Turn Calls/Inquiries into Signed Retainer
Agreements and Cash in the Bank… Remotely
Interviewer: This is Richard Jacobs, and you’re listening to the 1st of a series how to better convert potential clients into retained clients for attorneys. I’m here tonight with Josh Hale. He’s a pretty good converter and a criminal defense attorney from the San Diego area.
Josh: Thanks for having me on the call.
Tonight we’re going to talk about how attorney Hale converts potentials into clients and hopefully provide some value to other attorneys that are listening on how they can improve their score, get more clients retained, make more money and have a better time of being a lawyer and not just scratching by to make a living.
One of the things that you said to me in previous conversation was: You can tell, if you’re on the phone with a potential, usually in the first two minutes, if they’re going to retain you or not. I found that kind of odd. How can you tell that? What kind of signs do you get from people that tell you that’s going to happen or not?
Josh: Generally, people, believe it or not, I think have made their decision before they call you. Particularly, we are in the age of Internet, people have an idea who they’re looking at. They have an ability to look at who we are, who other people think we are, including past clients. They can look at reviews of our office. They can look at cases sometimes. I handle civil work as well. People can see some of the civil work I’ve handled. It’s all public record.
People do their homework now. It’s not the same as even when I started. I’ve had my license six years, going on seven. When I started, people just were guessing. Now, a lot of people already know what they want to do. They’re calling the attorney more or less to determine whether their gut instinct was right and I think a lot of times that’s exactly what happens and you can hear it in their voice whether they’re interested or not from the get go.
We’re in a little bit of a different field in so far as most of the people that are contacting us want to talk to us. They may not like the fact that they have to talk to us but they already know that they need to hire an attorney. Some other things, when you’re selling widgets, for example, sometimes you’re creating a need. With attorneys, by the time people are contacting us, due to our rules of ethics, the need’s already there. They’re just trying to decide who they want to use.
Interviewer: Okay. I mean, for the past two and a half years, I’ve actually been providing leads to attorneys that are cold. Sometimes they will have come and looked at an attorney’s profile on a my site, maybe read some reviews, but sometimes they are cold. When you talk about people researching you, I mean, I’m sure a lot of the Internet leads that people get, people maybe haven’t researched the person. Can you tell if someone has researched you or not? Can you tell what kind of call it’s going to be when you first get on?
Josh: The people that research you like to tell you. They like to let you know that they know about you. I have a lot of people who tell me that they’ve seen reviews for my office, that I’m the sort of attorney that they want to work with. I think that that’s easily the best indicator is when someone blatantly tells you. People want to appear intelligent and they want to show people that they’ve done their homework. We’ve always been rewarded for showing our homework. I think the easiest way is when someone just tells you.
When somebody doesn’t tell you, they still let on indicators. They say types of cases that you’ve handled in the past. “Oh, I understand that you do DUI’s,” or, “I understand that you do injury work,” or, “I understand that you do medical malpractice.” I’m just throwing out different areas that attorneys do. I don’t do medical malpractice myself. But you hear someone who says that and you automatically know that they know something about you when they say that because it’s not just information they’re going to get from looking at your publicity on a DUI site. You’ve got to be cognizant of what they’re saying and you’ve got to actually listen. That’s a sales technique my Dad taught me a long time ago: listen to people. A lot of people don’t listen. They’re too busy selling to listen.
Interviewer: You spent a lot of time cultivating reviews on the web. I know for awhile you used Kudzu and, again, as I talk to you, it seems like you spend a lot of time trying to cultivate as many reviews as you could. You feel that’s done a lot of the work for you in selling?
Josh: I don’t feel that. I know that. I know people say that to me before we get started a lot of times. They’ve seen what other people have said about me. One of the things that I hear an awful lot, particularly on Internet leads, is, “One of your clients referred me to you.” I’m rather blunt, I’ll ask, “What client referred you to my office?” They’ll say, “Well, it’s somebody that you handled something for.” And I’ll say, “Well, the only reason I’d like to know is I’d like to personally thank them for sending you to my office” and if they ever come back to my office in the future, I’d like to let them know that I’ll make sure I take care of them and give them some sort of retainer discount or something along those lines where they feel that they’ve done something worthwhile.
I can’t offer retainer discounts for that, but I can always give somebody a discount to say ‘thank you’.” A lot of times when people start going down that path of, “Well, we heard it from one of your clients,” eventually they’ll say, “Well, what I actually did,” and they’ll stumble and eventually they’ll say, “I actually read about you on the Internet.” From there, I know the reviews are working. I know that they’re paying off and the time I’ve put into them is paying me back.