In this episode Jim and Tyson talk about how they get people to raise their hands and let us know that they’re interested in our legal services.
- The before unit: before you get the client.
- The during unit: your representation of the client.
- The after unit: after you handled the case.
There are lots of people walking around who may need your services. Your job is to identify those people and find where they gather.
Niche down (we already talked about this in a previous episode). Narrow down the niche. Pick the target.
Clients need their problem solved. So if you advertise with a lot of practices, the ones that the client don’t need will act as noise and will distract. Your message needs to be clear. From a practical standpoint, if you do the things you can do and are good at, your clients will be happy and will go out and tell other people about you. Create an effective add, a compelling offer.
Hacking’s Hack: New podcast: “More Cheese, Less Whiskers”: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/more-cheese-less-whiskers/id1135262567?mt=2
Tyson’s Tip: https://www.purechat.com/
$20 a month to manage your web chats, web questions, etc. You can link it with InfusionSoft: https://www.infusionsoft.com/.
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Transcript: The Before Unit
Jim Hacking
it ties a man. I’m glad that we’re getting this thing rolling. So today we’re going to talk about the before unit. And this comes from our friends, Joe Polish and Dean Jackson in the profit activators. But correction
Tyson Mutrux
comes from your idol, Dean Jackson. Yes, and
Jim Hacking
we’ll get to that a little bit later in the show. Because my hack is somewhat related to that, you might guess what it is. But in any event, what we’re talking about is how we get people to raise their hands and let us know that they are interested in our legal services. Now, I’ve been emailing back and forth with a fellow in France. And he reminds me that in France, lawyers cannot advertise for their services. And I know, to someone like you a young gun like Tyson, that is sort of unheard of. But I remember back when lawyers couldn’t advertise. And I remember when I took first amendment in law school, how the lawyers down in Florida challenge the bars restrictions in Florida on lawyer advertising. So we’re not just talking about lawyer advertising today. But I think it’s interesting to see how far or how far down lawyers have gone since the ban on lawyer advertising was dropped. Yeah, and
Tyson Mutrux
you’re right, it is actually really odd to me, whenever I remember that Florida case, I don’t remember the name of the case. And I remember reading it multiple times and how absurd it was. The fact that you could not advertise. Every other profession advertises whether you are a window washer, or a doctor doesn’t matter. Everyone else advertises something you and I have both learned, the financial industry has a lot more restrictions than we do. But it’s still absurd that people could not advertise. That idea is hard for me to even comprehend. I have
Jim Hacking
sort of two thoughts on that. One is that it comes from a mindset, I think that we still see from time to time, particularly with lawyers, my age or older, who have us as a profession than that we’re sort of above selling or above trying to promote ourselves. And it’s sort of from this mindset that the law is above it. And the other thing that comes to mind is that lawyers have really abused that. And I’ve written, you know, we are our own worst enemies. And there have been some terrible ads. I mean, I think lawyer reputations have really gone down since they’ve been allowed to advertise. And I think that’s because so many lawyers do it the wrong way.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And that’s true. You talked about the car crash ones in particular, probably that’s, that’s the ones I think of. And there for some reason, those are the most prevalent, you don’t see people advertising for wills, and estates or even criminal defense, you think you’d see one of those, it’s always a personal injury, and they’re just terribly done, just absolutely terribly done. And those are the ones where they go a little bit further. And they make these outrageous claims sometimes, and there are even ones I’ve seen, or people throwing money around and it’s 10 it can be kind of ridiculous attempts. I think you’re right. I think the biggest part of that is that they just they’ve gone overboard with some of the advertisement even the
Jim Hacking
funny thing is, is that I don’t really notice it when I drive around St. Louis. But when I go to out of town for immigration, like to Chicago or Memphis, and I don’t know any of the lawyers on the billboards, then it seems like those billboards are everywhere. When we’re here we sort of are numb to it. We say, oh, there’s you know, there’s Mark’s billboard, or there’s someone else’s billboard over there someone’s bus at but when you go to town, and you see the ads, I mean, some cities are more aggressive. The lawyers are more aggressive, too. So
Tyson Mutrux
the one that I really noticed that and you’re right, it’s Florida. But then also, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, ah, you use Vegas, Las Vegas. I see them everywhere. It seems like they actually, Vegas is the first place I saw where they had the phone numbers that were all the same, like all twos and all fours and all that. That was the first place I’ve ever seen those billboards, which at the time, I thought they’re really clever. Now that we haven’t been to St. Louis. There’s two firms in St. Louis, that, you know, all threes and all twos. And so it’s a big fight back and forth. But I thought that that would get a little more a little little more competitive in the market out here, but it hasn’t grown on like it did out in Vegas. In Vegas. It feels like every number except for like, nines or something like that. We’re taking it once. All ones wasn’t taken was like all twos or threes, or fours or fives or sixes, or sevens. 11 nines weren’t taken for some reason. So
Jim Hacking
you’re just mad that you don’t have a cool phone number.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s so expensive. I know exactly because I worked for one of those firms that has one of those numbers and I know exactly what it costs and so it’s so outrageous. It’s not worth the price. It’s crazy, but I I’m jealous answer the question. I, I would I wish I would have had one of those numbers. But there’s the price, isn’t it it says, here’s what we need to talk about the four unit, I think you need to put that in a little bit more context, because we’re talking about the before unit during unit in the afternoon. But let’s go through each one of those just before unit is, basically before you get the client, the during unit is your representation of the client. And you could put this into context with any business clients. And then the after unit is after you’ve handled that case, in any follow up.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And then specifically, what we’re talking about today is that there are a lot of people walking around who may need our services. And our job is to identify those people and figure out where they gather, and how do we get them to raise their hand and let us know that we’re that they’re here, and that that’s sort of the window that we’re talking about today. In other words, from the unidentified masses, to the people who may be interested in doing business with us. I took my kids to a museum in Kansas City, right off Union Station, and there was this big, fake dinosaur dig where they had all these little bitty asphalt pellets or rubber pellets. And that acted like dirt, and you could dust and dust off and find a fossil. And that’s how I sort of view this of how do we, how do we dust off the masses and figure out the people who, who may be interested in hiring us,
Tyson Mutrux
right. And the first step is, that is we’ve already talked about this in previous podcasts with niching down, but the first thing is just narrowing down your niche, picking that one thing to target. And as Dean Jackson Giovanni’s talk about is, it’s okay to have multiple types of practices, that’s fine. But when you create an advertising or you start targeting a specific type of case, you can only do one at a time. So whenever you see these advertisements out there that say, personal injury, criminal offense, DWI, employment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it’s doesn’t do anything for you. Because they don’t know that person doesn’t know, okay, what is this? What is this ad about? You know, what does this tell me, it doesn’t tell you anything. So the first step is to pick that one practice area for you. It’s immigration, and you have effectively even gone even deeper. And I don’t know what all the different terminology used. But I know that even more recently, you’ve done a set of videos, or you put you package that set of videos to target a specific type of client. And that was on the podcast with Dean Jackson.
Jim Hacking
Right. So I think that one of the things to keep in mind is that our clients or our potential clients don’t wake up in the morning thinking, how can I make Tyson a more successful lawyer? How can I make Jim better do a better job at his firm, and I think that what they have instead is a problem that they need solved. And they don’t care about all the other problems that you solve, they only want their problem solved. So when you mark it, like you said, car accident, bankruptcy, divorce, immigration, if you do all those things, all the rest of the things that they don’t care about, that’s just sort of noise in the background, and it distracts from what they want solved. And so if you view it from their perspective, as opposed to your perspective, as a lawyer, and view, you know, they want they’re in a place of pain or discomfort, or frustration, and they want to get to the other side, where they’re done with that frustration. And your your message needs to be devoted towards that one specific thing. So for instance, even in a personal injury context, you know, you might have marketing or messaging that relates to a car accident, but people who slip and fall down the stairs at the Marriott, they don’t care at all about car accidents. So every time you talk to them about car accidents, before they’ve hired you, then that’s going to, you know, sound off message or off note.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. And from a practical standpoint, I think what attorneys think they can do is if they advertise for everything, they really only know one or two things, but they think that okay, if I handle this side well for them, they’re going to I’ll be able to keep them in my drawer and I’ll be able to, really though they’ll be I’ll be their attorney, and all it’s gonna take is for you to screw up one thing and they’ll never come back to you and say you’ve lost a good client forever. And let’s be honest, a lot of times that file that the case a you don’t really handle all the time that will or that trust or whatever it is, it sits in your drawer forever. You don’t do anything with it. You finally get it done. It’s probably not a good product and the clients gonna see is this guy as good as I thought he was. So from a practical standpoint, if you can hone in on the things you want to do and you’re good at, you are then going to create a raving fan out of that client that’s that’s a term that Ben Glass uses raving fan that is going to then go out and tell other people about you. So instead of you losing that client down the road, you’re going to then get more clients because that person is going to talk about you, they’re going to give you positive reviews, there’s a lot of different aspects to this, that it’s not just, Oh, I’m gonna give it to this client and get all the business but everything, you got to look longer term about this. And then you are you also hinting at this, and this is kind of the next thing is getting them to contact you.
Jim Hacking
So what we’ve done is we’ve decided to focus on one particular part of immigration law, and that is bringing a spouse or a fiance from overseas to the United States, those cases are fundamentally different than if the US citizen is in the United States and the person needing lawful status as in the United States. So they’re two very different cases, they’re similar. In one case, Tyson has married someone from France. And that person is still in France, and they need to be brought here. So they go down one path versus Tyson’s in the United States and his wife is in the United States, and Tyson and his wife want to stay together in the United States. So really, I thought that narrowing down within immigration to spouses was enough. But it’s not because people who have a spouse overseas don’t really care about people, the kinds of cases that people have spouses here.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, Jimmy, what are you doing over there?
Jim Hacking
It’s the lady watering the plants out side in the city. Sorry about that noise. This
Tyson Mutrux
is great. I love it. It’s it just shows the real world, I guess. So I didn’t mean to cut you off, go out, you’re fine.
Jim Hacking
So I want to focus more on the messaging. And I think that the messaging and that dissonance that comes up when you’re talking about more than one thing, I think that most people can’t take in information about three different kinds of law, three different practice areas. And so it’s really important to focus. Here’s the
Tyson Mutrux
other thing, you can list all those things. But does this mean you’ve created an effective ad? What have you, how have you been compelled them to contact you? What have you done to create something? Because that’s something that you’ve got to make a compelling offer to them? Right? Right. So what kind of ad can you create, that can compel them based on every practice? Right? So first, you got your book, what’s the name of your book that you give away? For free clients?
Jim Hacking
I have two one is the denied both the top 10 immigration mistakes that people make, and then the other one is the one for students called staying here.
Tyson Mutrux
So we don’t want the students staying here. Right? So if you had that book, you that’s your compelling you, let’s say you want to give that book away for free, right? You can’t put that in a in an ad, and then cover every practice area, right? I mean, what’s your book and a B, I mean, if you’re gonna make some sort of offer to them, it’s gonna be very, very hard. I don’t know anybody that’s going to craft an ad, and Dean Jackson, Joe Polish, probably two of the best people in the world that create ads, I doubt they would be able to create some sort of advertisement that says, that gets them to compel them to contact you, because you got to make some sort of compelling offer. So if someone can come up with one and let us know, that would be fantastic. But you got to come up with some sort of compelling offer for whatever service you’re targeting at that time.
Jim Hacking
Well, and I think that too many people want to go from zero to 100. All at once, you know, they call upon the ad to do too much. They want a super magic ad, this silver bullet ad that will take someone from sitting on their couch, thinking about who to hire for their car accident case, and getting them signed up. They want the ad to do it all in one step. And I think that you really have to break it down. And to think about it piece by piece. And the purpose of the book, or the special report that you offer, as a lead magnet is just to get people to raise their hand so you can start the conversation. You’re not You’re not trying to ask the ad to do too much. You’re not asking the ad to, you know, seal the deal. You’re just getting, you’re just taking it one step at a time. And the first step is to identify those people are having them self identify.
Tyson Mutrux
Right? Give them an example of what you’re talking about. I’ll give them an example of what I’m talking about, or what I do things that you do, and I’ll tell some things that I do.
Jim Hacking
Okay, so two years ago, I gave a talk at St. Louis University Medical School. And I talked to a bunch of the doctors who are here on either F one or j one student visas. And I told him about this little book that I had written, which is basically my talk for international students. I turned it into a book and a fellow who was there, he went to my webpage. He downloaded that book, and he read it. So once that happened, that put him on a sequence where now every Monday, he gets an email from me with sort of immigration news, news about our firm and news about my family. And now two years later, that fellow has married a US citizen and came to see me and he said, you know, it was those emails that you sent me every Monday. That way he remembered me when the time came for him to need an immigration attorney. So you know, that’s sort of the step by step sequence where you know, you You’re giving away quality content, you’re giving people information that’s good for them. And that, that starts the conversation that allows you to stay at the front of their mind when they think of you’re practicing.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s perfect. You’ve educated them. And they are they contacted you when they were ready, right? They, whenever that time came up, or they, they needed that that issue came up, they contacted you and mine, I got a couple examples. But the first one would be the postcards, I was doing a while to get back. And I’m not gonna tell you the secret sauce of how I was got the leads. But I sent out postcards and I did two different variations. The first one was a it was to criminal defense clients or prospects. And it was the seventh, I think the first one was the seventh lies, lawyers tell just to get your money. And then based on your advice, I changed it to the seven things you need to know for high end a criminal defense attorney, which you’re right, it was more effective. But what it was is it was a I gave them a web address to go to so they got the postcard. And then it was a web address to go to they went to the web address. If they wanted it, it was a free offer. And they download it or didn’t download it. They gave me their email and their name. And then they received an email with the PDF attached to it. And then they whenever they’re ready, or if they’re ready, they were able to call me in addition to this something else that I stole from Joe Polish and T Jackson, I’d let them call and listen to a free recorded message. And they gave them more information about the book that I sent them. And then they gave them an option of leaving me a message they can hang up. Or they can be forwarded to my office where I can then answer any questions that they’d have. So that’s one example. So they get the postcard and have the opportunity to get free information. If they read that book, they like it. And they can also respond to my email if they wanted to, since they get it from me. And then whenever they’re ready, they give me a call. And the response rate I think on that was between five to seven and a half percent, which is if you do direct mail, and you know that that’s pretty good number. It’s it’s I think average is one to 2%, somewhere somewhere around there, which is a really low, low number. So it’s a volumes game. Right. But so it was pretty effective. And then the other thing I do, which I’ve talked about before, is the Monday q&a, where I answer a variety of topics. But I make sure I let people know that I do personally from an offense so that whenever they’re ready to contact me. So basically what it is, is they submit their questions to me on a landing page, I get their email address in their name, so I can then market to them later on down the road. And they asked me their questions, I give them three legal advice, three of them a week on a video, but then I get people all the time, or they send a message through Facebook with a union policy. Hey, I know, I know, you only need personhood from an offense. Can you answer this question? Or, Hey, I saw that you do person drew from offense? Can you handle this case for me. So the those are both all three of these things. And we just talked about the things we were talking about in the book that you have, all these things are very effective ways of educating them. And they know you as that guy, or that attorney that does that type of type of case. And then whenever that comes up down the road and may not be right away, they’ll contact us. And this isn’t something where we’re selling a product. So you have to be in the top of mind whenever something happens to them. It’s no I think that if the people and this is a sidenote, the people that are that can probably be most effective at selling that product, as an attorney would be a will or trust or state something like that. Because you can then you can find a way to drum up that business. But when it comes to personal injury or immigration, you don’t need it till you need it. So those are things where you have to educate these people long term so that they know that you’re that person that does that. And so whenever it does happen to them, they’ll know who to call.
Jim Hacking
Well. I think that’s the operative word is long term that what we’re talking about here is the long play, I think way, way, way too many lawyers, especially in the personal injury contexts, focus 99% of their advertising on the time period immediately after the accident. And they assume that the person picks a lawyer in, you know, 36 hours and sometimes they do sometimes they just go down the yellow pages the phone line or or Google search and just call one after another and just keep keep doing that. So I think that that’s an important point. And you know, I think the flip side of that is a too many lawyers give up too early when they’re thinking about marketing and they don’t think they they assume that because they haven’t heard back from the person in the first seven days that that’s a bad lead or that someone’s thinking about hiring them.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, that’s why automation so important. We go through a lot automation and then just that just the example the two examples I gave. I don’t know how you do it. I’m gonna ask you Second, how you doing, but it’s just the two examples I gave, I had follow up sequences built in to those campaigns where if they got the email and didn’t, let’s say they didn’t download the free report, or let’s say that they did and never called me, there are follow up sequences based on what their actions were asking this adding more questions. The same thing with the Monday q&a, after they submitted the money q&a, I then have more follow up emails sent out to them, you know, one, thanking them and then offering to do a traffic ticket for free on later on down the road. I mean, there’s things like that that are built in there, just because I know, I know that the follow up is important. What are some stuff that you do?
Jim Hacking
What I was gonna say is, I think that absolutely, I think follow up is a whole other show and talking about automation should some we should talk about next week? The one thing I was gonna say is that what all of this assumes Tyson that’s very important that I think a lot of lawyers don’t do is they don’t necessarily even capture the people that contact them. So I think that if you start from a point of just trying to identify everyone who reaches out to your firm, I think, if you I think if you asked 100 lawyers, can you tell me within 10 minutes time, the last the names and contact information for the last 100 people to contact your firm in any form? I would suspect that less than 10% of lawyers could do that.
Tyson Mutrux
I guarantee it the mastermind that we did months ago. No one I mean, I think one person was able to tell us he said he could tell us exactly what what his what his leads or having clients he had or whatever. But other than that no one else did. And I know you and I, at least I think you have it on your dashboard. I have mine on my dashboard. Sure. So I have my leads, we have got his last seven days last 30 days last 90 days. And then last year, you may do a little differently. So everything every single thing that comes to the door does our office knows you market as a new lead. And then as it gets down the funnel are marked as you know, as a client, a former client or whatever it is, but Alright, so let’s
Jim Hacking
play our favorite game. How many leads have you had in the last 30 days?
Tyson Mutrux
The last 30 days? I have had 65?
Jim Hacking
Boom, check a lot. 140 Yeah, I
Tyson Mutrux
like yeah, whatever. Hey, listen, I’m fine with my number.
Jim Hacking
But listen, that’s a great number. That’s two a day. So listen, I think just getting back to basics. And just that little thing, if if anyone took anything else out of our podcast today, I think just making sure that you collect all the contact information from the people that reach out to you. I think that’s going to put you in a much better position, maybe not right away. But in the long term, it’s really going to pay off if you’re doing regular follow up with them.
Tyson Mutrux
What I initially that we just demonstrated thing, and this is not scripted. I think some people may think, Oh, these guys are full of shit. We could pull this number right up. I mean, we both had it pulled up. And we’re looking at it, right? Because we I think we both knew that was coming. So I didn’t at all. Look at it. I dashboard up as we were talking. So that’s why I had Infusionsoft
Jim Hacking
up before we started. So that was easy. It is interesting
Tyson Mutrux
how you’re right. I mean, but it’s it’s nice. So it’s something we could demonstrate. Listen, we do this, we know this stuff isn’t like we’re just talking about it and don’t do anything about it. So it’s important to people know. And another thing we need to talk about at some point is key key performance indicators, which are KPIs I think that we need to talk about. Well, we’ll get to that again. That’s another episode by itself. So Alright, so let’s wrap up. Yep. All right. So
Jim Hacking
my hack for the week is I did have the pleasure of appearing on a new podcast by, as you say my hero, Dean Jackson. He’s starting a new podcast. It’s called a more cheese, less whiskers. And if you go to More cheese, less whiskers.com, or look for it on iTunes, you can find that episode. That’s episode number one of the new podcast he’s going to do one a week where he talks to business owners, and they brainstorm on sort of a lot of the kinds of things that we talked about here, mostly about how to build your business,
Tyson Mutrux
the Tyson’s Tip of the Week is going to be and I don’t believe we had talked about this, but pure chat. We both use it for our websites. Don’t pay the company that calls you every week asking if you need someone to heal your chats for $300 down and 50 bucks per lead or whatever it is. That’s ridiculous. You can do it on your own. It’s probably better. You still do peer chat, right?
Jim Hacking
It’s $20 a month. And the last time I checked, which was several months ago, I had generated about $30,000 in legal fees off it.
Tyson Mutrux
And it’s something where you can get it on your desktop whenever you’re in your computer or you have it come to your cell phone just like a text message. And as a actually as a text message. They have an app as well, where people will get on your website and ask you questions. And what happens is you answer the questions. You can assign it to one of your assistants, but it’s a much more effective way of getting that lead and then handing it off. And you can even link it up with Infusionsoft if you have Infusionsoft or other services where the lead is automatically put into your list of contacts, which is a very, very nice tool. So pure chat. And if you go to a things he or she just pure chat.com, you can get more information that your writing is 20 bucks a month, which is very, very, very small fee for something like that.
Jim Hacking
I’m a big fan of peer chat. I talked them up a lot on Twitter, and I actually met one of the development heads at iKON. And they love the story that one time, I was taking my boys to basketball practice while I’m driving the car. And someone was chatting with me about a waiver case about trying to get a green card even though I’ve been here out of status. And so I’m driving down the highway, my son is typing in the peer chat, the responses until we get to the YMCA and I can park and safely continue the conversation but then turned into a $3,500 case. So that was fun. It’s a great example. All right, but we’ll talk to you next week.
