1. Don’t be cheap on lead acquisition.
I’m constantly amazed at how cheap many lawyers want to be on getting someone to identify themselves as in need of legal services and then closing the deal. Folks, we are in a high transaction business! Your emailed newsletter (alone) will never cut it. We must be arranging our businesses to outspend our competition on the generation of a new lead. It won’t happen overnight, but this has to be your mindset.
My view is that in order to do this, you must be very efficient in your marketing. Being “efficient” does not mean being cheap. It means being “smart.” When you sit down to create an ad, ask yourself: What exactly are we trying to accomplish? Before that ad is let loose, there are usually about 7–12 different steps/other pieces that must be created in order to make the ad work. This will usually involve at least one (and sometimes two) videos, with well-thought-out scripts, one or more physical marketing pieces that must be designed, and a funnel with follow up specific and appropriate to that ad created. Going through this process is the only way to achieve the goal of “spending more than your competition is willing to spend to acquire a good lead for your office.”
2. You need real clarity and comfort with whatever it is you are selling.
You can’t really have any “moral ambiguity” about the fact that you are a lawyer and you are selling. Everything I do is marketing and selling. Every conversation with a client, every conversation with a judge or opposing counsel is a marketing opportunity. (Tip: after every trial, I send my opposing counsel one of my books, congratulating them on a job well done for their client. Not necessarily a marketing book—sometimes it’s a business book, sometimes it’s “The Ultimate Success Secret.”) If you follow most of the lawyer listserves that don’t have anything to do with marketing, you will see a trend “against” the marketers. It’s just so easy to jump on that bandwagon. I see it all the time, lawyers who don’t have a clue about the quality of another lawyer’s legal work slamming them in a listserve because of the ads they run.
Here’s what to think about if they are the least bit squeamish about marketing and selling: I have two questions for you.
- Is there a potential new client out there for whom you would be the perfect lawyer?
- Someone with a problem that you would, in fact, be the best lawyer for and with whom you can make money? (If you can’t answer Yes to that question, then you really need to be looking for another line of work.)
- Assuming that the answer to the above is yes, why in the world would you leave it up to that person to choose the lawyer to solve his problem by random chance?
- It’s your moral obligation to get yourself in front of that client, just as it is your moral obligation to reject and send elsewhere that client you have no business representing.