No selling, no marketing – how you can easily attract quality clients

Even if you are not a natural salesperson or marketer, there are viable ways for law firms to attract highly sought (and very valuable) referrals, writes Colin Ritchie.

One of the things with which many professionals get uncomfortable is selling, closely followed by marketing. These skills are generally not what got you into law in the first place and they take you away from what you really enjoy doing, which is practising law. Nevertheless, in order to prosper, your firm needs quality new clients. To achieve that, surely you need to be able to market the practice and sell your wares to prospects to convert them to clients, or do you?

My recommendation is that if you do not enjoy selling and you do not enjoy marketing, do not do them; well, not in the traditional sense at least. You can still have a successful practice and, importantly, attract quality new clients by just being a lawyer.

Just to be clear, does that mean that I am saying you do not need a good website or do not need to worry about having a good LinkedIn profile? Of course not. They are a given in this day and age and if you do not have them, you are not in the game and probably do not deserve to be. What I am saying is that by concentrating on developing your practice’s referral strategy, you can eliminate both selling and marketing in the traditional sense.

Turning prospects into clients

I was working recently with the principal of a small law firm and he was lamenting his lack of selling skills in ‘closing the sale’, or turning a prospect into a client. He deduced that he would have to work on improving his sales skills to get better at this. I asked the question: “Do you have the same problem when the client is referred to you?” His reply was: “No, of course not. When they are referred to me, they are ready to buy my services. I don’t need to sell anything.” His selling problem was solved with the answer to that one question. To ensure that you do not need to sell your services, make sure that when new clients turn up that they are there to buy. Make sure that they are referred.

So much for selling. What about marketing, you say? Referrals are by far the biggest source of new clients for most firms, according to Macquarie Bank’s Legal Benchmarking 2015 survey and most professionals will tell you that referred clients are often their best new clients. So it would make sense to concentrate your new client-attraction strategies on that area. Many professionals in other fields of endeavour only attract clients by referral without doing any ‘marketing’ at all, so surely lawyers should be able to do the same.

But how many firms do you suppose have a system in place to ensure that referrals happen in a predictable manner? For lawyers, there are two main areas from which referrals come; your professional network and your existing clients. To turn on the referral tap in a predictable manner, it requires a different approach for each.

Tapping into professional networks

Let me first address the area of referrals from your professional network. Forget endless cups of coffee with prospective referrers from your professional network. If you have nothing of value to add to the conversation, you are just wasting your time and their time, with little prospect of predictable results. It also smacks of desperation.

In its excellent Referral Marketing Study, Hinge Marketing identifies that the key concern for potential referrers – and something with which they must be comfortable – is knowing that a firm has the expertise to undertake the work for which it is being referred. I would add a second concern; the referrer needs to be convinced that the client will have a good experience in dealing with the firm to which they have been referred. I would suggest that this concern is the one that stops many potential referrers from ever making any referrals. If the client experience is poor, this will ultimately reflect poorly on their judgement.

Those two points – having the legal expertise to do the work, and ensuring that the client has a good experience – are not marketing issues, of course. They are simply attributes of running a good practice. The key then is to demonstrate that you have both of those attributes to the right potential referrers and referrals will surely follow.

If you are the one wanting referrals, you will need to make the first step, as referrals are unlikely to flow without it. You are unlikely to get value (referrals in this case) without providing value first. So it is a matter of deciding how you will provide value to your referrer (and, indirectly, to their clients) in a way that positions you as having the skills and the bedside manner to help their clients. Approached this way, your professional network referral strategy does not have to be ‘marketing’ in the traditional sense.

Getting referrals from existing clients

Referrals from your existing clients are a bit different and therefore require a different approach (for some fairly obvious reasons). First, your clients are unlikely to be lawyers. That means the majority of your clients are unlikely to have any ability to judge you on your legal skills. But they will judge you. They will assess you on the things that they do understand about their dealings with your firm, which may be quite different from how your professional network judges you.

Another fundamental difference with existing client referrals is that most clients only have one lawyer, whereas your professional network may well know many. This means that even though you may provide better client service than other competing lawyers, your existing clients do not know that and are judging you on the broader view of all the other businesses with which they deal.

These fundamental differences simply mean that your existing client-referral strategy needs to be focused on standing out from all other businesses, which well may have nothing to do with law at all.

The niceties do count, after all

One aspect of existing clients which is very appealing is that you already know them. You know which ones you really like and, conversely, which ones you do not like. Life is short and, given a choice, you would prefer to deal with clients that are great to deal with and provide you with the work that you most want to do.

This aspect becomes doubly important when you recall the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’. In other words, nice clients tend to know other nice clients. Successful people tend to know other successful people and so on. You can simply pick the attributes of your existing clients that are important to you and ensure that these are the clients that refer.

I completed my professional studies with little focus at all being given to marketing or selling skills. Consequently, these areas still feel uncomfortable to me many years later. This did not stop me from building a successful practice, though, and it should not stop you either. It did, however, take some years for me to identify the observations that I have made in this article and realise their importance. Once I took action in this more focused way, success came very quickly.

By focusing on developing your referral strategy for both your professional network and your existing clients, you really can attract clients in a totally professional way – without resorting to marketing or selling as you know it.

Colin Ritchie is a director of Ritchie Business Solutions, a consultancy which specialises in marketing and profitability issues for small law firms.

www.ritchiebusinesssolutions.com.au