A stupidly simple way to get referrals

March 23, 2012 by
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So you want more referrals, eh? Okay, here are two questions you can ask people that should do the trick:

  1. “Who do you know who. . .?” (and yes, I know it’s “whom”), and
  2. “Will you introduce me?”

Yep, that simple.

Of course you have to finish the first question so that it frames the referral request properly. If your request is too broad (i.e., “. . .who might need my services”) you’re making it too hard on the person you’re asking. They can’t see, in their mind’s eye, anyone who fits that description, at least not without a lot of work on their part.

If your request is too narrow, (i.e., “. . .who owns an ios app development company and wants to file a patent claim against Apple”) you’re probably not going to get a lot of positive response.

Your work is to write a question that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right for the person you are asking. Don’t ask them to mentally inventory everybody they know in search of someone they can refer to you. Help them narrow their focus to a handful of candidates so that they can spot someone who fits the description.

You can do the same thing to get referred to prospective referral sources instead of directly to clients: “Who do you know who is a fee-based financial planner in West LA or the South Bay?”

Even though you ask the right question, you’ll still get people who don’t know anyone they can refer, or don’t realize that they do. That’s okay. You’re follow-up question is, “Who do you know who might know someone who does. . .?”

If they don’t know a fee-based financial planner in West LA or the South Bay, they might know an accountant who does. Or a commission-based planner who does. Or a planner on the other side of town who does. Help them to help you by asking a question they can answer, and they will.

Oh, and always ask, “Who do you know,” not “Do you know anyone. . .?” The former assumes they know someone and, through the power of suggestion, makes it more likely that they will come up with a name or two. The latter begs them to say no.

Ask enough people, “Who do you know. . .” and “Will you introduce me?” and before you know it, you’ll be talking to someone who can hire you or refer you to someone who can.

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Filed Under: Referrals, Relationship marketing Tagged With: ,

To build your practice faster create a “Focus 30 List”

February 23, 2012 by
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Most attorneys know a lot of people. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people–clients, former clients, attorneys, referral sources, prospects, friends and family, business contacts, community leaders. Your contact list is your most valuable marketing asset.

People who have inquired about your services are more likely to hire you than people who don’t know your name. People who have hired you before are likely to hire you again. People who have referred clients in the past are likely to refer in the future. The best way to grow any law practice is to stay in touch with the people who know, like, and trust you. Nurture this list and the people on it and your practice will grow.

But you can’t possibly give everyone on your list the same amount of attention. There simply isn’t time. And some people are more valuable to you than others. Your best client is obviously in a different category than someone who has never hired you. Someone who refers you two or three clients every month deserves more attention than someone who sent you one client last year.

You need a “Focus 30” list– a list of your 30 most valuable contacts.

These are your best clients and referral sources, your most promising prospects, the most influential and helpful professionals you know. Put their names on a list and carry it with you. Post it next to your computer. Keep it in front of you everywhere you go.

Why 30? Because experts tell us that’s about the maximum anyone can effectively work with at any one time. Whereas you will write and occasionally call the people on your master list, the people on your Focus 30 list get your personal time. You will talk to them every week, maybe even every day. You will meet with them every month. You give them your time and energy because they are the 30 most important people in your professional life.

Build or strengthen your relationship with your Focus 30. Call them, just to see how they’re doing. Send them business. Get to know their families, their employees, and their best contacts. Dedicate 80% of your time to your Focus 30 list, 20% to everyone else.

Your list will change over time. You will add people as they play a more prominent role in your life and remove those who drift away. Someone you thought deserved to be on the list will disappoint you. Someone who isn’t even on your radar today will emerge as a valuable ally tomorrow.

Your list may start out with only five or ten people. No hurry. Start with them.

When you get to thirty, you’ll need to pare some names to make room for others. Continually upgrade your list so that you focus on the best. And when you have 30 of the best, upgrade your list to the “best of the best”.

Eventually, you will have 30 people who send you so much business you won’t be able to handle it all.

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Filed Under: Client relations, Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services, Referrals, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , ,

How to get your clients to support your law practice

February 14, 2012 by
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My wife and I are continuing to unclutter. Yesterday she brought our daughter’s Irish Dance costumes to her old school to see if they could use them.

The school today is much smaller than it was ten years ago when my daughter attended. My wife noticed that there isn’t room for the parents to congregate inside the school like we used to do. It looked like most parents dropped off their kids.

When the school was bigger, many parents stayed for the class. We spent time together–at the school, during competitions, and eventually, outside the school envirnonment–and we got to know each other and our families. The school became a social incubator and helped foster relationships that still exist today, five or ten years after our children attended.

When we were active at the school, there were competitions and shows and we parents contributed much time and effort building sets, working lights and music, and selling tickets to the shows to our friends and neighbors. Yes, we were supporting our children, but the amount of effort we contributed would not have been anywhere near the same had our social group of parents not been so strong.

Today, I’m sure they don’t get anywhere near the amount of parent involvement we had, simply because the parents don’t know each other as well. As a result, the smaller school is more likely to stay that way.

A business can leverage their customer base by creating a social environment where their customers can build strong ties among themselves and, therefore, also with that business. A law firm can do the same thing.

Most lawyers have a one-to-one private relationship with their clients. They don’t “cross pollinate” their clientèle. Because of privacy issues this is to be expected. Most clients don’t want anyone to know they’ve hired a bankruptcy or criminal defense lawyer. But not all practices are so constricted.

A small business practice, for example, has clients who can benefit from knowing each other. They can refer business, exchange ideas, and recommend vendors. If you hold a monthly event–a mixer, a breakfast or lunch, a seminar series–where your clients regularly come together, they would build a social network of their own. Your clients would benefit and as the organizer of these events, so would you.

When you have strong relationships with your clients, they are much more likely to remain your clients. No other lawyer will get their referrals. And if you need a favor–sending traffic to your web site, promoting your seminar, or distributing your new report–your clients will help. In fact, they’ll probably be more likely to do so because of the added accountability of the social network.

If there’s any way to build a social element into your practice, I suggest you give it a try. If this isn’t appropriate for your clients, you can do the next best thing–organize a breakfast or lunch or other regular social event for your referral sources and friends of the firm.

Strong relationships with your clients and referral sources help you strengthen and grow your practice. When they have strong relationships among themselves, your growth can be accelerated.

You don’t have to be the sponsor of that group, just the organizer. And the best part is you won’t have to listen to accordion music.

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Filed Under: Client loyalty, Client relations, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t read this unless you want to quickly bring in a bunch of new clients

February 10, 2012 by
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If you have a few minutes today, there’s a very good chance you can use this time to bring in more business. I’ve been preaching the value of this “technique” for many years because it is an incredibly effective way to put people in your waiting room.

I put “technique” in quotes because it’s not a technique so much as common sense. You don’t have to study or practice. You don’t need any special tools. There’s nothing to prepare. You can do it as soon as you finish reading this post.

One lawyer who did this eventually wrote to me to tell me he was getting so much new business, his secretary made him stop!

So what is this brilliantly simple way to bring in more business? Simply this: Call your clients and say hello.

Call your current clients and your former clients and tell them you are calling to say hello and see how they are doing.

That’s it.

The first thing that will happen is that your clients will be amazed and delighted that you thought enough of them to reach out and say hello (without the meter running). They will appreciate you even more than they already do.

Ask them about their family or their work or business. They will be even more impressed that you remembered something personal about them. Let them talk.

Don’t ask for anything or offer anything. Remember, you’re just calling to say hello.

Now what?

Well, your presence on the telephone will prompt your clients to think about legal issues or concerns they’ve had recently and they will ask for advice. Or, they will think about a friend from work or someone in the family with a legal issue and ask you if you can help them.

Before you know it you will be talking to people who want to hire you.

Of course, you will also be talking to people with issues you don’t handle. You will refer them to lawyers in those practice areas and score points with the client and the lawyers you refer them to.

Not everyone will have business for you today. In fact, most won’t. But in reminding them that you still help people solve legal problems, when they do need your services, or know someone who does, guess who they are going to call?

If you get voice mail, leave a message and tell them you’ll call again. Call them again in a few days at a different time.

Your clients know, like, and trust you. They hired you once and they will hire you again. They know people who need your services or who will need your services in the future, and they will be only too happy to send that business to you.

And you don’t even have to ask.

—

If you want to grow your practice even quicker, go buy The Quantum Leap  Marketing System for Attorneys. It will show you how to build a large (or larger) practice quicker than you ever thought possible.

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Filed Under: Client loyalty, Client relations, Marketing legal services, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to get more clients with joint venture marketing

February 9, 2012 by
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John Jantsch shared a great marketing idea today and he used attorneys as an example. The idea is to get together with other professionals and businesses who target the same market you do and create a content-filled blog as a resource for that target market.

So the small business attorney pairs up with an insurance broker, an expert in employee benefits, a CPA, and a marketing expert, all of whom contribute articles or blog posts speaking to the issues business owners want and need.

The site or blog will get search engine traffic, attracting prospects who will learn about the individuals who write the posts and the services they offer.

Jantsch provides recommendations for WordPress plug-ins that will help you organize and run the blog. Here’s another post I saw today that recommends 15 plug-ins for multi-author blogs.

But what if you’re not up to the task of organizing and running this little venture just now? Is there anything else you can do to utilize this idea?

Yes there is and thanks for asking.

You can organize a one time collaboration where you and other profoessionals contribute articles, posts, reports, audios, or other content. You can put that on a web site that won’t necessarily attract a lot of search engine traffic because the site wouldn’t be regularly updated, but it would be a tremendous resource for each of the contributors who send traffic to the site.

You can put the content on a cd or dvd or in an ebook and use it as a reward for opt-ins to your regular web site. Or as a gift to people who attend your seminar, webinar, or teleconference. Or as a giveaway to your clients and contacts, encouraging them to send copies to their friends and contacts.

You can also organize a live event in your local market, with half a dozen speakers, each of whom invites guests.

The value of a collaborate marketing effort like this is that each of the participants is repsonsible for creating only their article or report, but each of you benefits from the content of the others. In addition, with each of you sending visitors to the site or otherwise distributing the content, each of you will get the tacit recommendation of the other professionals, as well as exposure to their clients and prospects.

If even a simplified version of this idea seems like too much work to take on right now, find one other professional or business owner who targets your market and do something together.

Send an en email to each other’s lists, offering a free consultation or a free report. Do a guest post for each other’s blog or newsletter. Invite each other to attend a networking group you belong to and introduce each other to centers of influence you know.

Cooperative marketing is effective because it instantly exposes you to a large group of prospective clients, all of whom have the implied or explicit recommendation of a professional they know, like, and trust. It’s a great idea no matter how you go about it.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing legal services, Online Marketing, Referrals, Relationship marketing, Web traffic Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Networking 101: What Do I Do After I’ve Made a New Contact?

February 1, 2012 by
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An attorney emailed and asked:

“Last week, I met a man who is the head of the [an influential association]. Good contact. I sent him an email saying nice to meet you, he responded likewise and hopes to see me around. Now what?”

Great question. What do you do after you meet someone? How do you develop a relationship that will bear fruit?

Of course there isn’t a simple answer. Each situation is as different as the individuals involved. And while every nascent networking relationship has the potential to grow and develop, it’s possible that it won’t. The chemistry isn’t there, the timing isn’t right or one of the parties simply isn’t amenable to taking the relationship to a higher level.

So you meet a lot of people, try a lot of things, and see what works. Most relationships probably won’t pan, out but that’s okay. You only need a few good ones.

When you meet a new contact, here’s what to do next:

First, never leave anything to the other party. Always take the initiative to move things forward. You invite them, you call them, you ask them. The reason we give people our business cards when we meet them, isn’t so they have our contact information, it’s to get theirs.

So you’ve done that. You took the lead and emailed “nice to meet you”. That’s good. He replied. Even better. The door is open to future contact and there is now a chance that he will remember you.

Second, when we meet new people, during those uncomfortable first few minutes where we exchange small talk, we are searching for “commonalities”. When we find them (a school, a mutual friend, a shared interest in golf, for example) we are united in that common interest and we have something we can talk about. When you find something in common with your new contact, however banal, you can use that to continue the conversation at a later time.

So, did you discover any commonalities with your new contact? Did you discuss anything that you can use to continue the conversation? If not, in your next communication, find a reason to ask him a question. Ask if he knows someone you know or what he thinks about an idea that is important to his industry. Share an article you think he may like and ask for his thoughts.

Third, and most important, networking isn’t about you getting something from the other person, at least not initially. In the beginning, networking is the search for people with problems you can help solve or objectives you can help meet. I am not necessarily referring to your legal services.

What does the other person want? Where is his pain? What is on his mind? You need to find out so you can help.

You might have information that can help. You might introduce him to someone. Or give him a referral.

You get what you want by first helping other people get what they want. The more you give, the more (eventually) you will get.

So, if you don’t know what this individual wants, find out. Ask him–“how can I help you with. . .?” Or ask people who know him or his organization what might be needed. Or do some research.

Once you know what someone wants, look for ways to help him get it. If you can’t help them yourself, turn to your existing network of clients and contacts and find someone who can. If your contacts can’t help, they may know someone who can.

Your role is to position yourself as the “go to” person when people need something. You connect people with problems with people who have solutions. In doing so, you help both people and you also help yourself.

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Filed Under: Communication, Marketing legal services, Networking, Relationship marketing, Thank you letters Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to get more clients from cases you don’t handle

December 8, 2011 by
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shield laws for bloggersI’m sure you read the story about the blogger in a defamation case who got hit with a $2.5 million judgment because, the judge said, she is not a journalist and was not protected by the state’s shield laws.

Interesting story. Important subject.

You read the story but did you make any money with it?

Attorneys can easily leverage a story like this to get more media attention, more traffic to their web site, more prospects, more referral sources, and more clients. And I’m not talking about the attorneys who handled the case itself, I’m talking about you.

Interested? Here’s all you have to do.

First, write a two or three page report summarizing defamation laws in your jurisdiction. You don’t have to practice in this area to do this, Uncle Google will help you, or you can ask an attorney friend who does (and tell him about this idea so he can do it, too).

In your report, mention the case about the blogger. Offer your opinion. Include a few citations, maybe a few resources.

Now, go back to Uncle Google and ask him to give you a list of bloggers in your target market(s) who are in your state or province.

Next, contact these bloggers (a personal email will do) and tell them you wrote a report for bloggers about how they can protect themselves against lawsuits like the one in the news. Offer to send it to them, free of charge. Tell them they are welcome to send it other bloggers they know and care about. (If you know the blogger, you could just send them the report in your first email).

In one day, you can get your report into the hands of dozens of people who every day write and influence the people you are targeting for your services. You have provided value to the blogger on a personal level, and asked nothing in return.

Where can this lead? Interviews, hosted webinars for their readers, guest posts, referrals, introductions, you name it.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t practice tort law. If you do, that’s an added benefit, but the point of this effort isn’t to show these bloggers you can help them in this particular area of the law, it’s to meet them.

Now, what else could you do with your report? Here are a few ideas:

  • Send it to local media with a cover letter letting them know you are available for interviews.
  • Call or email your clients and contacts: Who do you know in (your area) who writes a blog? Tell them you have a report that can help them.
  • Offer it through social media; post a video on youtube, opining on the story and linking to your report; offer it via forums, chat groups, listserves, and other areas where bloggers and people who know bloggers congregate.
  • Contact local blogger groups, business groups (anyone who has a blog), and offer a lunch talk.
  • Write about it on your blog or in your newsletter.
  • Take out ads and offer the report, as a “public service”.
  • Send it to lawyers in your practice area in states or provinces where you don’t practice. Tell them what you’re doing with the report in your area, invite them to do the same in theirs. (If you have to ask how this could help you, forget about this idea.)
  • Do a presentation at your bar group’s next function on how you used a news story to market your services.

You get the idea.

Oh, and you don’t need a news story to do this, you can write about anything that affects people in your target market or they people who influence them.

It’s about providing value in a leveraged way. It’s simple and it works. And if your report goes viral, it could help you take a quantum leap in the growth of your practice.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogging, Increase your income, Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services, Networking, News, Online Marketing, Publicity, Referrals, Relationship marketing, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Attorney Marketing 101: The psychology of referrals

October 19, 2011 by
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The psychology of referrals--lawyer marketingThere are two kinds of referral sources: those who can refer and those who will.

If you’ve done a good job for your clients, most are probably willing to give you referrals. That doesn’t mean they will. If they don’t know people who need your services, they can’t refer them.

Others — professionals, business owners, centers of influence — who are able to refer you a lot of business, often don’t.

Understanding why people do or do not give referrals can help you get more of them.

So why do people provide referrals? Your clients are willing to send referrals for several reasons:

First, your clients want to help their friends and colleagues to the benefit of your services. They can save their friends the time they might have spent looking for an attorney, and help them avoid the risk of getting an incompetent one or getting overcharged. Their friends appreciate this help; your client’s status is elevated. Being able to help their friends makes them feel important.

Second, when their friend retains you and is also satisfied with your work, it validates your referring client’s decision to hire you in the first place. Any doubts they may have had about their experience with you are removed.

The third reason your clients are willing to give you referrals is that they want to help you. However, clients don’t always know that you want their referrals. You need to tell them. Or, they understand that you want referrals but they just don’t think about it. You need to remind them.

If you’re not getting referrals from your clients, or you’re not getting as many as you would like, there are only two reasons: either you don’t deserve them or you’re not asking for them.

Now, how about non-clients, professionals, business owners, centers of influence–why might they give you referrals?

For some, it is the expectation of quid pro quo. They give you referrals and you give them referrals, or so they hope.

Others will refer their clients and contacts to you for the same reason your clients do: to help their clients avoid the risk and effort of finding an attorney on their own. In helping their clients this way, they add value to their relationships and their status is also elevated. And yes, some also feel good about helping you, too.

When a professional is able to refer business but is unwilling to do so, it may be because they don’t yet know, like, and trust you. It takes time for your relationship to develop. Eventually, they may turn out to be a big source of new business.

Many prospective referral sources don’t send you business because they don’t have it to give. They have a relationship with another attorney to whom they refer and they don’t have enough referrals for both of you. Unless their regular attorney has a conflict of interest, is unavailable, or doesn’t handle a given matter, your prospective referral source may be willing to refer, but not able.

In time, that may change. When the other attorney retires, dies or screws up, you could be next in line.

If you’re dealing with a prospective referral source who cannot reciprocate, there are other ways they can help you. By the same token, there are other ways you can help them when you can’t reciprocate.

Some people who can give referrals simply won’t. They may see it as risky–what if you screw up and make them look bad? Others just can’t be bothered.

Don’t dwell on the reasons why people won’t refer. If some clients won’t do it, it doesn’t matter; most will. With non-client referral sources, the numbers are reversed. Most won’t refer and this doesn’t matter. You only need a few who do.

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Filed Under: Client relations, Referral sources, Referrals, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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