Here’s a logic problem with practical consequences: Given that a firm’s survival depends on revenue; that revenue comes from sales; that lawyers are the ones charged with bringing in revenue; and that most lawyers can’t sell and don’t want to, which of the following should law firms do?

A) Keep depending on a handful of rainmakers with portable business.
B) Continue spending millions on marketing to support people who can’t sell.
C) Fire the CMO—again.
D) Scrap the existing compensation plan for one that truly provides a motivation for selling.
E) Teach the lawyers how to sell in a way they’ll accept.

If you doubt that the last answer is the best, consider one major law firm’s experience.

In the second session of a sales training program, several of the firm’s partners abruptly announced they had to opt out to respond to an urgent over-the-transom beauty contest. They were persuaded to stay and use the session to prepare for the pitch, so that all the participants could see the program in action.

The team garnered one of the largest antitrust cases of the decade. The astonished head of litigation, an initial skeptic, later wrote in a memo that the two things the client noted in its decision were the very two things (revolutionary for the time) that the session had stressed—gaining the prospect’s trust and showing that the lawyers knew the company. In a different pitch, the head of litigation added, there was an “unmistakable” difference between those who’d been trained and those who hadn’t.

Seldom do marketing programs produce such a “smoking gun.”

You’d think that in the ensuing 19 years, word would have leaked out about the potential of sales training. But a recent survey by The American Lawyer’s research arm found that the biggest complaint raised by young partners is that their firms don’t sufficiently prepare them to develop business.

Instead, firms have collectively spent literally billions of dollars and decades of time on an endless succession of dubious flavor-of-the-month marketing programs that don’t generate revenue.  Why? Because these programs are dictated more by what the partners will do within their comfort zones than by what works.  And then marketing—the process or the department—is blamed. 

If a worker keeps blaming his tools for his failure, you don’t keep giving him more expensive tools. You teach him how to build.

But law firms fail to adequately prepare the untutored, the unsuited, and the unwilling for a task that only they are permitted to perform and that is central to both the partners’ success and the firm’s. It seems self-evident that the vast middle of the partnership—the 75-or-so percent who are neither rainmakers nor beyond help—could improve if only they knew the rules of the game and were given a chance to practice how it’s played.

While training is hardly the only effective marketing project, it has the most potential to increase revenue. But experience indicates that training techniques will have little impact if a firm fails to address some fundamental issues, the solutions to which may be counterintuitive or counter to the short-term mentality of many firms.

Don’t call it sales (or even business development) training. The most important thing to address is the lawyers’ inherent loathing of sales, because nobody can be good at what they fear and hate. One firm had so much difficulty with the concept that it packaged—and delivered—it as communications training. The program was widely hailed in a survey of participants, particularly by the younger partners.

Why call it communications training? Effective selling is not about unloading products or services. It’s about figuring out what people want and need, and convincing them you can provide it—first through probing and listening, and later, through persuasion.

These are also the key elements of effective communications—influencing people by sussing out what matters to them and finding a way to link it to your agenda. Its impact depends not on how eloquent and erudite you are but on how directly you address their agenda.

Here’s a simple example: An executive at a party asks a fellow guest his profession. When the man says he’s a tax lawyer, the executive’s eyes involuntarily search the room for more promising conversation. Later he asks another guest, also a tax lawyer, what she does for a living. “I prevent the government from taking my client’s money,” she replies. The response almost demands the follow-up challenge, “How?” A relationship is born.

Any lawyer could pull off the second conversation with a little thought and practice. But only a rainmaker would seize on the question to engage the listener by addressing what really mattered to him.