We’re always on the lookout for useful content for our friends and clients. Today we welcome guest blogger Tom St. Louis. He is a legal marketing expert and founder of Smart Lawyer Marketing™. I hope this is useful to you!
President and Chief Executive Officer
In the beginning, before Google re-created the heavens and earth there were referrals. People used to ask around. Now a lot of people just walk around staring at iPhones.
Still, referrals do still happen and lawyers as a group are in such a mad rush to get noticed online that they often overlook what should be the very cornerstone of their marketing.
The magic formula is: 1 + 1 = 2
All clients have the potential to replace themselves. If every client gave you one referral— one good case—you would sustain 100% of what you are currently marketing like mad year over year to produce.
Think about it.
If half your clients sent you a case, then you'd be halfway there out of the box and Google would cease to hang over you like a specter.
Two very important questions:
- What percentage of your clients currently send you cases?
- What percentage of your intakes come from client referrals?
Bonus question: How much of your referral potential do you think you are currently realizing? And how important a priority should this be for you?
About question number 1:
10% is about average for personal injury law firms. Even then, a lot of people have to be well served for you to realize even 10%. Others get 40%.
What accounts for the difference?
Think of a Google search resulting in an inquiry about your services. How many of your competitors' clients did NOT step up and positively recommend them,
leaving them to go searching?
And when your competitors get an inquiry via Google search, did one of your clients fail to notice or fail to step up?
Because referring happens before Google.
You can literally preempt the whole online search if you know how to get your clients to 1) notice and 2) step up.
About the 2 Beach Heads.
Some clients self-select as Ambassadors for you.
They send you a case. That's the first Beach Head, the first referral from any potential referral source such as a client.
How are they thanked, rewarded and encouraged?
What are the emotional rewards they receive?
Do these “acknowledgment actions” of yours measurably trigger more referrals from these self-selected ambassadors?
What percentage of your single referrers graduate to double referrers?
That's the second Beach Head.
If you do not have many multiple referrers, you are literally getting in the way of the second Beachhead instead of leading your clients to it.
What You Want to Master.
How to orchestrate, program and compel the First Beachhead, and then how to use social proof and other compliance triggers to get more and more First Referrers to the Second Beachhead.
Can you think of a more important priority? How else could you possibly multiply the number of referrals you receive from clients?
To find out more about referrals or to receive an in depth Report called '7 Secrets to a Referral Surge in Your Personal Injury Law Practice', contact me by phone at 613-604-2858 or email moregreatcases@gmail.com.
I would be happy to talk to you about how you can set up the Referral Contract™ at intake, and do all the things that result in a multiplied flow of referrals.
Most of the principles I adapted from Robert Cialdini’s ‘Influence: the Science of Persuasion’. That and twenty years of working with personal Injury law firms on their intake processes.
More info available at www.smartlawyermarketing.com.
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