About

Why Your Ability to Attract New, High Quality Clients Is
The Key to You Career and Business Success Over the Next 3 Years

What’s the missing ingredient that prevents most law firm marketing efforts and attorney marketing plans from successfully attracting new, high quality clients on a consistent basis?

Marketing skills.

Marketing skills drive business. Your practice is a business whether or not you like to think of it that way.

Nothing happens until the “cash register rings.”

Rainmaker Best Practices is all about helping you:

• Attract more people (prospects) that are interested in your services.

• Convert more of those “prospects” into solid, long term clients.

• Have those clients refer more new high quality clients to you.

• Sell something! (You should start liking the word)

All you need to do is create a marketing message that quickly establishes you as the “Trusted Expert” in your field.

The Fundamental Flaw with Traditional Attorney Marketing

Traditional approaches to marketing suffer from a fundamental inherent flaw: they push your services and capabilities at the prospect. As a result, prospects can be turned off easily, because they’re simply suffering from marketing message overload and “attention age deficit.”

Whether you create a slick Web site that describes your services, use the pressure filled sales gimmicks that many sales training courses teach, or depend on the old traditional “networking approach” to get new clients, you will face the following hurdles if you continue to pursue traditional marketing strategies:

1. Prospects avoid you, because they don’t want to deal with yet another lawyer.

2. Prospects won’t give you straight answers about moving ahead.

3. You end up competing on price, and dealing with RFPs in competitive situations, instead of getting preferred treatment status.

4. You waste money on extremely high cost advertising and direct mail campaigns that don’t produce results.

5. You feel frustrated and mad, because you have to go through the indignity of pitching your services and skills when you are sure that you offer the best professional solution.

Getting Inside Your Client’s Mind For Better Results

There is another way. Before we discuss it, consider what your prospects are probably thinking when they realize they need to invest in legal services:

1. I don’t want to hire a lawyer, but I have to. This makes me feel ignorant and vulnerable, because I need outside help and can’t solve my own problems.

2. I have no way of knowing if the person I hire is really the right attorney for the job.

3. I hear many stories about people being burned when they hire the “wrong” lawyers.

4. Why can’t attorneys speak a language I can easily understand?

5. I want to get measurable business results.

6. This is going to be expensive, and I worry about not getting obvious return on investment.

The Root Cause of Your Failure: No Trust

Underlying each of these thoughts is a common message you must memorize. What it all boils down to is this: Your prospects are really saying, “I want to hire somebody I can trust.” Therefore, developing trust must become the theme and sole focal point of your marketing.

You have established trust when you meet four crucial criteria:

1. Your prospect is solidly familiar with you and with what you do.

2. Your prospect perceives you to be the obvious expert in your field.

3. Your prospect believes that you understand and care about his or her specific issues, and that you can solve them effectively and efficiently.

4. Your prospect likes you enough to want to take the next step and hand you a retainer.

Trust-Based Marketing and Its Enormous Side Benefits

Trust-based marketing positions you as the obvious expert with an unusual strategy. A key part of this strategy involves providing valuable education and information to your prospects up front, so that they perceive you as an expert. You don’t sell to them, or make endless proposals. Instead, you provide them aith valuable insights about their problems, what those problems cost, and how they can be solved — all within the area of your professional expertise. The more those prospects realize that you can help them, the more likely they are to call you when they have a need.

Marketing based on the development of trust creates unmatched new opportunities for getting your prospects’ attention and interest. Once you learn how to build trust, you can stop using traditional business development techniques, and everything will change for you:

• Prospects call you when they have a problem. You stop chasing them and intruding on them.

• You win more business as the “preferred provider”, before the prospect sends it out as the “dreaded” RFP. That’s because prospects perceive you to be an expert, and call you first when they have a need.

• Your entire marketing program has a single point of focus: develop trust. Therefore,all of your efforts become focused on creating educational materials…not on fancy slogans, taglines and Madison Avenue looking ads.

• You can charge premium fees, and stop competing on price.

• You can stop selling, and start having open, honest two-way conversations with your prospects.

• People refer business to you even if they have never hired you, because they perceive you to be an expert and appreciate your valuable information and knowledge.

• You feel good about marketing your services and actually come to enjoy the process.

The Principles of Trust-Based Marketing for Attorneys

If you want to market your legal skills on the basis of trust, it’s important that you follow proven principles in everything you do.Here are seven principles that lay the foundation of attorney/client trust development:

1. The more value you provide, the more trust you build. Most marketing and sales efforts focus on pushing your services and capabilities. This doesn’t build trust; in fact it does just the opposite.

Instead, you can build trust by providing value.

In trust-based marketing, value takes the form of free, or low-cost, educational products and services — white papers, special reports, articles, speeches, newsletters, audio CDs, streaming audio, DVDs, streaming video and interactive web sites etc. Each of these products helps your prospects to understand their critical problems (within your range of expertise), and start to develop solutions.

2. Trust increases gradually. It takes five to seven interactions with a prospect before they trust a lawyer enough to even consider hiring that person. Building trust is like dating - it takes time and a series of perceived high value interactions.

3. Trust is based on “pulling,” not “pushing.” You build trust when you give prospects the opportunity to choose for themselves whether or not to follow up on your insights and wisdom.

When they have a problem, they’ll contact you first.

4. Trust is delicate. Prospects are naturally and understandably “gun shy.” If you move too quickly, or push too hard your prospects will simply “shut you out.”

5. Some interactions build more trust than others. Your newsletter, public speaking, articles, and testimonials can all build an enormous amount of trust. None of these cost much to implement. Newsletters and articles establish your expertise, and provide value to your prospects. Public speaking and webinars lets the prospects interact with you in person, and makes them feel as if they know you. Testimonials provide “social proof” that others perceive you to be an expert.

6. Authenticity and empathy build trust. Prospects want to work with professionals who can step in their shoes and walk with them to a satisfying outcome. They also appreciate professionals who give open and honest advice about how to move forward and get challenges resolved.

7. The economics of trust are incredibly profitable. It doesn’t take long to develop a group of prospects that know you and perceive you to be the obvious expert in your field. Once they do, they will refer you to other people. Within six months to a year, you can establish yourself as a recognized expert and thought leader in your field and in your marketplace. You will have all the clients,referrals and business that you can handle.

Trust and Law Firm Marketing: A Perfect Match

Becoming a Trusted Advisor isn’t accidental. In an overly-crowded marketplace, trust based educational materials delivered in multiple formats (i.e. multi media) allows you to catch people’s attention, and smart follow up systems allow you to capitalize on that attention by building trust, billings and profits.

It’s not about fancy writing and big words.

It’s also not about being contrived or cheesy.

And it’s absolutely not about inappropriate high pressure sales techniques that simply don’t work in today’s world.

It is about the delivery of a complete and compelling “story” that will engage prospective clients and provide you with endless, and new opportunities to advance your career and grow your business.

So go ahead… subscribe today and join us for the fascinating trust based marketing strategies that continue to develop with new technologies and the science of human behaviour.

Strategies that will work in your law firm marketing plan today!