Nine out of ten solicitors think they are not doing enough to promote their businesses in the face of forthcoming competition from alternative business structures, research seen exclusively by the Gazette has suggested.

A survey of 330 solicitors by law firm referral service Contact Law found that 91% thought they needed to do more to sell their services to existing clients.

Only 52% said they had cross-sold their services to clients, while 51% said they never or only occasionally made a follow-up call after providing a quote to a client.

Of those surveyed, 38% said there was a need for a sales person or team within the structure of their firm, while 14% did not think that having someone working specifically on promoting the business or cross-selling services would benefit the firm.

Contact Law director Dan Watkins said: ‘There continues to be reluctance among solicitors to proactively sell their services to the general public, but if many law firms are to survive and prosper in the ABS era, this is an area they will need to address.

‘Solicitors will need to become much more tuned in to the idea of having a dedicated sales and marketing team or person promoting and selling their services. They need to maximise new business opportunities, particularly if they are going to compete with [big consumer brands], which you can guarantee will be throwing money at marketing to promote their legal offering.’

He added: ‘At the very least, it should be standard procedure in all firms to call back all prospective clients who have been given a quote. Many lawyers fall into the trap of thinking it’s only a will or a conveyance or a contract that the client needs, and as a result fail to make that all important call to the prospect to see if they have any concerns, and whether or not they wish to proceed.

‘But that is a very short-term viewpoint, as research shows that, for each £1,000 that a new client spends, they and their contacts will return to the firm to spend another £3,000 in the long term.

‘Put in that context, solicitors are really missing a trick if they fail to spend the time following up with prospects, whether they make the calls themselves or instruct a dedicated sales and marketing person to make the calls.’

Alastair Redfern, a solicitor at Leeds firm Cohen Cramer, added: ‘The problem with lawyers is that we are extremely passionate about the law, and our natural inclination when we first speak to clients is to offer legal advice, not to think about that client from a commercial standpoint.

‘ABSs are going to change all that. As an industry, we are going to have to become much more commercially tuned in.’

He continued: ‘As a firm, Cohen Cramer has adopted a much more sales-friendly approach. When we have that initial conversation with a client, we use telephone sales scripts that lay out exactly what the client is going to receive with a particular product, broken down step by step, and how much that product will cost. There is definitely a client demand to know upfront "what am I spending and what am I getting for my spend?"

‘For many of us who practise law, this may go against all our natural instincts, but if we don’t adopt a more commercially minded approach now, you can guarantee that others will do in the future.’