What are you doing to differentiate your law firm in a highly competitive market?
Differentiation is the process of distinguishing products or services to make them attractive to a target audience. In short, differentiation helps “us” choose – pink or blue, regular or lite…. What happens when there’s not enough differentiation? What happens when everything is gray? The choice doesn’t matter as much.
Years of doing what “other law firms are doing” has created a lot of undifferentiated law firms. When everyone is average they begin to compete on price location and style. Are law firms ready to start acting like Walmart and Target? Or are they already there? Are they in too deep?
Prospects want law firms to tell them why they should choose them. But that’s impossible, right? Meaningful means something different to everyone. Impossible to align, so many variations among clients and practices.
This presentation suggests that law firm leaders stop focusing on differentiating their features and start differentiating around something that matters to clients. Something that will help them choose. Focus on delivering the basic category benefits –those things all clients expect from their law firms — better than anyone else….and the rest will follow.
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Jayne -
Concise, insightful and beautifully formed. Sildes are awesome and advice spot on. You correctly point out that law firms choose to compete on exactly the same qualities, which eschews differentiation. Since competent lawyering, market pricing and efficient management are table stakes in business development, experience is the only effective differentiator. And experience is 80% emotional. This is precisely the reason reputation is so crucial, because that is what trial is based on. When engaged, only by delivering an experience that recognizes and exceeds the client’s expectations can a lawyer or law firm hope to establish a benchmark that consistently brings business back.
Russell,
Good points. I was also reminded yesterday of a famous quote relevant to delivering on the basic category benefits; Successful people don’t do extraoidinary things…they do ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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