The Attorney Marketing Center--Earn More. Work Less

Let them go

August 30, 2017 by David M. Ward

You have an email subscriber who wants to leave your list. Let them go. In fact, encourage them to do so. If they’re not happy with what you’re sending them, why should they remain?

That same goes for you and me.Â If you’re not digging my emails, if you think I email too often and you can’t keep up, if you don’t want to follow any of my advice, there’s no point in you sticking around. And from my perspective, if you don’t “dig” me, you’re not going to buy anything from me, so there’s no point in keeping you on my list.

Let’s part friends. But let’s part.

That’s the proper attitude whether we’re talking about email subscribers, social media connections, networking friends, or clients.Â If one or both of you isn’t been served by the relationship, one of you has to let the other go.

If a client isn’t happy with something and you’ve tried to work it out but it’s just not happening, you have to let them go. It’s best for both of you.

Don’t let them storm off, however. Use a little finesse.

I would say, “It sounds like you might be happier with another lawyer. Would you like me to give you a referral?”

Why this?

Because it’s kick-ass posture. You’re not only suggesting they might want to work with someone else, you’re offering to help them find them.

It says, “I’d love to continue to work with you, but I don’t need your business. I want you to be happy and if I’m not your guy, I know other lawyers who might be a better fit for you.”

Confident. Strong. Successful. The very picture of a lawyer who is in demand and whose clients are fortunate to be with them.

Of course by saying, “You might be. . ,” the word “might” keeps the door open. You’re giving them a chance to realize that they might NOT be happy with another lawyer and realize that maybe the reason they’re not happy isn’t entirely your fault.

By taking the high road, not arguing, not trying to convince them to say, you’re confirming that you really don’t need their business. By letting them go this way, clients often realize they really don’t want to go.

Anyway, you can’t stop them from leaving, so don’t try. Let them go. It may be the best way to get them to stay.

Good client relations is your best marketing strategy.

Filed Under: Client relations

How to talk to strangers

August 29, 2017 by David M. Ward

Okay, so you know the simplest way to start a conversation with a stranger is to ask a question or pay a compliment.

What do you say after that?

You know you shouldn’t talk about politics, religion, or sex. What’s left?

Here are four “safe” topics that can help you keep the conversation going and allow you to build rapport.

You can remember these four topics with the acronym, F.O.R.M.

F is for family.

Do they have kids? Are they married or in a relationship? Do they have a crazy uncle?

People like to talk about their family but you have to be careful about how you bring up the subject. You don’t want to ask too many personal questions when you first meet. The best way to find out about their family is to start talking about your own.

Mention something interesting or funny one of your kids did recently. Talk about something you and spouse like to do together. Tell them something your brother told you recently. You can then ask if they have kids or like to do what you and your spouse like to do.

O is for occupation.

Ask them what they do for a living. If they are college age, ask about their major or future plans.

When they tell you what they do or plan to do, comment on it. Tell them something you know or heard about their field or tell them about someone you know who does something similar.

You can then ask them what they like best about their job or business or how they got started.

R is for recreation.

What are their hobbies? What do they like to do for fun? You might ask, “What do you like to do when you’re not working?”

If you’re in a sports bar or the other person is wearing a jersey for their favorite team, you can ask if they go to the games or who their favorite player is.

If you don’t know anything about their sport or hobby, ask them what they like about it or how long they’ve been doing it.

M is for motivation.

What do they dream about doing? What drives them? What is their long term goal?

Getting someone to tell you about their dreams and goals is one of the most valuable ways to get to know them and bond with them but it can be difficult to get a stranger to open up to you. Therefore, start with one of the other rapport-building topics and look for clues you can use to ask about their dreams.

If they’ve told you they don’t like what they do for a living, you can ask what they would like to do instead. If they’ve told you their hobby is sky diving, you could ask if they know any professional sky divers and then ask if they’ve ever thought about doing the same thing.

Get people talking about themselves. I guarantee they’ll enjoy talking to you.

When you ask people what they do, they usually ask what you do. Be prepared to tell them

Filed Under: Networking Tagged With: conversations, rapport

Disaster preparedness for law firms

August 28, 2017 by David M. Ward

Houston, TX. is undergoing a world of hurt right now. Some say that certain public officials were warned but didn’t do enough to prepare. True or not, their plight should serve as a warning to all of us about the need to prepare for emergencies.

In your home and in your office, you need tools and supplies. Â You need food and water, first aid kits, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, flashlights, batteries, and tools to shut off the gas and water.

You also need to know what you will do if there’s a fire, flood, or earthquake. How will you get out? How will you communicate if phones are down?

Take some time to craft a plan and make sure everyone you care about has a copy.

But that’s just the beginning. You also need a plan in case of financial and business disasters.

What will you do if a Bar complaint or a lawsuit is filed against you? Who will you call? What will you say or do?

Put it in writing so if and when it happens, you don’t have to think about it, you can just “do”.

What should your family and employees or partners do if you become incapacitated or die? Put it in writing.

What will you do if a major client leaves and takes a third of your revenue with them? What will you do if you suffer a big financial loss due to embezzlement, bad investments, or partnership disputes?

If something big could go wrong, you should have a plan in place to address it.

While you’re thinking about what to do if disaster strikes, you should also think about what you can do to prevent it and/or mitigate your losses.

Make sure you have redundant systems in place for your calendars. Make sure your client data is encrypted and stored safely. Make sure you have enough insurance and enough cash in savings.

Yeah, I know, it’s no fun being an adult. But these things have to be done. If you find yourself procrastinating, or you realize you’re not very good at this sort of thing, ask someone else to do it. Ask your spouse, your office administrator, or a lawyer-friend for help.

Just make sure you get it done.

Be safe, not sorry. Make sure you have a plan in place for getting referrals

Filed Under: Law office management

Quantity or quality?

August 25, 2017 by David M. Ward

If you had to choose, would you choose more clients or better clients?Â Quantity or quality?

There are benefits to having a lot of clients:

More opportunities to learn and improve your skills
More opportunities to test different approaches and strategies (marketing, client relations, promotions, etc.
More clients mean more people contributing to overhead
Protection from loss. If you lose a few clients, you’ll have others to fill the gap.
More opportunities for repeat business, referrals, and introductions to other professionals
More opportunities to grow with small clients who become big clients

On the other hand, more clients mean more risks. More opportunities to make mistakes, more people clamoring for your attention, more people who might be unhappy and file a complaint or leave a bad review. There’s also more competition for smaller clients from the majority of lawyers who focus on them.

Well, how about the benefits that come with quality?

Bigger cases or clients means higher margins; you earn more per case or client
Higher profits allows you to deliver more value to each client, earning their repeat business and referrals
Better clients have more work for you; you don’t have to do additional outside marketing to get it
Better clients means referrals and introductions to better prospective clients
Better clients make it easier to build your reputation and stand out from the crowd
Leverage: one client could provide you with ten times the revenue of one new average client
Potential for more interesting work

But better clients aren’t all sunshine and lollipops. Lose one big client and your income could drop precipitously. Bigger clients aren’t as easy to replace. Bigger clients can be more demanding and more expensive to serve (more staff, better office, bigger overhead).

So, if the question is quantity or quality, what’s the answer?

How about “both”. How about a quantity of better clients and bigger cases?

That’s the goal. Getting there is a process.

When you’re starting out, you take what you can get. Later, you replace smaller clients with bigger and better ones and reject or refer smaller cases.

Your client mix changes over time as you continually work to increase revenue, lower costs, and increase profits. And it never stops. You never find the perfect balance because as soon as you get to a certain level you’ll want to get to the next one.

The only constant is constant change. Managing that is why you earn the big bucks.

Learn how to choose your target market and ideal client

Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services

When your gut argues with your bank account

August 24, 2017 by David M. Ward

I remember a client I considered one of my favorites. He brought me a lot of business. He never made any trouble. And he was easy to get along with.

Mike wore a lot of goldÂ jewelry, had expensive clothes, wore strong smelling cologne, talked fast and was always in a hurry. He gambled on sports. And he always had a cold, if you know what I mean.

But that was his business.Â When the phone rang and Mike was on the line, it made my day.

Soon, things began to change.

I never had any problems with his cases. No accusations of anything funny. But he was either the most accident-prone guy on Earth or something shady was going on.

He called me with another case. I turned it down. There wasn’t anything wrong with it that I could see but when you smell trouble, you’ve got to go with what your gut tells you and my gut was yelling and screaming that Mike was up to no good.

Mike stopped calling. Did he find another attorney? DidÂ the law catch up with him? A drug dealer? A bookie? Did he wrap himself around a telephone pole?

I never foundÂ out. He was gone and I was glad.

For awhile, Mike was my favorite client. But he was hardly an ideal client. It was early in my practice and I needed the money but I would never want more “Mikes”. An ideal client is someone who touches all the bases and Mike didn’t make the cut.

As you create a profile for your ideal client, don’t forget to check your gut. Even if your bank account says not to.

Need help creating a profile of your ideal client? Here it is

Filed Under: Marketing legal services

Lie, cheat, and steal your way to success

August 23, 2017 by David M. Ward

It’s corny but true. You can (and should) lie, cheat, and steal your way to success.

Lie in bed at night thinking about what you can do the next day to get more clients and increase your income.

Cheat some time during the day from your other activities and dedicate it to marketing.

Steal the best ideas from other lawyers, and especially from businesses since most lawyers are terrible marketers.

Solid advice because it gets you to focus on marketing and primes you to continually look for ideas you can steal, well, borrow from others.

Let’s talk about that.

We’re talking about finding what others are doing that’s working and emulating it. Using the essence but not the actual words. Modifying what others are doing to suit your practice, market, and style.

Start here: :

Set up a swipe file to collect emails, articles, ads, blog posts, and such, that other people are using to promote their practice or business.
Subscribe to other lawyers’ email lists and blogs. Do the same for other types of professionals and service businesses. Â Copy things you like and also things you don’t like (so you’ll know what to avoid).
Study the emails, etc., you like and ask yourself why you liked them. Make notes. Try your hand at writing it differently.
With each new email, ad, video, or piece of content, ask yourself why you opened it or why you watched it. What words or images caught your attention?
Once you began, what compelled you to continue? What did they promise or imply? What benefits did they offer? How did they get you to read all the way to the end?
Pay extra attention to headlines, sub-heads, email subjects and bullet points. Also note calls-to-action. You may not know why they are effective but if they resonate with you, put them in your swipe file and review them again later.
Did you buy what they offered? If so, why? If not, why not? What closed the deal for you? What objections did they overcome? Where did they miss the boat?

Go back through your swipe file periodically and ask yourself what you could use orÂ adapt. WhatÂ ideas, what offers, whatÂ words couldÂ you useÂ in your marketing?

Keep reading and watching and studying. Train your marketing eye. Study the content and conversations around you, not with the eye of a consumer or colleague but with the eye of a marketer.

You would be amazed at what you can learn, and what you can steal.

Marketing is easy when you know The Formula

Filed Under: Communication, Copywriting, Marketing legal services

A place for everything and everything in its place

August 22, 2017 by David M. Ward

I just watched a video by a guy who urges viewers to maintain separate apps for tasks, notes, appointments (calendar), and documents. He says it’s important to maintain “hard edges” between our systems because if we don’t, it will lead to confusion.

My opinion? That may be good advice for some people but not for everyone. In fact, some people find that using separate apps is the very thing that causes confusion.

Why force yourself to use separate apps when you don’t need to (or want to)? Why add a layer of complexity to how you manage the information in your life?

I’ve found that the fewer apps I use, the better. Fewer apps mean fewer apps to learn and maintain. It means fewer decisions about what information to put where. It means less time spent finding where I put things.

That’s why I use Evernote for both notes and tasks. I wrote about my system in Evernote for Lawyers.

Over the last few years, as my needs have changed, I’ve experimented with different apps. In particular, I used a separate app for task management and Evernote just for notes. I would link from the task management app to Evernote for details and supporting data.

Two apps instead of one.

All I did was complicate my life and I have come back to using Evernote for everything.

Well, almost everything. I keep a separate calendar for appointments and events. I store documents on my hard drive and in the cloud (Dropbox, Box). But most of the information in my life is managed with Evernote.

I have tinkered with my Evernote setup and work flow, however. I use a different notebook and tagging system today than I did a few years ago. I’ll share my current system with you at some point, but by the time I do that my system may change yet again.

So, how about you?

Do you use an integrated law practice management application to manage client data, calendars, billing, and documents? Do you use separate applications for each function? Do you prefer Onenote to Evernote or use something else? Do you use one app for work and another for personal matters?

Whatever you use, if it’s working for you, don’t change it.

But do experiment. You never know, you might find something that works better.

Evernote for Lawyers

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: evernote, evernote-for-lawyers

A simple productivity system that really works

August 21, 2017 by David M. Ward

No matter what productivity system or tools you use, if you’re like most people, you sometimes feel that you’re spending more time planning than doing.

Your write lists and then re-write them. You add tags or labels and ignore them. You move tasks from one folder to another. Your lists keep growing, you’re not getting a lot done, and you’re frustrated.

And the quest to find a better system continues.

I have one for you. It’s simple and you can use it with whatever you’re using now.

But first,Â I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that you will never get everything done. The good news is that you don’t have to.

If you continually get the most important things done, you’re golden.

How do you do that? Simple. Throughout your day, stop and ask yourself this question:Â “What’s the most important thing I could do right now?”

And then do it.

No matter what you have or don’t have on your lists, no matter how you might have prioritized the items on those lists, your subconscious mind knows better.

All you have to do is ask and listen to the answer.

Remember, you are the one who made the lists in the first place. You can override whatever you wrote down any time you choose.

Look at your lists if you want. Or put them away, get quiet, and ask the question. “What’s the most important thing I could do right now?”

You can trust the answer. It will automatically take into account things like due dates, urgency, and goals.

Ask the question and then do the thing. Do this a few times a day and relax. You’re getting the important things done. You don’t need to worry about anything else.

Let me show you how to get more referrals

Filed Under: Productivity

Three ways to level up your practice

August 17, 2017 by David M. Ward

When it comes to growing a law practice, slow and steady works. But, by definition, it’s slow. What if you want to grow quickly? What if you want to dramatically increase your income in a relatively short period of time?

Oh yes, it can be done. Some lawyers do it right out of the law school gate. Some do it when they reach their “day of disgust” and finally decide to get serious about marketing. Some do it when they see their numbers dropping and their fear of losing everything motivates them to finally take action.

But it can be done.

There are lots of things you could do to dramatically increase your income. I’m going to give you three. But more important than “what you do” is “what you think” and so first, I’m going to give you a few mindset adjustments.

First, to significantly boost your income you’ll need to do things that offer a big potential payoff. That means there might be additional risk and additional expense and you have to be prepared to accept this. You also need to be prepared to do things that take you outside your comfort zone.

Second, you have to jettison the idea that there is a direct correlation between the amount of time you work and the amount of income you earn. It’s not about how long it takes to do the work, it’s about how much value you deliver.

Third, you have to look for ways to employ leverage. One of the simplest ways to do that is to hire (more) people or outsource, and delegate as much of your work as possible. Rule of thumb: you should ONLY do those things that ONLY you can do. NB: there is very little that ONLY you can do.

Fourth, no matter how good you are getting things done you’ll probably need to get better. If you want to dramatically grow your practice, working harder is an option but so is working smarter.

Working smarter means “doing the right things,” the “20% activities that deliver 80% of your results and income”. It also means “doing things right”–getting the work done more quickly, efficiently, and with less effort.

With these principles in mind, here are three ways you might level up your practice:

(1) Bigger cases or better clients.

Bigger cases pay bigger fees. Why settle for an average fee of $10,000 when you could get $25,000? Or $100,000? The cases are out there and there’s no reason why you can’t get them.

Better clients pay higher fees and have more legal work. Why settle for “one of” work when you can bring in clients who have a steady stream of work?

(2) Increase your fees

One of the simplest ways to earn more is to charge more. Consider increasing your fees.

Not ten or fifteen percent, thirty percent. Fifty percent. 100%. Or more.

Crazy? Maybe. But maybe not. There’s only one way to find out.

Yes, you’ll lose some clients who can’t afford the increase or don’t want to pay it, but the new clients you bring in could more than offset those losses.

(3) Better referral sources (and more of them)

One of the best ways to bring in more business is to find referral sources that can send you more clients (and better clients, while you’re at it). Find professionals who can refer you five clients per month instead of five clients per year.

They’re out there and you can find them. Here’s a hint: they usually hang out with each other. Find one and they will lead you to others.

So, what do you think? Are you thinking, “These won’t work for me,” or are you thinking, “How can I make these work for me?”

Your attitude will determine your altitude. Translation: if you want to get big, fast, you need to think big and take massive action.

And remember, if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.

Plan your plan with this

Filed Under: Fees and Billing, Increase your income, Referral sources

Thinking like a lawyer may be costing you money

August 16, 2017 by David M. Ward

On my walk today I saw a car parked in front of a neighbor’s house. On the car door was a magnetic sign advertising, “Pam’s house sitting and pet sitting” business. Attached to the sign was a plastic business card holder which was filled with her cards.

Many lawyers who saw this wouldn’t give it a second thought. They’re busy thinking about their cases and clients and all the work they need to do. Or they would think about whether Pam is bonded and insured. Does she have employees and are they also insured? Does she supervise them? Did the owner of the house put the jewelry in a safe deposit box before they went out of town?

You know, lawyer stuff.

Enlightened lawyers would look at that sign and think about marketing.

No, I’m not suggesting a lawyer put a magnetic sign on their car. But if you’ve trained yourself to think like a business owner as well as a lawyer, seeing that sign might prompt you to start asking yourself about other ways Pam might be building her business.

Does she rely solely on that sign and word of mouth or does she do other kinds of marketing?Â Does she have a website? Is she listed in business directories? Does she advertise in our community newsletter? Does she distribute flyers?

Does she network with other business owners who might have customers or clients who need her pet sitting services–pet stores, vets, dog groomers, and kennels for example? For house sitting, does she network with real estate agents and travel agents?

Does she have a mailing list? How much repeat business does she get? How about referrals?

Does she know other house and pet sitters and do they cover for each other when one is overbooked? Has she considered expanding her services to include dog walking or pet food delivery?

This is how a business person thinks. Lawyers need to think this way, too because a law practice is also a business.

Ideas are everywhere. You just have to look for them. You might not be able to use many of the ideas you see (like car signs) but ideas you can’t use often lead to ideas you can use.

You know you want them. Here’s how to get more referrals