How to get client meetings for sales pitching?

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In our Precision Pitching course, the students learn to effectively pitch themselves in meetings with clients. Although our students are enthusiastic with our consultative approach to pitching, they frequently raise questions about how to actually get meetings with clients. Or, to be more blunt, they say the following:

Why would clients want to meet with lawyers? We tend to be boring and have little interesting to say.

If you find yourself facing the same problem, you can find below some tips on how to be interesting for clients. In particular, you can learn the following:

  • Why aren’t lawyers interesting?

  • How to identify the interests of your clients?

  • How to use client interests to get meetings?

A. Why aren’t lawyers interesting?

Actually, lawyers are extremely interesting … to other lawyers. We all seem to share a similar passion for the law, and the discussions can be fun and quite enjoyable.

However, we oftentimes fail to be interesting to our clients, because we are focused on talking about our interests. Clients, even in-house lawyers, usually have decidedly different interests from us, and they don’t find it the least bit interesting when we force them to focus on our interests.

So, if you want to be interesting, you need to focus on and discuss the interests of your clients.

B. How to identify the interests of your clients?

Best Method: Shut up and listen. If lawyers would just listen to clients, they would realize that clients are happy to talk about and share their interests.

Non-Contact Method: For lawyers that are not great at conversations, you can still learn a lot about the interests of your target clients by researching their interests. What events are they attending? What Linkedin posts are they liking? What blogs and websites are dedicated for them? (Website Tip: If you want to get a sense of the interests for in-house lawyers, check out this awesome site - The Centre for Legal Leadership.)

Round-table Method: My favorite approach is to run client round-tables. If you have a few clients with similar problems, they are probably very interested in speaking with other clients with the same problems. If you organize a round-table so that they can discuss these problems amongst each other, they will likely be quite grateful for your efforts. Better yet, you will have access to valuable discussions about key client interests. (As an added bonus, if you start to organize these round-tables on a regular basis, they will probably ask to invite new people, i.e., you can build your network.)

C. How to use client interests to get meetings?

Once you identify some important interests of clients, clients will be happy to meet with you if you help them with their interests. For example:

  • If they are looking to connect with someone, help them make the connection.

  • If they are looking for information on a topic, send them some reading material.

  • If they need a piano teacher for their kid, find them a teacher.

  • If they need anything (personal or business-related), do your best to help them with it.

Once you’ve demonstrated an ability to focus on and help them with their interests, they are much more likely to be willing to meet with you. But, you have to ask for the meeting. If you don’t know how to do this, check out our article about how to leverage conference connections for setting up introductory meetings - Chat Gpt Prompts: Capturing the Value of Networking Events.

D. Learn More

If you would like to learn more about our client-oriented approach to business development, check out the following articles:

Or, join us for our next course on Precision Pitching.