Podcast Ep. 9: Sales Conversations Without Fear for Women Lawyers
Having sales conversations with potential clients can be terrifying. Why? Because we feel judged. And the reality is, we are being judged - that’s what the sales conversation is all about.
Welcome to The Pathway to Partnership Podcast, a podcast designed specifically for women lawyers.
My name is Cecilia Poullain. I’m a coach for women lawyers who want to make partner.
Each week on the podcast, we explore the three pillars of my Pathway to Partnership programme: clarity, confidence and client development.
And today, we’re going to talk about something that many people dread: sales.
For a lot of women lawyers, selling their services feels very uncomfortable. It feels pushy. It feels sleazy. But if you want to make partner and if you want to be an effective partner, sales is an extremely important part of the job.
Today, we’re exploring how to bring different energies to your sales conversations so that they feel natural, credible and effective.
I want to start with a story. Late one Friday afternoon last year, I spoke to a potential coaching client. She had been treated appallingly by her employer. She was on sick leave and she was so distressed that her psychiatrist had suggested that she go on anti-depressants. She said she was interested in working with me but wanted to talk it over with her husband over the weekend. We arranged to speak again on the following Monday.
But when she got on the phone on Monday, the first thing she said was: “I’m really sorry Cecilia, but I’ve decided not to work with you - I’m not in any fit state to do this work right now.” I acknowledged what she had said… then asked her permission to coach her. During the call, she was frequently in tears, but by the end of our conversation, she was smiling and even laughing. I then switched my energy from “passive” to “assertive” and said to her, without even asking her opinion: “Actually, based on the conversation we’ve just had, you can’t afford not to work with me”. I was giving her my view as an expert. I knew I could help her. I knew I could keep her off the anti-depressants. I knew that she wasn’t depressed - she was grieving.
To my delight, she agreed, and within two months, she had received three job offers and had accepted one - and most importantly, she was back to her usual, cheerful self.
I’m sharing this story because it’s an example of the different energies we need to bring to sales conversations: listening deeply THEN showing up as an expert. In this episode, we’re going to look at why sales is such a problem for women lawyers and how to make it easier.
So why is sales such a problem?
The main reason is emotional. Having sales conversations with potential clients can be terrifying. Why? Because we feel judged. And the reality is, we are being judged - that’s what the sales conversation is all about. And if the person we’re talking to says “no”, we can go into a confidence tailspin - because we feel as though they are judging us as people and we start to think: “I’m not good enough”. Or we fall into the black and whites, the absolutes. We start to think: “I will never bring in enough work. I will never be able to bring in enough cash. I will never be able to support a team”. And for sole practitioners or small firms, it’s even worse - we start to think: “If they say no, my business will go under. This is the end”. So our emotional reaction to being judged is the first problem.
The second problem is we don’t know how to sell. As with so many of these things, as I say over and over again on this podcast, we’re expected to know how to sell without anyone ever teaching us - but sales is a whole profession in itself. In a few minutes, you will learn a simple sales conversation structure that will get you on your way.
A related problem specifically for women lawyers and even more specifically for younger women lawyers is that they find it very hard to establish their credibility with older men. That power dynamic can be very difficult. Interestingly, they also say that it is sometimes even harder to convince a General Counsel who is a woman than a GC who is a man.
Women can face a double-bind if they are too aggressive in their sales conversations: some people don’t like being challenged or having their authority and expertise put at risk, particularly by a younger woman. If the lawyer is assertive (and acts in the way a man might act), then she can be judged as aggressive even when she isn’t being particularly aggressive. However, if she doesn’t stand up and say what she thinks, then she can be seen as weak or not credible. Either way, she loses.
Many women are great at listening to their clients and understanding their problems, but in a sales conversation, they feel less confident proving why they are the best person for the job, and this part of the conversation can make them feel very anxious.
And finally, when the client starts to object and push back, in particular on price, if we aren’t confident enough and don’t fully believe in the unique value we can bring to that particular client, we can cave in to their demands and then bitterly regret it.
So they are just a few of the reasons why sales conversations can be difficult.
Before we get into the structure for sales conversationsI’d like to give you a little bit of context:
First, let’s look at “what is sales”? Let’s start by defining what it is not. Sales is not positioning or finding your niche or your speciality - that’s the work you need to do well before you get into the sales conversation. If you want to know more about that, check out Episode 7. And sales isn’t marketing. Marketing is all about making sure that people know you exist and moving them through the know, like, trust funnel. If you want to know more about that, check out Episode 8. That’s what sales isn’t. Sales is the conversation with a potential client when the client and you are deciding whether they are going to hire you or your firm as their lawyer and you are deciding if you want to work with them as a client. A sales conversation can take the form of a formal pitch, a Teams call, a coffee in a coffee shop or an in-person visit. That’s my first point on context.
And the third point is this. If there is an RFP, you need to ask yourself whether you actually want to respond. If you know you aren’t the right lawyer for this client or this case and have very little chance of winning, it may be a better use of your time to simply not respond. And sometimes, you will know that you are the token, benchmark bid, in which case you may want to respond in order to maintain good relationships with the client, but not waste too much time on it.
In certain situations, there is no sales conversation.
- I understand that more and more often, large corporate clients are asking their law firms to pitch for work by responding to an online questionnaire. I think that’s a real shame, because it doesn’t leave much room for the firm to differentiate their value - and I suspect that in this case, the only thing the client is really looking at is price. But I also understand that, even in this situation, when the formal RFP is online, there is often a sales conversation - but it happens afterwards, when the client asks to chat with the lawyer informally over a coffee. That’s the second point I wanted to make about context.
- And sometimes, when a client is referred to you for example, the sales conversation will be very light because the client isn’t really considering any other options. The only question is whether they are prepared to accept your fee.
- So there are two situations in which there isn’t really a sales conversation at all.
But in many other situations, you will find yourself in a sales conversation. In these situations, if you master the sales conversation structure which I’ll share with you in a moment, this is a huge advantage. Because the truth is that there are lots of very good lawyers out there, most of them are likely to do a great job, so it’s in how you handle the sales conversation that you can win the business. And if you master the structure, you will feel so much more confident.
As I mentioned a moment ago, well before you find yourself in a sales conversation, there is some work to do. And that work is knowing what your differentiated value is. A quick reminder of what “differentiated value” is. Your "differentiated value” is all the things that make you different and more valuable compared to all the other lawyers and other solutions out there for your ideal client. You need to know your differentiated value because that’s the way clients think. They aren’t making a choice in a vacuum. They are deciding between different options: between you and other lawyers, between you and doing it in-house, between you and potentially other professionals, consultants, accountants etc.
OK. That’s enough preliminaries. Now I want to get into the main point of this episode and provide you with a very simple structure that you will be able to remember and apply no matter what sales conversation you find yourself in. Professional sales people have multi-part structures that they script, rehearse and refine over time. You don’t need that. To start off with, this simple structure is more than enough to get you through.
The sales conversation has four parts:
Understanding the client’s “perfect world” - and we’ll talk in a moment about what “perfect world” means.
Proving that you can provide that perfect world - or, as I said before, deciding to walk away
Dealing with objections
Keeping control of the sale
So - understanding their perfect world, proving you can provide it, objections and keeping control of the sale.
Here’s the first part: understanding their perfect world.
You have three objectives in the first part of the sales conversation. You need to understand their issue; you need to understand what they are looking for in a firm and you need to establish your credibility.
In order to understand their issue, you need to really listen. When we’re great at relationship building, which a lot of women lawyers are, we can be naturally brilliant at this part of the conversation - we use active listening, we summarise what the client has just said, we repeat the last few words they said to keep them talking. That’s the first objective.
The second objective is to understand not only their problem but also what they are looking for in a law firm and in a lawyer. What is important to them? Is it the size of the firm? Is it the price? Is it the level of expertise - so, for example, are they looking for the specialist on this particular point, or are they happy to work with someone who will do a good enough job at a reasonable price. It is vital to know what they are looking for in a lawyer and a law firm, because it helps you to know whether you are the right firm for them.
The third objective is that, especially as a woman, you need to establish your credibility early. This is the answer to the question I asked before - how do younger women lawyers establish their credibility with older men?
Research shows that relationship-builders can be the worst sales people - because they don’t ever challenge the client. It shows that the best sales people are those who make the client feel slightly ill when they realise what risks they are taking. However, the idea of “challenging” has a very masculine energy to it. For women, challenging a client can be tricky, as if they challenge too hard, they can be labelled “aggressive” or “pushy”.
So how do you establish your credibility without challenging the client, or at least challenging them aggressively? Here are three ways:
The easiest way is by asking the right questions and asking your questions in a way that shows your expertise. You might say something like: “That’s one way forward. I’m curious — have you considered X? In my experience, it often makes a big difference in situations like this.”
Then ground your comments in evidence. Say things like: “In a recent deal of this type, this is what happened” or “We’ve seen regulators pay attention to this.” or “This is how this tends to play out in court.” This moves the conversation away from your opinion versus theirs and instead shows you are plugged into the broader market.
And then you can acknowledge what they say, and then add your perspective. So you might say something like: “Yes, that’s a good point. And we’ve also seen situations where XYZ” By using the word “and”, you are less likely to be perceived as oppositional, but you can still introduce your expertise. You can even say “and” when you’re saying exactly the opposite of what they have just said. Of course, you can use this technique in a lot of situations, not just sales conversations, because it makes sure that the other person continues to listen to you.
So there are three ways to ensure that you establish your credibility without “challenging” the client aggressively.
Once you have really understood their issue and you have really understood what sort of lawyer or firm they are looking for, the next step is to summarise. Summarise their issue to make you sure you have fully understood it. And then, you might say something like: “in a perfect world, you are looking for a lawyer who understands your business and will do a decent job without charging you over-the-top rates” or “in a perfect world, because this is such an important, complex issue with such a huge impact on your business you are looking for an ultra-specialist and are willing to pay correspondingly” or “in a perfect world, you need a lawyer who will help preserve the relationship between you and your husband after the divorce and who will not only deal with the legal side of things but who will also bring their emotional intelligence to the table”.
After you have summarised, you need to get them to confirm both that you have understood their issue and that you have understood what they are looking for in a lawyer or a law firm.
Once they have confirmed that, that’s the end of the first part of the sales conversation. If they don’t confirm it, then either you need to circle back and ask more questions or you need to walk away. You will know at this point if you are what they are looking for - if you’re not, there is no point trying to prove that you are.
Remember we spoke about “the perfect world” a second ago? Well, the second part of the conversation is all about proving that you can provide their “perfect world”. From this point onwards, you need to bring a different energy to the conversation. In the first part of the conversation, you will have a receptive, listening energy, not talk too much, ask lots of questions. Physically, you might be leaning forward, looking at your client.
But in the second part of the conversation, you sit up straighter. This indicates that you are going to take control. You talk more. You are more assertive and make strong claims. Your energy in the second part of the conversation is very different.
As I said before, the client will be comparing you with other alternatives. Which means that, in this part of the conversation, you need to quickly provide details of various deals you have worked on and the CVs of your team, which I know when I was a client I found pretty irrelevant, and then spend a lot of time helping them to make their choice by focussing on your differentiated value: what you do better than the alternatives the client might be considering.
It’s not about putting your competitors down, and saying things like: “we are a far better firm than XYZ & Partners”, it’s about comparing different approaches to the problem. So you might say something like: “unlike the multinational law firms, we are a small firm that understands the issues faced by small businesses - and in particular, we understand that it is absolutely critical for you that our fees stay within budget”. Or you might say: “unlike other firms, in addition to being lawyers, we are also trained mediators, which means we focus on preserving the relationship between the shareholders and find that this approach minimises litigation and legal costs and is generally a far happier process for everyone involved.”
So - that’s the second part of the conversation. Proving how you are the best alternative compared to all the others and helping your client make that choice.
The third part of the sales conversation is about addressing objections. When someone challenges you or objects, it can feel very threatening. You can go into a tailspin and start to think “they’ve already decided they’re going to say no” or “I have to do whatever it takes to save the sale”. This is why it is so important to do the work beforehand and to understand exactly what your unique value is. Because when you do that, you are in a far better place when they start to object. When you do that, you don’t crumble or cave in to the client’s demands.
The truth is, if someone is thinking of saying “no”, they won’t object. They will smile graciously and say: “thank you for your time” and walk away. If someone is objecting, it means that they are seriously considering you. If they work in an organisation, they are probably thinking about all the questions their boss or the business people are going to ask them. If they are an individual, they’re probably thinking about their partner. So objections are great news!
One of the biggest objections, of course, is price. This is what is usually discussed in that post-online-RFP coffee I referred to earlier. If you know in your bones that what you provide is incredibly valuable for this particular client, that you are the person to provide it to them, then you can switch the discussion from a question of price to a question of value. You want to start talking about how much working with you will save them in the long term, or how much they will potentially win if they win the court case or whatever it might be. Compare your fee with the potential risks or the potential gains, and suddenly it won’t seem like so much.
If you are hearing the same objections over and over again, you might actually want to raise them yourself and address them. That is another way of establishing your credibility.
And as a woman lawyer, you might even decide to explicitly raise the issue that you are a woman, and say something like: “I know this might sound odd, but as a woman, I find it more difficult to establish my credibility. But at the same time, I know I can do a great job - would it be OK if I shared some testimonials with you to reassure you?”
That’s the end of the third step.
The fourth step involves taking control of what happens next. You absolutely do not want to leave it hanging. You absolutely do not want the client to say: “OK, I’ll get back to you” without setting a time to speak again or without understanding what is happening next. You might, for example, ask what the internal validation process is, how long it is likely to last, who needs to be involved, and set up a follow-up call within a reasonable period. If it is appropriate, you might even presume the sale and get them to sign the contract there and then.
So that’s it. The sales conversation in four simple steps. Let’s just run over them quickly again:
The first part is all about listening and seeking to understand their problem and what they’re looking for in a lawyer or a firm. It’s also about establishing your credibility early in the conversation.
At the end of the first part, you summarise their issue and set out their perfect world - what they are ideally looking for in a lawyer, and then the energy changes.
In the second part, you help them make sense of alternative approaches and to prove that you correspond to the “perfect world” they have confirmed they are looking for. You sit up straight, you talk a lot, assertively take control of the conversation.
The third part is all about dealing with objections.
And finally, you need to keep control of the next steps.
As I said before, sales professionals write sales scripts, practice them and refine them over time. So next time you’re going to speak to a client about a potential job, why not pretend to be a “sales person”. Why not run through the structure I’ve just shared with you and even say it out loud. When you practice enough, you will walk into that conversation with a quiet confidence which is perhaps the best selling technique of all.
Before we go, I’d like to give you a weird sales tip from a book called “Pre-suasion” by Robert Cialdini. Robert Cialdini talks about how we are much more influenced by extraneous factors than we might think. As a woman lawyer, you might want to use this to your advantage in order to overcome any unconscious bias that the person you are talking to might have about women. You might, for example, include photos in your pitch of great female lawyers, think Christine Lagarde, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg or Michelle Obama, or perhaps quote a great female lawyer. These unconscious factors have far more impact than you would expect.
That’s it for today’s episode.
Thank you so much for joining me on The Pathway to Partnership Podcast.
I hope that you now have a framework that will give you more confidence for your next sales conversation.
If you’ve found this episode useful, please share it with a colleague or leave a rating or a review — it really helps other women lawyers find the show.
And if you’d like to go deeper, you can find resources and ways to work with me at ceciliapoullain.com.
Until next time — remember, you don’t have to do this alone and you get to define success as a woman lawyer on your own terms.