If You Want More Clients Think Like a Client
Your thought process affects everything you do.
That is no revelation.
The way you think determines the way you act.
The same holds true for your clients.
The way your clients think affects the way they act. The way they think affects their decision-making process when it comes to hiring a lawyer.
Here’s the issue:
Your thought process is different than your client’s thought process.
You don’t have to think like him but you do have to understand how he thinks and you have to be able to enter his thought process in order to help him understand what he is facing, and why he needs your help.
Below are five articles that will give you some insight into how clients think and how that thinking affects their actions.
Get into their minds, understand the thinking and develop a message that speaks to them.
Strategic Thinking and Your Client
You need to think through the entire interaction with your client from beginning to end, before it even takes place. This is called strategic thinking. This article is a good primer to help you understand what strategic thinking for lawyers is all about.
Ten Factors That Influence a Client’s Decision to Hire a Lawyer
Here is a checklist you can use to get yourself ready to be hired. Think about that. Are you personally ready to be hired? Are you personally prepared? This article can help.
Your Gratitude Can Often Determine Your Success as a Lawyer
In this article we discuss how you can attract more clients by simply being grateful. It seems too easy to be true but focusing on the things that are going well in life can help us attract more positive things into our life. Read it and tell me if you agree.
Attract Small Business Clients Easily
There are a few ways to attract new small business clients to your law firm. In this article we highlight three of them. Challenge yourself to implement them today.
Who doesn’t want to attract better clients who pay higher fees? This article is your guide to attracting those clients and engaging them.
These articles are a blueprint for attracting more clients. Read each of them a few times and put some of the ideas into practice. If you do it today, you can begin attracting new clients to your law firm immediately.
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EmailEssential To 25 Not Known By 25,000
I am physically repulsed by people who brag without having really accomplished anything.
Seriously, when I hear someone tout themselves as a “guru” or “rock star” when they’ve been on the scene for fifteen minutes, it makes me want to vomit.
What The Best Lawyers Have that the Fakes Don’t
A better way to promote your services is to have your clients give testimonials on your behalf.
But the “guru” or the “rock star” won’t do that. Why? Because for someone to give you a powerful testimonial they must view you as essential.
Think about that statement. Essential.
As in: “don’t make a move without consulting you.”
How many clients feel that way about you?
The best lawyers I know, regardless of practice area, possess this quality.
Clients call them before they make any life-altering decision.
How do you obtain this status in the mind of your client?
There are several key qualities you must possess, one of which is direct communication. This means telling people when things are not going well. It requires you to have guts and to be honest.
That’s not for everybody.
In fact, it’s not for most people.
The big ego, low self-esteem, guru will never do this because it will offend many and attract a few.
But the few it attracts are people who have enough ego strength of their own to handle direct feedback and adjust accordingly.
An Example
I’m lucky. I get to speak at some awesome events. Recently, I shared the stage with the General Counsel of one of the largest retail organizations in the world. People came to the event to hear this gentleman of extraordinary accomplishment and stature.
His speech was vanilla. In other words, he could have been welcoming the members of the Kiwanis Club to Cleveland instead of standing in front of a Las Vegas ballroom full of high-powered corporate litigators.
He finished to polite applause and a few people visited with him afterward.
I spoke after him.
I was, what is known as the “walk out” speaker. This is because most people leave after the keynote address and they throw someone like me up there to entertain the folks who want to wait out the traffic.
I started my speech as people were, quite literally, walking out.
I began by telling the audience that everything they learned about the practice of law – the business of law – in law school and at their big law firm was complete and total bull shit.
I continued to tell them, now screaming at the top of my lungs, in spite of wearing a microphone, that each of them was responsible for the deterioration of the profession because of the unethical and immoral practices they learned and continued to propagate.
I mused, again as loud as possible, how long it would be before some of them were led away in handcuffs and others stripped of their licenses to practice law.
By the time I got to the third part, the doors at the back of the room had closed and everyone had stopped in their tracks.
Some people were beginning to get angry.
Others were confused.
But everyone was listening.
I proceeded to give the speech of my life about becoming a Trusted Advisor and I was mobbed at the end of my presentation. Some people told me I was crazy but the majority wanted to learn more about me and what I could do to help them.
The way I communicated on that stage is the way I communicate with my clients.
I don’t have 25,000 people politely applauding me when I talk to them. I have 25 clients who hang on my every word. And they pay a premium to do so.
Do your clients feel this way about you?
I recently wrote a series of articles about this topic. They will help you achieve this type of status. You can find the first article and links to the others by clicking on the link below.
Achieve the Pinnacle of Success as a Lawyer
This article provides details about the topic of becoming a trusted advisor. It is your step-by-step guide to creating a law practice which will allow you to command a fee premium and differentiate yourself from everyone else who does what you do.
Building Valuable Client Relationships: Part 3: Do You Have Guts?
It’s 4AM and a corporate executive cannot sleep. The issues facing his business are threatening his company and his livelihood. His career is on the line.
He reaches for the telephone and places a call to the one person he knows will help him evaluate the situation in a rational and sober manner.
Are you on the receiving end of that telephone call?
If the answer is “no” or “not often” you will probably never make the kind of income you deserve.
In that moment, the corporate executive (or affluent client, professional, public figure) calls someone he trusts. Someone he knows he can count on. Someone who, regardless of field of professional accomplishment or avocation, will give him sound guidance even when that means delivering unwelcome news.
Most lawyers never become trusted advisors. They are simply content being experts in a specific area of the law. An expert can command a significant fee premium. An expert takes some risk but ultimately, can only be evaluated or compared to another expert. An expert also gets to sleep through the night without ever taking the desperate telephone call from a powerful client.
But the expert is only used sparingly. He rarely gets to give guidance and counsel on matters outside of his purview. The expert never has a permanent “seat at the table” let alone at the right hand of the person in charge.
The Key
Making the transition from expert to trusted advisor is not complicated but it is risky. That’s why few lawyers do it.
The risk lies in emotionally engaging people in a place where emotions are seldom spoken of, and never on display. The boardroom.
Experts can get into the boardroom but they seldom have what it takes to stay there.
How Do You Make the Transition?
Let’s say you are brought in to advise a board of directors on a merger. This is a fairly straightforward process. Typically you deliver your commentary and findings to the chief counsel of the company. You are thanked. Paid well. Dismissed.
Why?
This happens because you did not take the next step.
If you went the extra mile and evaluated the merger and it’s implications on the business landscape 5, 10 and 15 years down the road, and you provided strategies for handling the legal pitfalls you know would arise at each interval, you would have a seat at the table.
Again, most lawyers won’t do this. It involves risk. In fact, chief counsel of the company won’t do this because of the risk it involves.
That’s why YOU will need to give the presentation to the board of directors.
Once You Are in the Room
When the time comes to report your findings you stress their implications on the leadership of the company. You highlight the pain each of those executives will feel if certain action is not taken. You support your assertions with facts and case studies (stories) of huge colossal errors made by not following the guidance you have set forth.
You challenge the most powerful people in this company to take action or face disaster.
Then you sit down and wait.
Either you will be a hero or you will be fired.
Now it is slightly more complicated than that. There is significant relationship development work that precedes this dramatic moment.
But the question I have for you is:
Do you have the guts to lay it all on the line, every day, just like this?
Because if you don’t; If you just want to analyze and report; You can be a successful lawyer.
But you can never be a trusted advisor.
This article is the third in a series on developing business as a Trusted Advisor. Links to the other parts are included below for your review.
Part 1: Developing Relationships as a Lawyer
This article highlights the relationships that form during your representation of a client. It is a roadmap to higher fees and a better life.
The qualities of a Trusted Advisor are outlined in sharp detail. You can evaluate your emotional make-up against them and determine if you have what it takes.
Lawyers: Do This Get More Clients
Each month over 3,000 people come to Rainmaker Lawyer dot com looking for the secret of how lawyers get clients.
While there is no one thing that will magically propel you to the pinnacle of success as a lawyer, there is one thing that separates successful lawyers from lawyers who struggle.
There is one thing that makes all the difference when it comes to attracting clients.
I wrote a book on this subject titled Client Attraction Secrets for Lawyers so I’m certain I’m qualified to answer this question.
Here’s your answer:
The secret is action.
Do something.
Now.
Take action.
Sitting on your ass is a recipe for going broke.
Every minute you wait to start a marketing initiative is a minute you will never get back. That’s time you could have been spending educating a prospective client. It’s time you should have been spending connecting with a referral source. You may have just missed out on an opportunity to create a strategic alliance with someone who could change your practice and your life.
You read these articles. I know because I have NSA-level tracking software (yeah – marketing professionals have been tracking your movement for years and the government finally caught up. But that’s another story for another time).
You read this stuff all the time but you don’t do anything.
That’s what’s missing…you taking the first step.
I can make it easy for you. I can break it down into small bite size portions and feed it to you with a spoon.
But if I do, you need to chew it up and digest it. Otherwise we are both wasting our time.
Does this sound harsh? Are you offended?
Good. Go cry a little and never read my stuff again because it is of no use to you. It’s wasted on you.
Get out now.
Oh…still here?
Fine. Listen to this podcast. The title is: Do This Get More Clients.
Take notes and then take action.
Look I can’t come over to your office, rip you out of the chair and kick you in the can. I wish I could but I’m too busy teaching classes at charm school.
Do me a favor…since you have read this far, listen to the podcast, and take some kind of action.
If you send me an email with the action you’ve taken, and I think it is good enough, I might send you a copy of my book.
Then again, maybe I’ll just sit on my seat and gaze at the computer. It seems to be working for you.
Here are three articles that are less harsh but just as effective at helping you get clients as a lawyer:
The Rainmaker is Surprised When Someone Takes Action
It is a pretty rare occasion when someone surprises me. In fact, it almost never happens. One day a subscriber of mine contacted me and told me a story that shocked me. Find out what he did.
You either have a bias for action or you have a bias for sitting around. Sure, some people have a bias for work that makes them feel good and look busy. But you need to have a bias for doing the things that result in business.
Doing something is better than doing nothing. Doing something well is better than just doing something. Doing something well consistently is better than just doing something well once in a while. Knowing what to do is the place to start.
Where Have All The Good Times Gone?
The 1982 album Diver Down by Van Halen remains one of my favorites. One of the timeless classics contained on that pressed vinyl gem is the song “Where Have All the Good Times Gone.” While David Lee Roth’s sublime vocal styling makes the record what it is, the lyrics tell the story of someone reminiscing about easier times.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, in every corner law office, you can find someone reminiscing about how things used to be easier/better/more ethical/less cut throat…etc.
As much as I’d like to make this article about law firm marketing changing and people lamenting the change rather than getting on board, I cannot.
Why?
Because the disease of looking back and longing for an easier time is not limited to law firm marketing.
It has infected every area of life and every kind of practice.
I work with affluent lawyers and lawyers struggling to make this month’s rent payment. They have different problems but they both suffer just as much.
I mentor my licensees (people who are authorized to use my systems) and help them develop businesses consulting with attorneys. Some are more successful than others. But they all have some kind of large load they are bearing on their back.
My friends, people who have graduated with Ivy League Degrees and have high profile six and seven figure jobs, also have some personal suffering they carry with them on a day-to-day basis.
Is there a solution? Is there a way to stop the depression that rolls into our lives like a fog and never seems to lift?
For you – I don’t know. I’m not inside your head. I can write as if I am, but that’s just because your motivation is obvious. But writing for you and thinking for you are two different things (unfortunate for both of us, I know).
See, here’s the thing: When we focus on the negative things in our life, they become all-consuming. The more we long for yesterday, the less we appreciate today.
So here is the best guidance I can offer on this subject:
Enjoy what you’ve got. Right here. Right now. Today.
If you’ve only got a small television with basic cable, enjoy the Seinfeld reruns.
If you’ve only got Ramen Noodles for dinner, add some chicken broth and savor the flavor.
And if you’ve got anything more, take a moment and think about how the life you are living is probably someone else’s dream.
The take away line from: “Where Have All The Good Times Gone” is:
“Will this depression last for long?”
Based upon my experience, the answer to that question is entirely up to you.
