Episode 180 – Managing Your Potential Client’s Perceptions Of Your Law Firm

As an attorney you studied for years, went to the law school, you put in a lot of time & effort and you really care about people, you have helped hundreds of clients in their legal situations. This is all what you know about yourself and about your firm, but what do people think and perceive about you and your law firm?

They might have a very different story and why so? Because you have positioned your firm that way, on your website, in your copy, in your Facebook ads, in your pay per click ads and overall in your online presence you haven’t focused on who you actually are and how you can help the people in their legal situations.

We’ve discovered a way to find out what people think about your firm and how do they perceive you as an attorney. Listen to the podcast for detailed take on this. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

 

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Today, I want to talk about perception. How your potential clients and the world and the market perceives you as an attorney. A very important lesson that I’ve had to learn continuous times and I still have to learn and struggle with. So I recently read an article online that talked about the published perception of business and the most surprising thing that the article stated was that the average person that they surveyed, they surveyed several thousand, thinks that American businesses keep about 37% of all the money they make after tax that goes to their bottom line when in reality, the average is about 6.5%.

So it’s almost 6 times the amount that reality shows that businesses keep, that people think they keep. No wonder why people think businesses are rich, business people are rich and possibly evil, big corporations make all this money. A lot of industries may not go above 10% and some are 1% like grocery stores and things like that. So there’s a huge chasm between what the public thinks and what the reality is. As an attorney, what does the public think about attorneys? A lot of them don’t like them. What do you think about yourself? You’ve studied for years, gone through law school, it’s a very prestigious thing, you’ve put in a lot of time and effort. You know a lot, you really care about people and want to help them get them out of legal situations. That’s what you know but what do your clients perceive?

Very different story here. So there is a big lesson to be learned in this in how you position yourself, how you look to the public, how your marketing looks, your website, your Facebook, your Google Pay per Click, any of these things that you choose to do. What you say on your website, what pictures you use and all that. It all melds into the public’s perception of you which is very important. It can mean the difference between getting clients and not getting clients, between losing them to competition and not losing them to competition. So what can you do? What’s one way that is pretty distinct that will help you improve yourself? That way is to record calls coming into your office and either listen to them or have them transcribed and look at the transcripts.

We had to do this recently for a client that asked us to mystery shop their law firm. So we recorded and people knew they were being recorded, all the intake people and we transcribed all the calls that came in. What we found was pretty shocking and what the attorney, the main attorney that was running the place found was pretty shocking. His intake people had scripts and they had expectations and none of them were saying anything close to what the script asked them to say. They were all over the place and we saw many points in conversation where they sabotaged the deal. They hurt the attorney’s positioning before they got on the phone. They certainly didn’t make them look good or build them up, saying “Oh Attorney Smith has 20 years of experience, he’s handled a lot of cases that are similar to yours. Very nice guy, hold on a second, let me get him on the phone.” No, they didn’t say that kind of stuff.

In one case, they even recommended a different law firm that they whispered would do it cheaper. Now these people knew they were being recorded and they still did this stuff and they still found out that they were sabotaging intentionally and unintentionally the conversion of this firm which had gone down quite a bit, that’s why they called us in to help. We made some improvements, they did end up letting one staffer go which was kind of crazy but we made the improvements and we keep recording their calls to this day. We are getting some very good data out of it but now we see that they are sticking much closer, not 100% but 80% or 90% close to the script and their conversion rate has more than doubled and things are looking good for the firm but it was only because they took this extraordinary step in their minds to record the calls coming into their firm to see what the public perception is and to manage it.

When people contact their firm, it’s critical to do this and it’s critical for you to do this. So even if it’s just you answering the phone, I highly encourage you to record your own calls. Maybe you don’t have to listen to them, I know you probably can’t bear it, it’s embarrassing. It would be embarrassing for me to do the same thing. Sometimes they are cringe worthy. No offense, I’ve cringed when listening to things, so transcripts are maybe a lot better and get help. Get 3^rd party help to analyze what’s being said and to help develop a script for you and make your presentation better and manage the perception people have of you because I’m telling you it can be vastly improved and you can get more business without having to necessarily spend more on marketing and make yourself look good. Why not do it?

It’s a very important part of the game. If you need help with this specifically email Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com or call (888) 225-8594.

 

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