It’s one thing for prospective clients to inquire about your services and perhaps schedule an appointment, but quite another for them to actually keep the appointment and then be converted to paying clients. Too often, prospective clients break appointments or, after a free initial meeting, decide to take their business elsewhere.
In a recent webinar that was the fifth in ElderLawAnswers’ marketing funnel series, estate planning firm owner and author Alexis Neely outlined a system that has helped her achieve a nearly 100 percent client engagement rate and that was key to building her law practice from scratch into a more than million-dollar-a-year business in just three years. Attorneys may think that their marketing isn’t working, Neely pointed out, but it may in fact be working – it’s just that client engagement is falling short.
Neely began by relating two war stories that inspired her system, both of which occurred shortly after starting her own estate planning practice in 2003. In the first, after spending four hours with prospective clients and finally quoting a fee of $5,500, the clients accepted, but later called and said they’d decided to go with an attorney who had quoted a fee of less than half hers (and who would do much less for the clients, as well).
The second story involved three last-minute cancellations in one day, a loss of $10,000 in potential business that Neely had been counting on. She said she “almost threw in the towel at that point.” Instead, she hired a consultant for $12,500 to address her systems.
Her resulting system for engaging clients is one of six systems to transform a practice that are outlined in her free law business manifesto, www.getthemanifesto.com Neely said that her client engagement system has made possible a consistent, steady, and predictable revenue stream. Its two principal hallmarks are giving the client early buy-in by assigning them “homework” before the initial meeting, and not quoting a fee but having the client choose their own fee.
“Unsell” Yourself and Assign Homework
One of the first steps in Neely’s system is to devise a script for client inquiries that “unsells” your services, one that has you immediately shifting from a purveyor of legal services into the role of trusted advisor who is going to help the prospective clients make the very best decisions.
When the caller asks how much things will cost, the typical firm might give a fee range or offer a free initial consultation, neither of which is the right answer, according to Neely. The right answer is: before we can talk about it, we have to know what you truly need. Neely advised saying something like, “We don’t sell documents in this law office. What we do is guide families to the right solutions for them. Far too many people are gaining the false security of documents or using online services that are trained in providing documents, but then unfortunately what their families find out at the end of their life or in the event of incapacity is that those documents don’t work. The plan is one-size-fits-all, the assets not structured properly, and the family ends up in court. We’re not willing to allow that to happen to anybody who comes in to meet with us.”
At Neely’s firm, prospective clients are invited in for planning sessions on either family wealth planning or life and legacy planning. The family wealth planning session normally costs $750. Prospects are told that during this session the attorney will look at what would happen now if something were to happen to them and then how, based on that, they would want things to be different. Prospects are then invited to choose the solution that best meets their needs based on what’s most affordable, efficient and effective.
Key to reducing or eliminating meeting cancellations is giving the prospect a way to get the initial meeting for free. The free meeting is possible only if they do certain things before the meeting, things that get them engaged in the project of working with the firm. One engagement tool is “homework” that the prospect must submit prior to the meeting. This includes the conventional estate planning worksheet, but Neely’s version goes into more depth than just asking about assets and statements, getting into the family’s values and stories as well. “If you get your prospects working with a piece of homework before the meeting,” Neely said, “they are far more likely to engage your services and not even to shop around.”
To assure that the homework is done and submitted ahead of time, Neely’s firm makes it a part of their “shock and awe” pre-meeting packet that is sent to the prospective client. The packet includes a folder customized with the client’s name on it to hold all the statements they have been asked to bring into the meeting. Neely said that the simple addition of customizing the folder with the client’s name has increased her engagement rate by about 15 percent. She strongly recommends against just sending this packet electronically. Her firm sends a hard-copy version by USPS Priority Mail as well, which gives it substance and weight.
In addition to getting the homework in before the meeting, the $750 fee is waived only if the prospect also secures their appointment with a credit card. Neely acknowledged that some attorneys may be uncomfortable with asking clients to do this, but she presented testimonials from two attorneys who had initial reservations but who have done it successfully.
Getting to the Transformational Question
Neely stressed that getting buy-in from clients also requires a script for the entire meeting. She suggests embedding three key stories that show prospects “why you are the type of lawyer you are and why they want to hire you instead of somebody else.” For example, don’t just say “we make sure your trusts are funded”; the prospect won’t understand that. In her case, Neely tells the story of her father-in-law, who had an estate plan in place that had cost him $3,000 to create, but when he died the family learned that the plan had never been kept up to date and that assets had never been transferred into the trust. To her horror she learned that this wasn’t malpractice but common practice. She pledged then and there, she tells the prospects, that her firm would never be that way. A client hearing that story, she said, will inevitably think to themselves, “I don’t want to go to one of those law firms that’s going to charge $3,000 and not have a trust funded.”
Next in the script is taking the client through a series of questions. These should be very specific questions designed to get your prospects to tell you why they need to hire you (or why they don’t need to hire you). Then you ask them the transformational question, the key to the fee-quoting system, which is: “Out of all the things we’ve talked about today [list them], if you could take care of only one of them today, what would be the most important one?”
When they give you the answer, let them know that you can take care of all of what they talked about (assuming that you can). At this point, the client in effect chooses their own fee by choosing one of the firm’s packages. Neely’s firm offers clients a choice of three packages: a Family Plan, at $2,000-$4,000, a Trust Plan at $4,000-$6,000, and a Wealth Plan at $6,000-$8,000. (Elder care practices might have three additional packages, she noted.) Her packages are all built around foundational revocable living trusts. The Wealth Plan is a fully funded plan, the Trust Plan is funded by the client with the firm’s full support, and the Family Plan is a will-based plan for families that don’t mind if their assets go through the court process or don’t have assets that would go through.
“The way we present these packages,” Neely said, “shows them how we’re helping them make the best decision and choose the most effective, affordable and efficient plan for them and their family. We’re never trying to sell them more than they need because we’re on their same side.”
Once the appropriate plan has been chosen, move immediately into the design of the plan and have everything you need in that meeting to collect payment. Neely said she used to go into the initial client meeting with only pen and paper. Now she goes in with a folder her client services person has prepared with everything she needs to design the plan, quote fees and collect payment.
In addition to giving her a client engagement rate of 97.5 percent, Neely said her system has allowed her to train a client services director and hire Of Counsel attorneys so that she needs to be in the office only a few days a week.
Neely’s webinar is part of an ongoing series of webinars titled “The Elder Law Marketing Funnel.” For more information about the funnel and upcoming webinars, click here.
To view Neely’s hour-long webinar, click here.
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