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In this compilation episode, we feature marketing and presentation tips from cross-disciplinary guests Angela Meyer, Rachel Cossar, and Carol Carpenter. If you want to level up your client development and client presentation game (particularly on remote video calls), this is your episode.

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Angela Meyer,Carol Carpenter,Rachel Cossar,Exponent, Boston Ballet, Unity, ChatGPT

Welcome to the show, where we chronicle women’s journeys to the bench, bar, and beyond and seek to inspire the next generation of women layers and women law students. This episode is another compilation episode this time focusing on some tips from some of our non-lawyer guests in the areas of client development skills and also presentations skills.

We feature comments from prior episodes by Angela Meyer, a client relations experts, Carol Carpenter, who’s a chief marketing officer and also has been a CEO of various tech companies and Rachel Cossar, who is a former professional ballerina, tech company founder and also an expert on body language. Especially body language by way of video. She’ll provide some helpful tips with regard to zoom calls and meetings. We hope you enjoy this episode to level up your game in client relationships and client development.

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Angela Meyer - Business Development And Client Relationship Expert

Angela Meyer, Business Development and Client Relationship Expert.

I’m a Mechanical Engineer. I have a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and my professor, that was also my department chair at Southern Methodist University, was an expert witness and he did accident investigations for airplane crashes. It turned out he was a plaintiff’s expert, which was funny, as I found out later in my career.

I wanted to be an airline pilot. That was my goal. My parents were both in the military. I saw engineering school as a path to getting into the military to fly airplanes and go commercial. What happened was there was no path at that point for me to get in and start flying because of my age as I am now. I said, “If I can’t fly airplanes, why don’t I figure out how they crash?” He was an expert witness, so he introduced me to some of his clients and I started working on a number of his projects. I found that fascinating.

I went on to get my license and my PhD. He told me, “If you want to do this work, the best place in the world to do accident investigation is a company called Failure Analysis Associates, now Exponent in California. I was finishing my Post Doc at UC Berkeley and was looking at where I was going to go to work. I saw a job advertised for Failure Analysis and that’s what happened. I went to work for them and started down the expert witness path. I did that for a number of years, supporting and testifying experts. I didn’t get to testify. I got close to deposition, but I didn’t get it.

At the time, I was looking around. I didn’t feel my career was moving as fast as I wanted to be. I was the only woman in this practice area that I was in. I didn’t feel like I had as much billable work as I wanted. I would go around the office because I was in the corporate office in Menlo Park. I would knock on doors and ask for work. That was probably one of my low points because I’m like, “I got to go be a salesperson and go sell myself to people internally to try to get some work.”

I started getting on some bigger and bigger projects. People would say, “I need some help to do this or do that.” I ended up working on a project for the CEO of the company and eventually, a job opened working for him directly. I ended up getting that job, which I’m very grateful for because it changed the trajectory of my career.

About 6 or 8 months into that job, he said to me, “You’re changing jobs. You’re going to the marketing department.” I said, “We don’t have a marketing department.” He said, “You’re it.” I said, “What does a PhD in Engineering know about marketing?” He said, “You’re a PhD and you can do anything.” For the next 25 years, I did marketing, sales, business development, public relations and became the client face of the firm. I absolutely loved it.

I loved working with lawyers, in-house and outside council. It was a great run. I was fortunate because we were a sponsor of the Product Liability Advisory Council. When they were looking for a new executive director, they came after me, which was a dream. I got to work with you more and the rest of the crème de la crème of litigation and appellate lawyers. I did that for a while then I went back to Exponent and finished my career. Now I’m doing my own business development coaching and training for lawyers and other professional service companies.

To be perfectly honest, when I was getting ready to go college, I wanted to be a Theater major. Theater or Choreographer. That was my goal. My mother was like, “Absolutely not. We’re not paying for you to get it.” I had a little bit of a ham in me. You need to have some of that to do marketing. What Exponent saw in me was the fact that I could combine having a strong technical background, but I was able to translate it in a way that people understood what we did and why we did it.

Much like an expert does, but I was looking more at the value proposition for the client. We had to decide whether or not the product was defective or not or there was an issue or not. That’s all about science. What I felt that I was got to be pretty good at was that I could speak to clients to try to understand what their business issues were and how Exponent could fit into solving their business issues versus, “I’m a lawyer, hire me,” or, “I’m an engineer, hire me.”

I do that now. I was at a board meeting at SMU talking about the brand of the engineering school and how we could be better at communicating with the corporate world and the DFW area. It’s one of these things where engineers specifically, and I’m sure you’re going to say lawyers do the same thing. We’re great technicians, but we’re not great at communicating and comfortable with the networking selling effort. I always say business development is like dating.

Business development is like dating. You've got to get to know people and like them, and they need to trust you before they'll ever hire you.

You’ve got to know and get to know people, like them, and they need to trust you before they’re ever going to hire you. You got to get off this, “I got to sell.” To me, it’s all, “Can you connect the dots and create the relationships all the well by doing great work, providing excellent service, following up, making the deliverables happen, and all that. Can you solve the client’s issues of cost-effectively, credibly, and with no errors from an engineer point of view to the point where they say, ‘This was the greatest experience I ever had? I want to hire them again.’” That’s what I tried to do.

I tried to make sure that I was representing our company and the breadth of the services we offer, not just one myopic area. In terms of professional services, where people fall down is they say, “I’m a construction lawyer. I’m an IP lawyer. I’m an appellate lawyer. I can’t sell across the firm.” You can sell across the firm. Everybody is a network. It may not now impact you directly, but it impacts your firm, which impacts you because everybody’s in the boat. If everybody’s working together, the boat rises. If you’re working as an individual, you might as well be out on your own doing it your own way.

If you’re in a law firm, especially when you become a partner, you’re looking out for the total good of everyone. It’s not the good of the one. It’s for the good of all. This might be my religious upbringing or whatever. I always felt like if I could pay it forward and help somebody, eventually, it’s going to come back to help me. For me, with clients, whether a client called and it turned out that we didn’t have the right expertise, but I could direct him to another firm that had the right expertise. I’m trying to solve the client’s problem and help them out.

If I’m helping the client, you’re making the client’s life easier. What people saw in me was that I was trying to help them in the most efficient way possible and get the answer they needed. Not a technical answer. I’m not talking about being the witness. I’m trying to figure it out. It could be as little as I had people that I knew that we’d be sitting at a cocktail party and they’d be talking about their kids and their kid didn’t like reading.

I offered a suggestion of a particular book that my son liked when he was learning to read. He is like, “I never heard of it.” I went to Target and I bought him three books. I put them in the mail and sent it to him. It turned out his son loved them. Many years later, he is still talking about how I sent his son these books and he started reading it. It had nothing to do with business. I genuinely liked him and felt his pain trying to be a great partner at a law firm, do all this business development, try to juggle being a parent, the frustrations and difficulties, and raise his children.

We did that and I’m like, “It didn’t cost me a lot of money for me to do it.” I didn’t do it out of a sense like, “If I do this, he’s going to give me business.” It was purely empathy and I felt for him. Those kinds of things, whether it’s putting a presentation together for a client or sending them a paper in an area that they might want to be interested in learning about, or doing a webinar or writing a paper together.

However, we don’t think that way because we only think about, “I’ve got to do this brief. I’ve got to get ready for this deposition. The client is going to fire me if I don’t get the outcome he wants.” You got to think about that stuff, but it’s about the client’s hiring you for an answer, which you’re going to give them as best as you can.

They’re also hiring you for a client experience and you want it to be a good client experience, so they come back and hire you again. There are plenty of people. They go out there and hire. The question is, did you bring the best experience possible? I tell people all the time, “There’s plenty of people they can go hire. Why do they hire you? It isn’t necessarily because of your firm. It’s because of you.”

Rachel Cossar - Body Language Expert

Rachel Cossar, Tech Founder, Professional Ballerina and Body Language Expert.

Sometimes, I feel like I looked at all of the different career options I could have had. I chose the ones with the shortest career span first, did them, and now I’m in a position where I can age into this role because as many people probably know, you can’t be a rhythmic gymnast and a ballerina forever. The evolution of those careers was rhythmic gymnastics, just so the audience knows, is with the ribbon and the ball. It’s not with the flips. It’s very related to ballet.

That transition, while atypical, felt a little smoother. I had a wonderful career with Boston Ballet. Interestingly, ballet is a performing art that relies 100% on nonverbals to communicate messages. I have always had that affinity for what’s not being said, but what is very powerful being communicated. Unfortunately, I got injured at the end of that career. I had to make a transition, so it wasn’t necessarily at will.

When I transitioned into a more traditional workplace and I was working in fundraising roles at Harvard and New England Conservatory, which are very relationship-driven. I realized that there was so much richness in this more traditional workplace application of non-verbal communication. That was the bridge that happened between this onstage experience and the beginnings of what came next.

I think that weaving these different experiences together is where a lot of innovation comes from. Anyone who’s gone through a transition, which everyone does, there’s always that moment where you are not prepared for whatever comes next, or you have to take that leap of faith. Having the mindset of knowing that everything you have done to date is a platform you can stand on, and that can very well be a huge number one differentiator for you in a new space. It also might unlock something like a blind spot that other people may not have seen.

I think that’s right. I think people think of innovation, which is true in some ways as completely creating something brand new, but a lot of it is seeing connections between things. That’s even something that Steve Jobs said in one of his commencement speeches at Stanford, sometimes seeing those connections that others don’t see. The reason you see them is that you are coming from a different background. Your transition to this. You saw the need and you were doing a lot of hands-on in-person work on people and getting them prepared to present and present themselves well in business, then 2020 happens.

It’s interesting because, with some of this live facilitation, workshopping, and coaching, I found a little bit of that performance quality that I missed so much from the stage. March 2020 hits, and everyone’s virtual. I had a complete breakdown because you are realizing that communication and in-person connection has fundamentally changed, and now we are connecting over video. Very quickly I realized if people were having a hard time communicating effectively and with full awareness in person, this video thing is going to be a huge challenge.

I did flip my curriculum to be fully virtual. I was doing all these live virtual presence and body language programs that were taking off. What I realized was the people who need at least a baseline of feedback to help give them that nudge of self-awareness and education around what are the metrics that matter when it comes to visual communication over the video. That’s a job that’s way too big for one person.

It’s also a job that probably could benefit from some AI, some machine learning that has been taught to recognize a dynamic human that can track things like facial expression, variation, posture, and eye gaze. It was that gradual acceptance of what was soon to be a new world, and figuring out how we can evolve offerings to better meet where people are.

I think professionals, whether they are salespeople, lawyers, or recruiters that are able to shift very seamlessly between the skills that come to life when you are meeting in person and the skills that help you pop on video and help you build and establish rapport quickly. They are going to own this new world of work that we are building around us because it’s such an easy advantage to grab.

You need both and you need to be able to show up well in both environments, so it’s important to have those skills, too. What do you think are some good tips for those who want to up their Zoom game or Teams game?

Video is the only digital means of communication that allows us to leverage body language. If we are choosing to use video for whatever message we are trying to communicate, then there are certain things that 100% should be leveraged to ensure that we are sending an intentional impression. I say intentional because it’s not like in order to be successful on video, you have to do these things, specifically, but it’s more like you have to be mindful of certain categories of communication.

The first thing is your setup. You have to very mindfully ensure that your audience can see you, and can see you as a dynamic, engaging human being that your lens is at eye level so that you can very easily look into the lens without having to stoop down or look up. Frame, so that your hands enter the frame easily without you having to put your hands up by your head, which feels terribly awkward and looks a little off, too.

Hand usage is interesting because I think a lot of people are inclined just not to do that at all. You do it quite effectively, and I think it helps engagement. There are also some tips about how to do that, so you are not making people feel uncomfortable on the other end of the video.

Hands are one of the most human aspects of our communication. One of the main reasons why displaying open palms gestures with palms facing forward is considered to be so associated with things like openness, warmth, invitation, and open consideration is because it shows people very quickly that you are not reoccupied with anything else. You are not holding something in your pocket or fiddling around with your phone on the side.

Hands are one of the most human aspects of our communication. One of the main reasons for this is that displaying open palms, gestures with palms facing forward, is strongly associated with openness, warmth, and invitation.

It gives this visual cue of, “This person is fully present with me.” Even though a lot of that processing is happening subconsciously, what it does is helps develop rapport and build trust. If you are not using your hands, you become more of a talking head, which is very easy to disengage with and ignore. Neurologically, we get used to things quickly, and we immediately start to reduce the amount of mental energy that we associate with that specific object.

Same thing when you are monotonous, it’s easier to tone people out because you become accustomed to the sound, and therefore you are like, “It’s not a threat. It’s fine.” Vocal intonation is another example of including some dynamic variation in the way you are communicating so that you can keep people engaged with what you are saying. It’s more of a dynamic experience as a listener or an audience.

I think that’s definitely the hand gesture part because I do think that people tend to shy away from just doing that at all. You naturally use your hands to some degree. 

To your point of what can you do on the video to use hand gestures in a way that feels authentic and like you, making sure that you are far enough from the screen so that you use hand gestures in a way that feels normal. You don’t have to have your hands up by your head for them to get in the frame. Make sure your relationship to the lens is such that you can, with relative ease, have your hands showing, because then it’s just the question of using your hands as you might normally, and just making sure they are being picked up by the lens.

Other than trying to get them in there because it’s so tight.

It’s very awkward. A big part of that is giving yourself a little more distance, which lets you breathe more and maybe gesture a little more expansively. Those things can go a long way. I will say though, from your point of, this is a virtual environment. In the same way that if I was coaching someone in person and I saw that they were gesticulating wildly all the time. I would say we need to be a little more intentional when we decide to use hand gestures. It can’t be a constant flurry of activity. That is especially true on video because if someone is just waving their hands all over the place, that very quickly becomes so distracting.

Moderation in all things.

Intentionally using these hand gestures to enhance what we are saying. A lot of this takes a lot of practice.

That’s some good advice. If you are engaging remotely with judges and you want to get their attention. Is there anything in particular besides what we talked about that you might want to think about in that context?

I would just drive home the point that if you are showing up as one among many of these virtual boxes, you want to make sure that the quality of your presence in terms of your lighting is the most eye-catching possible. I don’t mean going over the top, but if you are able to have a real background that’s simple, non-distracting, but very pleasing. It’s more helpful than having a virtual background where you are maybe going in and out of it.

Carol Carpenter - Chief Marketing Officer For Unity

Carol Carpenter, Chief Marketing Officer, Unity.

I fell into business. One of my first jobs after business school was with Apple. That’s where I learned a tremendous amount about positioning and go-to-market, how supply chains work and how you hire, fire and build a team. I feel very fortunate that I ended up in a place like that. I liked the role of what they called product management and product marketing, which is all about how you take a good item and find a product market.

This sounds funny for Apple when you think about Apple now but this was back many years ago. They were not quite the leading tech company they are now. It was always an amazing brand. It was what I loved about. Back to your earlier point, when I looked around coming out of business school, there were the consulting firms and the banks. I thought, “I could see a hierarchy and a very male-dominated business environment.”

Technology was this rebel. These companies were rebellious. No one wore suits and everybody was somewhat equal. It was very much a meritocracy. I was like, “I’m going to go there and see what happens.” Lo and behold, fortunately, I’ve had some good mentors and sponsors along the way who have said, “Come do this.” Here I am.

You may have stumbled into business school. I do recall that you authored a book about how to get into business school after you got into a lot of them after undergrad. You did a pretty good job.

Thank you. I realize that you are a brand and how you pitch yourself, whether it’s a business school, a company or an association. How do you ensure? Whom do you want to be? I was fortunate to start thinking about it somewhat early, “I’m going to be a woman in these tech companies. I want to be a leader. I want to be someone who makes things happen, not just plans or reports on them. I want to be a change maker if I can.”

In an area that at the time was new in a way. There’s more room for that and more room to get a seat at the table when you’re saying, “This isn’t already a stayed way of operating. These are companies that are pushing the envelope.”

I was telling somebody. I was reflecting. In my 28 years of working, I have worked for 8 companies, which sounds like a lot. Half were startups, two were unmitigated disasters and two were sold. One where I was the CEO, I sold that company. Those were great learning experiences but also speaks, you have to be a little bit adventuresome to be in technology companies.

As you’ve probably seen in 2022, there’s been a lot of ebb and flow. You have to deal with ambiguity. Fortunately, I like the ambiguity. I like the fact that there’s not a set path. Probably some of that is because I come from a traditional immigrant household where they were so strict. There was a set path. I’m psychoanalyzing it. Some of it is rebellion.

Breaking out in new rebellious directions or something but it was good timing. I think of Apple as being so intertwined with Stanford when we were there too with all the computers and all of the things that we would work with when we were in college. Also, the university’s grown up with the technology companies in Silicon Valley so it’s been a shared trajectory.

It’s shared. I’m going to age myself. Think about how much the world has changed. We have the internet, Wikipedia and things like ChatGPT. I don’t know if that makes your job easier in law. I thought, “I’m going to try this. Write some of the marketing business plans.”

How’d that go?

It was not too bad. The ubiquity of it is astounding because theoretically, lots of people will have access. Google already did that. Search has done that. This takes it to the next level. You could do things like create a poster for something coming up like an event. I don’t have to be an artist in the true sense but I still have to apply some human judgment.

That was my takeaway after I said, “ChatGPT, write some of my business plans.” It gets close. It’s not perfect. You still have to put the inputs in like, what are the key milestones? What are the key outcomes? It does a pretty good job of stitching together. Think in law, there probably are some more of the laborious, menial parts. It could help.

I think of it as potentially, a first draft or an outline of something that you could work with but it still is very new and requires significant human input and guidance to make that work. Still, it has people talking and it’s interesting.

There are going to be lots of legal issues around ownership. I’m sure that’s the buzz. This is indicative. This is why I’m in tech because something like this happens every few years. There’s something so innovative. There’s a revolution going on around real-time 3D, which started in games. If you think about it, when you play a game, there’s no set ending. It all depends. Did you push X? Did you push Y? There’s a real-time element. Everything is unfolding. The rest of the entertainment is moving in that direction where you can go into a virtual environment. You can be in a sporting event.

It could be a real-time 3D experience where you as the player or watcher can have an impact. It’s pretty phenomenal. We’re doing lots of work in architecture and construction where real-time 3D is important for visualization and simulation. We’re doing a lot of work with car manufacturers who are trying to create the next experience instead of the dull dashboard. Some experience can engage drivers and create more affinity. We suffer from too many things to go after and market segments. Our challenge is, what are we going to focus on in the near term? What is possible and probable?

It’s interesting what you said too in terms of the correlation between where you are now and where you were at the beginning of your career at Apple, in terms of the roles that both of those companies and platforms play for other creators.

Many years ago, Apple was primarily focused on the creative market. People needed to use Photoshop and make beautiful things. They needed graphics capabilities. At Unity, we have this real-time 3D engine for creators, whether you’re creating an architectural map of a building or an amazing game or film. I was sharing that we’re excited that we have so many creators who are up for Academy Awards for virtual effects and it’s using Unity tools. I love that.

Every day somebody is coming and knocks on my Zoom saying, “We’ve got this interesting thing to show you,” whether it’s what the City of Orlando is doing with a digital twin to help them simulate weather and traffic patterns to the latest new game coming out on the Xbox that has amazing high-end graphics. Some of the effects in a lot of Avatar were made with digital tools. It’s exciting. What you and I were talking about is being on this cutting edge, how do we as leaders in these companies pick and choose what to work on? How to prioritize the combination of knowing the market, the customer and what’s possible.

As the Chief Marketing Officer, you’re part of the strategy, especially in a company that’s developing, like Unity is. That’s fun too.

It’s fun to see what creators do. I’m excited to see how things go with generative AI and how we deal with some of the challenges of ownership and IP. I’m sure we will make our way through that. Some of the bigger challenges are how you communicate it. I’m sure you have to do this in your role as well. Most people have a cognitive overload. There are too much media and many briefs to read. There’s too much marketing coming at them.

In my case, creators and developers to whom I’m trying to explain all the advantages of our real-time 3D engine. They’re never going to know it and get into all the details. How do you simplify? I talk to my team a lot. “How do we reduce cognitive overload? How do we reduce the cost of customer thinking?” Make it easy and simple. When people say, “What is marketing?” A big part of marketing and communication is simplifying.

You have to understand a lot more to be able to simplify. That’s part of the reason a lot of people don’t do it. You have to have a deep understanding to know what’s essential.

I’m sure you do that in law all the time.

We say things like, “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter brief.” It requires more effort and editing to par it down and make those choices.

What you and I were talking about is what you’re doing is creation as well, writing a brief. You’re creating something. We work with creators and it’s a very joyful process. It’s about sharing, communicating and changing minds, hearts and hopefully, the world at some level. That’s where marketing isn’t just brand or demand. It’s being part of the strategy. It’s about understanding the market and being a market maker.

My first boss at Apple was my boss’ boss. She used to ask me what I watched on TV. I’m like, “I’m too busy. I don’t watch TV.” She goes, “Don’t be an intellectual snob. You’ve got to watch all the shows that your audience is watching,” whether it’s Friends, which I did watch. Her point was well-taken. If you don’t understand your customer, how could you ever hope to communicate with them?

That’s been an interesting aspect of even the show, talking to a lot of different judges and understanding from a lot of different angles. What are they doing in their job every day that I could do to make that job easier? Understanding how they’re thinking, what they’re doing and how that impacts how I would present a case, write a brief or put things together. I’m thinking about what they’re working with day to day. That’s been an interesting change of perspective. I’ve talked to so many across the country that I get different insights from each of them about what that might look like. It’s impacted how I put things together and how I think about it.

You’re insightful about it because it’s marketing 101, know your audience. That’s the first step. Many people want to skip over it and talk about their point of view on a case.

Think about that. We were talking about before, in terms of when you’re thinking of marketing, you’re thinking of the reasons you make decisions. The functional economic and emotional. Often those are stated from the perspective of the person who has something to sell. Maybe you care about that more than the person who might want to work with you. You have to pay attention to that. Lawyers do that a lot. We talk about our experience and our background, this and that, which is helpful. It makes people feel comfortable but maybe someone’s more interested in knowing what you would do in their case or something about their concerns.

Those are important. When people talk about product market fit, marketing or selling, at the end of the day, everyone is human. We make our decisions because of those three things, economic, emotional and functional reasons. If I’m going to buy a pen at Target, it’s pretty functional and economic. It’s heavier on that. If I’m going to buy a car, it’s going to be more emotional. If I’m going to hire a lawyer, it’s going to be a combination of those things. The functional element is, “What’s your batting average? What else have you done? Tell me more of that history.” As you pointed out, there’s an emotional element to our decision-making.

Everyone is human, and we make our decisions because of three things: the economic, emotional, and functional reasons.

Great marketing, selling and storytelling get to that point of tapping into the emotion. It has to be layered in different doses, depending on the situation. If you can get to the why of why people are thinking, why they’re doing something or why this product or service makes sense, hands down, you’ve got a winner.

I think about that too in terms of legal tech. There’s a lot of technology that lawyers use. Some of it is AI-assisted but different kinds of technology. Results can vary depending on the item but to help you in your practice. Whether it’s managing cases, reviewing a brief or legal writing for grammar using AI. Sometimes the cases that the companies make for that are purely functional. Here’s what my product can do in a functional way. The better ones understand why a lawyer would want to use that and beyond just a functional component.

That goes for leadership. Everybody wants to be a valued member of a winning team with an inspired mission. If you’re leading, people want to feel valued. Value has a functional and economic component. Making sure of the inspired mission, people want to be part of something bigger than themselves.