There is one thing that will give you a little more of that freedom that we crave as owners of our firms. And in the pursuit of freedom the secret comes from — customer service! Make it your secret weapon and that will help you get over the mindset of selling your services. Within customer service there are three things that have really helped today’s podcast guest, John Ting. The three topics are: marketing, fees, and delegation. So let’s get started.
2:47 When people keep price shopping
3:37 Retaining their attention
8:18 Have you ever had a potential client ask: “What are you going to do for me?”
10:32 Having transparency with your practice
11:55 All about fees!
16:19 Having a shared email inbox, and what that looks like
🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.
Connect with John:
Resources:
- Join the Guild Membership
- Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer Youtube Channel
- Follow us on Instagram
- Join the Facebook Group
- Follow the Facebook Page
- Follow us on LinkedIn
Transcript: Breaking Limiting Mindset: Marketing, Fees & Delegation
Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear John ting as we share his talk breaking a limiting mindset, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode,
Speaker 2
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.
John Ting
Welcome to the show. So we have to unblock some mindsets. You know, I’ve been practicing for about 1011 years now. And the guild has really helped me even before then I’ve joined another group called entree leadership. And that was with business owners across the country, all tips, different types of industries. So I’ve really jam packed jam packed a lot in this. Raise your hand if you became a law firm owner, and thought you were gonna get freedom from it? Yeah, I thought I was gonna get that. So I’m still in pursuit of freedom. And what I mean by freedom is so that you don’t have to go on vacation or a conference like this and look at your emails, pull out your laptops, I’m guilty of it already.
John Ting
So the first thing I want to share with you is a secret. Okay, it’s my secret weapon. That is the theme to this presentation. And that is towards customer service. Okay. Bill talked about, you know, managing client expectations. So that’s kind of part of that. And there’s three things within customer service. Okay, that’s really helped me. It’s not just for your clients. It’s also for potential clients, you know, so we’re gonna start with marketing. Okay, the three topics marketing fees and delegation. I’ll try to not make this that boring. But you have to be intentional, at least believe mentioned this this morning is that you have to be intentional with your parenting, just like you’re intentional with your law practice. So I think a lot of y’all probably pay for SEO, you drowning your money in there. Okay. Because I mean, I’m not saying SEO is bad, I think it’s good. But you need to do something else. Okay. In addition to that, you need to keep them, you need to retain their attention. Okay. So a lot of us here in the guild, at least have a YouTube channel have some kind of social media channel, okay. And that’s to relax to build a trust, sharing getting credibility, just as if you were in court, right? When anyone started a law practice that anyone tell you don’t pay for Yellow Pages. I got that a lot. That was a tip 10 years ago, okay. And, and I learned from that I didn’t do yellow pages, but I paid for El Dia. It’s the Spanish subsidiary of Dallas Morning News. I drowned in money from that guy, a lot of calls. It was great. But for some reason, people kept price shopping. And I was like, Oh, I thought it was just normal. Because in practice, most immigration that I know, that’s normal, that’s just what immigrants foreign nationals do. But after I created the YouTube channel about a couple years ago, and now tick tock about a couple months ago, you’re building credibility now when people I just hired associate three months ago, and she’s like, Man, I really want to talk to you. I’m like, Yeah, that’s because all these channels like TV, really. So you’re attracting them. A lot of us already doing that. But there’s a step two, okay. Other than building the trust, but step two is retaining their attention, not just on the channels, giving them a document, do you ever go to an event and I don’t know, like, you’re at a meeting to give you a brochure, some information, hey, just take it home. This is what we do in a law practice. So kind of give you an idea of our when someone calls in for the first time in our law firm, we find that the my VAs find out what kind of case type it is. Maybe it’s like they want to accompany wants to sponsor an employee, or is the employee calling what our is we have a guide, some people call like ebook, okay. It’s really like 10 pages of a PDF. Okay. Has anyone had a week or a month you’re like, man, like getting a lot of questions, a similar questions. I’m sure you had that moment. Maybe Dustin, you had a week where it was like, spring break or something. And people are just drinking and driving all week, all times a day. And you get the similar questions. Oh, can I get my driver license? And can I get my drug? Can I drive after getting a DWI charge or something like that? I like yeah, you might have it on your website. But are they going to visit your website again? So this is what we’ve been doing. We create a different a lot of different PDFs a free guide for each case type. Okay, and we email it to them. We use doc sent you can upload the document to Doc sent I do see send.com is a subsidiary of Dropbox. And it’s kind of freaky. You can track when they see it when they open it, because they have to enter their email in it to look at it. And so this guide contains FAQs, common questions. All right. So we send that to him, and then we haven’t even really gone deep into it. But what you can do next, what we plan to do is okay, when we follow up in a sales process, you know, we’ll check. Okay, it’s been a week. Okay, have they looked at it? Because then we can tailor our conversation with them? Oh, you haven’t looked at it, you know, email it to you. One or you have looked at it. You have any questions about it? Okay. And, um, one of the last pages on the ebook, or the guide, is a core values mission statement, vision statement, how to refer cases to us how to refer people to us. I know it may sound strange like to include that kind of question. But we actually receive emails or calls from people I loved I loved your work. Can we refer a case to you? Of course, sounds like a silly question. But if you can, this all this information that guy they can always revisit maybe a search an email, John Ting, or your you know, your law firm name, and maybe they’ll come across it again. Okay, so I mentioned this because one of my RVA is the handle the calls, okay, the intake team, which you call the cares team, everything I’m sharing with you, Please steal it from my website. Okay. And this presentation, you can go the website greencard guys that come. And so I’ve had clients or potential clients hire us six months to a year later, because of these guides. We’re constantly improving. I just got a message from a team member yesterday, she was like, John, can we just pause on updating these guides? Because the great thing about Doxon is that when you share the link with them, which by the way, we create a template email so they don’t have to retype oh, here’s the free guide by Ting Law Group about this case type. So we create the template emails, don’t have to change the link on doc send, you can just re upload the new document and retain the same link. Okay, so you might be wondering what the hell is a bassinet doing on this presentation? I have two kids. The first kid were being cheap. We didn’t have this bassinet on the left. Okay. And we got one of the cheaper ones. As you can see from Google, you can see like it comes from Walmart Kohl’s, because we didn’t understand when we first had the first baby, three and a half now. We’re like we, this product on level just came out. We didn’t understand it. It did have the features, the benefits on the website, but we just didn’t feel like they had 182 reviews or even 73 reviews about it yet. It just literally came out that year. And then the second kid came around two years later, it was 11 months old now. And I’m like, You know what? Tao? Can we can we take a look at this thing again. Has anyone heard of the snoo? Okay, we got a couple of hands raised. Come on, dads, you got to know about this new it’s gonna save your life. Okay, save some headache. The main benefit I can share with you is it allows the kid to sleep. Allowing the kid to sleep allows you to sleep. Okay? It doesn’t work for everyone. But most babies it does newborns. I think it’s only good for like, five months or six months. This is why I’m sharing this with you. Because Have you ever had a potential client? Call? You have a consultation with them? And they like, yeah, here’s the legal strategy. I hear it. That’s great and everything. But what are you actually going to do for me? How do we get there? You’re like, well, we update you. Or you might be stumped, like what to say, right? So immigration world might be different from your practice area, but I still think you should share these benefits. Okay. So it’s all on my website, this example this new the benefits of this new. So I mentioned the first thing was like social media channels, building credibility. Okay. So for us, that’s Google reviews, for example, or ABA, whatever you use, I recommend Google. And then so you have the credibility and the reviews. Okay. Those go together. And then so for us, I have five benefits on my page, which really it can be applicable to any law, practice, transparency, access to attorney. Has anyone had clients paid clients? Raise your hand if this happened to you, they call in and you’re like, your assistant, whoever answers says, Attorney attorney, so and so is not available. I’m very sorry, he’s at court or she’s at court or in a client meeting. And then your assistant writes it down on traditional yellow pad, and then you forget about it, or he or she forgot to send it to you. I’m sure several of you right. So you need to do this. Here’s another secret kalindi.com or something similar, Tom, you know, I’m talking about but not just counting, you need to create a box just for current clients. Okay. And that’s They have a 24/7 don’t promote that, by the way, you are readily available but not 24/7. For us, we have it Tuesdays and Thursdays I say this, I had my associates say it now, in every consultation, we have access to us. We’re different than most law firms. But it’s not 24/7. If you have a question as a Friday, and you missed that Thursday box, then email us, we’ll get back to you. That’s one of our benefits. I think any law firm can use that as a benefit. So I talked about transparency. I say transparency, because at least in the immigration world, a lot of people who come to us as a second or third attorney says that maybe they’re like, I can’t get my documents from the previous lawyer or my current lawyer. I’m like, what the hell I mean, I gotta have them sign a consent form. And all that just takes time. So we say transparency, not just with fees, but also with documents on day one, okay, on onboarding. So we shared dropbox folder as an example. Let’s see what else we have. So probably the two ladies in the back. I’m the one assume your mom’s but do you know how much this new is? Yeah, 50 100 bucks. Yeah, we definitely paid for it the second for the second kid. I have not regretted it one bit. It was amazing. It rocks slowly, by the way helps the babies think that they’re in the womb
Becca Eberhart
is apathy on his back. If you’re new around here, the ZAP Athan is the OG automation workshop. At this next exclusive guild event. We’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher. To bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology so that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin. Join the guild today and grab your ticket at max law events.com
John Ting
Here’s the thing that leads up to the topic about fees. Okay, I don’t know if that’s really the peloton. I forgot but I’m a paying member of peloton for the last two or three years. I was so going every day for the first year and a half and then you know, Texas, the grid didn’t work out for about a couple of days. And I just fell off the bandwagon on that. But I’m still a paying member can’t believe that crap. It’s ridiculous. Costco I don’t know about you. I’m in the burbs. I’m in Chicagoland suburb of Houston. There’s a Costco like few minutes down the road. I probably could get something from Kroger and other grocery store but screw it. We’re going to Costco because we just need to buy in bulk every week for some odd reason. And what do you think they have in common? Anyone want to blur it out? Exactly. So that’s pretty much what I’m doing. Okay. You may have heard that more for like business attorneys. I’ve seen that during the pandemic started flat fees. I know that might be I don’t know if that how you can do that for pie. But for other type of hybrid, but the reason I don’t really call them clients, when we have the consultations, I call them members. I call my quotes, membership plans. Okay. So here’s here’s an example. Just truncated version. Okay, niches and riches. I think most people talked about that about practice area. But I also talked about for relation to membership plans, and immigration world, especially if you’ve heard of like USCIS Green Card interviews. Some people don’t want a lawyer interview, because it costs more takes more of your time as an attorney, right. And then, so we have the light Pro and Max. And so the light plan is more of like the DIY, they don’t care about, like after you file the case, peeps I have some clients are just great. They don’t want to talk to me at all, after we file it until the interview time comes. And then Pro, okay, you have like, we have preparation videos. And sometimes people watch the videos. And don’t even schedule a call with me. But we have it available in the max. The for example is the interview representation. So you price it to where the Pro and Max are really close together. Okay. So if they picked a pro, or if they picked a max, you’re okay. It’s still within your budget. Okay, in terms of expected revenue, something like something we call like Family Preference case where the wait time for to help a family member get a green card, maybe 10 years, we encourage them to pick the light plan, picking an all I had to do as far the first application, I don’t want to be stuck with a case for 10 years. So something that I think Bill talked about earlier is the duration of the case lifecycle. That’s what we think about as well in each of these plants when we recommend something because some people potential clients still ask us which one do you recommend? So we’re have another sales opportunity there. Okay. But I do also recommend in terms of niches and the riches for us and immigration in our law firm. We really tried to focus on like five top five ideal case types. And we even created like a avatar of a client. I think I heard this on on one of the weekly The weekend calls with Tyson. And Jim. So by the way, if you’re not in the guild, you might want to consider it because there’s little nuggets here and there, like provide a lot of value. Okay. In terms of delegation, how many of y’all have vas? Haram? If y’all are doing everything, answering phones, everything like that, okay, more power to you. I’m impressed. You may have heard of a lot of people talk about the 80% rule. I finally hired my first associate three months ago, thanks to the guild in the hot seat ahead, I think in August last year, and I had a plan, okay, like, I need to hire an associate, at least put up the job posting in January. And members of The Guild were very helpful to keep me accountable. And I knew and ahead of time, it’s not going to be perfect. I just gotta make progress. Like Tyson says all the time, have you made progress on it? Okay, on your on your objective or goal. That being said, 80%, for everything. It’s not just like, the legal work product. It’s also emails, if you haven’t listened to the maximum lawyer podcast that I was just had the honor of being on a couple of weeks ago, I have a lot of nuggets there to talk about different different tips on delegation as well. But one of them is having a shared email inbox. So during this conference, even on my flight, maybe I didn’t, I didn’t have time to like draft the email. But I always ask team members, you need to draft the email first. And if you need me to, I will look at it. And so I can edit it if necessary. Because I’ve just heard horror stories where people do email out something’s like, Oh, that’s not the legal strategy. Okay. Or, even though it’s not nothing to do about legal strategy, but the client just did not would not have appreciate that type of language. So it says that’s something else about vas. If there’s something especially if it’s a VA, or remote worker from outside America, there’s some maybe slight cultural differences in language, you might need to train them on. Okay. Something to consider. So, any questions? Yes. So my membership plans have evolved. Before I had it more like what you’re saying, paying every month, I think that’s what you’re alluding to paying every month up until the case is over. I played around with that with people who really needed a payment plan. And maybe even maybe needed a lower payment plant like amount. But now I just in terms of membership plan, I haven’t phrase where it’s listed services, because people always asked us, What do you actually do? And I tell immigration lawyers and all these Facebook groups, friends, we do a shit ton, okay. People don’t know it. It’s mostly customer service. We’re a call center. Think of it as like a yellow RPI lawyers here like this is like a call center. Right. But it claims center, Insurance Agency, some people and that’s why the guides are helpful, because some people have very common questions you get your assistants get all the time. So just put in that guide. And like I just respond to emails said client, you miss a deadline. For reference for the next time we filed this, need to look at the guide need to look at the timeline step by step. So you know what, when the when to take action? Hopefully that answers the question. So how I do it, at least for immigration 50 100 deposit 500 a month, and then whenever the balance is zero, they’re done paying, but maybe a membership plan is really to list the services. Yeah. And even some plans, I list out client support by a legal team and support team. But the LITE plan like you saw only to file I we leave that unchecked. Any other questions? I could blabber all day. So yes, sir. Yes. The the mindset that you find to get my son to do? Yes. Because the sorry, I didn’t really mention it. But yeah, like for example, the like tick tock social media. I think people just put content out there. And I think it’s gonna, like when people have consultation, they’re just gonna sign up. They have a legal problem when they call me they’re gonna sign up. No, I mean, they listen, immigration, sometimes not immediate detain cases. Sure. But yeah, most people I don’t. Maybe PII is different. What practice or do you have deeper? Okay, so that should be you would, I don’t know. I’ve never taken a criminal case. I don’t know. But do you find that people were more on it to hire? So right, that’s good. So it might not be necessary for everyone. But I think the guides are helpful, like Yeah, because maybe they maybe they don’t hire for the first time just thinking about it, you know, for your criminal defense. Maybe it’s like a low level offense, but if you represent like an immigrant, and they don’t understand the Uh, you might know this already, I think but if an immigrant takes a plea bargain, right, they can affect them for immigration. But you know, you’re, we’re all busy. Sometimes you might miss it in our checklist to discuss with them. And or they might not remember, they might not most the time when I get calls complain about other lawyers like oh, so and so didn’t tell me how Mike, I know this lawyer, I’m pretty sure they would have told you. So these guides help with that too. Even though we always have a disclaimer, this is not legal advice, just like, you know, website or whatever. So, that was a mindset block for me. Okay, because we got a lot of calls just like mentioning about the, when I had advertisement on the Spanish newspaper. That was difficult because I just was price shopping. But so even though I know some lawyers are hesitant on having like, video calls for consultations, and I love it, I started that really in 2018, because I had the baby and are co parenting. So think about that. Any other questions? Yes, Eric? Yeah, so I’ve mentioned that in the podcast, Max law podcast, tried to always mention, follow, subscribing, share, and then share experience. And then put your phone number at the end. Okay, if you have a tagline or something, add that every time I do that, in the beginning, at least, okay, and maybe even like an always do the captions, if possible, at least on tick tock, because some people watch it at night or in the morning and don’t want to wake up anyone else. Okay. All right. Well, contact me if you have any questions. Crush it. You can find me there. All right. Thank you.
Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer but to stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.
