Authentic Law Marketing Blog : Lawyer & Law Firm Consulting : Elizabeth Ferris : Ferris Consulting : Collaborative Lawyer Marketing, Family Law Marketing

I often tell my clients that Law firm marketing requires a different approach than commercial product or service marketing. Lawyer marketing is about top of mind awareness, reinforcement of credibility and expertise, and becoming recognized as the “go to” lawyer in your practice area and geographic location.

It is true, lawyer marketing is different, however I just read a post from Success Magazine on Selling Like John Lennon by Darren Hardy that is extremely relevant to lawyer marketing.

In the article, Hardy tells a story about his successful real estate agent, John Lennon (not the famous Beatle), who has sold more than 15 billion dollars in the past 15 years in South Miami. The key to Lennon’s success is transferable to lawyers who want to accelerate their business. 

What separated Lennon from other real estate agents was his focus on finding out what was most important to the prospective client and then focusing like a laser on how to assure their most important goals or fears were addressed.  

The following is an excerpt from the post by Darren Hardy:

“One time, the building developer called me to ask what I had sold that day. I said, ‘I sold a $4 million parking space, a $2.8 million gym and spa access pass and a $6 million closet. And each came with an apartment included. The developer was perplexed, ‘What do you mean you sold a $4 million parking space?’ I explained that I had discovered that was what was most important to that person. He had vintage cars and had a bad experience in a previous building. I spent an hour explaining the security, safety and cleanliness of our underground parking and he couldn’t write the check fast enough.”

How does this relate to lawyers? Too often lawyers work too hard at marketing and spend too much time giving prospective clients too much information, offering too many options and never really communicating their understanding of the clients concern and their ability to solve the problem.

Just like the Realtor who goes on and on about the beautiful view when the client is more interested in the home security system, I have heard lawyers talk for an hour about the features of a specific process without communicating to the client how the features solve the clients problem. 

You can accelerate your practice by following the same success strategy that John Lennon used to sell 15 billion in real estate. The success strategy includes, asking questions, listening, observing and focusing on what is most important to your prospective client.

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This weekend I spoke at the17th Annual Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference in Seattle on how to create an ADR marketing plan.

I observed highly passionate professionals who wanted to build their practice and attract more clients so they can use their skills and expertise to help clients.  I also observed frustrations about marketing and building an ADR practice, including:

    • Not enough time
    • Lack of clarity on what to do first
    • Not sure how to identify their best clients or how to attract them.

Do these sound familiar?

The following are six tips for getting started on an effective marketing plan for your ADR practice:

1. Ask yourself, “What is my vision for my practice; what kind of work do I want to do? Why is this important to me? Write down the answer and then commit yourself to doing something every day to meet your vision. Commit yourself to excellence in your ADR practice, involvement in your community and confidence in how you communicate your brand.

2. Be selective about the work you accept. If you are constantly busy with work that is not consistent with your vision for your practice, it will be difficult to find the time or energy to grow the kind of work that will allow you to achieve your goals. Decide who your ideal client is and proactively attract this type of client to your practice.

3. Nurture and grow business from your top referral sources. Referrals come from people who know, like and trust you. The best way to gain trust is to develop a relationship with those who already know about you. This will require scheduling the time to get to know your referral sources and learning about their businesses and interests.

4. Provide remarkable service to your clients. Word-of-mouth marketing is by far the best marketing strategy for any service. The only way to get people talking about your service is to make the experience for clients remarkable -- then they will want to tell other people.

5. Have a web site that educates people about your law or ADR practice. Offer information that is of value to your prospective clients. Your message should connect at an emotional level with your target markets’ desired outcomes.

6. Share your success- help others learn and grow. The more you share your success and knowledge with other ADR professionals, the more they will learn and spread the ADR message.

I am interested in your success stories and challenges. I will blog about them and help you spread the word about your practice.

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You can attract desirable clients to your practice by communicating a message that is relevant to the clients you want to attract.

This means communicating what your clients/referral sources are interested in hearing verses what you are interested in saying.  

Creating a relevant message requires preparation and having a solid understanding of your target markets most important problems and goals.

This article explores what does and does not work for effectively communicating the value of collaborative law practice.

What does not work?     Too much emphasis on the practitioner:

Example: We assist divorcing individuals with a cooperative process that gives families resources and options unavailable in traditional divorce models. XXX is a group of independently practicing family law attorneys, mediators, business valuators, mental health professionals and financial advisors specializing in divorce issues. Each practitioner, while in business independently in their field, has XXX to provide cohesive, multi-disciplinary services to divorcing clients.

What works?

1.    A message that starts with a point of relevance to the audience:

Example: Divorce does not have to be slash and burn.

2.    A message that relates to a problem the audience has and provides a solution:

Example: “A significant advantage of collaborative law is that all personal and financial matters are kept private rather than open public records of a case tried in court,” adds Carlton R. Marcyan, “For clients going through divorce, especially business owners and clients with high assets, keeping personal and financial matters private is an important value.” (full article) 

3.     A Message that conveys a story the audience can relate to:

Example: "One of the more unique holiday plans Galvin has seen is a couple in collaboration were caught up in a power struggle over who got to spend Christmas morning and day with the children. With the help of the collaborative team the parents were able to focus on the importance of honoring the children's tradition rather than fight over who would be with the children on Christmas morning. Traditionally, the family opened presents in their home and then went to the wife’s parents’ home for a meal and to play with all their cousins. In collaboration, the couple agreed it was in the children’s best interests to maintain that tradition and the ex-husband would be included in the festivities for the next few years while the children were still young rather than alternating holidays and depriving their children of something that they looked forward to." 

This type of arrangement is in contrast to what can happen if parents do not communicate. For example, if parents cannot agree on how to divide time with their children over holidays, it is common for a Judge to try to give everyone a little something and order alternating holidays year to year which often results in tradition and the holidays being less enjoyable for the children in order to satisfy the parents’ demands.

With more than half of the marriages in the United States ending in divorce, there is no doubt Collaborative Law is something that could help parents minimize the damage of divorce on children. January is the month when most parents begin divorce proceedings. “The greatest gift you can give your child in 2010 and beyond is to love your children more than you hate your spouse and work cooperatively with the other parent to co-parent your children,” advises Jim Galvin. (full article)

In summary, the following are four steps to increase the effectiveness of your message so you can attract desirable clients to your practice:

1.    Believe in your message. Your personal belief in your message will come across. Authenticity is essential for effective communication.

2.    Develop talking points. Define the primary benefits of your service and stay focused in your communication. Avoid getting too detailed about the process before you have communicated the value of what you do.

3.    Know your audience. Understand what is most important to your audience, including their problems and the solutions you provide. Tailor your talking points to address the concerns and goals of those you are communicating to.

4.    Use multiple communication channels. Communicate your message consistently and frequently. Opportunities for getting your message out include, face to face meetings, on-line directories, firm/organization bios, articles, on line press releases, and web site, LinkedIn and facebook profiles.  

Send me examples of how your communication has worked and what  challenges you are facing to consistently communicate your "message".

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Last week I gave a workshop on social media to over 30 collaborative practice  lawyers, mental health professionals and financial advisers.

A few of the participants were skeptical about social media and were not sure it was worth their time.

Others saw it as an opportunity for accelerating the growth of their practice.

Who is right? How do you know social media will work?

I believe the answer is not about whether social media works, rather it is about taking action to attract clients and referral sources to your collaborative practice. 

Taking action is the key to growing your practice.

The more action you take every day to convey what you do, who you do it for and the value you provide, the more clients and referral sources you will attract.

The following are emails describing the "action" taken from people attending my workshop in New York and from a law firm retreat I conducted in London.

"Since the workshop, I have added lots of people to my Linked In account and rewrote my bio.
 I am using Constant Contact to keep track of my clients, lawyers I work with and a coach list. I have just sent my first Constant Contact email announcing a workshop I'm doing on creating a Vision Board for clients.
 I was able to figure out how to put a link to the announcement on my website. It's another way to get people to sign onto my mailing list.
 I've written an involved article on the pros and cons of the one and two coach models (or Neutral and Co-Coach) and I'm developing my email lists.
 

Thought you'd like to know that there's a lot going on around here with a lot of people."

Micki McWade, Divorce coach New York.

" I am just discovering the joys of LinkedIn and Twitter though it is a bit unnerving when complete strangers start "following" you.

What I have found though from my first steps along the social media highway is that the more you do/say the more people notice you. A simple example is that the number of people who have looked at my LinkedIn profile has increased markedly since I started tweeting. I haven't yet directly related that to an increase in referrals but I guess that will take a bit more time.

The other thing I have found is that you have to make time to do it - and that's the real challenge."

Gillian Bishop, Family Law in Partnership,London

Stay tuned for more "action" focused tips for growing your practice in upcoming blog posts. Let me know what is working for you.
 
I will share your tips with other professionals in the Family law and Collaborative Practice community.

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This week I wrote a blog post about how the choices we make today determine our success in the future. Today I read Seth Godin’s blog , Take What You Can Get? and he eloquently reinforced this message.

Godin talks about the temptation we face to take what you “can get” when your practice is struggling or the economy is slow.

We can all relate to this temptation:

• You want to build your Collaborative Law practice and meet your monthly revenue quota; you receive a call from a prospective client who wants to “crush” their former spouse. They want you to represent them in high-conflict litigation. Do you take the case?

• Your law firm’s value proposition is to solve problems for clients who have high asset/ complex family law cases. The only clients you have been attracting recently want the cheapest divorce possible and don’t care much about the depth of your expertise. Do you take these clients?

Without question, anyone who is in business will experience these temptations. What will separate you from the pack is how you choose to respond.

In Seth Godin's blog post he  suggests the following:

"There are two things worth remembering here:

1. Like bending a sapling a hundred years before the tree is fully grown and mature, the gigs you take early will almost certainly impact the way your career looks later on. If you want to build a law practice in the music industry, you'll need to take on musicians as clients, even if the early ones can't pay enough. If you want to do work for Fortune 500 companies, you'll need to do work for Fortune 500 companies, sooner better than later.

2. The definition of "can get" is essential. Maybe it seems like this gig or that gig is the best you can get because that's all you're exposing yourself to. Almost always, the best gig I could get is shorthand for the easiest gig I could get."

You can avoid the “can get” trap by knowing what success looks like for you and exposing yourself to the people, clients and cases that will move you toward your desired results.

I would like to hear about the temptations you face in your practice and your strategies or challenges for overcoming these temptations.
 

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How do you find the time to grow a practice that is in alignment with your most important goals? 

For many lawyers and collaborative practitioners, the greatest barrier to growing their practice is not having enough time to do the marketing activities that will result in attracting new clients and referral sources. 

One solution to overcoming the “time” barrier is to get clarity on your practice goals. Once your goals are clear, the next step is to make choices everyday that move you towards achieving them.

Successful lawyers and collaborative practitioners have made a deliberate choice about their commitment to growing their practice  and it is this commitment that has provided the foundation for their accelerated growth.

Making a commitment gives you focus and direction and helps you to make choices that are in alignment with your most important goals.

Many lawyers and collaborative practitioners believe they “don’t have the time” to implement practice growth strategies such as meeting with referral sources, attending targeted networking events, writing articles, giving talks, updating their web site or participating in social media, but what is really happening is they have made a choice that something else is more important.

We have more control than we think about how much time we have, and it is how we choose to spend our time that will determine our success. 

So next time you feel you don't have the time to meet with a referral source, learn about new advances in your profession or write an article that positions you as a thought leader in your area of practice, give thought to what you are committed to and how the choices you make today will affect the results you want to achieve in the future.

Ask yourself, “What matters most to me? What would I really like to accomplish? The answer to these questions will act as a guide for helping you to make choices that are in alignment with your most important  goals.

I would like to hear how you are managing your time to grow your practice. Please share your story on what is working or what your challenges are for finding time to grow your practice.

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You can build a practice that attracts desirable clients, allows you to do work that inspires you and brings fulfillment to your work. The first step is to identify what you want and then to listen to how your mindset may minimize your success. Many collaborative law practitioners want to increase their collaborative practice but limit their success before they even get started with a marketing plan. The story they tell themselves is , "I  cannot afford to only do collaborative cases" or "if I only do out of court work, I will be perceived as a "softer" lawyer and my referrals will stop."   By acknowledging  how you are creating your own fear, you will be able to overcome that fear and develop a marketing plan that is focused on what you "want".

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In a white paper recently published by Law 360 on lessons for law firms from the financial crisis, there is a section on business development including an article Getting Windows For Building Business In The Downturn By Shannon Henson. The article highlights a key strategy for lawyers in an economic downturn::

The best way to protect yourself is to make sure you are building up your own client base. If you do that, then no matter what happens, you will be okay.

One of the most important strategies for buidling your client base is to master how you communicate the value of your services to potential clients.

Your goal is to clearly communicate the value you provide clients. Communicate what clients want to hear, i.e. how you solve their problem, verses what you want to tell them, i.e. your credentials.

Description Based message

Many attorneys describe what they do based on a roster of their services or a list of their features. For example, the following message is a familiar description for family lawyers:

"We are a group of knowledgeable, dedicated professionals engaged in the practice of family law."

The emphasis is on the features of the group (knowledgeable, dedicated professionals) and on a description of the service (practice of family law) versus any beneficial outcome to the client. The client has to work hard to translate what this means to them.

Value based message

Compare this response to a family lawyer I consulted with on creating his core message. Through the process of creating his core message, the family lawyer internalized who his best client were, how he differentiated himself and the value of his service.

The result has been an increase in referrals from desirable clients. He is receiving web site referrals from clients who want what he does best.

A few weeks ago, he was at a networking event and when was asked what he did, he replied, “I help divorcing clients to reach solutions.”  One gentleman was listening and heard his unique way of helping divorcing clients and immediately asked for his card. The gentleman said, "I am in the process of getting a divorce and have talked to three lawyers who all said the same thing, you are the first lawyer who has talked about reaching solutions.” A few days later, the gentleman retained him as his lawyer.

Summary

The success this family lawyer experienced came from his ability to differentiate his practice and to convey the value of his services.

When the family lawyer talked about what he did, it was not about him and his credentials. He talked about the client, their problem, and his ability to help them solve their problem.

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If you want to motivate your team, firm or organization to achieve extraordinary results, read Seth Godin’s recent blog post, Achievable avalanche opportunities. In the post he writes what is required in a organization to get people excited to achieve remarkable results.

The two critical components to motivating a group include:

1. Have clarity on the outcome ( results) you want to achieve.
2. Select an outcome that is perceived as achievable.

He said it is highly difficult to get a group excited about “amorphous and ethereal” goals or about an outcome that is vague.

These components are nothing new and make complete sense once you read them. The key is to internalize there importance and put them into action.

How does this relate to effective lawyer marketing?

If you want to achieve break-through results in growing your practice or attracting desirable clients, your first step is to define the results you want to achieve.

Often times, this is the most difficult step in creating an effective lawyer marketing plan.

To answer this question, I recommend taking a step back from your day-to- day routine of serving clients, meeting deadlines and responding to urgent tasks to give deep and meaningful consideration to what defines success for your practice?

Gaining clarity on the results you want to achieve is the "proactive" work that allows you to build the kind of practice that gets you excited and helps you to motivate your group, firm or team to achieve extraordinary results.

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In a recent blog post by Nick Morgan, Nick talked about the two critical elements to increasing your charisma.

The following are Nicks tips:

First, increase your authenticity.  And that means being absolutely aligned in what you say and how you say it – content and body language.  You can’t be authentic if those two modes of expression are not aligned.

Second, increase your passion.  Focus in yourself on how you feel about the moment, the people you’re with, the situation you’re in, and then express that (see #1).

 Working on these two steps will create a virtuous cycle that will increase your charisma quotient as you get more and more practiced at expressing emotion authentically.

Nick has simply and succinctly named two approaches that will not only increase your charisma but also increase your effectiveness to grow your law practice. Research shows that over 90% of what you communicate is non-verbal, this means that you must first be convinced about what you are saying before you can convince anyone else.

Assess you personal passion and belief in the value of your work. What can you do to increase your alignment between what you say and how you say it?

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Building a successful law and collaborative practice does not have to be complicated or require you to give up your social life and the things that you enjoy.

The following is a list of simple and effective things you can do to grow your practice:

1. Routinely ask yourself, “What is my vision for my practice; what kind of work do I want to do? Why is this important to me? Write down the answer and then commit yourself to doing something every day to meet your vision. Commit yourself to excellence in your field, whether it is family law, finance, employment law,collaborative practice, etc.

2. Be selective about the work you accept. If you are constantly busy with work that is not consistent with your vision for your practice, it will be difficult to find the time or energy to grow the kind of work that will allow you to achieve your goals. Decide who your ideal client is and proactively attract this type of client to your practice.

3. Nurture and grow business from your top referral sources. Referrals come from people who know, like and trust you. The best way to gain trust is to develop a relationship with those who already know about you. This will require scheduling the time to get to know your referral sources and learning about their businesses and interests.
 
4. Provide remarkable service to your clients. Word-of-mouth marketing is by far the best marketing strategy for any service. The only way to get people talking about your service is to make the experience for clients remarkable -- then they will want to tell other people.

5. Have a web site  (and blog) that educates people about who you are, including what differentiates you and what is your "unique selling proposition" . Offer information that is of value to your prospective clients. Your message should connect at an emotional level with your target markets’ desired outcomes. A good resource for learning about creating a Blog is Lex Blog.

6. Share your success- help others learn and grow. The more you share your success and knowledge with other professionals, the more they will learn about you and your expertise.
 
7. Begin doing something towards building your practice today. The small events you do today will result in Big change for your practice in the future.
 

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Last week I received a question asking me, "What is the best way to help people find the switch to illuminate the light bulb in their heads about the crucial need for vision, mission and values?"

This is a common question I receive from Law firms, Collaborative groups, and businesses. For some reason, the thought of creating a strategic vision and mission is counter intuitive to professionals who want to accelerate the growth of their practice in a difficult economic climate.

The instinct is to go out and start “doing” an activity or even worse to respond or react to an event of “special marketing offer” that requires an immediate decision.

Accelerated results come from the power of a group or firm to work in unison toward a shared vision. It is similar to an elite group of rowers whose power comes from the synchronicity of each person working together. Speed and power is achieved by rowing in unison in the same direction. If one person is out of sync the whole group’s ability to succeed is challenged. If a few people are rowing out of sync, the results can be disastrous.

This is true in organizations and law firms, for example, before I conducted a strategic planning retreat for a collaborative law group, the organization had 12 committees all working in different and sometimes opposite directions. Board members had different opinions of what were they thought were the high priority activities for the organization. This created tension among board members and even worse reduced the efficiency of limited and valuable human and financial resources. The organizations members were questioning the value of their membership and getting frustrated with the lack of results they were seeing.

The group participated in a in two day retreat that was preceded by interviews and targeted strategic assignments for board members. In the retreat, the board clarified the purpose of the group which put everyone on the same page as to “why” the organization existed.

This lively discussion allowed everyone to listen and convey what they believed was the reason for the organizations existence. The value from this process was not just in coming up with a great mission statement; the value came from the dialogue and mutual understanding of the companies reason for being.

Once everyone was in alignment with the purpose for the organization, they were able to move forward and create a shared vision about what they wanted the organization to achieve.

After defining the vision and mission, the group efficiently and effectively developed a plan to translate their vision into results. The energy of the group was ignited because the retreat discussion was focused on the organizations most important results. An action plan was created and is now used as a road map for prioritizing agenda items at every board meeting. The plan is being followed and the group has experienced breakthrough results.

It is difficult to answer the question about illuminating the light bulb on the value of vision. However, my response would be, it is not what the vision is... it is what vision does. Optimal results are achieved when everyone in your team knows where they want to go (clarifies what success looks like) and are in alignment on how to get there. In other words, they are all rowing in the same direction.

Let me know if you are part of a team that is rowing in different directions. I will provide you with some ideas on how to get everyone working towards a common goal.  

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I recently met with a partner at a law firm who asked me to assist him in placing an article he had  written.  He said a few of his partners had recently published articles in various publications and he thought he should be doing the same.

I asked, "what do you want to accomplish by writing and placing the article?" After a short conversation, he defined the results he wanted to achieve -he wanted to increase his visibility among targeted referral sources.

Once we clarified his objective, we formulated a strategy for increasing his visibility among targeted referral sources. We developed three tactics for achieving this goal. One of the tactics included writing and placing articles in targeted publications.

Strategy defines the results we want to achieve and tactics are the actions taken to achieve the strategy. Tactics can  include, launching a blog, attending networking events, creating a brochure, advertising, revising a web site, social media ( twitter, Linkedin, you tube, etc.) etc. See Kevin Okeefe's post Law firms mistakenly focus on social media tactics over strategy .

Clearly there is a difference between a strategy and a tactic and the key to achieving optimal results is to start with strategy before tactics. We all understand this basic concept yet, the majority of people will start with tactics before strategy. Why is this?

In this mornings post, When tactics drown out strategy Seth Godin lends great insight into answering this question. 

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don't feel confident outlining one unless we're sure it's going to work. And the 'work' part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I'm going to post this." If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

Lawyers and collaborative law practitioners are great at executing tactics. You know how to get things done. By starting first with strategy, you will achieve your desired results.

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 Social media is the new buzz in growing your law practice.

Today I read about how the American Bar Association is using Twitter to help attendees and non attendees follow what is happening at the meeting. You can read the article at At ABA, Whole Lotta Tweeting Going On .

Last week I was interviewed for an article In the Wisconsin Law Journal, Jack Zemlicka wrote about Online networking has limits.

Every day we see and hear more about the virtues and issues related to social media and growing your law and collaborative practice.

In the last few months my clients have been asking me, what is Twitter and why do I need to know about it?  

Twitter is one form of social media that is also called micro blogging and is a communications platform that helps you to do the following:

• Share information with people interested in your firm, your business and what you do.
  
• Gather real-time market intelligence and feedback
  
• Build relationships with clients, partners and other influencers who care about your firm or business
  
• Communicate with a company (or anyone else) about your experience with their  service or products

No question, Twitter is an important networking tool. Why the resistance? The down side of Twitter is learning how to use it and where to start. My recommendation is to:

• Begin reading about twitter at twitter101
  
• Start slowly and spend 30 minutes a day learning about the value of social media
  
• Define your goals for what you want to achieve using social media
  
•  Monitor your results and tweak your plan if you are not meeting desired goals.

On a lighter note, a few weeks ago I was watching John Stewart and in the show he explored the question, “Why Twitter?  .

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Building a law and collaborative practice that attracts profitable and desirable clients does not have to take all your time and energy. You can implement a strategy that increases your visibility and credibility by working smarter and re-purposing  or recycling the speeches and articles you write.

The universal challenge law firms and collaborative groups face in building their practice is to manage the time it takes to execute marketing activities while maintaining a full case load of complex, time consuming client work. 

One solution to maximizing your marketing efforts is to re-cycle (repurpose)  your marketing strategies. For example, one of my clients recently wrote an article about a topic he was knowledgeable and passionate about. The article was published as the lead article in a Law publication distributed to 20,000 attorneys in the lawyers target market. The article for the publication was written for the legal profession. 

To maximize the return on investment for writing the article, we recycled the article into five strategies including:

1.      Create a speech from the article. My client prepared a talk based on the content of his article.  He used the speech to give a talk at a networking event that included over 100 professionals in his target market.  One success factor for a successful speech is to talk on topics that you care deeply about.  My client’s talk was successful because he not only knew his topic well, but he was also speaking from a place of personal interest and passion.

2.      Re write the article for a slightly different audience. The original article was shortened and re-written for the general public. The new article was published in a society magazine targeted to the affluent community in his target geographic area.
 

3.      Use the article in your firm or organization newsletter. The edited article was featured in the firm’s newsletter that was sent to over 500 lawyers, wealth managers and other professionals in the target geographic area.
 

4.      Order reprints of the article and include in correspondence to prospective or existing referral sources. The edited article was was included in follow up letters that were sent to attendees of the networking event.
 

5.      Design reprints of the article as an insert for your firm brochure. The article was designed to include a short biography of the lawyer and used as insert in the firm brochure.

Over five marketing strategies were implemented based on one marketing activity. The activity was writing an article about a subject the lawyer was highly interested in, knowledgeable and passionate about.

The key to a successful marketing plan is to execute activities that are in alignment with your strengths and core competencies. Once you create content that conveys value to your clients and referral sources, re-cycle your content for additional articles, pod casts, and speeches that keep you top of mind with prospective clients and referral sources. 

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What separates the lawyers who bring in the greatest amount of new business  in a law firm from those who struggle to maintain their marketing goals?  Lawyers who have mastered the art of referrals remain at the top when it comes to attracting new clients and profitable business.

How do you master the Art of Referrals?

1. At the core of building referral sources is trust. Trust is based on two components, First, do I believe you are credible and competent and second, do I believe you have my best interest at heart? If I believe you meet both criteria I will begin to trust you. However if I believe you are competent  but I do not believe you have my interest at heart, I will not trust you and most likely I will not want to make a referral to you. In an article written by Charles H Green of the Trusted Advisor, he summarizes the four specific principles governing trustworthy behavior as: 

• A focus on the Other (client, customer, internal co-worker, boss, partner, subordinate) for the Other’s sake, not just as a means to one’s own ends.
  We often hear “client-focus,” or “customer-centric.” But these are terms all-too-often framed in terms of economic benefit to the person trying to be trusted.

• A collaborative approach to relationships. Collaboration here means a willingness to work together, creating both joint goals and joint approaches to getting there.

• A medium to long term relationship perspective, not a short-term transactional focus. Focus on relationships nurtures transactions; but focus on transactions chokes off relationships. The most profitable relationships for both parties are those where multiple transactions over time are assumed in the approach to each transaction.

• A habit of being transparent in all one’s dealings.Transparency has the great virtue of helping recall who said what to whom. It also increases credibility, and lowers self-orientation, by its willingness to keep no secrets.  

2. Demonstrate interest in others. You must show a level of interest and concern for others before they will care about you or your work. When meeting with a prospective referral source, ask,  "How  would I know if someone was a good client for you?" This demonstrates your interest in their work and success. It also allows you to know more about the referral source so you can refer a client if you believe they are the best resource for the client.

3. Clearly and succinctly communicate what you do. You will not receive referrals if the person you are talking to does not  know your value on how you can assist their clients. Once you have learned about the person you are talking to, communicate the value of your work as it relates to them and their interests. 

4. Schedule time in your calendar to strengthen your relationship with existing referral sources and to meet new referral sources at targeted events and on line social media.  Building strong referral sources will require dedicated and focused time. Figure out how many referrals you need a month to meet your marketing goals and use this as a gauge to identify how much time you should be spending each week on building your referral network.

5. Provide exceptional value to clients. Your best source of referral is with existing clients. A referral given to someone from an existing clients carries the most credibility because this person can speak from a place of experience about your work.  Increase referrals from your existing clients by assuring they have a positive experience with your service.

6. Acknowledge every referral you receive. Once you receive a referral from a client or colleague, be sure to thank them for the referral. Your thank you can be a letter, phone call, lunch, bottle of wine or tickets to a special event. It does not matter as much what you do as long as the thank you is timely, personal and conveys your appreciation. 

Everyone can master the art of building referrals by paying attention to who you want as a referral source and creating a plan to build trust and relationships with those professionals.  The best plan will be easy to implement if it comes from a genuine place of wanting to learn about and bring value to others.

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For many lawyers and collaborative professionals, marketing can be one of the most dreaded tasks. Many lawyers believe it is a “necessary evil” and see it as an uncomfortable yet essential activity for growing a profitable practice.

Yes, marketing is essential for accelerating your practice, especially in today’s challenging economic time. However, it does not need to be uncomfortable or dreaded.

Marketing is often mistaken for advertising hype, slick promotions and selling. Marketing is not selling, particularly in your profession. Nobody wants to be sold a divorce but everybody wants to get their problems solved in a compassionate, understanding way so they can move on.

So what is marketing? Marketing is about choosing target markets and delivering superior customer value. Your best marketing strategy starts with being authentic. This means knowing who you are, including your strengths, your core competency and your best clients. One of the best examples I have seen on the power of being authentic is from a video showing how one man was able to convince the US senate to fund 20 million dollars for public television in 1969. View Fred Rogers' defense of PBS in front of the Senate in 1969.

Once you define who you are and who your clients are, the next step is to excel in your area of strength and focus. Then you are ready to communicate your (targeted) message to the world.

The key to enjoying marketing is to be who you are, and deliver exceptional client value. By excelling in these two areas, you will experience higher satisfaction in your work and your marketing efforts.

Begin your marketing strategy today by answering the following questions:

1. Why does my practice exist… what contribution am I making?
2. Who are my ideal clients…what are their goals?
3. How do I solve problems for my ideal clients better than anyone else?
4. How do I differentiate my practice?

Once you answer the above questions, put your plan in place by communicating your message through your blog, web site, twitter, articles, presentations and outreach meetings with your referral network.

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