Pick Of The Pops
The 5 Mistakes & Myths That Stop Solicitors From Growing Their Practice
Pick of the Pops is a simple list to help you pass a stumbling block or to inspire you.
This month I cover the 5 most common myths/reasons/excuses I hear that stop solicitors from taking the action required to see the results that they want.
1. Worrying about what your competitors are doing and thinking that they are doing brilliantly without any evidence that what they are doing is working at all.
Straight in at number one this week, and it’s a biggy, being crippled by your competition.
The solicitor spends hours looking at their competitor’s website, driving by their office and calling the firm and hearing how friendly the receptionist sounds. Jealousy consumes him or her. They must be doing so well and making many, many more millions than their own firm. What’s the point of even trying, they think to themselves. They have clearly cleaned up in this town!
The good news is that in my experience there is absolutely no good reason at all for this to be the case! There is never any evidence that the competitor is doing better than the firm in question, just a ‘feeling’ that this is the case. This feeling takes all of the energy from the solicitor.
Stop doing this. It is a complete waste of your precious time. Focus on your own efforts, spend your 30 minutes every day working on your own firm’s marketing and you will soon forget about your competition.
2. Thinking that to attract more of your perfect clients you must start doing a new marketing tactic.
Hot on the heels of number one, we have another common myth. I need more clients. What new, shiny, exciting marketing tactic shall I implement now?
The answer is probably none.
99% of the time you can generate all of the clients that you want and need by simply optimising the marketing that you are already undertaking, for example:
- If Google Adwords is working, increase your daily budget to attract all of the clients that you are looking for or ask a professional to look over your Adwords campaign to suggest improvements (I do this free of charge for Marketing4Solicitors members; just email me on m4s@samsonconsulting.co.uk).
- If you send an email newsletter sporadically, start sending it every single month.
- Not having the meaningful conversation or following up all calls?Start doing this and you are unlikely to be required to spend any more money on any new marketing tactic.
- Does one of your blogs generate enquiries for your services every single month, but only one of them? Start writing weekly blog posts and have three or four times the enquiries coming from your blogs in the future. This tactic also then provides all of the content you need for your email newsletter above.
New is exciting, but often it really is not the answer!
3. Starting too many marketing activities at once so you do not have enough time to make any of them work.
Numbers two and three in the charts are very hot on the heels of each other, so I won’t say too much more, but just remember your time is precious.
Optimise one marketing activity so that it produces as many clients as it possibly can before rolling out new marketing tactics which are ill considered and not sufficiently planned.
4. Doing 30 minutes of marketing a day won’t change my practice, so I’m not going to bother.
Let me just repeat what I said earlier in this issue…
30 minutes a day for 5 days a week from July 2016 to December 2016 =
“45 hours spent working on your business.”
You can do an awful lot with 45 hours!
5. Not listening to me
I mean this one – strongly.
So many solicitors receive good, sound advice from me, based on my thousands of hours of experience of marketing law firms and then for one of two reasons ignore it.
Reason 1 – They fight the advice for some time before finally giving in, taking action and then seeing results.
At this point they say
“Why didn’t I do that sooner?”.
I know a lot of solicitors and a lot of business owners, and so many have a ‘self-sabotage’ button. They will do almost anything to stop themselves from achieving the results that they want to see.
I don’t claim to be a brain expert and understand why this happens, but I have seen it happen countless times to know that it is a serious problem. If you are paying me for advice, take the advice and run with it. Let the results speak for themselves.
I pay consultants to advise me on my business and I do what they tell me, even when I hear that ‘self-sabotaging’ voice inside saying “ignore them Nick, just keep doing what you are doing and it all will be fine” but I tell it to shut up and do what I am told. The results make me happy that I do this, so please, do the same for your business. When you receive my advice, take it and then don’t forget to thank me when it works. It is only polite after all.
Reason 2 – Someone else tells them something that contradicts my advice.
The someone else is often a friend with absolutely no marketing expertise who is as keen as you are to sabotage your business because they don’t want you to do better than them, or it is a lowly paid hourly worker such as a website designer.
Look, all day every day I work with solicitors to double or treble their turnover.
I know what works and what doesn’t.
I am here to fight your corner, but please don’t let yourself or your friends/web designers or others stop you from achieving the success that you deserve.
Take my advice, run with it and let the results be your counsel.
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill