Should solicitors offer free consultations? It will help to bring in more work won’t it? Surely it is a good thing? Read on to discover why solicitors should not offer free consultations.
There is simply no value in free anything.
If you provide free consultations to your prospects, they do not appreciate the value of your services. What is worse is that you feel that you have provided value and received nothing for it, so you resent it a little. Sometimes a lot.
What often happens with these ‘free consultations’ is that people spend the time with you but then often instruct someone else, who they are happy to pay for the initial meeting.
Being an adviser to law firm owners and other businesses, I experience this quite a lot.
People, often friends, ask my advice on what they should do to grow their business and until recently, being a person that wants the best for my friends and colleagues, I tell them what they need to do. However, because they haven’t parted with any of their hard-earned cash, they don’t take action. I feel like I have wasted my time and feel disappointed for them that they do not do what they need to do to obtain the results that they wish to achieve.
Now I am not saying that you do not use free to any extent. In fact, you must, but there has to be a ‘fair exchange of value’.
For example, on your website you must offer a ‘free initial enquiry’ so that prospects can contact you without fear of a large bill, but note the word is ‘enquiry’ and not ‘advice’. In exchange for their time and contact details, allowing to you to follow up, your prospect can have a free chat with you.
On that call, you have the ‘Meaningful Conversation’ with them (covered in depth in The Law Firm Growth Formula book on Amazon – or two free chapters here: //www.samsonconsulting.co.uk/law-firm-growth-formula-grow-law-firm/two-free-chapters/) to find out what matters to them about their current situation, but you do not provide legal advice (which fee earners always try to do). If you do, more often than not you will lose the instruction. What you do whilst having the Meaningful Conversation is to discover what matters to your client about this legal transaction and then explain why your service is perfect for them (if indeed it is).
You might think that I provide free advice on this blog post, but there is always a ‘fair exchange’ in that you are giving up your valuable time to read it. If you like what you read, more likely than not you will download my guide at the bottom of this page to continue our business relationship.
So my strong advice to you is to sell a free enquiry from your website, but never, ever, provide free legal advice or consultations until there has been a fair exchange of value. It will work better for you and for your clients.
What else should solicitors do and not do?
Click the button below to discover what you must be doing to win new clients (and perhaps as importantly what you should not be doing):
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