Articles - Do Legal Practices have a Sales Culture?

10 Tips on How to Market Your Practice More Effectively

By Mark Ace

As a rule, Lawyers do little pro-active marketing or selling. Very few Practices have an effective sales and marketing plan. Selling is often viewed by these professions as a ‘grubby business’ and conjures up images of second hand car dealers!! (Which is the perfect excuse to do nothing!!) The more enlightened Practices understand that to do nothing is a risky strategy. So what should they do?

Here’s a 10 step process that will guarantee results…

1.  Where is Your Practice now?

Really understand your business’s ‘capability to develop’ in the future. Consider your internal strengths & weaknesses. Consider the market opportunities & threats. Be brutally honest with yourselves! Be as objective as possible.

2. Set Your Marketing Goals

What volume of business do you want and by when?  What type of business do you want and by when? Set yourself targets. Be clear (very clear) about your goals. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do!!

3. Key Questions of strategy

Ask yourself…

1.      Where do we make money?

2.      How good is our competitive position?

3.      What are the good sectors to be in?

4.      What do our customers think about us?

5.      How do you raise profits quickly?

4. Targetting

Given step 3 above, identify the services you want to promote and the target market opportunities you want to attack.

5. Differentiation

Identify (or create) how your services will differ from those of your competitors. Positive differences are your competitive advantages. Negative differences are your competitive disadvantages.

6. Sales Training

Get some sales training! For example, when you are bidding for business, you want to give yourself every chance to capitalise on the opportunity. Work on increasing the sales conversion rate.

7. Database

Develop and maintain a good database that includes all relevant details of your target market(s). Your database is one of your most important business assets.

8. Cross-sell

It’s a lot more efficient (and cheaper!) to sell additional services to existing clients than to keep finding new clients…there’s probably a goldmine in your back yard!! Educate your colleagues, so that cross-selling gets easier for them.

9. Make it easy for the customer!

Make sure prospects and clients can reach you easily and deal with you with the minimum of hassle.

10. ‘Educate’ and communicate

Regularly and systematically communicate with your target market audience through a carefully considered mix of promotional tactics, e.g. Free seminars, Direct mail, Newsletters, Web site, Email marketing, Press articles, Strategic Alliances, Networking, Public Speaking etc…

• Create an action plan for your promotions… Who’s responsible? What promotions? When do they happen? How do we measure results? Etc.
• Measure the success rate of differing promotional tactics
• With experience, fine tune and adapt the promotional tactics used

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