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Plan for Success

Business development is a process, not an event. Successful attorneys and legal marketers never stop prospecting for new business, regardless of their workload.

Quantify your business goals and objectives as a first step in your legal rainmaking and marketing program. It is critical to understand specifically what you want to achieve and by when. While many goals revolve around “make more money,” translate this vague objective into precise actions that are clearly defined in your marketing plan.

You may want to establish at least one new client per month with an annual value of $10,000, for example. If your conversion rate is 25% (meaning that one of every four prospects turns into a client), this indicates that you need a minimum of 8 to 12 qualified prospects in your pipeline at all times to meet your goal for the next quarter.

This diagram illustrates the typical business development process. You may need as many as 50 to 100 inquiries just to get one profitable new client, depending on your legal practice.

Now you can appreciate the importance of keeping your pipeline full of qualified leads on a continuous basis. An inquiry is only an initial expression of interest. Many inquiries are unqualified for a variety of reasons (i.e., too small or not ready to retain an attorney). Your goal is to identify the most viable leads quickly, which you can then turn into true prospects with additional time and effort. The final stage in the business development cycle is to convert the prospect into a client.

Writing a detailed, integrated attorney marketing plan is a key starting point in creating an effective program to generate high quality new legal prospects. Marketing without a plan is like driving to a new and distant destination without a roadmap. You are sure to get lost! A sample attorney marketing plan is available upon request to the author.

There are three time-honored marketing techniques that help most attorneys generate new business. You will want to build your attorney marketing plan around these high-value activities:

1. Speaking engagements
2. Publishing opportunities
3. Seminars

These methods are so powerful in expanding your practice that we devote an entire chapter to each individual area in the following sections of this book.

Implementing your attorney marketing program is the crucial step where you finally get to see the results of all your planning and preparation. Nothing happens until you put your attorney marketing plan into action (except that your competition might get more business). Develop a marketing calendar at the beginning of each year for use as a monthly guide to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Monitor your results when your legal business development plan is in place. Focus on the attorney marketing techniques that work best for you, and modify or replace the campaigns that fail to produce results after sufficient testing.

About the Author: Margaret Grisdela is the Founder and President of Legal Expert Connections, Inc., a legal marketing firm specializing in marketing and business development in the legal and litigation support  markets.  You can reach her at mg@legalexpertconnections.com.