Turn Calls/Inquiries into Signed Retainer
Agreements and Cash in the Bank… Remotely
Interviewer: Wait a minute, people will say, “Oh a friend of mine recommended me,” but the truth is that they’re covering up that they’ve read reviews?
Josh: Well, everybody wants to feel that they know somebody. “I know somebody who knows you.” Part is they might think that they’re going to get a better deal. The other part is, if they’re saying that, like I said before, they’ve already kind of decided that they want to work with you.
The next trick is to give them the ability to work with you. Don’t put too many hurdles in front of somebody who’s already told you that they’d like to work with you. If somebody says that they were referred to you, it doesn’t matter if it was through the Internet or through their best friend who happens to be somebody you went to high school with. What’s important is they’ve already decided they want to work with you. Now how do you let them work with you? That’s what conversion is. Conversion is going that next step.
Interviewer: Was there a critical mass of “enough” reviews where this started to happen pretty frequently or did you pay attention to that?
Josh: I see, on any given site that I’m reviewed on, when there are five or more reviews on a given site, I get more, a lot of marketers like to use the word, “juice”. I get more “juice” out of it. I see more returns on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s, like you were saying before, Kudzu or Yelp or if it’s, you know, there’s hundreds of review sites out there. Some of them are better than others and some of them get you more referral juice than others but generally, you’ve got to have at least five.
One, anybody can write a review. Two, somebody can ask their friend to do it. Not to say that attorneys have ever been less than honest. I don’t mean to imply that at all but I know my reviews out there are all real and my clients do too. You can see it in the reviews. You can see the grammatical errors. You can see that somebody doesn’t talk like an attorney. They may talk like a telemarketer or they may talk like a dentist’s assistant. They speak differently even in the way they write and people can see that that’s real and that makes a big difference.
I knew one guy when I got out of law school that was having somebody else write reviews for him. I can’t say if it was an attorney who was doing this, I can’t say anything about that, all I’ll say is he had no value or benefit out of it for his business. I think it’s people can see through it. You know? People can see the honesty in my reviews. They see that it’s real people and that makes a big difference.
Interviewer: Well, one thing I’m getting from what you’re saying so far is that it’s got to be a goal of the attorney. Maybe it’ll take even six months or a year but their reviews will always have to be on their mind and, like you’re saying, they have to cultivate in a few select places at least, 5, 10, 15, and then it really starts to add a beneficial effect for everybody they talk to. They can point to the reviews’ credibility. People find them on their own, all that stuff. I think that summarizes what you’re trying to say, right?
Josh: I think so. I think that referrals are the best marketing, without a shadow of a doubt. Clients that come to me and are actually a friend of one of my previous clients or a sister or a brother of a previous client, they’re always the ones that hire me on the spot because they just say, “Hey, you treated my brother or sister, my cousin, my aunt, uncle well. I want to hire you.” I don’t have to convert them. They’ve converted themselves.
On somebody who’s coming from the Internet, they want to be there. They want to be able to say that it was somebody that they really did know and you’re just giving them an excuse. You’re letting them work with you and that’s what a lot of people that are doing this or any other type of sales don’t understand. Once you’ve got them with you, all you’re doing is giving them an excuse to work with you.
Interviewer: Tell me some of the ways that attorneys lost people or make it hard for people to work with them. I’m getting the feeling that you’re saying that attorneys push potentials away either intentionally or unintentionally so what have you seen that they do to do that?
Josh: Well, I think a lot of attorneys are going through life on the presumption that the way things used to be, are the way things should be now. I’ll explain that a little more. One of the things, when I got out of law school I was working for a gentleman who was about 80 years old and he had the feeling that you should always get somebody in the office, “You should always get them in the office,” because they’re more likely to sign if you can put the pen in their hand. I saw the fallacy in that because he was getting lots of people in the office but he was also getting lots of clients that he didn’t want. He was getting clients that weren’t paying. He was getting clients that weren’t paying enough. He was doing lots of work for nothing.
In what I do, I think that that’s a mistake, getting people into the office. I think that’s a waste of the attorney’s time. I think it’s a waste of the client’s time. I live in one of probably the biggest geographic court jurisdictions in the United States, which is San Diego County. You have probably 100 by 100 miles that is covered in one court jurisdiction.
I live in one of biggest geographic jurisdictions for courts probably in the U.S. It’s probably about 100 by 100 miles and if I make people come to my office that are in North San Diego and I’m in South San Diego, that’s an excuse for them not to hire me. “Oh, he’s too far away. It’s going to be too hard to work with him.” Well, I have people hire me in all of California in criminal matters and personal injury matters and small business matters. I don’t force anybody to come into the office. I have not met with somebody face to face for the initial retainer or for the initial contract in several years.
Every other attorney I talk to says, “Well I’ve got to get people office. I’ve got to get people in the office. I’ve got to get people in the office,” and I think that that’s a fallacy that has been perpetrated by listening to other attorneys on how they convert and I think it’s wrong. It hasn’t done anything for many attorneys and for some attorneys, it does less than that. It makes life more difficult because they get clients they don’t want. I think that’s a big part of it.