Not everyone who needs a lawyer, accountant, consultant, or coach wants one. Not every prospective client, who wants professional services, can afford to pay your fees. The three steps to increasing your firm clients and revenue are: (1) define your target prospect; (2) tailor your marketing messages to what your target prospects want; and (3) master the sales-cycle conversation.
1. Define your target prospects
Too many lawyers and other professional service providers fish in the wrong pond or use the wrong bait. They do not know whether there are sufficient prospects who want the solutions they offer at the price they need to generate sufficient revenue for their business model. This may be a consequence of a practice area already supersaturated with other lawyers or productized services that are too similar or aiming at the wrong geographic or demographic target market. Alternatively, your price point may be too high, but could be reduced with the introduction of process efficiencies.
The first step is to research your target prospects to better understand what they want, what they are willing to pay, and where they are likely to notice you and what you are offering. Understand them demographically and psychologically.
2. Tailor your marketing messages to what you target prospects want.
Not all prospective clients, people who want the solutions you are selling, will develop an interest in your brand of solution. Your value proposition is your solution combined with the experience of working with you. It is the client’s point of view on what they want and what they think will make them feel better, less anxious, happier. It is how close you get to giving them what they want, not just what they need.
There are three categories of value that lawyer’s offer clients. You can create new value, protect existing value, or restore value lost. If you what you offer leads to ways for your clients to do what they want to do, then you create value. If it leads to ways to help your clients preserve what matters to them most, then you maintain value. If it leads to ways to make your client whole after being physically, emotionally, or financially harmed, then you restore value.
A good value proposition quickly tells clients why working with you will make their lives easier and better. That spikes curiosity and interest in your brand of solutions, rather than that of your competition.
3. Master the sales-cycle conversation
When a prospective client is curious about you and your firm because they want what you are offering, the next step is to have a conversation. Instead of thinking of this conversation as an opportunity to tell the prospect what you will do and how you will help, think of it as an opportunity to develop a relationship and demonstrate that you understand what they want.
The key to converting a prospect into a client is communicating in way that first engages the prospect. Different people are more receptive to different communication behaviors – the “how” of communication. Once engaged, influencing a person to become a client is a matter of saying the right things at the right times. Our Rainmakers Incubator Workshop is where you’ll have an opportunity to learn and practice these techniques.
