Marketing Your Law Firm After The Funnel Flips

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For years I’ve heard lawyers say that the practice of law would be so much easier if it weren’t for the darn clients.  Though said in jest, there’s always a bit of truth to the observation.  After all, our clients can be royal pains in the tuchas (Google it).  They call over and over again, they complain, the whine, they never pay on time … come on, you know the drill.

But I’ve been thinking about how we serve our clients a lot lately.  In fact, I’ve been in deep conversations with my partner about the state of our client service and how we can improve it.  We should do better.  Why?  Because we can do better.

Over the weekend I had a chance to read (actually, to devour) a terrific book called Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones (affiliate link right there, folks – use it) by Joseph Jaffe. Jaffe is a luminary in the world of social media as well as a video podcaster and blogger.

In this, his third book, Jaffe challenges us all to look at our existing customers as the best source of new business. This isn’t anything new, after all; we all know that it’s easier to get a client who has been referred by a former client, and that the referred client will be far less likely to be a tire-kicker when it comes to price.

My takeaway from this book is the notion that what we think of as great customer service is nothing more than a translation of, “we’re doing this because it’s less expensive and more time-efficient than actually making the effort to really wow the people who have put their faith in us.”

So on the one hand I’ve been thinking about our firm’s client service and on the other hand I’m being challenged by Joseph Jaffe to think proactively about the way my firm treats clients. Not how fast we return phone calls (though that does help), but rather how we handle those calls as well as what we do to serve our clients in a way that makes them happiest.  How we hold their hands.

For years I’ve used a Client Satisfaction Survey to try to improve how I did business.  I took the criticism on the chin gladly, knowing that the happy clients couldn’t help make my office a better experience.  Gimme all the bad stuff – I feed on it!

But over the past few months I’ve noticed emails coming into the office that indicated a lack of positive client experience.  Little things, small sentences that would have normally made me think of the client as “one of those” problematic ones we all know so well.  At the same time, our Client Satisfaction Surveys have been coming back pretty clean – responding clients have been happy with us.

I knew there was a problem, and Jaffe had splashed cold water on my face.  Again.  His stuff tends to do that, and I know it’s by design.  It’s one reason why I like him.

The problem is that there’s a serious disconnect between what we consider to be good client service and what the client actually thinks.  That’s why some clients are impossible to please, and why they call over and over again with the same questions.  We think we’re answering, but the clients aren’t quite understanding us.

We end up resenting these clients.  Maybe we avoid them just a little bit, returning phone calls and emails a little later than might otherwise be the case.  We pawn them off to a paralegal or the receptionist, and generally do everything in our power to get the heck out of Dodge.  The work gets done, but the client gets the short end of the stick.

There is absolutely no excuse for a client being treated this way.  Period.  Sure, there are some who love to cause problems – I’m not talking about the problem client.  I’m talking about the client who simply wants and needs extra attention and is perceived by us as being an annoyance.

The problem in our industry is that our clients do NOT actively refer new clients to us.  Some do, but most do not.  They have no reason to do so, that’s true – we can’t incentivize them, we can’t pay a referral fee, we can’t give away a prize for the top referrer.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized: our clients will refer new business to us if they are so incredibly happy, so enormously thrilled, that they simply MUST tell SOMEONE about how terrific we are.

For us to pour our hard-earned money into getting new clients, only to chew them up and spit them out the other side of the process, is criminal.  We spend real dollars to get people to choose us over someone else, and rather than building that positive relationship and turning the client into an evangelist for us we … walk away.  Leave them dangling, lost forever in the wide world.

We need to realize that the service we provide to our clients is wonderful, but they are more likely to remember their experience with the firm than the fact that they got their bankruptcy discharge in 4 months.  They’re going to remember how we worked with them by phone and email, how we anticipated their questions and answered them before being asked, how we went the extra mile and explained things in a way they could easily understand.

Our funnel needs to be flipped – and fast.  As a bankruptcy lawyer, who better to reliably dispel the myths than the people who had been through the process?  Who else would be able to bear witness to the fact that a meeting of creditors is a non-event in most cases, and that even a Hearing on Confirmation involves more wrangling behind the scenes than when in front of the judge?

So when I went to court today I asked my client a pointed question – “If my office could have done one thing to make you feel more comfortable and better-prepared for your meeting of creditors today, what would that one thing have been?”  His answer was telling, and remarkably helpful.  It pointed out that the way we’ve been doing business is most efficient for us, but not the most helpful to the clients.  And trust me when I tell you that I personally thought we were soaking our client in so much remarkable information as to be over-the-top.

So here’s my challenge to you, gentle reader.  I want you to look at your client list.  Right now.  I want you to imagine that each one of those clients is really a megaphone to their community, a voice to spread the truth about your office.  Now I want you to think about what YOU would say if you were one of those megaphones.

Would you say something bad?  Something good?  Or, more likely, nothing at all?

Do you make a positive impression in such an outstanding manner as to essentially force your clients to tell the world about you?

Not just “doing a good job,” or “getting a good result,” but really just blowing their mind and making them immediately call everyone they know to tell them how awesome your firm is?

Shouldn’t you?  Don’t your clients deserve that experience, and don’t you deserve their referrals?

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