Today we’re excited to share a presentation by Brian Reidy from MaxLawCon 2021! Tune in to learn more about sales and making a client’s life better based on what you have to offer.
Brian was a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney. As a prosecutor, he successfully upheld convictions of murder, home invasion, and burglary. He spent also two years in the Juvenile Division, where he worked closely with the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), the Office of the Public Guardian, and the Public Defender to find permanent solutions for Illinois families involved in suspected child abuse, neglect, and/or dependency.
Many years ago, Brian had to face a custody battle right when he was hired by the Cook County state’s attorney. He was a brand new attorney, and he was suddenly involved in a custody battle. Brian was scared. He didn’t expect to be in this situation and didn’t know what to do. Many people think that lawyers know everything, but the reality is he didn’t know anything about child custody at that time, so he was scared! Brian sat on the other side of the attorney-client table, he didn’t know what to expect or what to do.
After gaining custody of his son, he learned how to help people in a similar situation. He used his personal experience, and then he gained additional professional experience with the state’s attorney, as well as in private practice. Brian has taken these personal and professional experiences, and he went out on his own because he believed there was a better way to help people through these difficult times in their life.
1:12 sales
4:24 where are they now, and then where do they want to be
8:05 what is going to happen next
12:11 I ask questions, you give some answers
16:28 time, money, and reputation
19:53 that’s the option I want
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Transcript: Sales That Convert with Brian Reidy
Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2021. Keep listening to hear Brian reedy as we share his talk sales that convert. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.
Speaker 1
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Brian Reidy
Brian reedy with really law office and I’m going to kind of walk you through some of my sales stuff. As you heard, our firm is grossed over a million dollars. We do divorce in Chicagoland area. And I don’t do any consultations, I don’t have my attorneys do consultations. And in many ways, I believe that attorneys do consultations wrong. And I’m going to explain how and why it’s going to be very difficult than 20 minutes, but I’ll do my best. A couple things fundamentally, you have to understand and believe that what you’re offering a client is going to make their life better. If you don’t stop now find something else to do. You see, when most people think about sales, they get queasy, they think this guy, right? The guy that’s pushy, that’s going to be selfish, that they’re thinking about themselves. They’re dishonest, they’re doing something to somebody, the reality is sales is not something you do to somebody, it’s something you do for somebody. But in order to do that, you have to understand that sales are a an emotional decision, justified by logic, okay, and I’m gonna say that again, because attorneys don’t want to believe that it’s an emotional decision later justified by logic. You ever hear somebody talk about a car, they talk about, oh, I got a great deal, right? That’s the logic they’re trying to justify, or is really safe vehicle. Now you probably like the smell of a car, maybe you like the look, whatever it was, there was some emotional connection that you had, and then you later justify it with logic, if you understand that, you’re going to be able to convert much better when it comes to sales. You see, the reason why lawyers are typically not good at sales, is because we think with our brain, we think with the you know, you ever see the matrix, you got the two pills, or one of them, you see the world differently. We took the one pill and now our views fucked up with the world. Okay, everything is a problem. Everything’s litigation, we see things differently, we start hearing facts, and we start analyzing it as a fact pattern in law school. But you know what, that’s not how people think they’re not coming to you, it’s a fact pattern. They’re coming to you with a real life problem. And when you start thinking, like this is a fact pattern of, okay, I know this, this is A, B, and C, we’re gonna have to do this, we’re gonna have to do that you’re not listening anymore. You’re trying to solve a problem. And again, during the sales consultation, you should not be talking about any legal advice, I will go so far to say that if you provide legal advice during the consultation, you may be committing malpractice, okay? Meaning you’re getting one version of events for maybe 30 minutes to an hour, especially if you do any litigation. You know, there’s another side of the story. So if you give them any advice of what to expect, or what those outcomes may be, you are probably doing more harm to you, your firm and that client at that meeting, the meeting, the sales meeting is about making a decision. That’s it. It’s not about what legal strategy we’re going to do. It’s about making a decision to change your life. Sales is something you do for somebody, you have to remember that this is not about you, it’s always about the client. And if you can stop thinking how you would feel you’re going to be able to do things better for a client. And the way to do that is to ask more questions. The questions that we asked should not be very complex. It should be stuff like, tell me more about that. Why does that matter to you? In fact, in our sales script, we have about six questions, total. And those are the types of questions they are. And I’ll share some more with you here in a moment. But you have to understand why did the clients come to you in the first place? There’s been some wonderful speakers at this event. And they’ve talked about marketing, and that’s wonderful. That’s a foundational moment of where are they now? And then where do they want to be? Their problems usually fall into one of three categories. And there can be permutations off of that. But time, money and their reputation in pretty much any area of law, meaning time is at issue. Maybe they’re gonna go to prison. If they don’t make an action. Maybe they’re about to die. Maybe they need a divorce quickly. Maybe something is going to be taken away from them, maybe their children, their family, they’re going to lose time with loved ones. What about their money? What kind of money is at stake? Maybe if you represent someone in the DUI, their CDL is online that provides their livelihood for their family, maybe they’re going to be paying maintenance or alimony, or a lot more money to the government that they don’t want to pay. The most underlooked one, I think, is reputation. And the reason I think reputation is underlooked is because as we get older, we try to pretend like things don’t matter to us, like things don’t hurt our feelings. But you know what I’ve come to realize, I do care. I care what my peers think of me, I care of my staff thinks of me, I care what my family thinks to me, Well, how are you going to feel as a father, if you don’t take action? How are you going to feel as fill in the blank if you don’t take action about the problem that brought you in here today. So as we went through the questions, it’s really important to probe and you’re going to find out which one of these things really impacts the client the most. By doing this, you’re also going to be able to provide better service, which is going to lead to higher client satisfaction, higher employee satisfaction, and overall more money in your pocket. Now, I said Money in Your Pocket, but I want to focus on profit. Profit is really important here, because I’m not talking about money in this situation. Normally, we think of your revenue minus expenses equals profit. In this circumstance, I’m talking about both sides of the transaction should make a profit. And what that means is you are exchanging something, you value less for something you value more, something, you value less for something you value more in the client’s situation, they’re saying, I would rather give you my money, then expend the time that it would take for me to learn this. And you’re saying, I will take your money and give you my time, or my service by widget, right? So it’s really important that you understand this, because one of the most common objections and sales is cost too much. Right? What does that really mean? They’re saying I don’t value what you’re selling more than the money in my pocket. So you have to work on discovering that true reason why they came in. Okay. So, yeah, truth. Truth be told. I looked at these slides for the first time last night. So for those high quickstarts in the room, yes, procrastination. So these are, again, some of the objections we talk about. We need to focus on what they want, making it profitable for them, and not just what we want the money. So if you don’t do that, right, you’re going to get these objections they’re not going to fall through. Okay, let’s talk about the actual script and the blueprint for the sales consultations. One thing that I want to kind of set up is there’s some overlap of words. Right now I’m using the word intake. Now, intake can have different meanings. We’ve had some great speakers at this conference, that talk about intake. What I mean by intake is the time you received the lead up to the scheduling of the appointment and making that happen. Okay, so this was all an orchestrated script, you need to make sure that the meeting is confirmed. Are they meeting in person? Are they meeting online? Is it very clear how this is going to take place? Do they have the zoom link, what is going to happen next, make sure you set them up for success. For example, John Fisher does a wonderful shock and awe package, if that’s going to happen and you want somebody to see that make sure you say you’re going to get a package and in that package is going to be some really important material, I want you to bring that to the meeting or have it filled out whatever you want them to do next, it’s really, really important that it takes place here. The other thing you’re going to do is you’re going to talk about your salesperson. Now, you may be the same person in your firm, you may be intake, you may be sales, you may be receptions. So don’t talk in the third person or something like that and say, you know, but if you have multiple people, you want to build them up, right? So you say, Hey, you’re going to be meeting with Joey. Joey is amazing. You’re in great hands. All that does is it gets that client primed, ready to meet with Joey or whomever they’re going to meet with. Once you get that appointment schedule. You need to make sure they show up. How do you do this? Well, depending on how far out the appointment is you need to make sure they’re confirmed. There should be text messages, emails, phone calls, however you need to do it, you need to make sure they show up. Now the day of the appointment. Again, your receptionist or whomever is at the front desk should know who’s coming in. If you’re meeting with a new prospective client named Paul at 1pm When the door opens before one o’clock have them say are you Paul? You know, would you like some water? Would you like some coffee? Make them feel comfortable? Understand they’ve got a problem in their life that’s caused them to take action.
Speaker 3
Have you ever felt overwhelmed with everything there is to do within your legal practice? How do you keep up with your legal work while making time for growing your practice and attracting clients? do important things like deadlines and even your family falls through the cracks? This is why you You should join us at the number one conference for legal entrepreneurs, Max law calm. We’re going to be focused on helping practices scale and bringing calm to the order. This conference is curated in order to accelerate your implementation. Based on where you are in your legal practice, we’re going to help you identify exactly what is most important right now. When you leave Mac’s law Comm, you go home with complete clarity, focus and a plan to make 2020 to your best year ever. And not only your best year in terms of revenue, but your best year in terms of time, time back with your family, more time to do the work that is in your zone of genius. Only taking the clients that you like, and more money in your pocket. It’s all at the maximum lawyer conference. Max law con is a two day event on Thursday, June 2, and Friday, June 3 In St. Charles, Missouri, seats are filling fast grab yours today at www dot max law con 2020 two.com.
Brian Reidy
I think my friend Billy terrazzo, yesterday tried to retail location set it didn’t really work out. So that means most of us here don’t have a location where people just are walking by. Right. And they say I just was walking by your office and I was thinking about what is the divorce, I’m just browsing for a divorce. Like, that doesn’t happen, right. So make sure that we’re greeting them warmly friendly, make sure that it’s a well orchestrated script, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to actually go through with our meeting. Now we have some key objectives during our meeting. This is our overall blueprint, first doing things we want to do. You can do them really in any order. But you want to assure them that there’s some confidentiality, even though they’re not meeting with an attorney. It’s just like your paralegal. Your paralegal is covered by attorney client privilege, as well. So you would say something like, Hey, we’re going to be talking about some difficult things today. So I want to assure you that everything is covered by attorney client privilege, is that okay? They’re gonna say yes, of course, they’re gonna say, yes. What this does is it starts to develop the report, I ask questions, you get some answers, right? start them off with some softball, easy, easy questions. Now, the next thing you want to do is you want to set a timeframe. This is really important for people that are do their own consultations. But you want to set out how much time do we have for this? For three reasons, okay, we’re gonna say, Hey, we got three reasons why we’re doing this. One is we want to make sure that they have enough time to make decisions. Because during this process, we’re going to take them to an emotional place, we’re going to be talking about their problems, the last thing you want to do is get them in that spot, and then say, Do you want to make a decision? And they say, I gotta pick up my kids from school. So you got to get that out of the way. Has anyone been in the consultation, they want to get out of where they’ve got someone crazy? And they’re like, Oh, my God, this is going terrible. Well, that’s the other reason why this time is going to work, right? Because you’re now gonna say, Geez, Marco, I see, we’re almost out of time. I thank you so much for coming in today. But I do have this up. As I mentioned, I only had 45 minutes. But let me give you some resources that might help you and you can kind of start walking your person out the door. The last thing it does is it helps build credibility. So if you tell them, you got 45 minutes, and you’re at minute 40, you can say, hey, Marco, we’re going through some really important stuff right now, I know I only said 45 minutes, but I can make 15 more minutes, does that work for you? What that does is you just told him you give a shit about his time that you respect him. And the firm respects you. So that’s really, really important, then you’re going to propose an agenda. I say propose an agenda, because you want to make it clear that they have the right to say no. Now, if your client wants to fight your agenda, how do you think they’re going to be as a client? Okay, maybe there’s some exceptions to it. But you what you want to do is you want to give them a cadence of what’s going to happen. So first thing we’re gonna do is we’re going to collect some background information, we’re going to talk about some of your finances, some of the people involved in your case. And then we’re going to talk about what brought you in today. And after we talk about that, if we’re able to help you, we will propose some solutions. Now we’re not able to help everyone. But if we are, we’ll do that at the end. Does that work for you? Most of the time, they’re gonna say yes. Now, what we’ve done now is we’ve opened the door. These are some script examples. I can send these to people if they want to. But now when we get into the actual script, we have opened the door to make this a systematic therapeutic kind of transaction. Well, we can ask them all the questions we want. We can ask them about their bank accounts, we can ask them about their credit card accounts or retirement accounts, whatever we need to ask them about, okay, because we’ve already said, this is confidential, and we need to get this information in order to go forth. So when you do get to objections about money, you may now know about any retirement accounts they have, you may know about their credit cards and the credit card limits and it doesn’t feel awkward now that you’re now trying to ask it at the end. If you’ve already got that information. The other thing we’re going to be asking about is who else is involved in this? Right? Who else is impacted by this? Maybe it’s family, friends, relatives, neighbors. If we have other people that are impacted by this situation, then maybe we have people to talk to about getting money or CO signing or things along those lines. Again, you don’t want to wait till the end to ask for this information. Because it makes that makes it difficult to close that gap. Once you’ve now gotten through this part, then you just get to focus on the questions. Okay, tell me what brought you in? And really, this is where it feels like there’s gotta be more to it. But there’s really not. It’s why is that important to you? Can you tell me more about that? Can you clarify what you mean by? How are you going to feel if you don’t take action? What happens to you, if you don’t take action, you’re just asking them to basically tell you their story, and explain why they need your help. You’ll be surprised at how many times people will realize by telling their own story over and over, that they need to make a decision, you’re also going to be very important to ask is make sure you ask what have you tried already to fix your problem. If they haven’t tried anything, it seems really odd that they came to an attorney first. Or maybe you were just the first attorney, and they need an attorney like that. It’s really important that you understand their reason. As we talked about before, time, money and reputation. One of the other things we talked about before is that we start thinking with our brain. And that’s a big mistake. And I want to give you an example that I hope hammers this home. So in Illinois, like some states, there’s an income shares approach to child support, meaning that we take both parties incomes into consideration. If you have more than 40% of the overnights, you pay less in child support than you would otherwise. Okay. Now, you may have a scenario where a parent comes into your office and says, I’m getting a divorce my my wife filed for divorce. Okay, so tell me what’s important to you? Well, I want to have my kids 50% of the time. And if you stop right there and say, Oh, this must be a good dad, he really cares about his kids. He wants to see his kids all the time, you could be making a major mistake. So what happens is when I do this scenario with with all my, the trainees, they all assume that he wants to be with his kids. But I always say you gotta go a step further and say, can you tell me why that matters to? Now? Chances are, you’re gonna get the answer of like, What do you mean? Why does it matter to me? Like, they’re my kids, I see him every day. I couldn’t imagine, you know, go on. Anytime without them. It’s really important to me to be there. Okay, great. Now, we’ve confirmed that his problems are time time with his children, and his reputation, his reputation as a father. But what if you said, Okay, can you tell me why you want 50% of your time? Well, what if his answer is, no, because I don’t want to give that bitch any more money. That’s a big difference, right? If you try and approach those clients the same way, you’re gonna have very bad problems, you’re gonna have bad outcomes. You see, the second guy’s priority was money. And if you try and serve people with the same solutions to different problems, you’re not going to have happy clients. So in order to find out what’s really there is you have to probe can you tell me more about why that matters to you. And then before you go to the close, it’s so important that you repeat back their problem. And you should be repeating their problem in a way that they’ve never heard it before. You’ve been taking notes, you’ve explained what they’re going through, and you basically will say something along the lines of, so what brought you in is fill in the blank. You’ve already tried this, but it’s not working. And if you don’t take any action in six months, you’re gonna feel like a terrible, you know, fill in the blank, father, husband, employer, whatever their problem is, is that correct? Now, if you do this, right, they’re gonna have a look of like, yeah, yeah, actually, that is correct. So now, when you go to the solutions, you go to the clothes, you say, okay, based upon everything that we’ve talked about, I think there are three possible options. The first option is you do absolutely nothing. Now, I may not recommend that option in your situation, because you can fill in the blank, right? If you’re a criminal attorney, well, you could do nothing but you know, you’re gonna end up behind bars forever, right? Or you could try to do this on your own. Most states allow for self represented litigants or process. It’s usually not the good idea, but they could do it. And then the last thing is you can hire legal services. You need them to rule each one of those things out and say that’s the option I want. Great. Now, let’s talk about getting started with our office. At that point, you have your paperwork, you’ve got your retainer process. and you’ve made the sale. Now I know this is impossible to justify all at once in 20 minutes, but this is something I’m really passionate about. If you want help with this, I’m happy to chat with any of you. Email me, I’ll send you my slides. For those you use law Maddox, I have all of this in LA Maddix be happy to share it with you send an email to admin at reedy law office.com We’ll get you what you need. I get 10 seconds, so I’m just gonna stare at you.
