Event: Texas Bar CLE, The Importance of Planning Ahead
The Importance of Planning Ahead
TexasBarCLE – Advanced Real Estate Seminar
Law Practice Management Program, State Bar of Texas
Topic Facilitator: Creating a Marketing Strategy to Assure Maximum
Client Service
San Antonio, TX
June 30, 2006, 7:00 am -8:15 am
Post Date: June 30, 2006
What Does Marketing Have to Do with Practicing Law?
The answer: Everything, if you are a small firm practitioner. How can you practice law without clients? Without marketing, how do you get clients? Most law schools don’t even mention the concept of marketing, much less teach aspiring lawyers how to sell their services. Selling and marketing, in fact, are dirty words among lawyers, being considered cousins of the unethical practice of soliciting.
The reality is, however, that you are probably engaging in marketing every week. The question is, how effective are you at it? Every time you respond to the question, “What do you do?” you are marketing. Every time you meet or greet someone who already knows what you do for a living, you are marketing. What are you advertising about yourself when you are not even talking about your business? Are you communicating by your demeanor and conversation that you are competent and knowledgeable, yet compassionate and trustworthy enough for someone to safely reveal a significant and troubling problem to you? Or do others feel inferior, judged and unimportant in your presence? Which professional would you choose to handle your important concerns?
Instead of marketing unconsciously, get on the road to becoming an effective marketer by following these three tips:
1. Begin by identifying your niche.
Many lawyers sabotage their own marketing by having a focus for their marketing efforts that is too broad and vague. Not only will you strain your brain if you are trying to be all things to all people, but that also makes it much more difficult to design an effective marketing program. When you use a buckshot approach instead of a laser approach focused on your strengths, your listeners are less likely to recognize themselves or a friend as someone who needs your services. They often need to hear you describe just their situation to recognize the benefit of your service in their lives. Federal Express offers several categories of delivery service, but they market to “when it absolutely, positively has to be there.”
Clients have more confidence in specialists. Neurosurgeons make more money than general practitioners. (Never say you are a general practitioner. If you won’t narrow your focus, at least say that you have a “full service firm.”) Don’t be afraid of losing the business outside your niche. You are still free to accept business that doesn’t fall into your niche category if you have the requisite expertise. And, if you develop a reputation for handling your niche market, you’ll be overflowing with business. Even your competitors in the broader market will refer to you.
Here are a few examples of well-defined niches other lawyers have staked out:
Women in divorce who want to heal
Minority business owners
Software developers in the movie and games industry
Plaintiffs in SUV roll-over cases
To get started identifying a niche for yourself, answer these questions:
What makes you unique? How do you stand out?
What do you do better than others?
What special expertise or experience do you have?
What is memorable about you?
2. Identify your ideal clients.
The next step goes hand in hand with identifying your niche. Develop the client base you want by making conscious decisions about who you want your marketing to attract. You have to know where your target is to effectively aim at it. As Yogi Berra said, “You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
Here are some useful questions to ask yourself, but don’t stop there. Create a description of your ideal clients that is so vivid that you will recognize them when you meet them.
What are the traits of the most ideal clients among your current clients?
What traits would your really ideal clients have?
What problems do they have?
Are they computer and technology literate? How do they use the Internet and email?
What kind of budgets do they have?
Do they belong to any particular ethnic, gender, age, geographic or other category?
Who else do they do business with? What other services or products do they buy?
Where do they gather or network?
Are they vocal about your services to others?
In identifying your target clients, it pays to look at growing markets and become knowledgeable about them. Today women start new businesses at twice the rate of men. Women employ more people than all the Fortune 500 companies combined. In general, women value relationships, even with their product manufacturers and service providers. Women would prefer to buy detergent from a company that sponsors after-school programs, for example. There is a savvy reason why Yoplait yogurt advertises that they will make a breast cancer donation for every Yoplait carton top sent in to them.
Other growing markets are seniors and ethnic minorities. The baby boomers are aging. The Hispanic population in Texas is mushrooming. Hispanics constitute about 35% of Houstonians now. By 2010 they are predicted to make up 54% of the Houston population. There are about 10 million Asian Americans, and their median household income is above the national average.
The SOHO (Small Office Home Office) boom has spawned whole new industries to serve that market. How are you positioned to appeal to SOHO workers?
3. Develop an “elevator speech”
Now that you are clear about what you do uniquely, and who you want to do it for, craft a clear and concise statement about it that you could tell someone in the brief time between floor stops in an elevator. This defining statement is your 30-second commercial that you get to broadcast every time someone asks you what you do.
Make it conversational in tone. It has to be something you will really say, without stumbling over yourself. Make it memorable. You want your listener to repeat it when they encounter someone who could use your unique brand of service. That is exactly what you are doing: creating a brand. Steve Scholl, a Houston lawyer, says, “I’m a trial lawyer who practices peacemaking.” Ted Hirtz, another Houston lawyer, uses humor and imagery to make his elevator speech memorable. He says, “I’m a proctologist in the courtroom.” Both of those statements catch the listener’s attention and tend to generate follow-up questions. They give the lawyer an opportunity to engage his listener in a conversation about the lawyer’s practice or the client’s business.
There are different schools of thought about what your defining statement should include. Experiment with each of the approaches described below, and use what works for you. If people hear your defining statement and ask for your business card, you have a winner!
Most effective defining statements are either dream-focused or pain-focused. Really good ones incorporate both. The statement should reference who your target clients are. Dream-focused statements speak to the situation or outcome that the client would like to have. For example, “I’m an Executive Coach for lawyers. I help them make more money while shortening their work day.” Pain-focused statements highlight the problems your target client needs your services to solve. For example, “I work with lawyers who feel stressed or stuck,” or “I work with lawyers who can’t get their staff to do it right the first time.” A statement that does both would be “I help lawyers turn chaos and lost time into profits and ease.”
Begin creating your dream-focused statement by filling in the blanks in this sentence: “I work with _________ who want _________ and _________.” (”I’m a collaborative family lawyer. I work with divorcing women who want a reasonable settlement and a quicker resolution.” Or: “I work with divorcing women who want a prompt and reasonable resolution so they can get on with the healing process.) For your pain-focused statement, try “I work with ______ who [have ______ problems].” (”I work with divorcing women who are afraid the stress of bitter parental disputes will harm their children.”)
Continue experimenting and tinkering with your defining statement over time. You want it to spark follow-up questions that give you a chance to showcase the results you have achieved for other clients. You also want it to stick in the memory of your listener like a radio jingle. You will know it really works when strangers call you and repeat your defining statement as they ask for your services.
With your niche, your target clients and your defining statement determined, you can begin your marketing campaign the next time you walk out your door, without spending a penny! To optimize their marketing efforts, however, professional service providers need to create visibility and credibility with their target audiences. We’ll explore how to do that in the next issue of Raising the Bar.
This article was originally published in the “Raising the Bar” column of the Texas Law Reporter in March 2003.
Post Date: June 12, 2006
The Biggest Bang for Your Management Buck
She tried to maintain her composure, but one large tear betrayed her as it slipped over the brim and slid down her cheek. “Why don’t they ever tell me that?” she asked plaintively. She had just received a positive annual review with quotes read by the firm administrator of the complimentary assessments by the attorneys she worked for. Like that legal secretary, most of us hunger for feedback, yet we are terrified of receiving it.
We have heard a lot over the years about what we do wrong from parents, teachers, bosses, spouses and even strangers. How often do we hear what we do right?
Studies show that the most powerful employee motivator is timely personal acknowledgment for a job well done. Employees will even stay at a lower paying job if they feel their contributions are valued. What an excellent management tool!
Since acknowledgment is so effective and carries no financial cost, why do lawyers use it so rarely? One significant reason maybe that, like most of the rest of the world, we just don’t know how to do it. Effective acknowledgment hasn’t been modeled for us enough. Another reason may be that an effective acknowledgment must be sincere, and sincerity tugs at our heartstrings, making us feel vulnerable and perhaps out of control. A third possible factor is that as lawyers we are conditioned to focus on what could go wrong, in order to protect against the risk, or on what did go wrong, in order to assign blame. What went right seems almost irrelevant from that perspective.
Regardless of the reason for our past actions, we don’t have to keep wasting valuable opportunities to increase productivity and get quality work from our lawyers and other team members. How do we make an appropriate acknowledgment? One lawyer had the tendency to tell his staff they were “doing a great job” one day, and complain irritably about something the next day. The staff felt confused about what they had done well before, and lost trust in the integrity of his words. Morale sagged, and employees often wasted time fretting amongst themselves about what he wanted.
To avoid such pitfalls, keep in mind the following four points in crafting an effective acknowledgment:
- Be timely. To enhance performance, the acknowledgmentshould come soon after the behavior we want to reinforce. If someone does an exceptional job in April, but we wait until the year-end review to acknowledge the effort, two unfortunate results can occur. One, by December we mayhave forgotten the April efforts, or the magnitude of them. Two, between April and December the employee may have become disheartened and perhaps even sour. The employeemay get the impression that his extraordinary efforts werenot noticed or appreciated, so why bother?
- Be specific. Accolades such as “great job” without further information do not provide any guidance as to whatbehavior we would like to see more of from the employee.Was it great because the turnaround was quick? Becausethere were no typos? Because it solved a perplexing andongoing problem? Because the efforts demonstratedinitiative and original thinking? Let them know specifically what you liked and why.
- Be sincere. Effusive praise (unless it is truly and extraordinarily warranted) may do more harm than good. Ifour praise outshines the employee’s effort, she will tend todistrust either our judgment or our honesty. Employees canalso discern mere lip service from the real thing, especially over time. We can give credibility to our acknowledgmentby supplying the specifics and keeping the tone genuine.
- Acknowledge ordinary success. Acknowledgments don’t need to involve trumpets heralding extraordinary events. Acknowledge any behavior that you would like to maintain or see more of. “Alice, I appreciate that you almost always arrive at work on time. It makes me feel like I can count on you.” “Jeff, you got all these photocopies back to me in the right order. I appreciate your conscientiousness.” “Karen, that was a perceptive idea you suggested at the meeting this morning. The client wants to follow up on it.”
If acknowledgments feel a little uncomfortable or foreign to you, you just need more practice. To keep the daily urgencies of practicing law from distracting you from this important but often overlooked activity, set up some goals or structures to hold the focus on it. Start small and “increase the reps” as you build your acknowledgment muscles. Initially you might aim to deliver an acknowledgment to at least one person per day. Here are a few structures that might help you remember:
- put your acknowledgment goal on your task list;
- leave yourself a voicemail;
- put a stone or trinket in your pocket as a reminder; or
- get an accountability partner.
If you get off a long conference call at the end of the day and discover everyone else has left the office, leave someone a note of acknowledgment. If you forget to give an acknowledgment at the office, give one to your spouse or kids. They won’t mind a bit!
Post Date: June 12, 2006