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January 05, 2006
Rule Six: When You Work, You Are Marketing.
Rule Six: When You Work, You Are Marketing.
Rule Six is more a truth to be kept in mind than a "rule." This is where the needs of clients and their lawyers come together. It's about value to both. But you can't forget this one. Keeping or not keeping in mind the germ of Rule Six--that "when you work, you are marketing"--is the difference between having a financially healthy practice and having to close your doors.
Repeating Clients. We as lawyers are always marketing when we work. Clients and customers need and want their lawyers, CPAs, doctors, auto mechanics, store clerks and bank tellers to do good if not first-rate work. Professionals and other vendors of all manner rely on pleasing the customer in order to get more work. If you rely on or shoot for repeat business, good work--which includes the quality of communication and follow-up while you are doing it--drives whether you get more of that type of work or, even better, make inroads toward doing other types of work. (For example, my firm often starts work for a client in the corporate tax or environmental area--but we are always looking to expand our activity for that client to, say, employment practices, commercial litigation and/or international work.)
One-Night Stands. If, on the other hand, your practice is more along the line of "one-night stands"--i.e., divorce or criminal work where you generally serve the client once for a discrete time period--use your good work and service to obtain word-of-mouth referrals. See Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 best-seller The Tipping Point for inspiration on scores of good ideas on creating word-of-mouth dynamics. If you are not sure whether a satisfied client will refer work, just ask her or him to do that.
So we are always marketing--and in doing that constantly sending to clients barrages of small but powerful ads. The ads range from "don't hire us again" to "we want to keep your business--and get more of it". Pretty simple. But it's apparently not all that intuitive to many of us in the legal profession. I am amazed at how long it takes us to learn it. For my money, "Rule Six" is the best single thing you could ever tell a lawyer starting out. And, hey, it's good for both clients and their firms.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:11 PM | Comments (1)
Branding Revisited--and Explained. Golden Comments.
In response to the December 29 post on the apparent failure of most lawyers to brand their firms, Michelle Golden at Golden Practices got to the heart of the matter in a couple of fabulous posts (here and here). And Tom Kane of The Legal Marketing Blog added depth to the dialogue in his January 3 post.
Michelle is saying to me that: (1) we lawyers (and other professionals) are all trying to distinguish ourselves from each other based on words, (2) the standards/words we claim are the same anyway, (3) the standards aren't too high to begin with, (4) we can't even meet those standards, (5) truly differentiating your law firm from "the others" must come from actions--not marketing rubric, and, most importantly, (6) the actions can't be just any action.
Even actually providing "quality service" is not enough. That, Michelle continues, should be a "gimme":
[S]ervice quality isn't going to be impressive enough as a differentiator. Most firms pay lip service to things like "responsive," "on time," or "proactive" in their brochures or on the web. These are basic expectations, folks. No one can argue that they should be the rule, not the exception! Just as competence is expected by a paying customer, so is good service.
In marketing, nearly every firm now claims the above traits (though few consistently deliver) so while doing these might actually make you different, claiming them doesn't at all differentiate you, rather it throws you right into the pack. And citing these as advantages of working with your firms just shows how low the bar is within the profession, doesn't it?
All this "timely, proactive" stuff just sounds like blah-blah-blah to the customer who has found that firms don't usually do a good job despite their claims....
Real distinction, in my mind, is stuff like:
Value pricing in advance (using fixed price agreements and change orders as necessary)
Specialization in an industry or a narrow area of practice whereby you become highly visible in the circles of your customers
Humanizing your people: some do it through unique bios/bio photos and others do it by featuring "a day in the life" of their people.
Service packaging/bundling for instance offering a level of all-inclusive services such as the "concierge model" with no charging for phone calls or other access to you.
And real branding is hard:
There is a price to pay--an investment--in becoming distinct. Most firms won't DO these things because they aren't easy. And they are non-traditional. They are different. Innovative. Not safe.
But customers and recruits eat them up.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)