I was pleased to be mentioned in the National Law Journal last week by social media columnist Adrian Dayton! Full disclosure – Adrian is also my friend and co-author of our upcoming book from Ark Group Publishing about developing business using Linkedin and Blogs.

I was mentioned “Five Linkedin Tips that Lawyer’s Don’t Know” and it contained some great ideas that we would all benefit from. Adrian and I agree that there was one suggestion that I should clarify for those of you who might be thinking of trying it..

Adrian suggested that we update our Outlook contacts on a regular basis by re-uploading them into LinkedIn – presumably to catch the new ones who weren’t there when we opened our LinkedIn account a couple of years ago. While keeping your LinkedIn Contacts current is critical to your successful networking, uploading that Outlook CSV file a second time could be problematic.

If you did upload your outlook contacts a first time, the rest of this article is for you. If you never really dumped your Outlook contacts into LinkedIn in the first place – jump down to the footnote at the bottom and I’ll convince you to do so.

If you re-upload your Outlook contacts, LinkedIn will not tell you which ones are already your contacts, and it will not let you know who didn’t respond to your invite. You have to manually figure this out – which can be like using the hunt-n-peck typing method to write a book – tedious! To add insult to injury, you have a lifetime maximum of 3,000 LinkedIn invitations to use, and uploading your outlook contacts twice (and duplicating lots of them) could use 1/2 or 2/3 of those invitations. Three thousand sounds like a lot now, but I can almost guarantee that it won’t in 3 years…

Hopefully LinkedIn will fix this problem, but for how, you have to manually cross-reference your new Outlook list (in a CSV file) with the Sent folder of your Linkedin Inbox [Inbox > Sent]. Dunno ‘bout you, but I have 247 pages, with 15 per page. Not happening.

My best advice is to keep up with your contacts by ALWAYS sending out Linkedin invites after events, conferences, etc. My second best advice is to pour a glass of wine one evening and page through your Outlook contacts noting who is a newish contact who might not have made it to your Linkedin list. Note them down and head to Linkedin to add them.

Last piece of advice: If you are customizing your invitations the way you should be, stick with one glass.

Footnote: If you never actually uploaded your Outlook contacts into LinkedIn because you were worried about not being able to control the process once it started – get over it and upload the list. I promise that LinkedIn will allow you to choose who gets an invite before it actually sends them – each name has a check box. You are still in the driver’s seat, even after you upload the CSV file. And your LinkedIn strategy is only as strong as your network. Here are the directions for the procedure.
Good luck!

For the first time, at the LMA 2011 annual conference several weeks ago, I heard a convincing argument that sales people and lawyers have something in common:  “both are high producing individual contributors.”  As opposed to team players, presumably.

This quote was courtesy of Kelvin Chin, Sales Director at Womble Carlyle who was one of three senior business development professionals to speak on how to develop a sales culture at a law firm.

Even as part of a panel of like-minded business development professionals, Womble stands out as a culture unusually accepting of the term “sales” and everything that goes with it.   Since most attorneys I know would rather swallow a powdered wig than say that they engage in sales, it’s no surprise that the other two firms represented on the panel – Nixon Peabody and Perkins Coie –  stick to euphemisms like business development and lead generation.

The panel’s shared best practices had a lot to do with making smart choices before any new coaching or training program gets off the ground.  Getting off the on the right foot can mean success in the long term and that includes:

-  Work with a coalition of the willing;

-  Be sure to FIRST get management’s buy-in that the ‘coalition of the willing’ is who you’ll focus on, rather than those who have been stagnant for years or who just haven’t been living up to expectations;

- Make certain that the program is championed by a well-respected equity partner (equity partners are more rare these days and they carry more cache).

- Identify those who seem to ‘get’ the concept of business development but don’t have the skills yet (read:  no remedial cases).

-  The ideal demographic is senior associates and young or newly minted partners.

-  When you launch a coaching or training program, think carefully about who is invited to apply, then select those who make the best case for their own success.

These tips certainly make sense from my experience — what would you add to these?