Tag Archives: sales

Mar 13

Our Top 10 Tips for Off-Line Marketing

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This article first appeared in the March 2013 issue of Modern Law Magazine (Issue 5 with an ABS Supplement) where there is plenty more excellent content well worth reading.

Question: Marketing has moved on from the days of all-day lunches with wine but what is it your clients feel is being lost in the world of direct / online marketing and what do you recommend companies ensure in their bid to get more work?

Answer: If you check the tracking analytics for your online newsletter, you will find that fewer than 35% of the people you sent it to have actually opened it.  Even less will have “clicked through” to read any of the articles.  This is great information and tells you how best to work with them, but what about the other 65%?

Online communications and social media are essential, but not enough.  Many simple things that worked in 2007 – before lawyers retrenched due to the recession – are still good, although what works best for you will depend on your clients, geography and the characteristics of your people. 

There is a long list of potentially good marketing activities, but these are my Top 10:

  1. Know and play to strengths, but dig deep to find them.
  2. Aim to create opportunities to meet face-to-face early on with people aged over 40 to establish a strong, trusting relationship.  Subsequent exchanges online will make more impact (at any age) if you’ve agreed that’s how to keep in touch.  
  3. Always check at that stage what is the best way to stay in touch and make sure that’s recorded and shared with your colleagues. 
  4. When you talk to clients, business partners / introducers and prospects, explore their world – their business and their family – not just today’s legal problem.  
  5. Discover their passion, share that with colleagues and make sure the client knows you know about it.  Lunch, breakfast, coffee, dinner with other business advisors and their clients all work – but so does a walk in the country.  
  6. Make it relaxed and try to talk their language.
  7. Adopt JFDI – too often, lawyers spend a lot of time considering all the options and don’t quite get around to doing it.  So if there is an idea to be explored or actioned “Just Do It!” 
  8. Be willing to pick up the phone to renew contact, to arrange to meet or to follow up on meeting at an event or even online through Linkedin.
  9. Invest in some hard copy newsletters and bulletins to get them on desks as well as e-communications, but actively manage the database to focus on the right people to keep production and distribution costs down.  
  10. Ask clients how they want you to stay in touch when you make first contact.  New client inception forms should always include the question.  Then do what they ask; not what is easiest or cheapest.

Allan Carton

Jun 26

Good to know the big boys have to work hard at it too

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Clifford Chance want to do more to get closer to clients, creating opportunities to cross-refer business – just like everyone else and they clearly don’t find it easy either.  High on their agenda … with strategic cost reduction too.

There are a lot of blindingly obvious initiaitives that lawyers don’t do in practice and some of the biggest culprits are the more mature partners and the largest firms who can ignore and resist the need to change. So no harm in going back to basics and re-stating the obvious now and then. In fact, there should be a lot more of it.

Courtesy of the Lawyer

Did you know that by promoting a referral culture among your partners, a prized banking client can become an equally valuable corporate client?

Well, that was the message at Clifford Chance’s most recent partner conference in Barcelona. Global managing partner David Childs waxed lyrical about the need to stop partners working in silos and to start leveraging the firm’s banking clients to provide work to other areas (see The Lawyer story), while senior partner Malcolm Sweeting spoke about making the most of the firm’s offices across the globe.

This isn’t the first time this year that Clifford Chance has emphasised utilising resources to maximum effect. The firm appears to be on a bit of a cost-saving drive of late.  In May, The Lawyer reported that the firm was shifting its London corporate team to the same floor of its Canary Wharf building and trialling open-plan for its lawyers.

Allan Carton

Jul 19

Make more out of making wills – no rocket science here

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PART 1 – Getting the basics right.  In part 2 we look at how to step up your game by offering services focused more on the positive solutions that your clients and prospects are actively looking for.

Promoting wills gives you a golden opportunity to expand your client base and increase client loyalty, so that the business you do today will generate income in the future.  Whatever you do, don’t just make extra wills and leave them in your vaults to be retrieved in twenty years time.  Take positive steps to ensure that your investment in promotion works for your firm throughout the years ahead.   Taking the best interests of your client into account, your aim should be to convert:

  • Every enquiry into a will – because they need it.
  • Every will in to a joint executorship – because you can make a positive difference when it comes to handling the estate. If you feel not when the time comes, you can always decide to renounce and let them get on with it.
  • Every executor, trustee and beneficiary into a client – because friends, family and colleagues of clients are your best prospects and they should feel comfortable with your practice if their friend is well satisfied with what you have done for them.
  • Every client of the probate department into a client of the whole firm, because it makes life easier for your client and you can do a better job for them in most areas … can’t you?

This takes preparation, planning and commitment from everyone in your practice.  So how well have you prepared for a wills promotion?  Everybody does the easy bits: posters in the window, leaflets in reception and an advert in the local rag.  That on its own is not enough.  And remember, making wills won’t make anyone rich.  It’s the administration and other work that can flow from personal contact that makes it all worthwhile.  So why not start now and gear your firm up to harness the full potential of the new enquiries that a wills promotion will generate for you?

Ten Point Action Plan

Here are ten practical tips for preparing a campaign – whether it’s a national Make A Will week, or your own independent promotion.

Tip 1. – Make sure all your staff know that what matters most is making the clients comfortable, taking time to build a rapport with them, as well as doing the legal job well.

Tip 2. – If you don’t have a marketing/prospecting database, get one organised before the promotion. You’ll have to set aside chargeable time to sort out a good system, but it’s an investment worth making.  If you don’t have searchable records of executors, trustees and beneficiaries, as well as testators, set these up now, before your campaign begins.  Otherwise, you will lose out on one of the best sources of new clients available to high street practices.

Tip 3. -  When people ring to find out how much it costs to make a will, take time to talk to them about what they need and what you can do for them before you give them a price.

Tip 4. -  Always give your clients some added value – something that will surprise them – not just “mirror wills” at a discount.  Offer them something different, perhaps a free review in five years’ time.  But if you do this then make sure they know how how they will benefit from your initiative.  Don’t just throw in a freebie without considering the particular needs of the client and the real consequences of your firm – you could offer a free will for other members of their family or perhaps a free review of their financial affairs to be dealt with by a trusted and independent financial adviser, if not in-house.

Tip 5. -  When your clients arrive at the office, offer them a cup of tea or coffee so they experience some quality personal contact and give them some digestible reading material as they wait for the meeting with you.

Tip 6. – Ask open questions like “How will your son deal with the tax side of things?” and listen to what your client says.  Show your interest by relating what your clients have said to past experiences of good and bad things that have happened.

Tip 7. – Sell your service as a joint executor.  Don’t just tell your clients what you will do – tell them how it will make things much easier for the people they leave behind. Find out what matters to your clients, by exploring their ideas and fears on what will happen after their death and respond with practical advice.

Tip 8. -  Get your clients’ agreement for you to keep in touch and keep them informed.  Add them to you mailing list and do actually keep in touch.  To do this, you need to get your client and contact database in order.  This should be an absolute priority for every law firm right now.

Tip 9. – Always be clear about the cost or likely cost of your service. 

Tip 10. -  Invest some time in business development with your clients’ consent. Invite every executor and trustee into your office when the will has been made to discuss their role and responsibilities, and your role in helping them.  Give executors and trustees information to take away and get their agreement for you to keep in touch.  Add them to your mailing list and do keep in touch.  Again, you need that database.

Solicitors need to recognise that getting paid for the immediate job in hand is not always the absolute priority.  Whilst it would make no sense at all to offer free or discounted will in isolation, firms choosing to implement a comprehensive marketing strategy will develop new private client business through new contacts generated by this approach and businesses will thrive after your wills promotion is over.

Allan Carton

Nov 29

Legal Aid reforms would impact on conveyancers

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The Ministry of Justice has issued a consultation paper called “Proposals for Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales”.  The consultation proposes two potential changes to use money held on client account to fund Legal Aid.  This is a serious threat because event though conveyancers are not getting the interest that they did it is still helping many stay afloat and the proposals seem unfair in principle.

Read more at Today’s Conveyancer on how this might impact on you here.

The consulation paper can be found at http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/legal-aid-reform-151110.htm and remains open until the 14th February 2011.

Nov 26

Beware smiling assassins!

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Customer advocates are the holy grail of customer management.  These much sought after and highly valuable customers attract new business through word of mouth recommendations without the need for a reward, defend reputations publicly and act as a positive force within a customer base. However, as with all stories of good and evil, there are also dark forces at work. Highly toxic customers, who endanger your business and damage your reputation through negative word of mouth recommendations, I call these customers smiling assassins!

But how do we identify smiling assassins and more importantly, what can we do about them?  To help you spot assassins, consider an experience where you didn’t receive the level of service you expected or paid for, e.g. at a restaurant or a hotel. Did you complain? Or did you simply smile and say “yes fine” when asked “was everything ok?“, rather than “no it was bloody awful and I’m not coming back because of …!“ If so, you are a smiling assassin, especially if you create negative word of mouth.

The majority of consumers are smiling assassins. They don’t set out to be, often they want to voice an opinion or provide feedback but there is no method for doing this. Others don’t want to engage in a dialogue that could lead to embarrassment or confrontation so they simply smile, say “yes fine” and walk away, forever.  Businesses also make it difficult for customers and employees to facilitate feedback.  They see complaints as a nuisance or a distraction; if we ignore them they’ll go away one contact centre manager told me recently. This “burying of heads in the sand” approach and the ignorance of real customer insight is extremely dangerous and results in many missed opportunity to improve services for all customers.

The answer to finding and converting assassins is to take the emotion out of the feedback process and to make it simple. Encouraging customers to be critical is free consultancy, but don’t ask them to complete lengthy questionnaires or send them to a website.  Be sincere, simple and make the communication work for them.  Remember that you are using their time and their thoughts. Capture their issues, concerns and comments, then act upon them. If you can recover the assassin they are highly likely to become an advocate; then rather than tell others how bad you are, they will tell them how you listen, respond and actually care. If you don’t look after your customers, somebody else will, and evil will prevail!

Check out some recent research here from the MoJ that demonstrates just how prevalent this problem is amongst clients of legal firms during the next few days.

Lee Williams

Oct 04

Solicitor Joint Ventures With IFA's – Making it Work

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Solicitors should explore the opportunities to establish a joint venture with the emerging elite tier of fee-based and highly qualified IFAs who are poised to enter the professional community due to major changes in their regulation.   A joint venture is one way to help reposition your practice up-market, where advisory skills will command a premium; at a time when organisations like Co-operative Legal Services are poised to capitalise on the commodity end of the legal market.

Effective integration of financial / wealth management services into a legal practice can help solicitors to regain their historic role of trusted advisers; it can also be a catalyst for change, provided the lawyers recognise the vision of a different kind of service their practice should deliver in the future.  One focused on satisfying a range of clients’ needs as part of a lifelong relationship, rather than completing legal transactions on demand.

In this download we explain how we work with SIFA and their (IFA and Solicitor) members to ensure the success of joint ventures between solicitors and IFA’s.  For more background and information on these JV’s, contact Allan Carton

Sep 02

Tap into the best free advice you can get

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Lawyers often go around in circles in internal discussions about what they could do to win more business and clients.  The solution is easy – ask the clients you want to work for and the referrers you want to work with just what they want from you.  But how many firms do this?  

Taking this approach, you can open up new opportunities, retain clients that are considering other options, demonstrate commitment, bring your people closer to clients, educate them ….

Read more here.

Jun 23

Help your people make more of LinkedIn

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If you think there is value in LinkedIn (and social networking more generally) here are some insights that might help enthuse other people in your practice and help you to do more yourself.  There are many features in LinkedIn, but I would consider “Groups” as one of the most important and most effective for lawyers, so it’s worth checking out this video (and the other information the page) as a lot of new features have just been added to make this even more user-friendly and effective.

Perhaps more importantly, do play this to your other colleagues who are struggling with the concept of social media, to help them picture how this can work for them.

  

Apr 20

Cooperative Legal learning old tricks?

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The news about Cooperative Legal going on a major new advertising campaign in their stores prompted us to check out their conveyancing services yesterday … which proved to be a very disappointing experience as a consumer; great news if you are one of their competitors though. We made one of our ghost calls to their conveyancing team, asking for a quote on legal fees when moving home to check out their response. It wasn’t good.

It took all of 4 minutes to get to speak to someone, working through their call answering system options with a long time on hold.  The person who spoke to us made no effort to tell us anything about the benefits of using their services; they didn’t find out anything about the caller other than the price of the properties involved, so we couldn’t judge them on anything other than price (and the poor experience of getting to speak to them).  Not only that but they also quoted a higher legal fee than any of the 3 other legal practices we approached after that call with the same numbers. Mind you, the other legal practices didn’t fare much better at all.  They were just as bad and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to talk to us about more than just the price.

At least follow up emails are better than in the past. where there is some mention of the benefits, but that comes too late.  The everlasting first impression has already done the damage. 

I had thought the Cooperative would be raising standards, but far from it on this performance. However, lawyers shouldn’t get too complacent over this. I’d expect Cooperative Legal to get better in the future – shocked if they didn’t.   It’s really not difficult for conveyancers to handle these telephone enquiries dramatically better to convert more calls into business, potentially at higher fees.  We run half day sessions that enable conveyancers to think about and handle calls very differently with potential to change the dynamics of these calls overnight.

We can help by running a workshop to help you generate more business >>

Allan Carton

Jan 13

More legal practices should consider telemarketing

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An extract from Allan Carton in a discussion in the PM Forum on LinkedIn

I see a difference between “telesales” and “telemarketing”.  Patience and calm persistence in developing a relationship with prospects tends to produce the best results for legal and accountancy practices. Fewer quality opportunities are better than lots of wasted meetings (for more see below). Getting people able to do this and keen to communicate internally to share feedback, explore options and listen to you about your business are all essential for telemarketing because it is not a one-off hit.

Cleaning and fine tuning the database should be an integral part of the initiaitive as the telemarketeers explore prospects to identify precisely the right people to develop a relationship with on each area of interest.

More firms should be doing more telemarketing. It works to generate new business, with quick wins achievable but best done long term as a continuous part of your promotion of the practice – provided you have found the right people to do it with you.

Other comments in response (all of which we would agree with) to the good question from Katerina Rabava: “What do you have to be aware of when briefing a telesales company?”

John Stoddart: Quality over quantity. How many calls do you want them to make, how many appointments, how are they going to ensure that the appointments are of suitable quality and how experienced a telemarketing firm are they to ensure they understand your brand and proposition. You also have to be aware that you will have to train them and be on-site for part of them during the campaign so location is also an issue.

Jeremy Damsell: You, as the client, MUST pledge to provide as much ongoing (and accurate), feedback as you will naturally be demanding from them. This relationship has to be a partnership, effectively, and will only flourish with regular communication.  Do not deviate from the agreed brief. Speaking from the perspective of a key account manager at an established professional services telephone marketing company, I have experience of clients attempting to switch the brief at the last minute, yet expect the same results.  If you are providing a database to this company, ensure it is as accurate as possible. Failure to do so will likely mean the failure of the campaign. Advance cleaning will pay dividends.

If you want to explore telemarketing options for your practice further, contact Allan Carton at acarton@inpractice.co.uk or on +44 (0)7779 653105