The holidays are a great time for lawyers to forge a very special bond with prospects, referrals sources and current clients simply by saying THANK YOU and showing gratitude for their loyalty to your firm.

I’m sure some of you are thinking, “GREAT! I’ll just send a quick email to everyone on my list saying Happy Thanksgiving and call it a day”….but I’m going to challenge you to take things up a notch and really get personal this year.

Before you do anything, I want you to really experience the energy of gratitude.  Close your eyes for a moment and bring into your body the immense gratitude you feel for all of the clients who hired you and paid your fees this year.  Let yourself really feel how thankful you are for the food they put on your table, the car payments they made, and everything you were able to enjoy as a result of their choice to work with you over all the other lawyers they could have picked.

From that place of gratitude, come up with a way to uniquely express your thanks.

If you are feeling stuck, here are some of my best suggestions:

* Send a personal email to your clients, referral sources and even your leads and prospects.  From your heart, share how you have been able to make a difference in the world and feel great about what you do thanks to the clients who chose to work with you.  Let people into your life on an emotional level.  If you have an email broadcast service, you can do this automated.  Just make sure it has the capacity to personalize the message with the receiver’s name.  If you don’t have an email broadcast service or a database of client emails, put this on your list of must haves for 2010.

* Send out a voice broadcast.  If you’re not familiar with these, they’re similar to the robocalls you get during election time and I know that sounds weird, but clients really seem to love them! I know quite a few attorneys having great success with this during the holidays and their easy to set up.  I’d set it so it only calls during the day and leaves a message on the voice mail. Also, make sure to listen to it after it’s recorded and that you sound happy and upbeat.

* Drop a card in the mail. Thanksgiving is a great time to send holiday cards so they don’t get lost in the holiday card mess.  For extra impact, write a personal note that speaks specifically to the person you are writing to. At least do this for your best clients and referral sources.

The bottom line is you need to do SOMETHING to express your gratitude this holiday season.  Remember, in this new economy, the little extras go a long way, so take a moment and do something that’s good for your soul and your business.

And to you I say THANK YOU so much for being you and being willing to step outside of the old, outdated way of doing things and into a new vision of what it means to be a lawyer and run a business.

It is my absolute pleasure to serve you and I am so grateful to be able to do it,

One Saturday a few years ago, I had three initial meetings on my schedule and I was super excited to not only help three new clients, but to bring in at least $9,000 to meet my obligations.

I’m sure you can imagine how I felt then when all three appointments cancelled in the same day!

I knew I could not continue to run my business this way and if you’ve been experiencing cancellations in your business, you can’t continue to run your business that way either. Cancellations mean no consistency, no predictability and ultimately may mean no business.

There are a few ways to eliminate cancellations and they all have to do with how you are showing the value of your time:

1.    Convert your free initial consultations into a meeting that has a name, a value and a purpose. For example, Personal Family Lawyers don’t have free initial consultations, they have $750 Family Wealth Planning Sessions or $1,250 Whole Family Wealth Audits, each with a specific purpose.

2.    Take a credit card to reserve time with you. This is a strategy that virtually every lawyer I’ve talked to has been scared to death to try, but every single one that has tried it has never gone back. It’s critical that you do it right though – or you will lose clients. When done right, you’ll never do it any other way.

3.    Create a follow up campaign that is run whenever someone makes an appointment. Last week we talked about the pre-meeting package and that’s the first step. After that though, you want to send out a series of emails and make a series of phone calls to your prospect that are all designed to get them prepared for the meeting and, most importantly, show up for the meeting ready to say yes to your services!

If you’ve been experiencing cancellations, take these three steps and watch the cancellations disappear. You and your business deserve it. Your time is valuable and it’s time your prospects know that too.

And last, but far from least, be sure to mark off October 29th at 3:00pm EST on your calendar now when I’ll be covering all of these client engagement strategies in depth and live on a special client engagement tele-conference training you won’t want to miss.

Do your prospects view you as “stuffy”, “slimy”, “cold” or “self-absorbed”?

While you’re probably thinking the answer to that question is a big HECK NO, the subliminal messages you’re sending by way of your office space may say otherwise.

Essentially, if your office space is littered with stuffy law books, grouchy faces and uncomfortable furniture, I can guarantee you are losing potential clients.

Why?

Because people want to see your human side, they want to know they are more than just a number to your firm and they want to feel like family.

And in most cases, a prospect will say YES on the spot to an attorney who makes them feel that way, even if their price is a bit higher than the guy down the street, because it’s so rare.

Fortunately, there is a whole lot you can do to revamp your office space so clients feel right at home upon walking through the door.

To show you what I mean, here’s a video clip of my personal office space which includes some really essential tips in creating a tranquil and home-like setting.

The video is only 7 minutes long and I encourage you to watch it in its entirety if you’re looking for simple and easy steps to immediately bring more paying clients into your firm.

www.personalfamilylawyer.com/officevideo

PS – your office doesn’t have to look just like my office to make people feel at home, just like your house doesn’t look like my house. But, give some thought to how you can take the elements I talk about in the video and adapt them to your personality and style. I’d love to hear what you come up with. Drop me an email back and let me know.

Imagine standing before a judge…you’ve just stated your case and you’re feeling super confident that a decision will be made on your behalf.

Then she asks for that one key piece of information and you begin to flounder.  You can’t find your documents, you’re nervous, and you’re starting to say things that don’t quite make sense.

How do you “look” in that situation?

Unprepared?  Maybe even untrustworthy? Totally not professional.

Most of us would never dream of showing up unprepared before a judge, but we think NOTHING of appearing completely disheveled, unprepared and even untrustworthy to potential clients.

And that could be why are not engaging most of the prospects who come in to meet with you.   

So what does being unprepared at a client meeting look like?  Consider the following real life examples:

* You start a client meeting without everything you would need to engage the client and collect a check should your prospect say “yes” to your services.  Instead, when someone does say yes, you have to leave the meeting room several times, holler for your secretary, wait for the forms to be printed, etc…  You get the picture.  Hopefully, it’s not the picture of what happens in your office because when it does, it shows you are simply not organized and prepared.

* You quote a fee that you pulled out of the air without presenting a formal, pre-thought out fee schedule.  When the prospect looks surprised at your price, you begin negotiating, agreeing to lower your fee.  Now, your prospect sees you as untrustworthy.

* Your secretary interrupts the meeting so you can take an “important phone call” and you actually do it-leaving the client to feel as they’re being “squeezed in” and the meeting wasn’t well planned by your office staff.

Now, these are extreme examples and perhaps you’ve never acted so unprofessionally in your office.  But, I’ll admit, I can’t say the same.  When I first started out, I didn’t know how to go into an initial client meeting prepared to quote a fee or engage a client.  I never left a client meeting to take another phone call, but I’ve watched shocked as another lawyer did.

So how can you ensure that your prospects see you as the trustworthy, prepared, organized professional that you are?

Start here:

* Don’t just offer food and drinks to your prospects when they come in-have a spread waiting for them, as though they are welcome guests.

* Have every document you could possibly need when they say yes to your services, pre-printed in a folder, including your engagement letter, privacy notice and method of payment form, so you never have to leave the office or make the prospect wait once they’ve decided to move ahead.

* Prepare a laminated fee schedule that you bring to each meeting so your prospects don’t feel like you’re just making up numbers that are open to negotiation if they don’t like the price.

* Never take another phone call or allow any other interruption during a client meeting.  

Don’t just take my word for it-TRY IT this week!  Be prepared, and I mean really prepared, and keep tracking your results.  You’ll be astonished at how small shifts can have a big impact.  And, if you’ve already seen it, let us know.

Don’t forget to mark your calendar for October 29th when I’ll be hosting a special training call and going in depth on my system for engaging nearly every prospect who calls your office.  It works for hundreds of lawyers and it will work for you too.

The number one complaint I receive about attorneys is clients often feel like “just a number” or “not a priority” after they’ve written their check to engage their lawyer. Often, they’ll call their lawyer, have to leave a voice mail and not receive a return phone call back for days, if at all.

I’ve heard quite frequently that clients feel as if they’ve fallen into a black hole.

What that means for you is that you can make a huge impact on your clients and turn them into raving fans by counteracting this experience.

What happens in your practice right now after your client writes you a check?  When do they hear from you again?  When do they get reminded that the investment they just made was a good one? If this follow up is happening, is it happening the same way, at the same time, for each client? Is it being tracked so you’re sure no one is falling off the radar?   

If you couldn’t answer these questions affirmatively, you are sabotaging the hard work you put into the client engagement process.

Fortunately, automating your follow-up and creating a WOW experience after the client engagement process is easier than you think.

To get started, you’ll need to set up a practice management system (there are many to choose from), or even an excel spreadsheet that lays out what needs to happen (and more importantly WHEN it needs to happen) after a prospect becomes a paying client of your firm.

Next week, I’ll outline a simple process for you to follow that will make a HUGE difference in how your clients talk about you to their friends, family, clients and colleagues, which will result in far more referrals for you. 

Stay tuned and until then think about what you’d want to receive from your lawyer if you’d just made a big investment in his or her services.

Before I share with you my 3 simple steps to kickstart your creativity without making the trek to  Burning Man, let me quickly make the case for why you must infuse your business with your creative juices.

In the new “experience” economy, your prospects are not simply looking for a lawyer, they are looking for an experience.

They want to feel special. They want to feel as if they’ve gotten something unique and different. And you want to provide that to them because it’s what justifies your higher fees and makes you unshoppable.

Who doesn’t want that? (If you don’t want clients lined up eager to pay you higher fees than the rest of the lawyers in your community, don’t worry about creativity – you can continue to provide the same old, same old, no problem.)

Do these three things in the next week and see what happens:

1. Take a walk.

If you are more of an indoor person, take a walk in nature. Focus your attention during your walk  on how everything works together and supports everything else effortlessly.

If you love the outdoors and spend a lot of time outisde already, take a walk inside at your local mall and consider how you would change things around to make the shopping experience more enjoyable.

Journal your observations.

2. Ask some questions.

Pick three people in your community who provide a service and ask them what their biggest business challenge is and then spend 30 minutes or so brainstorming ways they can solve their challenge.

These can be people you don’t speak with regularly or even know very well. Let them know you are working on a project to increase your creativity and are offering your time without asking for anything in return. A natural side benefit of this step could be making a great connection with another professional in your community.

Get outside your comfort zone here and connect with at least one business owner completely outside of your realm of business, such as a plumber or a carpet cleaner.

3. Move your body.

As lawyers, we spend a lot more time in our heads than other people. This can drain creativity more than anything else.

Go dancing, do yoga, play softball or football or hockey. Just get out there and do something that gets the blood flowing. You’ll be amazed at how a little body moving stimulates your creative juices.

You, your clients and your business deserve it!

If you’re like most lawyers, your marketing budget runs on average of $2,000- 4,000 a month.  This might include everything from direct mail to email marketing, Google adwords campaigns, ads in local publications or seminars and networking lunches.

When the phone starts ringing as a result of your marketing efforts, you are beyond happy and consider your marketing investment to be money well spent.

But is it really?

Not until you master the art of turning those phone calls into money in your pocket.  Unfortunately, many of you are losing a whole lot of coin because you are investing in marketing without making the same investment in conversion.

Fortunately, converting leads into clients won’t cost you much more money than you are already spending to attract those leads, but it does require an upfront investment of your time and energy.  Best yet, once you get it down, your lead to client conversion process can run without you.

The place to start is to get a crystal clear understanding of where you are right now.  Here’s what you’ll want to do:

1. Over the next month, make a commitment to collect the data you need to track your numbers.
2.  Have whoever answers your phones log every phone call.

3.  Require that all calls inquiring into becoming a client be recorded on a prospect intake form, which captures how the person heard of you, all of their contact information, specifics about their situation and whether they made an appointment.

4.  Use a spreadsheet to then track how many actually made it in for their appointment and finally how many of those callers became paying clients after meeting with you or the other attorneys of your firm.

Each week, sit down with your team and review your lead to prospect conversion number (this is the number of phone calls you received that turned into appointments) and your prospect to client conversion number (this is the number of appointments made that turned into clients).

If these numbers are not both at least 75%, don’t spend any more marketing dollars until you  fix your client engagement problem because otherwise you are pouring money down the drain.

I can’t stress enough that there is NO POINT in spending money on marketing if you are not doing as well as you can to convert your prospects into paying clients once they pick up the phone to call your office.

In the next few weeks, I’ll cover all of this in more detail.  Until then, here’s a few diagnostic clues to find the “leak” where your prospects may be getting away during the client engagement process:

- Your phone is not being answered in the correct way

- There is no system to follow up with prospects who want more information

- There is no system to follow up with prospects in the time period between when they make an appointment and come in to your office for their appointment

- You are not following a script during your client engagement meeting

We’ll cover each of these and more in depth in the coming weeks, but until then start by collecting hard numbers on what’s actually happening in your office so you’ll be ready for the fixes as they are presented and understand which fix you need to focus on.

You may be quite surprised by what you discover once you begin collecting your numbers.

In continuing our series on client engagement in this week’s Law Business Revolution Briefing Memorandum, we are covering how your intake process (or lack thereof) affects the number of prospects—and eventually paying clients—who make it into your office each month.

Hopefully by now you have a rough list of stats compiled that tells you how effective your overall client engagement process really is (and if you missed last week’s article, you can find out how to gather those stats here). But for the purpose of this lesson on client intake, I want you to grab that spreadsheet and focus on the number of prospects that called your office last week vs. the number of prospects that set up an appointment with your firm.

If you’re not showing at least a 50 % conversion rate and preferably 75%, you need to take a closer look at how your intake is being handled.

There are 4 essential do’s and donts that dictate this process and if you violate any one of these principles, you will see a direct downward impact on the number of appointments you set each month.

To ensure you are getting the absolute best results from your intake process, take some time this week to implement these principles in your own firm:

1. DON’T be your own intake specialist! You must have someone besides yourself answering the calls from prospective clients. Most people are intimidated speaking directly to an attorney and quite frankly, there are much better uses for your time. So whether you hire someone in-house or contract with a virtual intake specialist, commit to stop doing intake from now on.

2. DO provide a detailed script to your intake specialist-  Your intake specialist should be using a script for every phone call which explains your services, conveys the value of your initial meeting and encourages prospects to say “yes” to coming in for an appointment. You never want your intake specialist to come up with this information on the fly, and it’s up to you to write a script that will achieve those goals.

3. DON’T discuss numbers on the intake call! When done right, your intake specialist should NEVER have to discuss your fees on the intake call. In fact, a good intake specialist using a great script won’t even need to give a price range! But, at all costs you want to ensure that the prospect doesn’t feel as if you are avoiding the “how much will it cost” question or they’ll flee faster than you can say boo. The only numbers that your intake specialist should have to focus on are what it will cost your prospect to NOT meet with you and the value of your initial meeting that they’ll be getting free.

4. DO follow up with prospects that don’t set an appointment after the initial phone call- Whether you send a warm letter, email or welcome packet via direct mail, this constant communication helps people on the fence eventually pick up the phone and call. Studies show that it takes up to 5 “touches” or contact with a firm for a prospect to take action—so don’t give up if the prospect doesn’t say “yes” right away.-

And don’t forget to track your numbers this week as you start making some of the changes I mentioned above! I want you to see with your own eyes the impact that automation and client engagement systems have on your bottom line and how simple direction in this area can change the effectiveness of your firm forever.

Someone calls your office and schedules an appointment to meet with you, then what?

If you’re like most lawyers, nothing happens, that’s what.  Your secretary simply blocks the time on your calendar and you sit back and wait.  If that’s the case, you are missing a primo opportunity to pre-sell your prospects before they even ever sit down with you, making it far more likely they’ll write you a check when they do make it into your office.

What you want to do instead of nothing is send out a killer pre-meeting package (PMP) that will wow your prospects before they even step foot in your door.

Now, one thing to note – I personally only send out the PMP to people who have made an appointment to come into the office and meet with me.  There are lawyers who send their PMP out and then set the appointment.  This strategy did not work for me when I tried it.  I found myself sending out a lot of PMPs and not getting the appointments made.

The most difficult part of sending out a well-structured PMP is putting your very first one together.  So to make sure you’re doing things right, you’ll want your package to include the following:

1. A professional Linen Folder- Don’t settle for something cheap and flimsy to package your materials.  Understand that a good, quality folder shows the prospect that you really care about them and their relationship with your firm.  You can even go one step further and order a custom linen folder with your logo on the front for best results.

2. Credibility Boosters- You’ll want to stuff your folder with plenty of information designed to boost your credibility and convince your prospect that you are the absolute best person to work with them before they ever set foot in your firm.  Credibility may include articles that have been written about you, interviews on CD, press releases, a copy of your book or other “press materials” and if your State bar rules allow it, a sheet of testimonials by former happy clients. It’s likely you don’t have these things already, but everything I’ve listed can be easily created within three months from now, so get started.

3. Pre-Meeting Homework – Your package should include some form of interactive paperwork that your prospect must complete and return before their meeting.  Not only will this help you come to the meeting prepared to serve your prospects with the information they need to say yes to you, but by taking action before the meeting, your prospects are more likely to say yes when they make it in.

4. Firm Story- Your folder must include at least one document that conveys your firm story and why you are different from everyone else in town.  This is really the clincher of the PMP and something you should spend time getting right (and if you’re totally lost on how to develop a firm story, stay tuned because we’ll be covering this in the weeks to come).

5. Fee Information – This can be controversial, but you’ll absolutely want to provide some information about your fees and how they are determined.  No one likes surprises and most people don’t trust lawyers to begin with.  The more you can communicate directly and not hide the ball, the more prospects will trust you and make it in to their meeting.

6. Humanized bios of you and your staff- While it’s great to convey how just how smart you are and how many awards you’ve earned as a lawyer, you also want your bio to be personal so the prospect feels like they “know” you and your team on a much deeper level.  People do business with people they know, like and trust.  You have to convey who you are, not simply where you went to law school and the awards you won, for this to happen.

Finally, to finish things off, you’ll want to mail your PMP in a USPS priority mailer so it looks and feels “important” and doesn’t get tossed aside as junk mail. I can’t think of anyone that ignores a priority mailer sent to their house, so it’s in your best interest to spring for this final touch.

No matter what type of law you practice, make a commitment to design a PMP for your firm within the next 30 days.  Then, send this package out to every prospect who requests an appointment with you and continue to record your results. If done right, you should see a nice increase in your bottom line over the weeks and months to come!

The doom and gloom news about the economy has you convinced that the reason you are struggling is because of the downturn.  And perhaps as a result, you’ve resigned yourself to less income, less profit, and less clients.  Don’t do it.  It’s not the economy.

Well, it may sort of be the economy (there ARE less clients who need your services, that’s true).   There are plenty of people who need you, but today in order to attract them and get them to want to do business with you, you need to provide more.

You don’t need to provide more documents, or more time, or more knowledge.  You need to provide more experience.

The people who can afford your services and will be happy to pay your fees are bombarded with marketing messages from lawyers who all look the same.

If you can stand out in the marketplace, you’ve accomplished half the battle.

And when they contact you and you give them a wow experience right away, you’ve accomplished the other half.

The wow experience begins with how your phone is answered.

Today, I want you to call your office (or have a friend do it while you are listening in) and talk to the person answering your phone.

Ask the questions a prospect would ask before making an appointment.

You are likely to be SHOCKED at what you hear.

If you get a sinking feeling in your stomach just reading this or hear that little voice in your head telling you “nah, you don’t need to do that” it’s a good sign that you are avoiding a serious problem because you don’t want to deal with it.

Or, you don’t have anyone answering your phone other than you.

So, here’s what you should do right away.

1.Get someone to answer your phone.  This can be a virtual someone and does not have to be an employee.

2.  Train your new greeter to answer every phone call with a smile and the following script:

“Welcome to the law firm of {insert name}, this is {insert name}, how can I assist you?”

Now, you are creating a wow experience from the very first time a prospect comes into contact with you.

Next week, I’ll be back with another simple way you can create a wow experience for your prospects and clients that will shift the global down economy into your own personal boon economy by making you so different from everyone else that you become unshoppable!