Stefan Grafe, CEO of Mext Consulting and developer of TrustLogic, is a leading expert on the science of trust building and how law firm marketing and business development teams can apply these principles to expand their firm’s trust equity. He will be delivering a keynote address on trust building at the Law Firm Marketing Summit in London in October.
 
How should law firm marketing teams approach trust building?          

One challenge when you start talking about trust with a lot of people is their defences go up right away. They say we are already highly trusted. But marketing and BD teams really need to go in and take that defensiveness out by being very clear that the objective is to continuously build more trust. Most partners are highly trusted by their direct clients, but the trust drops off very quickly if you look at the broader stakeholder context and prospects that aren’t yet clients. The aim is therefore to build more trust with wider stakeholder groups, which then also helps with cross selling. And obviously to build more trust with prospects to increase the chance of winning their business and expending less effort on it. A second point is that being trusted, no matter how highly, doesn’t actually mean anything unless you’re the most trusted. So you need to put a conscious focus on becoming the most trusted among your competitors.”

Can you talk about your TrustLogic concept and the science behind this?

The science is actually a really important aspect of it. I wanted to understand trust – how do you build it? How do you steer it? So I engaged Professor Wilhelm Salber and psychologist Barbara Grohsgart to research how trust forms and how people experience it. Through our research it became clear you can’t actually just trust – we can only trust in and for aspects. And we discovered through our studies the reasons why people trust always fell into six categories – relationship, vision, stability, competence, benefit and development trust – which became our TrustLogic method and our Six Buckets of Trust.

How do firms follow this science-based approach?

You can apply it in marketing to everything – every social media post, every profile, every campaign, every proposal, anything. Most law firms and partners are highly trusted for their competency – for their legal expertise – but that trust is actually only a small part of it. One law firm partner I interviewed last year has played in bands since childhood. When you think about what competency that gives him as a lawyer, it brings in creativity to look at legal issues in a different way. But also in terms of people engagement, he has a finely tuned sense for how a room ticks and how to interact with the room at the right moments. Those competencies are equally important to clients as the legal expertise. So suddenly you have a far broader playing field with vision trust, development trust and all of the other trust aspects.

Do law firms and lawyers face any unique challenges when trying to build trust?

Professional services as a broader category is totally different from most other industries because if you have other services like energy, you have one product, you have a mass audience and it’s one value proposition, and you typically have to build trust only in the brand and maybe the one product. For law firms, you have very complex stakeholder interdependencies from board to execution level, peers, business units, different areas of law; all of these things are far more complex. Secondly, it’s obviously a very high-value and often a very high-stakes game. And thirdly, legal matters often have a custom element to them. That all makes it more challenging.”

What are some of the common pitfalls you typically see law firms struggling with when it comes to building trust?

Probably the biggest pitfall is people staying too shallow and not putting the work into really exploring their own trust buckets and putting the discipline in to applying these elements and learning from them.

What are the benefits for firms that follow this approach?

If you get it right, the very first effect is a huge increase in self-trust, confidence and motivation of the entire team. That is probably the most important because if you don’t have that, you can’t carry it to the outside. Second, when we ask lawyers what does it feel like to work with a client that trusts you? So let’s say seven or eight out of 10, they all describe it as work, but it’s pleasant. And then we ask them what it feels like to work with clients that trust you at a level of nine or 10 out of 10? And they say, it feels effortless. So that’s what firms can achieve. And then third, this translates into money because your business development works much faster and you’re getting more client growth. A lot of our clients stop writing off as many hours as they did before and they’re also asking for more money up front because they know they’re building the right trust to earn that money.

Stefan Grafe is speaking at the Law Firm Marketing Summit, which is co-hosted by GLP and takes place on 15 October at RSA House in London. Click here to read the agenda and here to book a delegate place. For sponsorship enquiries email [email protected].