Lawyer Marketing: Be Genuiely Interested in Your Clients
I have been reading the classic Dale Carnegie book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recently and came across a line that really hit home to me. To paraphrase, it was the statement that you can make more friends in two months by being genuinely interested in people than you can in two years by trying to make people interested in you.
I have heard this said another way in the past: people don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.
I believe that by showing your prospective clients that you are genuinely interested in them and helping them solve their problems you can build up your client base with great clients quicker than by tooting your own horn all the time. I find this is pretty standard for all professionals - not just attorneys. The feeling is that if I want someone to hire me, I need to tell them all of the great things about myself like how high I graduated in my undergraduate and law school classes, how many certifications or professional merits I have received, how many similar cases I’ve won, etc. While this information is relevant and helps me to sell myself, what really sells the client is that you care enough to know what their problem is and that you know how to get in all of those personal highlights in a manner that shows them how it helps solve their problems rather than building up your ego in front of them.
How can you go about showing people how much you care? Get involved in the community in similar areas that your law practice servcs. This gives you an opportunity to speak to people in a non-threatening environment, without all of the formality of law books, suits and big desks, and just talk.
This thought goes against some advice I received in law school which was: "never have coffee with your clients." I think the visiting attorney was trying to get through to us that we want our business relationships to remain business so we don’t internalize everything and take every set-back or loss personally. I think there’s a way to show clients that your are genuinely interested in them and their problems without becoming so personally intertwined that we cannot focus on serving our clients.
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