another sense, it can be very competitive. I think you pointed at this in terms of law school per se. That kind of competition tends to come out and sort of pervade itself a little bit within the early practice. So…

Nine times out of ten, you’re sort of 40 years old, and I think this was your last point, or I’m just trying to synthesize all this. You’re 40, 45, and maybe you’re trying to move to another firm or making partner, and this muscle’s never been developed, so it’s a little atrophied. So that’s just sort of like a comment summarizing this. What about the, let’s just go into it, what about the idea that selling has sort of taboos around this? And I think you already mentioned this before. And so…

I want to, you know, there’s a dignified or a, what’s the word that I’m looking for, you know, you’re sort of degenerating the practice in some sense, if you believe that, by associating with selling. What are your comments around there? I’m sure you’ve had conversations about this either directly or indirectly in manner of speaking.

Steve (14:39.806)
Yeah. One of the first networking groups that I belonged to, there was a life insurance guy in the room and I brought him because I met him and I thought he was a nice guy. He just destroyed the room. I mean he went out and pushed business cards, he was selling insurance to everybody. He wasn’t networking, he was selling hardcore. And eventually the leader of that group, the chamber president came up to me and said, did you bring this guy?

And I was like, yeah, do I have to say yes? I guess I do. And I apologize profusely. And a lesson was learned that day that, yeah, there’s right and wrong ways to do things. And so there’s an ethical way to do business development that where everybody feels good and there’s a wrong way. And so if you’re out pitching and selling and convincing, which is lawyers even call it, hey, we’re going on a pitch meeting. I mean, that’s real language they’re using. And because that’s what the buyers want.

they wanna be pitched to because they think that’s what they want, that’s actually not what they want. What they want and what should happen is we’ve identified a problem or two, we’re gonna identify more, we’re gonna ask a lot of questions, we’re gonna continue to figure out, is this a fit? That’s the most important word. And when it’s done properly and ethically with the other person’s best interests in mind, what ends up happening is it ends up being an incredibly powerful relationship building tool.

an unbelievably powerful tool for enjoying business development versus feeling negative or dirty about it because when all you’re doing is asking questions, listening and solving problems, well, that’s all lawyers want to do anyway. So we just, they’ve been kind of shown a bad path of how to get business and it doesn’t have to be that way. So we just need to continue to help lawyers understand.

you know, what selling really is, and it is not about, you know, pushing anything on anybody. The words convince come, the word convince and pitch and sell come up a lot, and I just immediately turned that around and said, that’s not really what we’re doing here.

Ben Chiriboga (16:43.877)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let’s go deeper into that actually, because let’s pivot into the modern selling. So, we grounded this conversation by saying, selling or business development or client development, really just developing business and being helpful. Let’s use that, but we need to use shorter words than that. In 2023, it really isn’t, we really need to reformulate our entire idea.

Not only because there’s more information than ever, but maybe just the old antiquated way of selling was never even the way to do it to begin with effectively. It really, at its core, selling is about helping, listening, asking good questions, and seeing whether or not there is a good fit. Absolutely. But let’s do this. Let’s go into that modern way of selling. And I’d like for you to attach this to the idea of relationships and relationship building. Nexel’s all about relationship building. We have…

A CRM that theoretically should give you all the information, not theoretically, actually does give you all the information that you need about that relationship at both the company and the contact level. Can you say a little bit and just tie it in a really specific way, how does developing business and relationship building kind of go together? Sometimes I feel like people think they’re antithetical, but I actually think they’re completely aligned in terms of it’s necessary to really further a relationship.

Steve (18:12.782)
I mean, at the heart of relationships is, you know, the word understanding. I think, you know, I want my friends to understand me. I want my wife to understand me. And when I feel understood, I feel good. I feel good about her. I feel good about me. And I think when I’m looking to buy insurance, when I’m looking to buy, when I’m going to hire a new accountant or hire a lawyer.

the level of understanding directly relates to my interest level in working with that person. So through questioning and through relationship building and through that ferreting out of information, there’s a level of understanding. And when I feel understood, that’s when I feel like, oh, I wanna move forward. So an easy example of this would be, I go into a therapist’s office and I say, hey, I’m having a lot of negative feelings about my father.

and she says, okay, well here, take these pills and you’ll feel better about it. You won’t even think about it anymore. So there was a prescription given, no understanding at all, and I don’t know how I feel about taking pills, right? So that’s what a lot of lawyers are doing, is they’re prescribing without diagnosing. What I would prefer is, so Steve, it sounds like you’re coming to me because you’re having some challenges with your dad. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s been going on?

well and then I tell what’s been going on. And so when did that start? And is that always been the case? And does he treat other people that way? And there’s a lot of questions that we go with, like peeling an onion, getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And when you do that in business development with a general counsel, with a CEO, with someone who’s got problems, and they feel understood.

they’re gonna wanna work with you, even if you’re the most expensive or someone that they really maybe, you know, they were just using you for numbers and you didn’t have to give the numbers. They, before numbers are even given, they feel understood and they feel a connection and that connection’s, I want you as my lawyer.

Ben Chiriboga (20:16.502)
Let me ask you the idea about listening and what good listening means in sort of like this context because in some ways, I feel like good listening isn’t just about making sure that you’re hearing the person, it’s about being interested and wanting to actually help. Can you say a little bit more about listening because it always, it comes back, I feel like, in this way about asking good questions and listening and discovery. Can you say more about that and why, truthfully, and hopefully,

for all the listeners out there, we can see that listening is at the core of both good relationships, probably everybody buys that, but it’s also basically at the core of developing business. And in that way, that’s where that corner nexus is. But yeah, say more about listening and where you need to be to be a good listener for this.

Steve (21:07.018)
Right, so where does understanding…

begin? Well, it begins with good questions and it kind of goes to good listening and empathy and understanding all relate. Personally, I don’t have a meeting without taking notes. I have a notepad I’ve got my remarkable 2, which I’m a huge fan of that tablet, feels like paper, but it’s electric, electronic. I have no paper anymore, which has been wonderful. But every person I meet with and speak with, I’m writing down their name, I’m taking notes

Steve (21:40.169)
and that allows me to not only kind of make sure that I’m on top of things, but I can then say, hey, I kind of wrote down here something about you wanted to understand more about listening and then I can ask a deeper question. So I think there’s so many ways to get distracted.

with, especially on Zoom calls, you’ve got email, you’ve got your phone chiming. My kid’s in Costa Rica right now, and he’s trying to tell me about eating a Big Mac, he had his first Big Mac, and that’s happening in real time right before we got on here. So there’s lots of distractions. We have to stay focused, we have to listen, not just with our ears, but with our whole being. We need to identify and look at body language to identify how, and read people’s body language is just as important as the words they say. So there’s all these things,

And again, if you’re not doing that and you’re distracted or you think you can just keep it all in your head, you know, if you can’t, good for you. I found that that’s very challenging to do, especially if you think about what understanding means. A lot of it, in my opinion, is being able to repeat back what someone said. Because if you give me, let’s say that, Ben, you give me something really juicy about, I had someone, just as an example, gave me something the other day that said, if I don’t change my situation, you know, I’m not gonna be able to feed my family.

Now, if I just summarize that and go, so if I’m hearing you right, you’re not happy. Well, that’s not listening. I wanna be able to say, you know, that sounds really difficult. You know, the idea or thought that you may not be able to feed your family is scary. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like. You know, what have you thought about doing to resolve that in the past? Okay.

Ben Chiriboga (23:02.733)
Yeah, sure.

Steve (23:21.618)
And that’s going to make a huge difference in that conversation versus, you know, summarizing someone because you’re not listening and you’re not taking notes and you’re not really in the moment, you know, fully.

Ben Chiriboga (23:33.041)
Yeah, I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask like a psychological issue and this is for me coming from being prior lawyer and you know, I basically had to, just to understand sales, I kind of felt like I had to almost give myself a lobotomy, you know, in some sense. And it’s this, you know, in some sense, when you leave law school, you get this title, it says ESQ behind your name.

and you know, there is a, you work in a law firm, nine days, you know, five days a week, and you’re surrounded by other lawyers, and you’re talking to other lawyers, and all of this builds up to basically create this perception that you are the expert, and you know the prescription that needs to be done. I just, I guess I wanna ask, you know, when all of that is what’s surrounded around you, when a client comes to you with a legal problem, it can be very difficult to switch off and say,

well I need to deeply listen to actually understand because this person actually might. No it’s more about their situation. Am I making sense in terms of it’s hard to sort of like this I’m the professional I’m here to just tell you what to do effectively and. To be cliche you know type a personalities of lawyers and dominant personalities and all of this kind of stuff and that’s not the case with every lawyer around the world certainly but.

You know, there’s a lot of that kind of, I’m here to prescribe and I know what’s best, so just do what I’m saying. Coming from that position really makes listening and active listening very, very hard. Would you agree, do you sort of see that sort of pervasive a little bit?

Steve (25:13.078)
Yeah, I mean, I would say, go so far as to say, one of the killers of good business development is solving too early, it’s prescribing too early, it’s free consulting, and then they take, and then you feel empty because they took from you and they left and now they’re not returning your calls. You’ve officially been ghosted. There’s so many negatives to, and this goes back to the thing we said earlier, Ben, about buyers, the way buyers work. They gather, gather information.

Ben Chiriboga (25:21.361)
Right.

Steve (25:41.91)
but they’re not really being walked through a buying decision, okay? So what I teach every day is relationship building, establishing agendas that allow for us to ask questions and not prescribe. And one of the first things I have to do with a group of lawyers that I work with is I have to, you know, if you ever watch an old like show about horses at a ranch, they get a wild horse, they gotta break the horse. I have to break lawyers like a horse.

Ben Chiriboga (26:07.725)
Yeah, right.

Steve (26:09.794)
because they’re such amazing solution people. And I am too, I’m a great solution person and I don’t want them solving things. What I want them to do is I want them to take their solution, I want them to stuff it down in their pocket and keep listening and asking questions and trying to figure out what all the details are of the diagnosis prior to that prescription being provided. And it’s very hard because they have the prescription that’s at the tip of their tongue.

and they wanna give it, and that’s what they know is giving prescriptions, giving solutions. And I have to break them of that because with, if they continue to do that, it hurts the entire methodology that I’m trying to teach them, which is the diagnosis, the questioning, the understanding, qualifying is a huge one. Like you’re just giving information and pricing, for example, Ben, to someone who’s not the decision maker. All right, it’s someone that’s gonna then take that information and bring it to someone else and totally destroy it.

and they’re just gonna say no, and you’re out $100,000, $1 million matter because you didn’t have a process, you didn’t think about what needs to happen before you solve, and who are you giving the solution to? So it’s like a trial, there’s so many moving parts, and if you don’t know what those moving parts are and how they’re gonna play out, you’re gonna lose the trial. And same thing in sales and business development, you have to know all the moving parts, and most lawyers don’t have any formal training on that, which means that there’s mistakes happening.

We don’t ramp it.

Ben Chiriboga (27:37.833)
Yeah, I like the grab and the grounding in the case of a trial because I was a litigator myself and, you know, great trials have an entire arc to them in terms of, of course, everybody knows from popular culture, opening and closing statements and cross examination and direct examination and all the rest of it. You know, it’s always wild to me that like people know that arc, but they don’t do the same arc in the context of something like sales.

Yeah, I’ve always thought, wow, if people could understand that there has to be an arc in this and prescribing too quickly to your point really hurts both you and hurts your buying partner. And in some ways it could even hurt the relationship in that way. So I just wanted to double click on that and sort of say like, yeah, that’s absolutely the case. And I think…

People lose it whenever they’re in another circumstance. What they know in a trial circumstance, they just don’t know, and applies to, let’s say, a sales circumstance. I wanna shift and end with our last pillar, which is maybe you can walk through a little bit what it means to break a lawyer, what needs to, and we say this lovingly, of course, because we’re all on the same team.

What has worked? What does it mean to try to when you work with lawyers on a day to day basis? How do you start to sort of do that process of shifting minds and kind of what does that feel like and what are you trying to do first, second, third? And this is maybe for everybody who’s trying to make a change in themselves to kind of get there. What needs to happen? Are there any realizations, early mindset shifts that are always really helpful?

Steve (29:22.698)
Yeah, I would say it starts before someone engages me, just as an example. I need to understand that their problems are significant, the growth they’re looking for is significant, and I have to understand how motivated they are to change, how motivated they are to grow, because if all they’re looking for is five or 10% change, or they’re just looking to kinda get a couple of skills built, that’s probably not a good client for me. So I think I’m looking for, even before we start,

that I understand that there’s potential here and that there’s commitment to change it, to the point where I say, are you willing to burn the ship behind you? Are you willing to draw a line in the sand, push your chips in? And we have a ton of different ways of looking at it, but that’s sort of the first step. The second step is now we’re engaged and we need to start putting a plan together. And the plan includes a goal, a objective to reach, it includes where’s the low-hanging fruit, how are we gonna spend our time?

How are you gonna spend your time? And then, of course, breaking it into actionable, tactical, day-to-day functions. And so, as we go along, they’re gonna make mistakes. That’s fine. We cannot learn without failure and mistakes. But my job is to step in and say, all right, you just went into a meeting, you had a big opportunity to lock up. Why didn’t you call me before that meeting? You should have, I told you to and you didn’t. Okay, so that’s one potential issue. The other is, they went in with

the idea of sales-free selling, the idea of walking a buyer through a buying decision, and the buyer took control and started asking about rates, and the thing went off the rails fairly quickly. That’s okay too, but here’s where we need to make a switch, Ben. What can we learn from that? What can we do to, when someone says, how, what are your rates? And you just tell them the rates, and they go, okay, this meeting’s over. They wouldn’t say that. They’ll run out the clock on it, and then never call you back, because your rates were higher than they could handle, for example. But,

how do we handle that in the future? So maybe we do something like an agree and redirect where we say, that’s a really great question. I get that a lot. People are very interested in knowing my rates. Unfortunately, it’s a lot like asking, what’s a bag of groceries cost? I don’t know what we’re dealing with. I don’t know what’s involved. I don’t know how to staff it. So if it’s okay with you, Ben, if we could just allow me to ask a few more questions, I promise you we’ll get to rates kind of near the end of our meeting. Is that okay? So we just came up with a way of…

Steve (31:48.002)
continuing to ask questions, continuing to take and walk a buyer through a buying decision without giving up our solutions, without giving up our rates early on. And that’s one of hundreds of different things that we need to do within the space of a meeting to get the best possible outcome. And sometimes that best outcome, Ben, is moving someone to a no. I’m turning people away, I don’t wanna say at a record pace, but I’m turning people away on a fairly regular basis when I identify that they’re not a fit for me. On the other hand, when someone is a fit for me,

it’s a little bit of a love fest and we’re like, holy mackerel, this is like lightning striking. This is gonna be, we’re all gonna make a lot of money here and then everything’s on the right track. So that’s really what we’re talking about is making sure that we have a methodology that’s gonna work within what you’re trying to accomplish and again, without ever feeling like you have to go out and aggressively sell or push or convince.

Ben Chiriboga (32:23.206)
Yeah.

Ben Chiriboga (32:45.853)
Yeah, so I want to end with just picking up on something that you said, you know, I think the world of BD, you know, I’ve been in legal, I’ve only ever done legal my entire career and even in that point in time, you know, I feel like there is this flash happening right now around the world of business development, coaching, client development, coaching. It’s happening at the company level. We see the rise of business professionals.

coaching professionals within all the way from Big Law, the largest law firms in the world. My good buddy, Darryl Cross from Norton Rose Fulbright is the head of sales at a international law firm with that title, all the way down to individual one-on-one coaching. What do you think’s going on? Like what do you think’s going on in the cultural milieu of legal right now, that BD and.

dare I say sort of sales coaching is kind of coming to the fore.

Steve (33:45.502)
Yeah, it’s still a slow moving train. I mean, in the States, for me to get CLE approved for business development topics 10 years ago, 15 years ago was a nightmare. Today, it’s just step right up. There are law firms that are hiring internal salespeople now. There are young lawyers and are coming out and now recognizing the importance of business development.

Ben Chiriboga (34:08.341)
Mm-hmm, right.

Steve (34:15.662)
as a part of their life. Doesn’t mean that they’re jumping in and doing it, but they’re at least acknowledging that it’s important. They still keep their head down and learn the law and spend the first number of years not doing it, but that’s okay. It’ll come back when they feel comfortable that they’ve got the lawyer side down. And the other thing is there’s a number of states in the US, for example, that are making non-lawyer ownership.

a reality and so I think there’s never been a better time for lawyers to get their business development and marketing chops going than now because if you wait too long, you’re gonna be competing against Google and Amazon and Deloitte and all these major players that have big pockets that are gonna be buying up law firms and you’re gonna be competing against actual real marketing and sales agencies and so that’s gonna make things very, very challenging in the future. So.

Ben Chiriboga (34:45.737)
Right.

Ben Chiriboga (35:12.445)
Yeah.

Steve (35:13.15)
I think there’s a definite need for lawyers to start thinking about it and actually taking action on it now. And whether that’s reading books, listening to podcasts, anything that, hiring a coach, finding a mentor, whatever you need to do to start getting acclimated with that side of the legal business, the business of law, don’t hesitate, don’t wait, because you’re gonna find yourself kind of left in the dust.

Ben Chiriboga (35:40.273)
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful capstone on a great conversation. Steve, I want to thank you so much for going through and talking about, you know, the taboo of sales, how it’s changing, how we need to shift our mindsets. Any last words that you kind of want to leave us with?

Steve (35:55.222)
You know, I think I nailed it on the head with, if you’re a lawyer and you go to a recruiter and say, hey, I’m unhappy, my firm just got bought, or my boss is a tyrant, or whatever, and they’re gonna say very quickly to you, what’s your book of business? And you’re gonna say, well, I don’t have a book of business, but I’m a great attorney, and they’ll go, unplaceable. I mean, they’re not gonna be that blunt about anything, but you’re unplaceable in most scenarios. So I’m just kinda putting a fine point on, this is the reality of the industry.

whether you want to bury your head in the sand or not is up to you, but lift your head up and start getting serious about client development. It’s gonna end up being a big part of the future for law and a future for you. And so again, I’d love to be a resource. People don’t have to hire me. I’ve written four books. I’ve got a podcast, Be That Lawyer. I’ve got tons of video content on YouTube. I mean, Ben, I just want to help this industry that’s in such desperate need of help to get ahead on this game.

Ben Chiriboga (36:55.025)
Yeah, well, Steve, thanks so much. Why don’t you plug a little bit the website, maybe we could plug a couple of the other books, the podcast, of course, Be That Lawyer. Tell us where we can find more about you.

Steve (37:05.202)
Sure. Lots of information and resources on my website, which is essentially my last name, fretson, F-R-E-T-Z-I-N.com. The Be That Lawyer podcast has hit over 300 episodes in just over three and a half years. Doing two shows a week, I’m bringing on all the top experts. You mentioned Ben Paul on the show, all that kind of stuff.

So it’s a great resource. And my books, I’ve got four of them. The ones that I’d recommend are either sales-free selling to get an understanding of how, based on our conversation today, Ben, how things have changed. And then my most recent one, legal business development isn’t rocket science, which might give some lawyers some relief to know that, no, I’m not teaching rocket science. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It is a learned skill. It isn’t about the person that just, you know, has the personality that gets the business. Introverts do very, very well.

in business development with methodology and proven systems. So check out legal business development as in rocket science is another option.

Ben Chiriboga (38:06.917)
Yeah, I gotta say, even though you’re a sales guy, I think you got some real marketing chops on you there, understanding channels and assets and scalable systems. It’s sales and marketing, right? They kind of basically, it’s peanut butter and jelly when they’re working together. It’s a beautiful thing, right? Totally. All right, well, thank you so much, Steve, for sitting down with us, and thank you, everybody, for listening. We’ll be back very soon with another Fireside Chat. In the meantime, check out.

Steve (38:21.162)
Yeah, absolutely, agreed.

Ben Chiriboga (38:34.501)
All the other ones that we have done, we have some really, really great episodes about the changing nature of IP law and what IP practice needs to do to be more business oriented. We’ve done stuff about selling to tech companies and being law firms well positioned for tech clients. Lots of good stuff there. And another one in the can, Steve Frentzen. Thank you so much for being on Nextel. Take care, everybody. Thanks, guys.

Steve (39:01.496)
Thank you.

Ben Chiriboga (39:04.689)
All right, all good, and we’re out.

Steve (39:06.058)
Hey, nice.

 

Transcript

Ben Chiriboga (00:01.165)
Okay, hello and welcome back everyone. This is Ben Chiriboga, the Chief Growth Officer here at Nexel welcoming you to another Nexel Fireside Chat. I’m sitting down with my new friend Steve Fretzen today. Steve, welcome to the Nexel Fireside Chat series.

Steve (00:18.558)
Hey, good to be here, Ben.

Ben Chiriboga (00:22.413)
It’s amazing to have you here. We got connected by another friend of Nexel, Ben Paul, who recommended you all around the world of sales and legal sales. So I’m really excited to be chatting with you. We’re gonna actually talk a little bit about the taboo of sales and the S word in legal. Why don’t you sort of kick us off with your background a little bit? I know that you’re a consultant, really business development consultant.

For lawyers, you also have your own podcast as well. Yeah, set the table for us.

Steve (00:56.534)
Yeah, so I’m not an attorney by profession. I got pulled into the legal space in 2008, 2009 with the big recession, mainly because I had been working with entrepreneurs on non-salesy methodologies for growing business. In fact, I came up with, my first book is entitled Sales-Free Selling, and what that’s all about is how we can take sales and sort of kill it and move into things like

asking questions, being a good listener, empathy, qualifying, walking a buyer through a buying decision. So what resonated with lawyers was the idea that I’m not teaching them sales, I’m teaching them the soft skills of how to grow business without being salesy, and it really, really gelled. And so about a year to 16 months after I started working with my first attorney, it just got out of control in a good way, and I decided to push my chips in and be a specialist in an industry

a desperate need for coaching and training around business development. And we don’t use the bad word sales, Ben, because it’s scary to people. We call it marketing, we call it business development, anything that helps the snowflakes and the dandelions feel good about doing client development, another one that we use. But that’s really my background. I’ve written four books, I’ve got the podcast, and my goal is to really kinda change the way lawyers think about.

Ben Chiriboga (02:05.813)
Sure.

Steve (02:23.298)
growing business in a non-salesy way.

Ben Chiriboga (02:26.833)
Yeah, totally. So what were you doing before? Tell me a little bit about the world before that. Yeah, and nobody ever picks legal. It sort of picks them in a weird way. But yeah, what was life before legal?

Steve (02:41.29)
Yeah, before legal, I’ve had a very long sales career. I started selling shoes when I was in high school and just loved the customer service side of it and helping learn about what people’s needs are and fulfilling needs and kind of work my way up the food chain and just continue to learn sales and become a student of the game and a student of, how do I make the best possible career for myself? And ultimately ended up starting my own sales consultancy in 2004.

mainly focused on entrepreneurs and sales teams. And then again, you know, transitioned over to legal in 2008, nine. But it, again, I just, I always was taught to be pushy and to be aggressive and to be a salesperson. And I always felt raw about it. I never really enjoyed that part of it. And I think it was an old school Saturn commercial. Saturn’s a car that existed in the nineties, everybody. And it was, no one likes to be sold. It’s fun to buy, but no one likes to be sold.

Ben Chiriboga (03:36.802)
Yeah.

Steve (03:41.138)
And that’s so true, and I think so, why not come up with systems and methodologies that are non-salesy as a way to accomplish goals without ever feeling bad about it?

Ben Chiriboga (03:52.785)
Yeah, what um, let’s just take a let’s just take a global view. You know, you’re a student of sales. You’ve been in the game for a while. You’ve written books on it. You think about it deeply. You know, what is the state? What does, what is the state of sales and you know, for, for putting aside the lawyers and the words that we use for, for all of that, and then we’re well acquainted with that, you know, sales and.

in my world of tech world, in tech sales is a great word. You know, it’s fantastic. I mean, it’s really a lever to be pulled. And yeah, we wholeheartedly embrace it here. What’s the status of sales do you think today in the world as we sit in 2023 though?

Steve (04:34.151)
I think it’s become much more normalized. I think that for many people sales was a default.

profession, you know, something wasn’t working out, well, I just go into sales, right? You work in retail, you sell cars, you sell whatever you can sell to try to make some money. You know, if you have the gift to gab or you enjoy people, you go into sales. And I think now it’s been understood and recognized that it’s one of the top ways to make money. It’s one of the most wonderful professions if you can do it with integrity and find the right company and the right fit. And so while I think that, you know, lawyers, you know,

in maybe one of the most, if not the most noble profession, sales can be seen as a negative. Hey, there’s a salesman at my door, but I really don’t like that. We’ve all been sold to. So it does have a negative connotation, but I think it’s changing. And I’m trying to be a part of that. I’m trying to be a part of that change in how people feel about it, because what sales really is at the core is about bringing people together to solve a problem.

I mean, that’s really what it is. And so, you know, my job is not to sell my services. My job is to evaluate people to see if there’s a fit for us to work together. And so that’s a very different model than I need to hit my quotas. I need to jam a square peg in a round hole and do whatever I have to do to get someone to say yes. That’s why people are so turned off by sales.

Ben Chiriboga (05:41.993)
Yeah.

Ben Chiriboga (06:02.013)
Yeah, let’s flip it on its head just a little bit, but still keeping with this idea of where is the world of sales in 2023. There’s a lot of discussion around this idea that really we have such educated buyers now that sort of come to us. They typically know everything about us, everything about the company.

content is abundant out there, word of mouth referrals, regardless, you know, regardless of where you’re at, the point is, is that people know a lot, lot more than used to be in. Would you say that that’s kind of a contributing factor to this kind of shift in sales of where it’s going?

Steve (06:42.218)
Yeah, 100%. So back in the day when I started selling, you know, things, services and products, no one had any information. So it was sort of like, you know, if they believed in you and they needed this, the product or the service they would buy and, and that was sort of it. And sometimes it worked out and sometimes people felt raw about it or felt screwed over by whatever they bought, whether that was insurance, whether that was a car, that was a lemon, whatever the case was, that’s kind of the way it was.

Now that there’s so much information out there and the internet obviously being a huge part of that, buyers have a lot more control than they used to have. So when you walk in to get a car, you’re not like, well, I don’t even know anything about like what this should cost. You have a ton of information.

Right? You know what a law firm or a lawyer may charge compared to others, because a lot of that stuff is easily available. So what’s happened is the buyers have taken control, which then hurts the seller because the seller ends up becoming someone who just presents and gives numbers and then gets kind of run around and kind of like jumps through hoops to get business. And so what ends up happening is a little bit of a, of a, of a, of a.

confrontational type of a situation where the buyer is out for the buyer, the seller is out for the seller, and no one’s really working to cohesively find a fit. And so that’s sort of what’s happening. So what I’m trying to do again is change that model. So allow the seller to take control, but make it all about the buyer so that it’s a mutual conversation about the problems and the potential solutions and how they fit together versus it being someone trying to

get the cheapest price and the other person trying to get the highest price and it’s they’re not really meeting where they need to meet.

Ben Chiriboga (08:24.657)
Yeah, you know, you know, a salesperson that I really respect one time sort of said that modern sales today is kind of like going down like a like a river rapid together. So the salesperson might be at the at the end sort of the river guide kind of knows the past along. But you know, at the end of the day, they’re rowing together with other people who might

you know, the buyers, let’s say in this case, trying to all basically get down the rapid, because while there is a lot of information, there’s also a lot of missteps and a lot of complexity, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that analogy? Does that land for you?

Steve (09:03.006)
Yeah, I think it does. I think, you know, again, the goal is, I mean, let’s say an attorney comes to me and I’m a business development coach, you know, with, you know, doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t have any method of how to develop business, just kind of running around, you know, going to conferences and speaking here and writing there. And it’s just like random acts of marketing and, you know, and if I identify those problems and the solutions that I have sort of fit those, to solve those problems, and it’s gonna end up making that lawyer a lot more money, which is the case.

because they’re not wasting time and they’re not spinning their wheels and they’re not doing random acts of marketing, then there’s an investment of time and money and energy to be placed in that. But we need to come together to find the problems, find the solutions. And I think that getting down a river with rapids where there’s good communication and you’re on the same team versus it’s you against me, I mean, that’s going to be a much better way to get down safely without cracking a skull.

Ben Chiriboga (09:59.333)
Yeah, totally. All right, so we’re gonna talk today, I think the subject of the conversation was really going to be around the taboo of proactive, let’s call it sales if we want, let’s call it client development if we want, let’s call it business development if we want, but really what we’re talking about is kind of proactively going and having conversations with clients. So…

You’ve now been in this game for about almost 15 years, I’d say 2008, I don’t know if I did the math right, but pretty close. I had a former life before getting into tech, I had a former life as a lawyer myself, and the first thing I could say is, nobody ever taught a lawyer in law school anything remotely like business development or sales or even client development skills.

But even more so, even deeper, there is still sort of a taboo around this idea of being proactive with your business development and developing business, et cetera, et cetera. So let’s maybe just start out, why is that the case? Why do you think that that’s sort of the middle mainstream view right now, if you agree with that?

Steve (11:11.958)
Well, I mean, if you think about how law school works, and I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve worked with and spoken at a number of law schools, and there’s even one or two that have picked up my most recent book and are using it as curriculum. So they are slowly coming around, slowly. However, they’re preparing you to be a lawyer, they’re preparing you to think like a lawyer and to handle the ins and outs, but they’re not really…

Ben Chiriboga (11:26.033)
Nice.

Steve (11:39.778)
thinking about marketing, business development, and teaching you how to be a business person because they don’t know if you’re gonna go in-house, they don’t know if you’re gonna go in private practice. Is it really their responsibility? That’s gonna be a question to be answered at a later time. But ultimately, when a lawyer thinks about their future, especially in private practice, there is absolutely nothing more important other than maybe being a great lawyer.

than having your own clients. And again, I can’t tell you how many lawyers come to me, they’re looking for another job somewhere else, and they’re totally unplaceable because they don’t have a client base to bring with them. A portable book of business is an insider’s kind of verbiage about it. And so I think that we’ve gotta figure out a way to start letting lawyers know early on, maybe even before law school, in college, and then in law school, and…

in the first couple of years out about the importance of developing a network, the importance of maintaining relationships, developing relationships, because the person to your left or right, I think in law school they say, look to your left and look to the right, those people won’t be here in two years, right? And what they should be saying is, right? What they should be saying is look to your left and look to your right, one of these people could be a general counsel at a major corporation in 10 years, and you need to stay in touch with that person, right? So it’s a very different mindset.

Ben Chiriboga (12:45.988)
I remember this.

Steve (12:59.49)
that needs to be had in order for lawyers to start to realize the importance of client development as a function of control and freedom and enjoyment of a career. And that’s just not the past of the legal industry and of law school.

Ben Chiriboga (13:15.953)
Yeah, so I want to take, you know, I do think culturally it’s sort of ingrained in some part because there’s no training, so sort of the light isn’t shined on that in some respects. On another sense, it can be very competitive. I think you pointed at this in terms of law school per se. That kind of competition tends to come out and sort of pervade itself a little bit within the early practice. So…

Nine times out of ten, you’re sort of 40 years old, and I think this was your last point, or I’m just trying to synthesize all this. You’re 40, 45, and maybe you’re trying to move to another firm or making partner, and this muscle’s never been developed, so it’s a little atrophied. So that’s just sort of like a comment summarizing this. What about the, let’s just go into it, what about the idea that selling has sort of taboos around this? And I think you already mentioned this before. And so…

I want to, you know, there’s a dignified or a, what’s the word that I’m looking for, you know, you’re sort of degenerating the practice in some sense, if you believe that, by associating with selling. What are your comments around there? I’m sure you’ve had conversations about this either directly or indirectly in manner of speaking.

Steve (14:39.806)
Yeah. One of the first networking groups that I belonged to, there was a life insurance guy in the room and I brought him because I met him and I thought he was a nice guy. He just destroyed the room. I mean he went out and pushed business cards, he was selling insurance to everybody. He wasn’t networking, he was selling hardcore. And eventually the leader of that group, the chamber president came up to me and said, did you bring this guy?

And I was like, yeah, do I have to say yes? I guess I do. And I apologize profusely. And a lesson was learned that day that, yeah, there’s right and wrong ways to do things. And so there’s an ethical way to do business development that where everybody feels good and there’s a wrong way. And so if you’re out pitching and selling and convincing, which is lawyers even call it, hey, we’re going on a pitch meeting. I mean, that’s real language they’re using. And because that’s what the buyers want.

they wanna be pitched to because they think that’s what they want, that’s actually not what they want. What they want and what should happen is we’ve identified a problem or two, we’re gonna identify more, we’re gonna ask a lot of questions, we’re gonna continue to figure out, is this a fit? That’s the most important word. And when it’s done properly and ethically with the other person’s best interests in mind, what ends up happening is it ends up being an incredibly powerful relationship building tool.

an unbelievably powerful tool for enjoying business development versus feeling negative or dirty about it because when all you’re doing is asking questions, listening and solving problems, well, that’s all lawyers want to do anyway. So we just, they’ve been kind of shown a bad path of how to get business and it doesn’t have to be that way. So we just need to continue to help lawyers understand.

you know, what selling really is, and it is not about, you know, pushing anything on anybody. The words convince come, the word convince and pitch and sell come up a lot, and I just immediately turned that around and said, that’s not really what we’re doing here.

Ben Chiriboga (16:43.877)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let’s go deeper into that actually, because let’s pivot into the modern selling. So, we grounded this conversation by saying, selling or business development or client development, really just developing business and being helpful. Let’s use that, but we need to use shorter words than that. In 2023, it really isn’t, we really need to reformulate our entire idea.

Not only because there’s more information than ever, but maybe just the old antiquated way of selling was never even the way to do it to begin with effectively. It really, at its core, selling is about helping, listening, asking good questions, and seeing whether or not there is a good fit. Absolutely. But let’s do this. Let’s go into that modern way of selling. And I’d like for you to attach this to the idea of relationships and relationship building. Nexel’s all about relationship building. We have…

A CRM that theoretically should give you all the information, not theoretically, actually does give you all the information that you need about that relationship at both the company and the contact level. Can you say a little bit and just tie it in a really specific way, how does developing business and relationship building kind of go together? Sometimes I feel like people think they’re antithetical, but I actually think they’re completely aligned in terms of it’s necessary to really further a relationship.

Steve (18:12.782)
I mean, at the heart of relationships is, you know, the word understanding. I think, you know, I want my friends to understand me. I want my wife to understand me. And when I feel understood, I feel good. I feel good about her. I feel good about me. And I think when I’m looking to buy insurance, when I’m looking to buy, when I’m going to hire a new accountant or hire a lawyer.

the level of understanding directly relates to my interest level in working with that person. So through questioning and through relationship building and through that ferreting out of information, there’s a level of understanding. And when I feel understood, that’s when I feel like, oh, I wanna move forward. So an easy example of this would be, I go into a therapist’s office and I say, hey, I’m having a lot of negative feelings about my father.

and she says, okay, well here, take these pills and you’ll feel better about it. You won’t even think about it anymore. So there was a prescription given, no understanding at all, and I don’t know how I feel about taking pills, right? So that’s what a lot of lawyers are doing, is they’re prescribing without diagnosing. What I would prefer is, so Steve, it sounds like you’re coming to me because you’re having some challenges with your dad. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s been going on?

well and then I tell what’s been going on. And so when did that start? And is that always been the case? And does he treat other people that way? And there’s a lot of questions that we go with, like peeling an onion, getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And when you do that in business development with a general counsel, with a CEO, with someone who’s got problems, and they feel understood.

they’re gonna wanna work with you, even if you’re the most expensive or someone that they really maybe, you know, they were just using you for numbers and you didn’t have to give the numbers. They, before numbers are even given, they feel understood and they feel a connection and that connection’s, I want you as my lawyer.

Ben Chiriboga (20:16.502)
Let me ask you the idea about listening and what good listening means in sort of like this context because in some ways, I feel like good listening isn’t just about making sure that you’re hearing the person, it’s about being interested and wanting to actually help. Can you say a little bit more about listening because it always, it comes back, I feel like, in this way about asking good questions and listening and discovery. Can you say more about that and why, truthfully, and hopefully,

for all the listeners out there, we can see that listening is at the core of both good relationships, probably everybody buys that, but it’s also basically at the core of developing business. And in that way, that’s where that corner nexus is. But yeah, say more about listening and where you need to be to be a good listener for this.

Steve (21:07.018)
Right, so where does understanding…

begin? Well, it begins with good questions and it kind of goes to good listening and empathy and understanding all relate. Personally, I don’t have a meeting without taking notes. I have a notepad I’ve got my remarkable 2, which I’m a huge fan of that tablet, feels like paper, but it’s electric, electronic. I have no paper anymore, which has been wonderful. But every person I meet with and speak with, I’m writing down their name, I’m taking notes

Steve (21:40.169)
and that allows me to not only kind of make sure that I’m on top of things, but I can then say, hey, I kind of wrote down here something about you wanted to understand more about listening and then I can ask a deeper question. So I think there’s so many ways to get distracted.

with, especially on Zoom calls, you’ve got email, you’ve got your phone chiming. My kid’s in Costa Rica right now, and he’s trying to tell me about eating a Big Mac, he had his first Big Mac, and that’s happening in real time right before we got on here. So there’s lots of distractions. We have to stay focused, we have to listen, not just with our ears, but with our whole being. We need to identify and look at body language to identify how, and read people’s body language is just as important as the words they say. So there’s all these things,

And again, if you’re not doing that and you’re distracted or you think you can just keep it all in your head, you know, if you can’t, good for you. I found that that’s very challenging to do, especially if you think about what understanding means. A lot of it, in my opinion, is being able to repeat back what someone said. Because if you give me, let’s say that, Ben, you give me something really juicy about, I had someone, just as an example, gave me something the other day that said, if I don’t change my situation, you know, I’m not gonna be able to feed my family.

Now, if I just summarize that and go, so if I’m hearing you right, you’re not happy. Well, that’s not listening. I wanna be able to say, you know, that sounds really difficult. You know, the idea or thought that you may not be able to feed your family is scary. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like. You know, what have you thought about doing to resolve that in the past? Okay.

Ben Chiriboga (23:02.733)
Yeah, sure.

Steve (23:21.618)
And that’s going to make a huge difference in that conversation versus, you know, summarizing someone because you’re not listening and you’re not taking notes and you’re not really in the moment, you know, fully.

Ben Chiriboga (23:33.041)
Yeah, I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask like a psychological issue and this is for me coming from being prior lawyer and you know, I basically had to, just to understand sales, I kind of felt like I had to almost give myself a lobotomy, you know, in some sense. And it’s this, you know, in some sense, when you leave law school, you get this title, it says ESQ behind your name.

and you know, there is a, you work in a law firm, nine days, you know, five days a week, and you’re surrounded by other lawyers, and you’re talking to other lawyers, and all of this builds up to basically create this perception that you are the expert, and you know the prescription that needs to be done. I just, I guess I wanna ask, you know, when all of that is what’s surrounded around you, when a client comes to you with a legal problem, it can be very difficult to switch off and say,

well I need to deeply listen to actually understand because this person actually might. No it’s more about their situation. Am I making sense in terms of it’s hard to sort of like this I’m the professional I’m here to just tell you what to do effectively and. To be cliche you know type a personalities of lawyers and dominant personalities and all of this kind of stuff and that’s not the case with every lawyer around the world certainly but.

You know, there’s a lot of that kind of, I’m here to prescribe and I know what’s best, so just do what I’m saying. Coming from that position really makes listening and active listening very, very hard. Would you agree, do you sort of see that sort of pervasive a little bit?

Steve (25:13.078)
Yeah, I mean, I would say, go so far as to say, one of the killers of good business development is solving too early, it’s prescribing too early, it’s free consulting, and then they take, and then you feel empty because they took from you and they left and now they’re not returning your calls. You’ve officially been ghosted. There’s so many negatives to, and this goes back to the thing we said earlier, Ben, about buyers, the way buyers work. They gather, gather information.

Ben Chiriboga (25:21.361)
Right.

Steve (25:41.91)
but they’re not really being walked through a buying decision, okay? So what I teach every day is relationship building, establishing agendas that allow for us to ask questions and not prescribe. And one of the first things I have to do with a group of lawyers that I work with is I have to, you know, if you ever watch an old like show about horses at a ranch, they get a wild horse, they gotta break the horse. I have to break lawyers like a horse.

Ben Chiriboga (26:07.725)
Yeah, right.

Steve (26:09.794)
because they’re such amazing solution people. And I am too, I’m a great solution person and I don’t want them solving things. What I want them to do is I want them to take their solution, I want them to stuff it down in their pocket and keep listening and asking questions and trying to figure out what all the details are of the diagnosis prior to that prescription being provided. And it’s very hard because they have the prescription that’s at the tip of their tongue.

and they wanna give it, and that’s what they know is giving prescriptions, giving solutions. And I have to break them of that because with, if they continue to do that, it hurts the entire methodology that I’m trying to teach them, which is the diagnosis, the questioning, the understanding, qualifying is a huge one. Like you’re just giving information and pricing, for example, Ben, to someone who’s not the decision maker. All right, it’s someone that’s gonna then take that information and bring it to someone else and totally destroy it.

and they’re just gonna say no, and you’re out $100,000, $1 million matter because you didn’t have a process, you didn’t think about what needs to happen before you solve, and who are you giving the solution to? So it’s like a trial, there’s so many moving parts, and if you don’t know what those moving parts are and how they’re gonna play out, you’re gonna lose the trial. And same thing in sales and business development, you have to know all the moving parts, and most lawyers don’t have any formal training on that, which means that there’s mistakes happening.

We don’t ramp it.

Ben Chiriboga (27:37.833)
Yeah, I like the grab and the grounding in the case of a trial because I was a litigator myself and, you know, great trials have an entire arc to them in terms of, of course, everybody knows from popular culture, opening and closing statements and cross examination and direct examination and all the rest of it. You know, it’s always wild to me that like people know that arc, but they don’t do the same arc in the context of something like sales.

Yeah, I’ve always thought, wow, if people could understand that there has to be an arc in this and prescribing too quickly to your point really hurts both you and hurts your buying partner. And in some ways it could even hurt the relationship in that way. So I just wanted to double click on that and sort of say like, yeah, that’s absolutely the case. And I think…

People lose it whenever they’re in another circumstance. What they know in a trial circumstance, they just don’t know, and applies to, let’s say, a sales circumstance. I wanna shift and end with our last pillar, which is maybe you can walk through a little bit what it means to break a lawyer, what needs to, and we say this lovingly, of course, because we’re all on the same team.

What has worked? What does it mean to try to when you work with lawyers on a day to day basis? How do you start to sort of do that process of shifting minds and kind of what does that feel like and what are you trying to do first, second, third? And this is maybe for everybody who’s trying to make a change in themselves to kind of get there. What needs to happen? Are there any realizations, early mindset shifts that are always really helpful?

Steve (29:22.698)
Yeah, I would say it starts before someone engages me, just as an example. I need to understand that their problems are significant, the growth they’re looking for is significant, and I have to understand how motivated they are to change, how motivated they are to grow, because if all they’re looking for is five or 10% change, or they’re just looking to kinda get a couple of skills built, that’s probably not a good client for me. So I think I’m looking for, even before we start,

that I understand that there’s potential here and that there’s commitment to change it, to the point where I say, are you willing to burn the ship behind you? Are you willing to draw a line in the sand, push your chips in? And we have a ton of different ways of looking at it, but that’s sort of the first step. The second step is now we’re engaged and we need to start putting a plan together. And the plan includes a goal, a objective to reach, it includes where’s the low-hanging fruit, how are we gonna spend our time?

How are you gonna spend your time? And then, of course, breaking it into actionable, tactical, day-to-day functions. And so, as we go along, they’re gonna make mistakes. That’s fine. We cannot learn without failure and mistakes. But my job is to step in and say, all right, you just went into a meeting, you had a big opportunity to lock up. Why didn’t you call me before that meeting? You should have, I told you to and you didn’t. Okay, so that’s one potential issue. The other is, they went in with

the idea of sales-free selling, the idea of walking a buyer through a buying decision, and the buyer took control and started asking about rates, and the thing went off the rails fairly quickly. That’s okay too, but here’s where we need to make a switch, Ben. What can we learn from that? What can we do to, when someone says, how, what are your rates? And you just tell them the rates, and they go, okay, this meeting’s over. They wouldn’t say that. They’ll run out the clock on it, and then never call you back, because your rates were higher than they could handle, for example. But,

how do we handle that in the future? So maybe we do something like an agree and redirect where we say, that’s a really great question. I get that a lot. People are very interested in knowing my rates. Unfortunately, it’s a lot like asking, what’s a bag of groceries cost? I don’t know what we’re dealing with. I don’t know what’s involved. I don’t know how to staff it. So if it’s okay with you, Ben, if we could just allow me to ask a few more questions, I promise you we’ll get to rates kind of near the end of our meeting. Is that okay? So we just came up with a way of…

Steve (31:48.002)
continuing to ask questions, continuing to take and walk a buyer through a buying decision without giving up our solutions, without giving up our rates early on. And that’s one of hundreds of different things that we need to do within the space of a meeting to get the best possible outcome. And sometimes that best outcome, Ben, is moving someone to a no. I’m turning people away, I don’t wanna say at a record pace, but I’m turning people away on a fairly regular basis when I identify that they’re not a fit for me. On the other hand, when someone is a fit for me,

it’s a little bit of a love fest and we’re like, holy mackerel, this is like lightning striking. This is gonna be, we’re all gonna make a lot of money here and then everything’s on the right track. So that’s really what we’re talking about is making sure that we have a methodology that’s gonna work within what you’re trying to accomplish and again, without ever feeling like you have to go out and aggressively sell or push or convince.

Ben Chiriboga (32:23.206)
Yeah.

Ben Chiriboga (32:45.853)
Yeah, so I want to end with just picking up on something that you said, you know, I think the world of BD, you know, I’ve been in legal, I’ve only ever done legal my entire career and even in that point in time, you know, I feel like there is this flash happening right now around the world of business development, coaching, client development, coaching. It’s happening at the company level. We see the rise of business professionals.

coaching professionals within all the way from Big Law, the largest law firms in the world. My good buddy, Darryl Cross from Norton Rose Fulbright is the head of sales at a international law firm with that title, all the way down to individual one-on-one coaching. What do you think’s going on? Like what do you think’s going on in the cultural milieu of legal right now, that BD and.

dare I say sort of sales coaching is kind of coming to the fore.

Steve (33:45.502)
Yeah, it’s still a slow moving train. I mean, in the States, for me to get CLE approved for business development topics 10 years ago, 15 years ago was a nightmare. Today, it’s just step right up. There are law firms that are hiring internal salespeople now. There are young lawyers and are coming out and now recognizing the importance of business development.

Ben Chiriboga (34:08.341)
Mm-hmm, right.

Steve (34:15.662)
as a part of their life. Doesn’t mean that they’re jumping in and doing it, but they’re at least acknowledging that it’s important. They still keep their head down and learn the law and spend the first number of years not doing it, but that’s okay. It’ll come back when they feel comfortable that they’ve got the lawyer side down. And the other thing is there’s a number of states in the US, for example, that are making non-lawyer ownership.

a reality and so I think there’s never been a better time for lawyers to get their business development and marketing chops going than now because if you wait too long, you’re gonna be competing against Google and Amazon and Deloitte and all these major players that have big pockets that are gonna be buying up law firms and you’re gonna be competing against actual real marketing and sales agencies and so that’s gonna make things very, very challenging in the future. So.

Ben Chiriboga (34:45.737)
Right.

Ben Chiriboga (35:12.445)
Yeah.

Steve (35:13.15)
I think there’s a definite need for lawyers to start thinking about it and actually taking action on it now. And whether that’s reading books, listening to podcasts, anything that, hiring a coach, finding a mentor, whatever you need to do to start getting acclimated with that side of the legal business, the business of law, don’t hesitate, don’t wait, because you’re gonna find yourself kind of left in the dust.

Ben Chiriboga (35:40.273)
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful capstone on a great conversation. Steve, I want to thank you so much for going through and talking about, you know, the taboo of sales, how it’s changing, how we need to shift our mindsets. Any last words that you kind of want to leave us with?

Steve (35:55.222)
You know, I think I nailed it on the head with, if you’re a lawyer and you go to a recruiter and say, hey, I’m unhappy, my firm just got bought, or my boss is a tyrant, or whatever, and they’re gonna say very quickly to you, what’s your book of business? And you’re gonna say, well, I don’t have a book of business, but I’m a great attorney, and they’ll go, unplaceable. I mean, they’re not gonna be that blunt about anything, but you’re unplaceable in most scenarios. So I’m just kinda putting a fine point on, this is the reality of the industry.

whether you want to bury your head in the sand or not is up to you, but lift your head up and start getting serious about client development. It’s gonna end up being a big part of the future for law and a future for you. And so again, I’d love to be a resource. People don’t have to hire me. I’ve written four books. I’ve got a podcast, Be That Lawyer. I’ve got tons of video content on YouTube. I mean, Ben, I just want to help this industry that’s in such desperate need of help to get ahead on this game.

Ben Chiriboga (36:55.025)
Yeah, well, Steve, thanks so much. Why don’t you plug a little bit the website, maybe we could plug a couple of the other books, the podcast, of course, Be That Lawyer. Tell us where we can find more about you.

Steve (37:05.202)
Sure. Lots of information and resources on my website, which is essentially my last name, fretson, F-R-E-T-Z-I-N.com. The Be That Lawyer podcast has hit over 300 episodes in just over three and a half years. Doing two shows a week, I’m bringing on all the top experts. You mentioned Ben Paul on the show, all that kind of stuff.

So it’s a great resource. And my books, I’ve got four of them. The ones that I’d recommend are either sales-free selling to get an understanding of how, based on our conversation today, Ben, how things have changed. And then my most recent one, legal business development isn’t rocket science, which might give some lawyers some relief to know that, no, I’m not teaching rocket science. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It is a learned skill. It isn’t about the person that just, you know, has the personality that gets the business. Introverts do very, very well.

in business development with methodology and proven systems. So check out legal business development as in rocket science is another option.

Ben Chiriboga (38:06.917)
Yeah, I gotta say, even though you’re a sales guy, I think you got some real marketing chops on you there, understanding channels and assets and scalable systems. It’s sales and marketing, right? They kind of basically, it’s peanut butter and jelly when they’re working together. It’s a beautiful thing, right? Totally. All right, well, thank you so much, Steve, for sitting down with us, and thank you, everybody, for listening. We’ll be back very soon with another Fireside Chat. In the meantime, check out.

Steve (38:21.162)
Yeah, absolutely, agreed.

Ben Chiriboga (38:34.501)
All the other ones that we have done, we have some really, really great episodes about the changing nature of IP law and what IP practice needs to do to be more business oriented. We’ve done stuff about selling to tech companies and being law firms well positioned for tech clients. Lots of good stuff there. And another one in the can, Steve Frentzen. Thank you so much for being on Nextel. Take care, everybody. Thanks, guys.

Steve (39:01.496)
Thank you.

Ben Chiriboga (39:04.689)
All right, all good, and we’re out.

Steve (39:06.058)
Hey, nice.

 

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