In the beginning, you probably weren’t too picky about who hired you. You were starting your own law practice and you had law school loans to pay off and living expenses to meet. Your #1 qualifying factor for clients was probably a pulse.
However, as your law firm grew, you came to realize that not all clients are worth the money they pay you (if they paid you). You regretted taking on clients that demanded the moon and never wanted to compensate you for delivering it.
Hopefully, these experiences taught you a valuable lesson: To avoid bad clients that waste your time and resources, the best thing you can do is to create an ideal client profile for your firm and focus on attracting these types of clients.
If you are a B2C attorney, your ideal client profile should be a detailed description that includes income level, profession, gender, age, and other important demographic details. If you are a B2B attorney, specify business size in terms of revenues, type of industry, legal specialty (employment law, real estate, litigation), etc.
As you qualify prospects against your ideal client profile, you need to educate those prospects on how you work, what they can expect, how you charge, and what you expect of them as clients. If they voice objections, then they are most likely not a good fit for your law firm.
But you also need to set your law firm up in a way that positions it to attract top-tier clients who will pay you what you are worth. Here are five ways you can consistently attract your ideal client:
- Establish a professional, polished image.
Top-tier clients do not want to do business with law firms that appear to be unsophisticated or unprofessional. Luckily, it’s pretty simple — and inexpensive — to project a polished image. WordPress websites are easy to set up and manage with a number of professional templates available. You can handle many of your business functions — bookkeeping, invoicing, etc. — with software solutions or outsourcing. The point is, it doesn’t take a lot to create a professional business image that attracts high-end clients.
- Make your free content better than your competition’s paid content.
Blog posts, articles, videos, newsletters, webinars, and seminars show prospects that you are the expert in your practice area. These all provide the foundation of knowledge and trust that prospects need to hire you. Providing content and ideas that others may charge for shows prospects your depth and quality. If you have to outsource this work, then do it so you have the highest quality content available in your market.
- Price your services on the high end.
People will place value according to what you charge, and top-tier clients are turned off by low prices. Base your pricing on the value you deliver, and the valuable clients will come. You can even offer different services at different price points, but just be sure you always have a premium product offering.
- Showcase your testimonials with video.
Video testimonials are much more impactful than written ones because they are obviously genuine. Post them on your website, blog, and social media pages and provide prospects who ask with contact information for these references so they can follow up.
- Have a professional sales team to close deals.
Depending on the size of your firm, you need a dedicated team or at least an intake specialist responsible for handling calls from prospects. This is not a receptionist! This is not a paralegal or an attorney! This is a person who knows how to sell over the phone.
If your firm is fielding more than 10 leads a week from new prospects that are coming from different sources — your website, phone calls, social media, advertising, your newsletter, etc. — you need a customer relationship management (CRM) software system to help you track and manage these leads. A CRM system allows you to track every lead and see where they are in the sales process so good prospects don’t slip through the cracks.
