What do you “know” to be true about legal marketing?

January 13, 2015 by
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Smart people once believed that it was impossible for man to fly. Most accepted this as truth and never considered challenging it. The Wright brothers thought differently and changed the world.

Orville Wright said, “If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.”

It got me thinking about what we (lawyers, society) believe is true about the subject of legal marketing.

Not long ago, many lawyers said that other than writing scholarly articles, public speaking, and networking, marketing wasn’t appropriate for an attorney. While this is still true in some places, most of the world has evolved.

Advertising was long thought to be inappropriate, even unethical. Most western jurisdictions now recognize that with certain standards in place, advertising isn’t the stain on the profession it was once thought to be.

Question for you. What do you know to be true about legal marketing? What do you do, or refrain from doing, to market your practice based on your beliefs?

Let’s take the subject of referrals. It is widely understood that you get more referrals if you ask for them. Yet many attorneys don’t ask. They think it makes them look weak or needy, or they don’t know what to say so they don’t even try.

Our beliefs create our reality. If you believe that asking for referrals makes you look weak or is an imposition, you won’t ask. On the other hand, if you believe that referrals are good for all three parties (the referral giver, the client, and you), your entire framework changes.

You’ll ask for referrals because you know that a referral helps the referred client save time and avoid the risk of making a bad decision. You’ll ask for referrals because you’ll know that your clients and contacts want to help the people they know get the benefits you offer and you’ll know they also want to help you.

If your beliefs about referrals currently preclude you from asking for them, changing those beliefs could transform your practice.

It’s time to re-examine all of your beliefs about legal marketing and re-validate them. Are they still true? Has anything changed? Are there any exceptions?

Have you “closed the door” to things you might now consider?

Have you looked at things as black and white and not seen the gray areas within within which you could operate?

Step away from the construct that is your existing practice and look at it from a distance. See your practice and all of your existing beliefs as contained in a giant box.

How can you think outside that box?

Because progress never occurs inside the box.

Marketing is easier when you know The Formula

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Filed Under: Legal industry, Marketing legal services, Referrals Tagged With: ,

What to do when you have nothing new to offer

January 12, 2015 by
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What’s new?

Unfortunately, for most attorneys, the answer is “nothing”. They offer the same services today that they offered last year, and the year before that.

The clients change, the cases have different elements, but for most attorneys, same old same old. Even if they offer a menu of services, the menu rarely, if ever, changes.

Worse, many of their clients need them only once in their lifetime.

If attorneys owned any other type of business, they would regularly offer new products or services. Their business would always be growing.

But if a client doesn’t need another divorce, or doesn’t get in another accident, it’s game over.

It would be great to be able to offer the client another service, wouldn’t it? But if you specialize (as you should), you probably don’t have anything else.

Some attorneys offer updated documents, reviews, and modifications, and that’s good. But what about everyone else?

Well, there are a couple of things every attorney can do.

First, you can partner with other attorneys and promote their services to your clients. In return, your partner promotes your services to their clients. You can also do joint ventures with other types of professionals, and businesses, too.

Your clients have problems and needs that go beyond what you can do for them. They need help finding high quality professionals and vendors. They would love to get a good deal, or at least know they aren’t getting a bad one.

You can help them, and in so doing, help yourself.

Think “clients” not “cases” or “engagements”. Continually look for ways to help your clients with their other business or personal needs.

See The Attorney Marketing Formula for different ways you can work with joint venture partners.

Second, no matter what kind of practice you have, you should continually be creating new content.

Every article, blog post, report, seminar, video, or ebook you produce and put out into the market place can bring you new clients.

They can bring traffic to your website via search and social sharing. You can ask your clients and contacts, (and joint venture partners), to share our content with their clients and lists. You can offer them for sale on Kindle and other venues, where millions of prospective clients can find them.

Each piece of content you create educates prospects about what you do and how you can help them. It pre-sells them on the need for an attorney, and why that attorney should be you. And it prompts them to contact you to ask questions, make an appointment, or sign up for your list.

New services, albeit someone else’s, and new content. These are your new products and services. This is what you should continually create and offer.

Then, when someone asks, “What’s new?” you’ll be able to show them.

To learn more about joint ventures, get this

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Legal industry, Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services, Referrals, Web traffic

Don’t break the chain

January 9, 2015 by
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You know a lawyer whose practice is rocking. More business than she can handle, lots of money, busy as all hell. Three years ago, she had just opened her doors. No clients, tiny office, nothing happening.

How did she get from a standing start to where she is today?

Many factors could have contributed to her growth, including talent, connections, hard work, and luck. But one factor may be more important than you might think.

Momentum.

When she started her practice, she did some things to bring in business, and then she kept doing them. She got better at them, and did them faster. She got progressively bigger results. Those results compounded and she continued to grow, until her practice reached the tipping point and became the juggernaut it is today.

Momentum is a critical factor in anything we do. Creating it is the hardest part of anything we do.

It’s like pushing a car from a dead stop. It takes a lot of effort to overcome inertia, but once the car starts rolling, it gets easier, and then easier still, until you have to do little more than lean on it to keep it going.

Alrighty then, how do we create momentum?

We do it with consistency.

Whatever it is you need to do, you do it regularly. You don’t “do” some marketing this week and pick it up again in six months. You do a little bit every day or every week.

You get better at it. It becomes easier. You do it faster and get better results.

Your results affect other areas of your life. If you build momentum with an exercise program, you get more energy to do other things. You might finally be able to read that book you’ve been wanting to read, or start that new website project.

When you write a blog post or newsletter article each week, you become a better writer, of course, but you may also become a better speaker. You may get better at networking, too, as you reach out to other professionals to invite them to do a guest post for you and as they do the same for you.

When Jerry Seinfeld was starting out, he promised himself that he would write one new joke every day. Every day he did it, he made a mark on his calendar. As the marks piled up, he kept going because he didn’t want to “break the chain”.

In any area you want to improve, find something you can do and do it. Walk for ten minutes three times a week. Write two paragraphs every morning. Invite one professional to lunch every week.

Get started and don’t break the chain. Consistency breeds momentum, and momentum breeds results.

If you need a marketing plan that really works, get this. 

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Law office management, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Personal development, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With:

When was the last time you failed at something big?

January 8, 2015 by
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We’ve heard the rhetoric many times before. Lawyers are risk adverse, we don’t make good entrepreneurs, we’re not good in business.

And it’s true. Most lawyers are overly cautious. It’s in our nature.

But without risk, there is no reward. As Robert Kennedy put it, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

Fear of failure is the biggest obstacle to our success. But this fear is often unreasonable.

What holds us back is that we tend to overestimate the cost of failure. We imagine dire consequences and worst case scenarios that are greatly unrealistic in their scope and very unlikely to occur. (Researchers have found that eight-five percent of what we worry about never happens.)

We also underestimate the potential rewards of our actions. One good idea or relationship can make us rich.

It comes down to this: If you want to be more successful, you’ve got to try new things and take more risks.

If you try something and it doesn’t work, you learn from it. As Napoleon Hill tells us, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

Okay, take more risks. Got it. But how?

I think we start by taking small risks more frequently. We get in the habit of regularly trying new things, things that might not work but which have limited downside.

We get used to the experience of failing often, but on a small scale.

As we see that most things work out most of the time, and that when they don’t we easily recover, we eventually take bigger risks.

In other words, we learn how to take risks by taking risks.

Start by changing the way you look at the ideas that cross your path. Instead of rejecting many of them automatically, as we both know you do, collect them and put them on a list called “maybe”.

Then, once a week or so, choose something on that list and try it. If it doesn’t work, if you hate it, if someone you report to says you can’t do that anymore, you will have learned something and you can try something else.

And whenever you feel the tug of fear that seeks to hold you back, remember what Mark Twain said: “My life has been filled with calamities, some of which actually happened.”

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Filed Under: Personal development, success Tagged With: ,

Planning 2015 and beyond

January 7, 2015 by
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What do you want to accomplish this year? Be specific. Next year at this time, if I ask you, “Did you do it?” I hope you’ll be able to answer in the affirmative, but what is “it”?

You have many options. You must decide what you want and be very clear about it. What’s the number? What’s the outcome?

Do you want more clients? How many? Do you want better clients? How do you define better? Do you want fewer clients who pay you more? How many and how much?

Start with the big picture–where do you want to be five or ten years from now?

Do you want to expand into a new market? Branch out into a new practice area? Attract different types of clients?

Do you want a big firm, with lots of employees and offices, or a small firm with low overhead and low(er) management requirements?

Do you want to build a war chest to finance something new, or passive income so you can retire?

Before you make a plan or take action, you must know what you want. But there’s something else you need to figure out.

Why?

Whatever it is that you want, you have to know why you want it. You want more income? Why? What will you do with it?

When you think you know your “why” take it deeper. You say you want more money to pay off debt, start a college fund, or hire some new staff. Fine. Why do you want that?

Ah, more staff will allow you to earn more and work less. Okay, why do you want that?

It will give you more time with the family you love. You won’t miss soccer games and ballet recitals. You’ll be able to pursue music or art or travel the world.

Okay, but why do you want those things?

Keep asking yourself “why” until you get to the emotional core that is driving what you want. That core will be fueled by one of two emotions: love or fear.

Your love of your children will keep you going when you hit an obstacle. So will your fear of disappointing them.

It is our emotions that drive us and unless we access those emotions, it’s too easy to get distracted, procrastinate, or give up.

When you have emotional clarity about what you want, nothing will stop you from getting it. Without that clarity, anything can stop you.

Get clear about what you want, and why you want it.

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Filed Under: Career satisfaction, Goal Setting, Increase your income, Personal development, success Tagged With:

Selling legal services without breaking a sweat

January 6, 2015 by
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I once had a secretary who asked me for a raise. I thought I paid her well but I told her that I would consider paying her more if she would first show me that she was worth more. I knew she capable of a lot more and was only doing enough to keep her job.

She countered. She said that if I wanted her to do more, I had to pay her more. First.

She used to work for the government, so I know why she didn’t get it. In the real world, if you want to earn more, show your employer that you are worth more. If you do, you may not even have to ask for a raise.

The same goes for lawyers in private practice. Show your clients and target market that you are worth more to them, and then you can easily raise your rates.

I talked about this yesterday. I said that the foundation of marketing and building a successful law practice is delivering value to your clients and target market. The more value you give, the more clients, repeat business, referrals, and other benefits you get, and that includes being able to charge higher fees.

Give more value, FIRST.

One of the benefits of doing this is that it practically eliminates the need to do any selling. The value you deliver does the selling for you.

Something as simple as posting high quality information on your website tells your market what they need to know about you and how you can help them. Through this information, and the client stories you tell to illustrate your points, people can see that you have knowledge, experience, and a work ethic that they want in an attorney.

Prospects get to know and trust you through your content. They sell themselves on hiring you. Referral sources see how much you know and how much you do for your clients and they know that their referrals will be in good hands.

How else can you deliver value to your market?

By providing referrals, making introductions, and promoting their business or practice.

By sharing their content with your lists and contacts.

By helping their causes through donations and volunteering your time.

When you deliver enough value to your market, you don’t need to sell your services. You need do little more than mention them.

They already know and trust you. They already know you’re good at what you do. If they need your help, or know someone who does, they’re not going to go anywhere else.

Selling legal services is easier when you know the formula

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Marketing legal services, Relationship marketing, Salesmanship Tagged With: ,

The foundation of all attorney marketing

January 5, 2015 by
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The foundation of all attorney marketing is value. The more value you deliver to your target market, the more successful you will become.

When you deliver more value, you get more clients, and better clients, and you’re able to charge higher fees. You get more referrals and fewer complaints. You build a base of loyal fans who are not only willing to help you, they go out of their way to do it.

Value starts with your services, of course, but it’s not just the excellence with which your perform those services. It is a function of everything under the umbrella of “client relations”.

It is the little things you do for your clients that improve their entire experience with you. It’s the way you show them that you care about them as individuals and not just names on a file. It’s how you make them feel about themselves and their decision to put their trust in you.

Maya Angelou said it best when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Value doesn’t stop with clients. You also deliver value to your prospects, referral sources, and others who work in, advise, or sell to your target market. Give them more value, make them feel good about knowing you, and they will remember you when they need your services or know someone who does.

You can deliver value to your prospective clients and referral sources through content-rich websites, videos, podcasts, articles, books, and speaking engagements that educate and empower them and help them make better decisions. You can deliver value through free consultations and free seminars, or paid seminars, books and courses.

The foundation of all attorney marketing is value. Find out what your market wants and deliver it to them. Over and over again. Surprise and delight them by giving them more than anyone else in the market, and you will own that market.

Marketing is easier when you know The Formula.

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Filed Under: Client loyalty, Client relations, Increase your income, success

We get what we expect, not what we want

January 2, 2015 by
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Years ago, my wife and I attended an annual New Year’s party at her agent’s home. Every year, all of the guests wrote down what we expected to happen that year. Not our goals, our expectations.

The agent collected our scribbles in a basket and before we wrote our current expectations, we read what we had written the previous year. We could share with the group if we wanted to, or not.

The idea is that we don’t get what we want (our goals), we get what we expect. Goals are aspirational; expectations are objective.

I believe this is true. Our subconscious mind is a servo-mechanism, after all. It accepts our beliefs (expectations) as reality and works to create that reality.

I never quite got the hang of it, however. Every year, I wrote down what I wanted to happen, in the guise of what I expected. And every year, I missed the mark by a long shot. But this was my fault. I didn’t put a lot of thought into the exercise.

Maybe I was afraid my wife’s agent would secretly sneak a peak at what we had written so I wrote down something acceptable.

Anyway, if it is true that we get what we expect and not what we want, how does this help us? How do we access our deepest beliefs, and how do we use them to get what we want?

You got me.

Hypnosis? Meditation? Prayer?

All I know is that as we write down our goals for the year, we should give some thought to our expectations. That way, instead of choosing random goals that we hope will magically come true, we will choose goals that come true because they are the natural progression of our current reality.

If it turns out that our goals and are current reality are miles apart, and we’re honest with ourselves about that, after we write our goals, we will write down a list of things we need to work on in order to close that gap.

Need a simple marketing plan that really works? Get this

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Filed Under: Goal Setting, Personal development Tagged With:

Give it away, give it away, give it away (but not everything)

December 29, 2014 by
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You’re thinking about next year, aren’t you? If you’re not, just check your email. It’s undoubtedly filled with messages about goal setting, resolutions, organizing your work flow like a boss. . .

Oh, and don’t forget to register for the next goo-roo webinar that promises to reveal the secrets to profligate wealth. (Note to self: the free webinar is a sales pitch).

Not all free webinars are like that. Just most of them. You don’t learn that much. Or they tell you the “what” but not the “how”.

I know, they can’t give away everything for free. They’ve got a business to run. Just like you do. You don’t give away all of your wisdom and advice during a free consultation (nor should you), so you get that.

But you’ve got to give people something.

I’m not saying you can’t sell your services without “content”. You certainly can. Advertising still works. But if you’re asking people to invest an hour of their time with you at your seminar, watching your videos, or reading your blog, you’ve got to give them something in return.

And the more you give them, the more likely they are to see you as the solution to what ails them.

So, as you plan your next move, I suggest you add “content creation” to your list. If you already do this, ask yourself how you can do it more or make it better.

Put some articles on your website. Write a report or ebook. Make some screen capture videos. Teach people something about your area of expertise, so they can see that you know what you’re doing and get a sense of what it would be like to work with you.

People go online for information. Give them some.

The Attorney Marketing Formula comes with a simple marketing plan that really works. Go here.

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Filed Under: Goal Setting, Marketing Plan

99% of attorneys give the other 1% a bad name

December 26, 2014 by
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Attorneys are often regarded as selfish bastards who eat their young. We rank below used car sales people and politicians on the trust and likability meter. So I read with interest a story about an attorney who drove a stake through the heart of this stereotype.

It happened in an Oregon courtroom where Castor Conley, a 27-year-old married father of a 17-month-old girl, was charged with paying $150 to $200 for a stolen Nissan, which he sold for $275 to another buyer, who then sold it for parts. Conley pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, but the deputy district attorney agreed to classify it as a misdemeanor if he paid $983 in restitution to the owner of the truck.

Conley couldn’t come up with the money, however.

Attorney Colin M. Murphy was in the courtroom on another matter and overheard the conversation. He didn’t know the defendant but realized that a felony conviction would affect his job and housing prospects and he volunteered to pay the money.

‘All of us sometime in our lives have done something we would rather not have done,’ he told The Oregonian. ‘And the time will come when perhaps we are going to be held accountable. And I think at that point we would like to have somebody show us mercy.”

The judge told Conley he should eventually pay back Murphy, but Murphy said he was happy to give the man a chance. “If I get paid back, great,” Murphy said. “If I don’t, no problem. I’m not going to hold the kid to it.”

I know it’s the Christmas season, but Murphy needs to stop this nonsense. He’s making the rest of us look bad.

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Filed Under: Image, Inspiration, Legal industry
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