Get the inside scoop on my law firm's most recent grassroots referral based marketing play which generated a 5900% ROI.
See Brian at Ten Golden Rules Live in Boca Raton April 26.
Want a copy of all of the letters Brian used in the mailer sequence from this episode? Click here.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Get the inside scoop on my law firm's most recent grassroots referral based marketing play which generated a 5900% ROI.
See Brian at Ten Golden Rules Live in Boca Raton April 26.
Want a copy of all of the letters Brian used in the mailer sequence from this episode? Click here.
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Welcome back in friends, to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass. I'm an injury lawyer in Northern Virginia and while it would be surprising that you were listening to this and you didn't know who I am, maybe somebody shared this episode with you, or maybe you listen and you're like I don't actually know what that guy does, which, if you're a lawyer, it would surprise you how many of your friends don't actually know what you do. And maybe I haven't said in a while, but if you have an injury case in Virginia, and especially in the Northern Virginia area, that you need to refer out, I'd be happy to take a look at it. And today's episode is going to be on the topic of referrals. I'm heading down to Boca Raton, florida, next week to speak at my friend Jay Berkowitz's event 10 Golden Rules Live. By the way, tickets are still available to that and it's a really affordable two-day seminar with excellent speakers, including me. And if you're going, reach out to me because I would love to say hi and meet some of you guys in real life. But I'm going to be talking about this the one special trick that we use to generate auto accident referrals from chiropractors, and if you're not an injury lawyer, don't turn this off, because I'm going to tell you exactly how I would use this referral tactic if I were in a different area of law. All right, stay tuned.
Speaker 1:Okay, so before I tell you exactly what we did earlier this year, let me go over the numbers. I spent maybe $600 all in on this campaign and it's netted for us so far at least three referrals that have turned into signed clients. My average fee value on an auto accident case is $18,000. Maybe it's a little smaller in a chiropractic case, which is who this target demographic is, but let's call it 12,000. So a $36,000 return on a $600 investment is about 5,900% ROI. So hopefully I have your attention with that. In a world where, if we're putting a marketing dollar out into the universe, most web marketing guys are pretty happy if you can get a 5 or a 6 or a 10x return, I'm going to tell you how to get a 59x return on that dollar. So here's what we did.
Speaker 1:This all starts with figuring out what problems your referral partners have. So the very first thing that I did really over the span of years, but concentrated in the last three months or so of 2023, is. I called up a bunch of chiropractors that we have cases with now and I said let's go to lunch. And at that lunch I didn't talk anything about my practice. I asked questions exclusively about what problems do you have with auto injury lawyers on cases that you're working on? And the problems that you hear when you ask these questions are they come up again and again.
Speaker 1:The lawyer doesn't give me updates on the case. The lawyer at the end of the case asked me to cut my fee. All the time these cases take way too long to get through the pipeline and the lawyer never tells me that it's a bad case until it's time for them to ask me to cut my fee which actually is a new one that I hadn't heard before and a light bulb went off and I'm like, oh shit, that's right. Why aren't we telling these people in the beginning of the case, especially if they've referred us the case hey, maybe this one isn't so good, and I think a lot of times it's because we hope it will turn out another way or because we don't want to be turning away a case because it's too small. Because we turn away the small cases, they won't send us the big cases.
Speaker 1:I think that's wrong. First of all, because you have to educate your referral sources on the kinds of things that you actually want and the kind of things that you actually look for. Otherwise, you end up in a situation where at the end of the case, you're just pissing them off because you're calling and saying I need you to cut your fee by 33% or by 50% so that we can get the case closed and get it over with. Number one thing is you go and you have these lunches where you're just asking questions. You're not providing any of the answers. You're not talking about why you're better, you're not asking for referrals, you're just asking questions about what types of things? About people like me, bother people like you. Okay, now that I know all of that, I'm going to put that into a letter.
Speaker 1:And so what we did is we went out into like maybe a 10 mile radius from my office, because I don't actually need all of Virginia. If I can just dominate referrals in a 10 mile radius from my office, I can be pretty fat and happy. And so we found all the chiropractors in the 10 mile radius, I think, using like the Virginia Chiropractic Association database, and we sent them a letter outlining all the problems that chiropractors told me they had with lawyers and a basic copywriting letter identify the problem, agitate the problem and identify the solution. And then, by the way, hey, I'm the solution. And I just said does anybody want to go out to lunch and get to know a little bit more about each other's practices and talk about how we might solve this problem for you? And of those 60 letters, 48 of them got no response at all. But I went out to lunch with 10 or 12 of the doctors and so that's the $600 marketing spend. That's all the marketing spend that we had on this project is going to lunch with these doctors. And of those doctors, seven of them I haven't heard from since, but three of them have referred us cases, and so it's not that hard.
Speaker 1:It's not that hard to generate referrals from people that have problems that your practice solves. And the issue with most chiropractor-lawyer relationships is that the expectation is, for every case you refer me, I'm going to send you one back, something like that, and I just say in the initial correspondence I'm not in the position to do that. We run a pretty good practice. I don't really take cases from people who haven't already seen a doctor. I don't really take cases from people who are calling the lawyer before they're going to a doctor because, honestly, I don't believe that you're all that hurt. Second thing, I don't really usually refer patients clients to chiropractors because it always shows up in a medical record and because it always gets highlighted by the defense adjuster or by the defense lawyer at trial that you're the one that sent them to the doctor, and I've seen that play many times. So I don't really do that.
Speaker 1:We will do it in extreme cases. If I have somebody that doesn't have any health insurance and that's the only way they're going to get access to medicine, fine, we'll do it then. But in every other case I'm not going to do it, and we don't. I don't advertise on TV, I don't advertise on radio, we don't spend a whole lot of money on PPC, and so I just don't have a huge call volume that I can send out to chiropractors. And Northern Virginia is the kind of area where, if you're 10 miles away, it might be 45 minutes before you get there, and so the numbers just don't work out that I ever would be able to generate enough calls to send you enough cases to make you happy. So we just say that in the beginning.
Speaker 1:But I bet if you're running an honest chiropractic shop, you have these cases in your portfolio and you're probably frustrated with the lawyer that you send these cases to. Is that interesting to anybody? Is anybody interested in generating a relationship with a lawyer who you can trust? Because I'm going to show you the settlement statements, because I'm going to get you the money faster and because we have a good reputation because we actually try cases. If the case settles, it's for full value from the insurance company. And so I went out and I had 10 or so of these lunches with doctors that generated about three referrals.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing that you need to know is that for the other 50 letters that we sent, no response, and so the sample size of the number of letters that you're sending out has to be large enough. You can't send one, can't send five, because you might get one or five doctors that don't respond to you. And then you conclude that this thing doesn't work. It's the same as spending very little amount of money on PPC, very little amount of money on SEO, very little amount of money boosting social media hosts and then just assuming it doesn't work. The volume has to be large enough, because most people are either going to ignore you or the letter isn't going to make it to them, or they're going to already have that problem solved. And the other note on this is the letter has to make it to them.
Speaker 1:So the thing, one of the things, that we did, is we struck off any large medical practices. I really only want to talk to what I would call like a mom and pop shop, where it's the doctor and an assistant, or maybe just the doctor, and in a couple of the practices that I was invited to go and visit, it's just the doctor. But if you're at a place where there's a receptionist or an assistant or somebody else opening the mail, you've got to get it past him or her to get to the doctor. And so my director of happiness, susie, did a little bit of research this takes effort, but did just a little bit of research to figure out what the assistant's name is and put the assistant's name on a sticky note that says hey, alyssa, whatever the name is, I think doctors would appreciate seeing this letter. And that's how you get past the gatekeeper. You always have to be thinking how do I get past the person who's opening the mail and get to the decision maker. That's why so many.
Speaker 1:I don't hardly ever see any advertisements that come in the mail because they just get trashed at the front desk. So if I were doing direct mail advertising, I probably wouldn't be sending a postcard, I'd probably be sending a box, because I know at least it's going to make it to the lawyer or to the doctor or whoever it is that you're trying to reach. And then here's what happens if you send enough of them and you also get a little bit lucky. These guys talk to each other, and so I've been invited to speak to the Virginia Chiropractic Association by one doctor. We had another doctor who said I have three friends who also have this problem. Let me set you up with them. And then I got a call out of the blue from a pain management doctor a couple of days ago saying I don't have very many auto accident cases in my practice right now, but I'd like to talk to you about what it would look like if I might have some more. And if I did, would you be interested in receiving my referrals? Why? Because chiropractors are his referral source to begin with, and because he takes those people out to lunch, and so we heard about us through them.
Speaker 1:And so now, with a $600 marketing spend, developed a network of 10 chiropractors who at least know my name, know my face, and a pain management clinic, and the goal is now to start cultivating relationships. Because I have a cell phone number, I have permission to text and I can begin to now populate an email drip campaign. I can send our shock and awe box with an article when something is interesting that may be interesting to a chiropractor. It's permission-based marketing. It's not cold email marketing. It's not cold calls. It's not cold calls somebody that's given you permission to come into their office with some value, because that's what we led with, nothing about how great we are. That's on the back end. Hey, we also handle these cases really quickly. But I can solve your problem, and so here's how I would think about this if I were in a different practice area and I shared this with our hero mastermind group last week when they were in the office is, if you're running the kind of practice that is a maybe a transactional, like an estate planning practice, there are other service professionals that service your clients.
Speaker 1:So if you're an estate planner, your clients probably have a CPA, they might have a tax planner, probably have a realtor, might have a family law lawyer, might have been divorced, might have an accountant, who's different than the CPA, and the tax advisors, all these other professionals, right. And so, as you're seeing the documents that your clients are providing you, you start generating this list. So let's say there are 10 people, 10 other service professionals that service your clients and most of your clients have seven of the 10 boxes checked, whatever it is. Now when I have a client that comes in that's got seven of the 10 boxes left. I've got a list of who are the professionals, the three professionals that they're missing, and who are the three, two or three suggestions that I can give them in each of those categories that they can go and I can make a connection with. And now I'm the connector right, and I'll bet you, if you refer enough of your estate planning clients to a CPA or enough of your estate planning clients to a realtor, that realtor or the CPA is going to remember your name the next time somebody doesn't have an estate planner and it's just. It's creating these networks where you are the center of influence and where you have led with value, which so many lawyers just fail to do.
Speaker 1:We think that being smarter and being better and being a super lawyer and having the best, cleanest website is a differentiating factor, and the reality is that it is just not. Because, by and large, your referral sources, they only care about a couple of things. Number one is this person going to take good care of my clients? Number two am I going to suffer embarrassment by association because I referred them to somebody who sucked at their job and now they think that I only know people that suck at their job? And number three is this taking a liability or a problem off of my hand and getting it solved by somebody else. And if you can address those three things, you will generate far more referrals than you will if you have a great website, than you will if you go to networking events and you have an amazing 30-second elevator pitch, than you will if you just do good work and hope that the clients will come and so looking for other professionals who serve your clients or the clients that you want to serve and solving the problems that they have is the number one thing that will lead to more referrals. One of the things that we did earlier this year is we shut off all of our digital marketing spend and we just poured it into this person to person relationship building. So we're trying to have lunch once or twice a week with other professionals. We're paying for that with the money that we would have spent otherwise on digital marketing.
Speaker 1:The digital marketing is important and it needs to be there, because one of the things that happens when somebody makes a referral is they go online and they look for you, right. So you can't these lawyers just say, oh, I don't need a good website because all my business is referral-based. Well, that may be true, but you probably have more business, more referral-based business, if you showed up and you didn't have early 2000s era website and an AOL email address. So you have to pay attention to that stuff. But we know at our law firm that in 2022 and 2023, 60% of our cases came from referrals from real life human beings and 80% of our money came from referrals from real life human beings Didn't come from digital. Now, maybe because I don't spend a whole ton of money on digital, but I don't think that we have to right, and so it's ironic a little bit that I'm going and speaking at a digital event about this. But the digital is the backbone and the spend is a nice bonus, but people do business with people, and so getting in front of them, them solving their problems and developing relationships where the referral sources, the people that have, are centers of influence, for your clients already know and trust you is the unlock to finding more cases in 2024, and so if you've made it this far in the episode, assume it means you got value and I'm going to give you more value.
Speaker 1:So if you go to the website that is linked in the show description, you're going to get copies of the letters that we sent to these chiropractors. Develop your own referral letter. You're going to get a loom video that I shot explaining this whole process in detail. I think I used the letters explaining exactly what I've done because I want you to be able to do it in your area.
Speaker 1:If you're in Northern Virginia, do me a favor, don't do it. At least change the letter, because they've already gotten it and they're going to get another wave of it here in a couple of months, because we're going to run this back every three, four, five months or so because it works. But the world is large and if I get a chiropractic referral source, I'm almost certain it's not taking one away from you. But just change the letter a little bit, please, so that link's going to be in the show description. If you are inclined to go and go to the link, download the letters and run this program, do me a favor share this episode with one other person, because it might help them subscribe to the show, and I hope you guys have a great weekend.