In this episode, Alay Yajnik and Steve Fretzin, president of Fretzin, Inc.,  discuss business development coaching:

* Client referrals are the easiest, most effective way to build your book.
* Start with a simple business development plan: goals, your perfect client, who are your strategic partners, how will you fit business development into your day.
* It’s OK to pursue a strategy, even if you don’t know how you’ll do it. You can learn.
* A good coach will help you with the three P’s for success in any endeavor, including biz dev: Planning, Process, Performance improvement. It’s often the little things that make a huge impact.

Alay Yajnik: Welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage. This podcast is dedicated to helping attorneys earn more money, get better clients and spend more time with family. I’m your host Alay Yajnik, Law firm growth expert, author and founder of Law Firm Success Group. Smart business guidance for small law firms begins in 3…2…1….
Alay Yajnik: It is my pleasure to welcome to the program today, Steve Fretzin, president of Fretzin Inc. He focuses on business development, training and coaching. Steve is a three-time author and he is the host of The Be That Lawyer podcast, which just passed four thousand downloads and probably is on its way past five. Steve, welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage today.
Steve Fretzin: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Alay Yajnik: Thank you for being on the program. Really excited to be chatting with you today. I know our guests are going to get a lot out of listening to you. So tell us a little bit about yourself just as we get started.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah, I mean, the easiest place to start is to share that I’m not an attorney. I came up in sales through hard knocks and hard work and learned a lot of valuable lessons, worked for some evil bosses. And eventually I learned enough through hiring coaches and getting trained myself that I started my business back in 2004, mainly focused on sales teams and entrepreneurs, and had no interest or idea or thought that lawyers would be a group that I would work with. And I did it for a number of years. And the concept that I had been working on and building up on is essentially that everyone hates sales, everyone hates being sold to. If you’re older than maybe 40, you may remember the old Saturn commercials “no one likes to be sold to.” So I have all my processes that I had developed and generated were around what I call sales-free selling, which is where you don’t have to pitch. You don’t have to convince, you don’t have to talk your way through things. It was a lot more consultative questioning, listening, qualifying and trying to put yourself on even ground with your perspective client. When the recession hit in 2008, that’s really when I started working with attorneys. They started calling me and what they loved was that sales free idea, the fact that they that they didn’t want to pitch either. They didn’t want to go on to have to sell business and bring in clients in kind of a sales way. So it really worked well and the synergies were there. And after working with attorneys for a few years, I basically pushed my chips in and just said, “Look, there’s a need, there’s a skill set that I have that works well with attorneys and we seem to get along pretty well.” So that’s how it all went down.
Alay Yajnik: I love that approach. And one of the things that I hear from a lot of attorneys is they’ll ask me, “Are you a lawyer?” And I’m not either and we go through that. What were some of the things you discovered as you started to take the sales processes you’ve created, which were not at the time attorney specific, and you started to use those processes for lawyers and law firms?