Word of mouth is the “Holy Grail” of professional service firm marketing. There is no other better client referral than the enthusiastic  recommendation of your firm by an impassioned existing client to another potential client.

Let’s face it…word of mouth referrals are like cocaine.  Doesn’t your pride  and your chest swell when a new client comes through the door and specifically wants YOU on the case and they want YOU specifically because one of the client’s most trusted friends, associate, advisor etc. has recommended you? Doesn’t this validate your expertise, your charm, your skill? Doesn’t it prove that your firm is on the right track?

Plus…word of mouth is inexpensive, convenient, easy to do (i.e. you do nothing but HOPE that some word of mouth gets around) and it doesn’t require ANY kind of thinking on your part.

Perfect isn’t it?

Then why aren’t you getting all the new business you’d like to have?

Relying on word of mouth marketing is a tactic that is loved by small and large law firms alike. Relying on word of mouth (the way you are probably doing it anyway) is a guaranteed way for a small to mid sized practice to stay small or mid sized.

Here’s why:

1. Word of mouth is eratic. You cannot control when someone will make a recommendation about your firm. If you can’t control frequency…you can’t control or predict when new business is going to come walking through the door.

2. Word of mouth is limited in scope. Your existing clients can only refer you to their limited circle of friends, acquantances and business associates. If your current specialty is IT business structuring and you want to move into biotechnology patents your current ” word of mouth ” network is probably going to leave you and your kids pretty hungy!

3.  Word of mouth is easy to “screw” with. Your competitors (especially) if you’re operating in a cut throat environment are busy out there generating their own NEGATIVE word of mouth campaign about you through their own networks.

4.  Word of mouth is non-scalable. By that I mean…you have one partner in your firm who is “Miss Personality.” Your other partners and staff are “Tomatos.” Miss Personality brings all the new business through word of mouth. How do you teach everyone else in your firm to develop “likeable” dispositions EXACTLY like Miss Personailty’s?

5.  Word of mouth is subjective in nature. The person referring you obviously “likes” you. In a B2B environment “like” is not a quantifiable metric. It’s important to be sure…but…at some point in the sales cycle you have to be able to “talk the talk and walk the walk.” You probably can’t! Word of mouth marketers tend to get lazy and forget that there’s more to business than glad handing and backslapping. Can you still make presentations on par with the “hungriest” firms in the neighbourhood?

6. Word of mouth gives control of your business to your clients.  When you’re hot and everything you touch turns to gold your clients are enthusiastic and you can do no wrong. Referrals flood in! What happens when something changes in the business environment that negatively impacts what you do? Simple example: You were the genius mortgage lawyer who got your clients into that million dollar home that they couldn’t really afford 6 years ago. They were going to get rich on leverage and appreciation. Now they have negative equity, are facing foreclosure and personal bankruptcy.

How’s your word of mouth network going to look now after a hundred or so of your past clients tell the entire universe about your overly “aggressive” tendencies?

You didn’t “pay” anything for your word of mouth network. If you didn’t “pay” anything…you can’t control the message that comes out of the network.

7. Word of mouth is not a SYSTEM. To me a system means that if you do “A”….”B” will result EVERYTIME.

It’s predictable, controllable, replicable and repeatable.

It may or MAY NOT be inexpensive.

Inexpensive is a relative term. If I spend five million dollars to make a return of five hundred million dollars…the five million was inexpensive.

If I spend NOTHING to make NOTHING…well…that was the most expensive “nothing” in your business because you’re not acquiring new billings at the rate you could be.

In business you want to control as many of the variables as you possibly can.

Word of mouth is the LEAST controllable marketing approach you can adopt.

Maybe that’s why it’s the CHEAPEST!

Chances are that when you sit down to work on your law firm marketing plan or your individual attorney marketing plan there are great long periods of well…confusion.

Total confusion as to what marketing activities you personally should be doing, total confusion as to what marketing activities your firm should be doing and…great, great, great uncertainty as to what marketing activities will bring you the most “bang” for your valuable time and financial investment.

I’ve been working on materials for a new webinar that I’m delivering next week and I thought I’d share a graphic that I’ve developed for the class with all of you.

Simply click on the image at the top left to bring up a full size printable PDF file of the “Attorney Marketing Chart” I’ve designed.

The chart lists in (no particular order) the various marketing activities that you could be doing at any given moment on any given day.

Right now there are ninety seven possible things you could be doing to get clients and the list is not totally complete by any means!

I think you’ll agree…this is “utterly ridiculous.”

When do you have time for all of this “stuff?” How do make sense of all of this “stuff?” When are you ever going to implement even a fraction of all of this “stuff?”

A picture is worth a thousand words. If you want to succeed in your attorney marketing efforts you must do four things:

1. Undertake a marketing education and learn what advantages/disadvantages these various activities bring to your firm and clients marketing communication wise.

2. Learn which 8-10 of these activities are the MOST effective in generating new business.

3. Simplify your plan and concentrate on those 8-10 activities.

4. Execute relentlessly on those 8-10 activities that are proven to work.

If you have lots of time and/or lots of staff take a look at doing some of the other 90 or so “nice to have” activities.

The point is this…do a few things EXCEEDINGLY well rather than doing a bunch of “stuff” superficially and without depth.

Good marketing needs depth and time before it will show you results.

Now…put up that chart on your wall and start thinking!

Click here to learn more about next week’s webinar ” The Ultimate -Step One Day Marketing Plan.”

Depending on how complex you like to make things it’s either scribbled on the back of an envelope (the “entrepreneur’s way) or it’s a “mental barfing exercise” running to several hundred pages (the “Big Law” way.)

No matter how you’ve put it together or when you put together, there’s one BIG question you have to ask yourself:

“What now????”

In spite of what I’ve said in previous articles here’s the number one reason that law firm marketing plans fail…lack of EXECUTION.

Successful law firm marketing requires that you build credibility in your marketplace. Building credibility takes time. Building credibility takes massive ACTION.

How do you translate nebulous marketing plan goals like “increase biotech legal advisory service billings by 12% this year” or “get 10 new clients in the next 3 months” into reality?

Grinders sit in their offices…Rainmakers take MASSIVE action.

Here are 12 action steps that will give your law firm marketing plan a “kick in the ass”:

1. Understand your client’s DEEP pain. Tap your knowledge of your niche markets and write down the top 5 things that cause your clients GREAT and MASSIVE pain. Pain they are willing to PAY you to remove from their lives. Do this on your lunch hour TODAY.

2. Pull out all of your existing marketing materials TODAY and review them to see if they address your clients massive pain in a POWERFUL way. If they don’t throw them out and redo them within the next seven days.

3. Look at what your competitors are doing. Can you present yourself in a differentiated way or offer something that they don’t? Get this analysis done this week on ONE sheet of paper.

4. Create a POWERFUL positioning package for your firm that describes in detail your history, your mission, your personnel, your philosophy, your alliances, your process for working with clients and your fees. Also highlight what makes you the “go to EXPERT” in your niche market. Get this done within 14 days. Make sure every existing, new and prospective client gets this package. Get this done within 21 days.

5. Get a web site that works. Visit 10 web sites within your niche and then design something that CLEARLY showcases your expertise. Get a blog up and running and put 10 articles on it. Hire someone who actually knows how to sell professional services via the internet to “build the damn thing” while you write keyword rich targeted articles that get noticed by search engines. Get this done in 90 days.

6. Find out what your clients read (i.e. what trade magazines, association newsletters etc.) and what associations they belong to. Get your articles from your blog published or discussed at association meetings by calling editors or association heads and FINDING OUT what they want to see from contributors. Target 90 days for this also.

7. Create an email newsletter that is MARKETING driven and send it out regularly to your captive “herd.” Your herd includes current clients, prospective clients and referral sources. You can easily automate all this crap and get your first one in 14 days.

8. Deliver small breakfast seminars to your best referral sources and prospects once a month. Invite 7-10 people max and base them on your blog articles. Better yet…use the Internet and deliver the whole thing as web cast. You can get one of these up and running by next week.

9. Write 4 white papers per year and distribute them to clients and put them up on your web site. Make a BIG DEAL out of each white paper released in your newsletter, seminars and other contacts with your marketplace. Do your first one in the next 90 days.

10. Write and publish or self-publish a book. Books make you the ULTIMATE perceived go to expert in your field. Plan on taking 6-12 months to pull this one off.

11. Get your handsome face on TV or your great voice on radio. Call your local stations and offer to speak on a topic that will interest their target audiences. You could start on this one in the next 5 minutes…simply pick up the phone.

12. Go to lunch twice a week with someone who isn’t a client or a coworker (your coworkers aren’t going buy anything from you but they will drink beer with you.) Next time you see an interesting business article in the newspaper about a local success story…phone them up and ask to meet them…NOT with a view to selling them anything…simply to learn something about them and their businesses. The largest client I ever acquired in my professional career came from just such a phone call and subsequent lunch.

Show a POSITIVE and GENUINE interest in what other people are doing and you’ll have more meetings, more fun and make more money than you EVER thought you would.

Rainmakers “kick ass…any ass” and they learn something from each experience…grinders do massive analysis followed by…NOTHING.

Next time you find yourself saying: “I don’t where to start with my marketing activities;” refer back to this list.

Remember…your law firm marketing plan will NEVER kick any ass until you decide to get up and off of your ass.

Here are ten guaranteed signs that your marketing plan will fail.

1. You talked a good marketing game in January BUT you never made marketing a priority. In other words you wrote up the “big marketing plan” threw it in a drawer and went about business as usual. Marketing is an afterthought as usual–if you don’t make marketing a priority and then “live and breath” the concept how do you expect the other team members to get on board and actually execute the big “master plan?”

2. You never prepared detailed cash flow budgets and projections so that you’d have something to measure progress by. REAL businesses run with numbers. Somehow most professionals refuse to accept this.

3. Coincident with number 2…you never developed metrics to measure the success or failure of your plans and activities against projections developed in number 2. Things like response rates, client churn rates, average new billings per clients, client lifetime values…etc. Do you have any written metrics for your firm and do you constantly monitor them?

4. You don’t have the right people on board to succeed. As author Jim Collins writes…you need the right people “on the bus and the wrong people” off the bus. If you have a firm full of “grinders” you’ll have lousy marketing results. If you look for Rainmakers…guess what; you’ll have marketing focus and outstanding marketing results.

5. You haven’t set a clear and powerful direction for your entire team. It’s much more powerful to have weekly meetings with all your staff and COMMUNICATE that we do “marketing” at this firm and here’s what is expected from EVERYONE to achieve those marketing goals.

6. Your firm lacks focus. By focus I don’t mean we’re say “patent lawyers.” By focus I mean laser like obsession with identifying market niches that are lucrative (patent law is not a niche - it’s a specialty - BIG difference.) A niche is something like “we’re molecular patent lawyers - now who in this country needs molecular patents? Let’s go after those prospective clients relentlessly.

7. You provide poor client service. There are certain client “moments” when what you say and do are more critical than others. It’s those moments that determine whether or not you’ll get client referrals. Are your new client referrals from existing clients growing every quarter or are they declining? If they’re dropping off…you’ve got a client service problem whether you choose to admit it or not.

8. You’re spending money on the wrong things. Big fancy offices, expensive cars and country club memberships DON’T bring in new clients. Get rid of all that “stuff” and spend the money on communicating to existing clients and prospective clients how you are IMPROVING the operations of their businesses or personal lives.

9. You can’t easily predict future revenues. How much new business will you get from referrals in the next 30 days? How much new business will you get from your web site in the next 30 days. If you’re like most lawyers, CPAs or consultants your mouth is hanging open and your mind has gone blank.

Ask any CEO of a Fortune 500 company these questions he or she will respond with EXACT expectations in dollars and percentage terms. All successful businesses strive to create marketing SYSTEMS that generate revenues on a consistent and predictable basis.

Can you speak in such knowledgeable terms about your firm or is all “hit and miss?”

10. You don’t look for sources of leverage. Leverage allows you to MULTIPLY all your activities. What’s leverage?

Leverage involves things like Joint Ventures with other comparable non-competing firms so that you can access THEIR preexisting client lists and already built up goodwill.

Leverage is designing marketing campaigns and activities that successful connect with “one to many prospects” instead of “one to one.” Think breakfast seminars and web casts as good examples here.

There you’ve got ten ideas that will radically improve your marketing results.

Until next time.

Most of you are probably retching into your garbage cans right now just thinking about it.

Dr. Phil is probably the most irritating personality I can think of and I bet a lot of you would agree with me. His advice is vacuous, superficial and loaded with platitudes that I can get from any reasonably well experienced local bartender for the price of a drink.

Dr. Phil has an army of “morons” that he has collected from Oprah’s talk show and the Maury Pauvitch daily “low life spectacle” for followers.

These “morons” have made Dr. Phil the most highly paid psychologist in America in 2007 with an income of an estimated thirty million dollars (yup - that’s $30,000,000.00) according to Forbes Magazine.

I bet that I have your full attention now!

Most people simply cannot grasp that market leaders (Rainmakers) are made, not born. It doesn’t matter whether your talking about a law firm, a CPA firm or even the world of “baby pablum” psychology.

There are literally thousands of ordinary even sub-standard professionals who gone from being once virtually “nobodies” in their professions to “preeminent expert” status and now enjoy success far beyond anything that they (or even you) could have imagined possible.

These new “breed” of experts have better positioning…better personal branding and… a better understanding of their target clients than the “wannabes” in their perspective fields.

They DON’T have better educations, better experience, more knowledge or even more expertise.

What they have done is either consciously or unconsciously stumbled upon the secret to enormously lucrative marketing success.

The difference between Dr. Phil with his thirty million dollar book deals, TV contracts, best selling books and celebrity clients and contacts and the local neighbourhood minimum wage social worker has NOTHING to do with his credentials or background expertise from the school of “hard knocks.”

It has EVERYTHING to do with his positioning, his superior personal branding, his willingness to speak the language of his target markets (read: soccer moms who have lost their minds from interacting solely with preschoolers 20 hours per day or “trailer” trash who lack self esteem and suffer from eating and substance abuse disorders.)

In short Dr. Phil is the MOST VISIBLE expert in his marketplace.

And…here is the good news for you. You can easily do the same thing.

There are very simple, easy to implement and proven strategies that you can use right now to go from “invisible” to “visible” in any market - and very, very, very rapidly.

Will this work for law firms, CPA firms or other professionals who have “high brow” target markets?

Well…it sure as hell is working for Robert Shapiro who has taken his O.J.Simpson fame and parlayed it into Legalzoom.com.

Robert Shapiro who’s main area of expertise centers around white collar criminal defense issues is now a partner in the very creative online enterprise that provides everything from simple incorporations to real estate transfers.

The famous “criminal trial” lawyer is probably taking some of your firm’s “bread and butter” business right now as you’re reading this blog post.

How well known are you in your target markets?

I think you’ll agree (or you’ll violently disagree) that Dr. Phil and Robert Shapiro can certainly teach you something about law firm marketing plans that work.

Kick off some comments on this article by posting your thoughts below.

Fundamental to the success of any law firm marketing campaign and any law firm marketing plan is understanding the concept of the “sales funnel.”

Yes, whether you like it or not legal services marketing (just like any other professional service such as business consulting, CPA services or even psychological counseling - think Dr. Phil) is a business and as a business it must follow the fundamental rules of marketing.

The cornerstone of any successful marketing method must begin with the understanding that not every person you or your firm comes in contact with is ready to be a client. In fact a great many prospects will never become clients.

In other words, your marketing efforts from all sources will generate leads (that go into the top of the funnel) and only a very small percentage (maybe 1% or less) will ever drop out of that funnel as clients.

Law firms tend to concentrate (generally to the exclusion of all else) most of their marketing efforts on improving the “closing rate” or the percentage amount of prospects that they can convert to clients.

Hence the fascination with RFPs, networking, luncheons, presentations etc. The idea being: “If we spend more time trying to build “relationships” (what ever that might be defined as) we’ll close more new deals.

So called “thought leaders” tend to foster this approach and sadly it’s a total marketing misconception.

Charles Green, Author of Trust Based Selling has written an excellent article titled: “Why Your Sales Process Matters Less Than The Psychology Of Selling.”

The article is a fantastic and well done discussion with numerical analysis of an entire marketing pipeline start to finish.

Unfortunately it misses the whole point of what a marketing funnel is supposed to do.

A superb marketing funnel is designed to generate the maximum amount of qualified prospects possible in your given marketing universe. It is from that pool of qualified prospects that we apply the concept of relationship building tactics so that new clients are developed over time.

Now here is the point of today’s post.

No matter how good you are relationship building…you won’t close any deals if you don’t have anyone to talk to!

Here’s the good part though…the more people you have to speak with…the more new clients you will have in spite of having “zero” relationship building skills.

Here’s a simple example.

Suppose you are a mega-superstar “relationship” builder.

You have 10 qualified leads and over the course of a year, you wine them, dine them, schmooze them, golf with them and literally do anything they want of you.

If at the end of a year; you have closed 50% of them and thus acquired 5 new clients, you would be considered a “marketing genius” anywhere in the world of professional sales and marketing (the average sales professional closes around 16% of qualified prospects.)

Let’s say I on the other hand through my integrated marketing efforts have created a pool of 100 top notch prospects.

Let’s also say I’m just an average “Joe/Jane” and close only 16% of these prospects in 12 months - nowhere near the “genius barfly pick up-artist” ratio you have.

Pop quiz…who has made the most money?

All things being equal (i.e. the average new client billing size is the same in each example) I will have 16 new clients…and you will have 5 even though you are almost 400% better at closing (read “building relationships”) than I am.

Please reread the above until you understand it.

Even though you have four times the “interpersonal skills” that I do…I have made more than three times the amount of money than you have in the same twelve month period.

Take a look at last week’s post titled “Lawyer Marketing Video: How To Sue Drug Companies For Free - 6,500 YouTube Views And Counting.”

That is an example of a lead generation tactic that is designed to “flood” (and I do mean…flood) the top end of your sales funnel with qualified prospects.

What could you do with 6,500 qualified people to “practice” your relationship building skills on over the next 12 months?

I don’t know how you answered the above question, but I’ll take 6,500 qualified leads that were developed through “smart marketing” any day over solely relying on my “relationship building” skills and I think most of you out there would agree.

More highly qualified leads equals more money no matter what business you’re in.

That is called “results.”

No disrespect to “thought leaders,” but I’d rather be a results leader.

I’m still hearing the same old lament over and over again from attorneys, lawyers and law firm marketing directors: “Marketing on the Internet is a waste of time.”

Well…did it ever occur to you that you simply don’t know what you’re doing?

Here is a video from YouTube.com that is titled “How To Sue Drug Companies For Free.” It explains how you can sue a drug company even if you have no money using the contingency fee structure that we have in America.

No rocket science in this thing so far… right?

It was posted on May 01, 2007 and since then it has been viewed 6,557 times! That’s about 730 times per month.

Here’s the best part part - the girl who did the video isn’t even a lawyer she’s a consumer advocate/activist.

How many of you out there could have made this same video?

What would you have done with 6,000 plus calls to your office?

Watch the video below and note two things:

1. No fancy sets.

2. No fancy scripting.

3. Filmed in an office (you’ve all got offices right?)

Think you can learn something here? (Be honest!)

This is a perfect example of “How To Get Google, Yahoo and MSN to Send You Clients For Free.”
and a great way to flood your sales funnel with targeted high quality potential clients.

If this doesn’t convince you to get streaming video working in your practice I think you’re beyond all hope.

The major problem you all face is: “How do I get people to visit my web site?”

How would like Google, Yahoo and MSN to send you all the high quality clients you can handle for free.

No this isn’t paid advertising.

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) comes to the rescue.

“Search engine optimization” is the science of publishing information and building links that makes search engines rank your website high in the search results.

Search engine marketing attracts people who are looking for something they actually want, need and desire, and their minds are actively engaged and in tune with the sources they find that satisfy that desire.

Each and every day hundreds of millions of people search for products, services and information - including legal services using search engines, and the SEO consulting industry has become really big business.

Here are some things you need to know about SEO:

• SEO is not hard. Anyone an be successful at it with the right information.

• You do not need to spend thousands of dollars to get top rankings.

• You know your product and industry better than any consultant does, and armed with knowledge of SEO techniques you can do a better job of promoting your sites than they can.

• Many SEO consultants do not do their best work for clients. If they did, you could fire them when you got your results—that’s why they would rather slowly raise your rankings over time and show continued improvement to justify their expensive fees.

• You personally can achieve great rankings in as little as 90 days - if you are willing to put the time into it!

Now don’t think this whole thing is a “walk in the park.” If it was every person who claimed to be an SEO expert would already be a millionaire and they sure wouldn’t be talking to you.

What I do want you to know is that SEO is not “rocket science.”

Good SEO is time consuming…and the rules that the various search engines apply are constantly changing.

Before you run out and hire a SEO consultant for thousands of dollars you should at least get some information as to what SEO is all about and how SEO objectives are achieved and measured.

By far the very best SEO book on the market today is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

This is the same SEO book that I use in my own operations and the same SEO book I refer to when I work with clients.

If you want to learn how to get Google, MSN and Yahoo to start sending qualified prospects to your site then this is the book for you.

Even if you don’t want to try these things yourself; you NEED to know how SEO works before you run out and hire expensive consultants who are speaking a language that is simply way above your level of understanding.

A good and profitable web site represents an investment of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

I urge you…take the time to read this book and put some effort into your marketing education before making costly mistakes.

Get the SEO Book here.

It also meant more visitors to my various sites and the need to have reliable web hosting that could handle my “growing pains” and my unique technical requirements.

Well a few thousand dollars, several months and a huge amount of frustration later I realized three things:

1. Web hosts are not created equal. Some want $500-$1,000 per month to give you limited access to your own servers such as 5 or 10 hours per month for updates etc. Did you know you can get the same services for less than $10 per month?

2. All web hosting companies boast of “technical support.” I’ve had web hosting companies not respond to technical support questions for 48 hours or more. And…it’s not a person that you get to speak with, it’s an email with no personalized return address.

3. Most economical hosting packages “promise that they can grow with you.” They don’t and they can’t. They have stuck you in an “econo-buck” package that won’t allow you to have more than one domain, has extremely limited bandwidth limitations and/or cannot support dynamic content management systems.

Ultimately, a few key details made the difference, and although I learned this stuff the hard (read: the very, very, very expensive) way, the good news is that you can avoid these same mistakes.

Here is how I picked the web site hosting company that I am still using to this day:

1. I initiated discussions with others who are heavily involved in the Internet aspects of marketing their services. I got real opinions from people in the trenches…not…from hosting company sales reps.

2. I researched their up-time claims and spoke with current clients as to technical support and bandwidth issues.

3. I examined their ability to host Content Management Systems so that I could maintain dynamic and constantly updated web sites and blogs without the need for a web “geek.”

As you can imagine this took a lot of time…but when you operate over 20 web sites as I do…moving them all is one huge time sucking endeavor that you don’t want to repeat very often in any given decade!

Here’s the web hosting firm that I decided on and have been with ever since.

Midphase Web Hosting.

Here Are The Top 5 Reasons You Should Have Your Web Site With Midphase

1. Here’s the most important number one reason – service and reliability. Hosting has become ridiculously cheap in recent years, and there are plenty of shady operations competing on price. I don’t want to “chase” technical support people. In my time with Midphase I have never had a technical support issue that wasn’t resolved within one hour. In addition to that, you can phone their technical support line, get a real live person in less than 5 minutes and usually get your technical problem resolved right there on the spot. Try calling Microsoft technical support (or your own local “yokel”) and see what happens to you — I think you get my point.

2. Painless transition from your current host. MidPhase will actually move your files and databases, transfer your existing domain for you, and, if necessary, even buy out your remaining existing hosting contract up to $50.

3. You can easily administer your own account and domain with a 24/7 accessible web-based control panel, file uploads and your own branded email allows you to quickly take care of business from anywhere. You can also easily create sub domains and even host 25 additional domains on your account. You don’t to call and pay a web “geek” everytime you want to do something.

4. One-click installation of professional grade content management systems like WordPress, Joomla or for extra heavy duty users Drupal. This makes it extremely simple to set up a blog or a dynamic web site in minutes without “geek” charges.

5. Only $7.95 per month for 3.5 terabytes of bandwidth (ridiculously huge - even for steaming video needs), 350,000 MB of storage, free domain registration and renewals, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. And this is just the base plan! That’s more “stuff” than 99.9% of you reading this well ever need.

I urge you to get on board with Midphase today whether you are just starting out or even if you’re a larger well “established” firm.

Save yourself all the time and effort that I put into this research problem and get the “technical web site” aspects out of the way as quickly as possible.

You want to be marketing your web site — not worrying about the damn thing!

By the way…Midphase offers a full 30 day moneyback guarantee.

There’s another marketing problem solved and one less headache to worry about.

After a long hiatus I’ve decided to bring back the Rainmaker Best Practices Blog to give you some new law firm marketing ideas.

I was traversing the law marketing blog landscape this weekend and ran into this post at Bruce MacEwen’s blog “Adam Smith, Esq”

Even though the post was written in March of 2006, absolutely nothing has changed in the arcane and often confused world of lawyer and attorney marketing.

One of Bruce’s readers wrote this:

“Most businesses know their leading indicators of sales. For example, if the company increases the number of sales calls in January, there will be more sales in April.

“Has anyone analyzed empirically what the leading indicators of sales are for AmLaw 200 law firms? Do the indicators include ads in the trade press? Fancy dinners with potential clients? Rounds of golf with potential clients? Publishing articles in legal or trade journals? Giving speeches? Winning jury trials? Closing big deals?

“It strikes me that law firms have very little idea of what business development activities they really want to encourage among their lawyers and so take a scattershot approach to the effort.

“Has anyone thought intelligently about this?”

Well the answer is…NO they haven’t.

This is the first post of a new round of “lawyer marketing” bashing on my part and for those of you that remember my old blog posts of 2006 please come back and see the new resources and materials that will be going up on this completely redesigned web site in the next few weeks.

There have been a lot of changes in marketing for law firms and I hope to present some of them to you here so that you can start thinking intelligently about them.

Read more about this blog here.