Episode 200 – Getting More Of The Best Type Of Clients

2017 is around the corner and getting more clients is going to get even tougher. And to find the higher quality clients that actually pay your fees, you must have a plan.

You need look at the marketing you’re doing, how you’re targeting your audience and who you’re targeting. I’ve talked about how you can target these high-end clients specifically in this podcast. Listen to it or download it to learn more. Make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

 

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about getting the kind of clients that you want and ask you the sort of questions that you may not have thought of or just thought of in passing. Whatever your practice area or areas there are going to be certain clients that are bringing in more money, that are less hassle, that may require fewer trips to the courthouse, that you like to get. Maybe they are in town A vs. town B and town A is near your home and you don’t have to travel so far, not against traffic. Maybe the kind of clients you get or you want to get are more referrals or bigger value cases or smaller value cases where not much is at stake.

Have you ever thought what kind of clients am I getting right now? Let me look at the past year and categorize them. What kind of clients do I want more of and what kind of clients do I want less of? The reason that this thinking is valuable is now that you’ve thought about this or if you’ve thought about this. Now you can say how can I do that? How can I engineer my practice to do that? Yes there are ways. Let’s say you want to get more referrals because you find that they are the least price resistant, they make the best clients, and you enjoy helping referrals of people that you’ve helped before. So how do you get more of them? One way, for instance is to start sending a monthly newsletter to past clients to keep you in their mind 12 times a year.

Then they are much more likely when a friend or a co-worker or a spouse or associate or someone they meet that they know about really well has a legal issue whether it’s estate planning or car accident, divorce, that kind of thing. They are much more likely to refer and increase your referral rate, so that’s an example of thinking, strategizing and making a plan of action. What’s another way? Let’s say that you really don’t like the people who have no money and who have to offer payment plans to you. Are you advertising or you seem to get people from poorer parts of town? Maybe that’s not good for you if you are a DUI lawyer or a divorce lawyer. How do you get people with more money or people that are less likely to complain about price? Can you focus your marketing on a wealthier part of town?

Is there a certain demographic or ethnicity that you can focus on more, maybe for some reason Asian in your neighborhood or this other neighborhood tend to have cases that you like to take? Maybe Indian people, maybe women or men or older people or wealthier people. How can you reconfigure things in your practice to attract those kinds of people and to repel the tire kickers, the ones that have no money, that price shop you that only care about the minimum amount of work you can do for the lowest price. You don’t want those people, for instance. So how do you find them? What types of marketing do you do? I’ll give you a couple of examples here. What does your website say? Does it talk about things that appeal to the lowest common denominator or does it appeal to let’s say wealthier people or people with more severe problems that will pay more? What do the articles on your website say?

What do the images show? Do they show you as a high end attorney or you have just kind of a pixelated okay image that doesn’t really show you as a true professional or a high powered person? How is the color scheme? How is the look and feel of your website? Does it feel upscale or does it feel more at home and approachable and that kind of thing? Is that the kind of client that you want? That is another place to look. Look at your reviews. What kind of cases do you have positive reviews or testimonials for? Let’s say, you do criminal defense and you’ve got a lot of traffic ticket ones, you’ve got a couple DUI ones but you want to focus on White Collar crime, if you don’t have any reviews specific to that part of your practice area, you are much less likely to get those kind of clients because They don’t see that.

Yes, you are criminal defense lawyer, wonderful but have you handled embezzlements or fraud cases or securities cases, those kinds of things. Let’s say, if it’s a drug offense, do you have specific drug offense testimonials? If not, again, you won’t have that much of a pull on customers. What I’m trying to say is, once you start this thought process, it’s a very valuable thing to do. It’s a very valuable thing to go through your files and to think about this past year now that the year is coming to a close of what kinds of clients did you get? How many? What did you like about who you got? What did you not like about who you got? How can you change things up in your practice to get more of the best ones because that means 2017 is going to be a much better year for you if you do it.

It may take half way through the year to do it but with a good strategy and a good plan you are much more likely to get what you want versus random chance in the universe or a change in law or something some external force magically either bringing it or not bringing it to you and no one wants that. Everyone wants to be in control of their own destiny. I certainly do and I’m sure you do. That’s why you spend so much time in law school and so much time in practicing and doing all the things that you do. Hope this helps. If you need strategy and you don’t understand how you can attract the kind of clients you want, give us a call (888) 225-8594. We can help you do that. It doesn’t matter, your practice area whether it’s for corporations or individual people or people that take a long time to decide or people that have immediate needs.

All these people have needs and you can speak to all these flavors and types of people. So besides calling us at (888) 225-8594 you can email me at Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com. Thank you.

 

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