In sales and marketing it is axiomatic that people buy what they want, not what they need. Your client may need a living trust, but unless he wants it, he’s not going to hire you to prepare it. He may need to settle his case, but if he doesn’t want to take the latest offer, you’re going to trial.
Your job is to help your client want what he needs.
So, you show him the facts. You tell him what he will gain if he follows your advice and what he may lose if he does not.
But the facts, compelling though they may be, are often not enough. The client doesn’t believe the bad things will happen to him, or he’s willing to take his chances. What then?
Your best bet is to use “third party,” meaning someone else’s experience or expert opinion. So, you tell your client stories about what happened to others who didn’t follow your advice. Or you show him statistics compiled by an independent organization. Or articles written by other lawyers.
This is something you do every day with your clients. You do the best you can because that’s all you can do.
But with new clients, you have a choice.
You can choose to convince prospective clients that they need a living trust, for example, and many attorneys do precisely that. They educate prospects, through seminars and reports and blog posts, in an attempt to persuade them that a will isn’t enough and that a living trust is what they need.
They spend a lot of time and money and go through a lot of people to find the ones who will become clients.
But you don’t have to do that. You can choose to target people who have already decided they want a living trust and show them why they should choose you as their attorney.
This is what I do with my services.
All attorneys need to know about marketing, right? No matter how busy and successful they are, there’s always room to grow. But not all attorneys want to know about marketing. Do I try to convince them that they should? No. I let their circumstances and other blogs inform them and motivate them. When they want to learn about marketing or improve their results, I show them how I can help.
There’s nothing wrong with educating your target market about why they need what you offer. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. There are a lot of people at various stages of learning about what they need and many of them will eventually decide to hire an attorney. You’ll want to be there when they do.
Focus most of your energy, however, on the ones who have already decided they want an attorney and are looking for the right one.
The Attorney Marketing Formula shows you how to get more clients. Click here for details.
