Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Triple Your Law Firm's Referrals | Delisi Friday's CORE Method
Sick of pouring budget into ads that attract the wrong cases? In this episode, Delisi Friday breaks down a referral-first growth plan built on two pillars: better intake and the CORE method—Create Once, Recycle Everywhere. We get into the exact intake language that protects trust (“Who can we thank for the referral?”), the follow-up rhythm that keeps you top-of-mind, and how to turn one recording into weeks of credibility-building content without burning out your team.
You’ll learn:
- The intake script that shortens time-to-retainer
- How to map and prioritize your warm network (without feeling salesy)
- CORE workflows to multiply content across channels in minutes
- Simple touchpoints (think: thank-you notes, key-date reminders) that quietly drive repeat referrals
If you’re ready to replace random acts of marketing with a predictable referral engine, hit play—and share this with the partner who still thinks “more clicks” is the answer.
Stay tuned for Part Two, where we go deeper on building a durable pipeline that compounds.
Find Delisi Friday:
Website: FirstCallFriday.com
Email: delisi@firstcallfriday.com
YouTube: First Call Friday
Podcast: From Coffee to Cases with Delisi Friday
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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
Your former clients can be like your hugest referral source. They already know the business, they already know the people in it and, unless they had a horrible experience, they're the first person who's going to say oh, I know who you should call, refer it, and you get business that way. If you have a former client who suggests a friend, call your firm. That trust is something that digital marketing can never buy. An ad can never buy the level of trust you have when a friend or a loved one says you should call Brian Glass because he helped me and I had a great experience, versus a lawyer who's spending tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions on digital marketing.
Speaker 2:Hey friends, welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. If you're tired of burning cash on ads and chasing leads that go nowhere, today's conversation is going to hit home. My guest is Delisi Friday, founder of First Call Friday, and she's built a proven system that helps law firms grow through what actually works relationships, referrals and a smarter intake process. In this episode, delisi breaks down why your best clients still find you on Google after a referral, the one intake question that every firm should be asking, and how to turn a single piece of content into weeks of marketing gold with her COR strategy Create once, recycle everywhere. We also dive into simple but powerful referral touch points like birthday cards and settlement anniversaries that keep clients coming back and sending more people your way. So stick around, hit, play and get ready to shift from random acts of marketing to a referral-first system that compounds over time. And here's the best part. This is just part one. We've got even more with Delisi coming soon.
Speaker 3:Hello everybody and welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Delisi. Friday of First Call Friday. Delisi and I were just getting to know each other off air before recording and we're going to be hanging out in Las Vegas at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing in September. Man, the fall conference schedule is kind of blurring together for me, but I will see you in Vegas in September and hopefully we'll see many, many, many of the listeners to this show. Delisi, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Thank you for coming on and we were talking before we got started about your background. But for people who don't know you and I know you primarily for LinkedIn, from LinkedIn give us a quick background of how you got into the legal marketing industry and what your role is today with helping lawyers.
Speaker 1:Sure. So I got into the legal industry the day I was born. I was born the day my dad became a lawyer. I grew up in a law firm. I wasn't watching Sesame Street, I was watching Jerry Spencer. I kind of hesitate to say that now because we lost him recently and God bless him, but I grew up watching him.
Speaker 1:When I was a kid, legal was meant to be a part of my life because of my dad. My first official legal marketing job was working with Michael Cowan of Cowan Rodriguez Peacock and he really showed me that my passion is referral marketing, because that's how I helped grow his firm from seven to eight figures. Then I went to go be chief of staff to Arjon Robbins, who's the attorney who created how to manage a small law firm, and I learned so much about the business side of running a law firm and just business as a whole, because because he's an eight-figure serial entrepreneur. So I got to work within his enterprise and when I left him I did some contract work and I realized I don't want to help just one firm, I want to help lots of firms, because I love legal so much and that's how I started. First Call Friday.
Speaker 3:Here's what I'm. Well, I got to ask you this first. Did I mishear you, or were you born the day that your dad became a lawyer?
Speaker 1:My dad became a dad and a lawyer on the same day. I came early.
Speaker 3:My dad tells a story of being see now I'm not going to remember the story either being sworn in just before I was born or just after I was born. But so your dad had to had to decide between, like, swearing in ceremony and staying at the hospital, or how did that work?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I actually have the photo where I'm like I don't know 24 hours or 48 hours old and it's him swearing in. So I don't, I didn't ask like the timeline, but he's like it really was like the biggest day of my life. Everything changed.
Speaker 3:I'm like, yeah, personally and professionally, you also, just going through that job history right Two enormous names in the legal industry Michael Cowan and then R John Robbins. What did you do to get the job with Michael?
Speaker 1:So that was actually on accident. Funny enough, no one's ever asked me this question. And there's a. I'm going to tie this up for you.
Speaker 1:I used to be a headhunter and when I was a headhunter, I love to recruit for law firms because, duh, I love law firms and I thought that would be my future, because I'm such a big believer in relationships. And when I was looking for a job description, my client was like I don't have a job description, but look one up. And I'm like man, I'm about to write this for you. Okay, I found the job description Michael Cowan had posted for a marketing director for his office and when I read it I was like this guy described me. So I said, well, let me go talk to him. I just want to see like, if it's not me, then hire me to find the person you need, because I know this job.
Speaker 1:And when I met him I could tell he was very smart and very honest. And he told me I actually know your dad. Your dad and I were in the same room when we went to go train with Jerry Spence. So I know you are someone who has a great reputation and you love the legal industry. Will you take this job and help me grow in the San Antonio market, and I felt like it was a sign that I had to work for him, and I'm so glad.
Speaker 3:I listened. Very cool story. And if you don't know Michael Cowan, he's host trial lawyer nation. He runs the big, big rig trucking school.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I should have just let you do that. And he's and he's developed a reputation, I'm sure with your help, of being the truck accident guy in Texas. And so if you are a lawyer that has a trucking practice and I'm he probably handles cases outside of Texas. But but we know in the industry that there, if you're outside of PI like maybe you don't know this, but in the industry there are guys who are trucking gurus. There's Tim Summeroth in Iowa, there's Michael Cohen in Texas and they know things about trucks and layers of coverage and all this stuff that some of us simple red car hit a blue car lawyers like me don't know. And so you helped Michael develop his reputation and the referral network in that niche and we'll talk about some of my limiting beliefs in the PI referral network building, relationship building area. But what were some of the things that you did to develop Michael's name in that niche?
Speaker 1:Yes. So I created Pink Ring Boot Camp and Trial Lawyer Nation and those were some of the strategies. So I will say the number one thing that I recommend to anyone, when they have the budget and they're ready to invest in a long term marketing strategy, is podcasts. I am a huge believer in podcasts because, if you think about it, you're going to have to record some kind of content right, either for social media or for some marketing efforts. I believe in the marketing acronym CORE Create Once, recycle Everywhere. If I can get a lawyer to create one piece of marketing and recycle it everywhere, I am a very efficient marketer.
Speaker 1:So I told Michael okay, we're going to create this podcast. He had the idea because he was trying to find a podcast to listen to when he was running on trucking cases and growing his business and all the things you ask when you own a law firm and you want to keep learning. So he came to me and he said Delisi, I can't find one, let's make it. And I was like Michael, I've never made a podcast, what do we do? And so I said, okay, I'm going to think like a marketer, let's record it and figure out how many different ways I can use this piece of marketing.
Speaker 1:And so for lawyers who are thinking about different ways to market, I love podcasts because if you do the podcast on video, you can use audio, you can use the video. You create that one piece of content, you share shorts, you share reels, you share audiograms, you own your podcast. And for anyone who nerds out on digital marketing and SEO other than Guy and Conrad, when you go online and you search your name, I guarantee you, if you have a podcast, all that content is going to come up on page one. And if you don't have the money to do it yourself, my next suggestion is be a guest on a podcast, because someone else already has the time and the tools to create all of the marketing content. You can get in front of an audience that doesn't know who you are and still recycle that content to build your brand and share your message. So I am a huge, huge believer in podcasts. I'm sure you are too. You obviously have one that does very well.
Speaker 3:And I've guessed it on tons of others. And so the thing I would say, if you know you said, if you don't have the money to start a podcast, like it's cheap. I have a Riverside account, I have a Buzzsprout account it's probably $100 to $150 a month for the technology. Now somebody has to do some of the editing and some of the distribution. But even that, like I use Opus Pro to do the short clips which you'll get when we're done recording here, and then I have my EA who manages the distribution of all of that. So that barrier to entry really is not money, it's time. But if you don't have the time and or you don't have the money, then being a guest is the next best thing, right? And so I'm curious your thoughts on how can you be a good guest, how can you get somebody to pay attention to you and get you invited first, and then how can you be a good guest on another lawyer's podcast?
Speaker 1:So my recommendation is don't submit yourself as a guest idea to a podcast unless you actually enjoy the podcast. I think that's a big part of it, because you should listen to the podcast and understand what the podcast is about. Who is the audience for the podcast? What kind of questions does this person typically have on their podcast? And then my suggestion would be reach out to the podcast host and don't ask to be a guest at first. Start a relationship and say hey, Brian, I just want to let you know I listened to your most recent episode with Cassidy Lewis and I loved it.
Speaker 1:My favorite part was when she talked about how she grew her team from just her to four and a half people in her marketing department, and that's it. Let the person know you listened to the podcast and tell them what your favorite part was. Then get to know them a little bit more through connecting on LinkedIn and then send a message hey, you know what? I was listening to your most recent podcast with Jacob Molina and I think a great episode would be if you talked about how to do referral marketing on LinkedIn. I think I would be a great guest and suggest yourself. But let them know you actually did your homework and I think that stands out much more than someone who just blind submits themselves for podcasts. I know there are people out there you can hire and they will blind submit you to podcasts and I don't think those do as well, because it's just numbers just submitting blindly. Does it really make sense?
Speaker 3:I routinely ignore those and listeners should know that I reached out to you.
Speaker 1:You did, as I was giving the examples, like man, people are going to think I came in.
Speaker 3:But you know, what's really funny is exactly what you described for the way to get on podcasts is what I described on LinkedIn this week or last week about the way to get a job if you're a 2L.
Speaker 3:Right, it's the exact same thing. It's demonstrated knowledge of the law, firm curiosity about what the firm does, and not an ask actually for a job, right, who else do you know that might be interested in somebody like me? Right, right, who else do you know that might be interested in somebody like me? Right? Because when you, when you are coming directly in, or, even worse, when you have an agency coming directly in and making the ask with this person is so great Once you have them on your podcast, like they're in the beginning, yeah, podcast hosts will do that, but after enough shows, it's like no, I the same pitch that you're giving to everybody and you haven't done any homework to figure out whether your guy would be a good fit on this show or not. So it's funny how many parallels there are between and I guess this is all relationship building and it'll tie back in referrals but this demonstrated knowledge of the person that you're reaching out to in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like the clients who are going to call you because they need a lawyer. They're going to. Well, not all of them. Some of them are going to do homework before they call you to see if you're the right fit. Some of them will not.
Speaker 3:But your best clients have done some homework right.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes.
Speaker 3:I don't know this world has changed in the last 10 years, and certainly in the last five post-COVID, where I am shocked the number of people who find us on Google and I can see on the back end, I can see the whole digital paper trail Find us on Google, call us 37 seconds later, have a 12 minute phone call with my intake team and three and a half minutes later have signed a retainer. It's crazy. Now they don't tend to be your top flight clients. Your top flight clients are people who have done their research or, more importantly, have come to you by referral right, if we were to go back and look at all of our data from 2024 and take the top I don't know decile of settlements and attorney's fees, I promise you almost all of those people would have been referred by somebody, either by a lawyer or by a family member, or by a former client or by a doctor.
Speaker 3:Your best clients are coming from referrals from other people. It doesn't mean you can ignore the digital, because people are often getting more than one referral and then they're coming and checking you out. But that's what we're going to talk about today is how do we build the referral network? Just before we jumped on. You told me something that I said on with Jacob Molina.
Speaker 1:Yes, go ahead. So I was listening to the Jacob Molina episode that you did and you mentioned referrals, but the way you responded was something along the lines of you know, I don't, it's when we were talking about LinkedIn. I'm getting maybe five referrals from LinkedIn and I think most lawyers are going to just do it themselves versus calling me, and I'm like, oh, whenever Brian asked me to be on his show, I would love to talk about this because I believe in referrals so much. So tell me what you meant by that. Let's unpack this together.
Speaker 3:So here's my thesis for LinkedIn is this I don't use LinkedIn to to acquire Virginia car crash cases. It happens occasionally and probably every other month I'm getting a message or a phone call from somebody who I've got a relationship with it, meaning that, like we comment on each other's posts, who you know stumbled across a case in Virginia. I have said, and I think I said in that podcast, if you have one of these alphabet soup practices or you have a true niche practice, you're a trucking lawyer, right, ftca lawyer, erisa, long-term disability lawyer, whistleblower lawyer a hundred percent it's because I don't know anybody else other than the people who come to mind immediately for me for those cases Brewster Rawls, my dad, john Howley, is a whistleblower in New York. Other than people that do that, I don't know anybody else that does it.
Speaker 3:I know a lot of people who practice car crash law in a lot of states and if you're in Virginia where you actually have a high probability that a car crash case is going to call you and you have an estate planning practice or a criminal practice, some lawyers will try to keep that on their own and try to do it on their own. And so for me, the best use of my time and effort on LinkedIn is in is in an effort to grow my personal brand and name, not as a send me your car crash cases, but as a invite me to come speak on your stage, and so that's what I use it for. And so you will see when you look at my content, very little of it has to do with injury law or results that we get, and that's it's in part intentional. It's in part because maybe I have this limiting belief around the number of cases that I actually might be able to acquire if I put more time, effort and energy into trying to acquire Virginia car crash cases. Tell me why I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:I think you're wrong, but just like a small part of that. You have such a huge reach on LinkedIn and people know, like and trust you. But if you don't ask, you don't get, and I think if you just took a couple of small actions then you could find out who could potentially refer you case. So what I just heard. If you're one of my clients, I would say, okay, let's test something. You have a lot of people on LinkedIn who you communicate with on a regular basis. Have you ever sent them a DM and said hey, brian, you know we've communicated on multiple posts together. We have a lot in common. We're in different states.
Speaker 1:I'd love to see if we can hop on a phone call or a Zoom and, you know, meet each other face to face, learn a little bit about your practice and when that happens, you can learn about the other attorney's practice, the kinds of cases they accept, and what should naturally happen is they ask the same about you.
Speaker 1:So you have an opportunity to tell them I do this and these are the cases I accept in this area, and then the next time they have or if they ever have a case in Virginia to send your way, they send it to you what you're doing now? I think they might naturally send it to you, because you create so much content, you have so many followers, but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and so I'm a big believer in shooting my shot and just seeing where that leads. And sometimes that extra question and conversation helps get someone there, because in my 20 years of working in the legal industry I have learned sometimes you have to really spell something out for a lawyer, because they're so smart and analytical they might not put that last piece together. So if you help them by saying I would be honored if you ever had a car crash case in Virginia, if you sent it my way, sometimes you have to say that so they can think it and it sounds super simple, but it does make a difference.
Speaker 3:The DM is an admitted gap in my game. I don't do it. Here's what I do Occasionally when I see somebody post something and I, for whatever reason, I'm not going to comment on it, I will send a DM. So a little more personal, a little more I don't know, like if there's a take that I'm not going to share as a comment. But I'll say I really loved what you said there. But other than that, I don't do it at all because because I get so many and I ignore the vast majority of them and there doesn't seem to me to be a very good filtering device for me to be able to ignore all of the crap that comes in. So what's, what is your? I don't know. Is it a? Is it a number of DMs? Is it a number of times? Amount of time spent doing that? Like, what's? What is your recommendation to your clients for that?
Speaker 1:I don't have a, it's almost like a. How much is my case worth? Kind of question?
Speaker 2:I'm going to say it depends, brian.
Speaker 1:It depends what's your goal? I mean, is your goal to say, okay, I'm going to have four calls with lawyers that I know through LinkedIn, but I want to make sure we actually have a established relationship? Well then, I would say how many DMs do you have to send each week for us to hit your goal? Because I'm going to work backwards and that's how I would accomplish that. If you don't have a set number and sometimes lawyers don't I'll say let's think of your referral list. How many names do you want to add to this list as potential referrals? Let's start there and say okay, what kind of actions do we have to take to increase this list? And let's just talk about what's realistic for the time and the energy you need to do these tasks while also being a practicing lawyer. And so it depends.
Speaker 3:This is clearly a chief of staff speaking, because you're like tell me what the goal is and then we'll just reverse engineer the things that you have to do.
Speaker 1:You might not enjoy doing all the things, but If I could tell you the stories, brian, where Arjun would come, and I'd be like, wait, wait, what is our goal, what are we trying to accomplish? Because sometimes it helps to just talk out the goal, and when you talk about what the goal is, you might realize wait, I should actually be doing this instead, because this accomplishes my goal faster, and so I like to do everything with the end in mind first.
Speaker 3:The way, if you don't have anybody in your business who asks you that question and then has a conversation with you about it, like you're leaving dollars on the table right Because so many, so many lawyers especially people who are high like quick start will decide what the goal is, decide what the means are and then just start down the path towards those means without ever considering, like, is there a different way to get to this goal? So maybe a year or two ago I made my marketing director write out like what are all the channels that we have and what are, what is the goal of each of those and how do we know if any of them work? There's so much stuff that goes on within a law firm's marketing department that is just a complete waste of time and money.
Speaker 1:And sometimes ROI is hard and tracking it is hard and you mentioned referrals and someone finding you on Google. Sometimes the hardest part about legal marketing is trying to determine where that case actually came from, because you might have someone who referred that client to you and said you have to call Brian Glass, and then that person went to Google to go find Brian Glass and then they clicked your ad. So you might think, oh, Google brought that case in. But you have no idea. Delisi actually referred that person. They just happened to use Google to find your phone number.
Speaker 3:For sure. So we built into our intake script who can we thank for the referral? Because that does two or three things right and I haven't stated it exactly correctly. The goal is to convince whoever's calling that, even if they weren't referred, that most people come to you because somebody else knew, liked and trusted you right, and so we've built that in. Even if it does come hard-coded from a tracking number, from some digital property, somewhere people are getting asked or should be getting asked. That's another authority-building tactic that you can put in your toolkit.
Speaker 1:I love that. Everyone should do that. Attorneys should do that. Just so you know, you mentioned that on a previous podcast and I heard it and I was like oh, that's brilliant. That's actually a question in order to schedule a meeting with me through Calendly. Who can I thank for referring you, because I heard it from you?
Speaker 3:Beautiful, beautiful. So tell me about your business. What are you, how are you spending your time and what impact are you making on the world now?
Speaker 1:So what do I do in my business? I help lawyers with referral marketing and that could be anyone from. I have associates at bigger firms who pay me because they say I want to be a bigger value to the firm and generate referrals into the firm if I want to grow within. Sometimes it's law firm owners. You say I have a marketing budget of X. How can I use this efficiently and strategically to grow referrals? And then sometimes I have law firms that will call me and say Delisi, I recognize that my lawyers should probably be on LinkedIn to generate case referrals and grow our brand as a law firm, because people connect with people.
Speaker 1:They don't typically connect with the brand. So the more associates and people within your law firm you can have online championing your brand and your law firm, the better. So I'll help train those law firms and the lawyers interested in doing it on how to use LinkedIn, because you can't force someone to do it. They either want to or they don't. The lawyers where you're like Brian, you have to get on LinkedIn and part of your KPI is just to do a put no. That's never going to work. It's going to sound horrible. It's going to be like putting them in a prison. Only have the lawyers who love and want to do it do it. If not, it's not going to be successful. That's what I do, who I help. Everything is all referral marketing based, because that's my experience, that's my passion, and one of the things you and I both have in common is when I can integrate that with gifting.
Speaker 3:Tell me about that.
Speaker 1:I love gifting. I love gifting so much. I think gifting helps create and grow relationships with your referral partners, but also your former clients. Oh my God, people leave gold. They just leave gold and run away from it. When they don't market to former clients, your former clients can be like your hugest referral source. They already know the business, they already know the business, they already know the people in it and, unless they had a horrible experience, they're the first person who's going to say, oh I know who you should call, refer it, and you get business that way. If you have a former client who suggests a friend call your firm, that trust is something that digital marketing can never buy. An ad can never buy the level of trust you have when a friend or a loved one says you should call Brian Glass because he helped me and I had a great experience, versus a lawyer who's spending tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions on digital marketing. They can't buy that trust. That referral is gold and costs minimal money, and so I believe in it. So so much.
Speaker 3:So we do. We still do the hard copy print newsletter that goes out once a month. We do we do Starbucks gift cards on on your birthday for clients and for former clients, I think, to like maybe to one year out or something like that and then the team is empowered to buy I don't even know if we have a limit, but you know, to buy a gift for a client probably like up to a hundred bucks clients in surgery or had a death in the family, or something like that and just ship it out. We don't even get asked anymore and it's not my skillset, right, and so we've empowered the team to do that.
Speaker 3:They have some resources to do it and now I don't have, like it's burdensome for me to have to think about what am I going to get somebody because I spend so much time? What if they don't like it? What if it doesn't get to them? But having somebody else on the team who can do that and is good at it and likes doing it you know, to your point about LinkedIn, like, if you don't like doing it, you won't do it, I don't, that's why I don't give a lot of gifts, but it's why I have people on my team who take care of it for me, and so having having that the team that's empowered to ship the stuff without even asking you, I think is incredibly helpful. How do you keep track of all of this?
Speaker 1:For my clients.
Speaker 3:Well as uh, yeah, I mean, what's your advice on as a law firm of tracking? And I'll tell you why I'm asking. We have stumbled over ourselves for the last eight months on trying to figure out this referral marketing play. So we have, for a couple of years now, we've sent a chiropractor newsletter, invitations for lunch, that kind of thing to drum up PI business, and it's worked to varying degrees, but we've had a hard time doing it consistently, it consistently, and so we've. We have moved from lead docket to an Excel sheet to well, no, from keep to a lead docket, to an Excel sheet, to MailChimp.
Speaker 3:And now we're on this. We're just started with this thing called big contacts. I think it's called big contacts trying to figure out what's the one place where we can keep a name and everybody on the team can have access to it and we can figure out like what list is that person on? What gifts have they gotten? Has anybody personally reached out to them about the last referral that they sent or any of the referrals that they sent? And so we think, like Lauren, my marketing director has has just brought this big context thing to us in our last meeting and we think that's going to be the solution, but it took us a long time to find it, so maybe there's something else out, because if you're not, if you're more than a one person shop, it's really hard to keep up with all of the moving parts and still practice law.
Speaker 1:Yeah it is. I help lawyers from every size from, honestly, some of my favorite clients are the lawyers who are a one person show right now and they build their entire firm based on referrals and I help them talk that through. But they have to be very strategic and lean because it's just them, so they have to take action to bring in the cases and then they also have to work the cases. And then I have clients who are bigger, who are like nine-figure firms only two and they have a whole team to delegate it. So, honestly, it just depends on again, I hate to say it depends, but it really does depend on the tools that you have and the team that you have to figure out who does what. So for an attorney that's just on his own, what I recommend is thinking through how can we systematize this in a way that takes less effort from you. So you mentioned birthday cards. I love to use handwritten. Have you ever used handwritten?
Speaker 3:Handwritten with like T-T-T-Y-N is the way it's spelled, right, and it's a fake handwriting. Yes, I don't know that we that I have. I know that I haven't used it, but I'm familiar.
Speaker 1:I love handwritten. I have literally used it to send out tens of thousands of mail pieces and previous roles, and so that's super easy for you just to have an Excel spreadsheet of names and email addresses, a standardized message for all of those. You upload it, you hit print, they send it out, wham bam. Thank you, ma'am. All I had to do is take a couple of steps and then it's done. That's easy and takes less time. Now, if you want to do multiple touch points, one thing I love to do and here's an idea for the PI lawyers who listen, I love birthday cards, but you know what else? I love Anniversary cards of their settlement. Hey, brian, we were just thinking of you. Can you believe it's been one year since we settled your case. Hope you're doing well. Everyone from and that's super simple Run your case report. Okay, when did the cases in August of last year settle? Let me upload this, send this out, and that's easy.
Speaker 3:And that goes out for handwritten and there's no thinking.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, exactly. So that's, that's simple for like a one person show. If you have a team, you can kind of graduate from an Excel spreadsheet to a CRM that actually does that. I love if someone has the budget to have a CRM that's integrated into your case management system. I know you can do that with Salesforce and Litify, and if you can integrate it then you can really see, okay, what is marketing doing. And did this lead to a referral? Because what I usually hear is Delisi, the lawyers have no idea that marketing is doing this one thing. So Brian just asked this guy out to lunch and had no idea that the marketing did their job and sent out this letter to him last week. So he looked like a jerk when he was saying something and had no clue marketing did this, and sometimes it's just the left hands not talking to the right. So having that integration is so nice, but not everyone can afford that because that's got some commas in it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know I'm not big enough that I don't know what marketing is. I consider myself, you know, super CMO and so and most small law firm owners actually want to be the chief marketing officer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do. I mean, especially if their name's on the door, then part of it is they want to have ownership and it's also their name and their reputation, so I get it. So there's not an easy answer to answer your question. It really just depends on what tools you have available, how can you use them and what makes sense for you in terms of the time that you have to commit to it, the budget you have to commit to it, and do you have someone who can help you?
Speaker 3:Because the more you have someone help, the better. Yeah, that's been the most challenging thing for us recently is finding the one central place to manage all of the contact. So, because it's not often like we wouldn't have the problem, I don't think where marketing had sent something out and then I called them for lunch, we would have the problem where, like, two of us called them for lunch at the same time. It's a right hand, not talking to the left hand, and this stuff, it outperforms your digital marketing and the digital marketing. You pay for it one month and then it's gone the next month. Right, it easily turns off, but the referral marketing stays forever.
Speaker 3:Now, it's much, much harder to track, right, there are some ways around that, but it is harder to track and it feels worse, I think. And and it feels worse, I think, you know, when you have the, the low hit rate, like most of the, just like everything, most of the activity that you take isn't going to yield a result or isn't going to yield an immediate result, and so you can go to five networking lunches and and not get a case out of it, right, and it feels like that was a waste of time and money, whereas if you give a thousand dollars to Google, like you're at least going to provoke a phone call usually, and so you do have to play the long game thinking about what's the result that I want, and then how many of that activity do I have to undertake to get to that result?
Speaker 1:You hit the nail on the head, because sometimes when I talk to a lawyer they'll say okay, great. I should be asking you how do I measure if this is successful? And the challenging part about referral marketing is what you're doing now can help you later on. You might not get the result right away. Some of my clients do. Some of them have a case referred to them right away and some of them don't. So it is kind of hard to track sometimes when it comes to referral marketing, because it is a long game.
Speaker 3:You're almost better off not getting that immediate result, though, because if you get a case referred to you the first time that you go out to lunch with somebody, you can ingrain that expectation that every time I go out to lunch with somebody, I should get a case referred to me. Yeah, and so you're almost better off having a couple of misses early on, hey. So if somebody is looking to get started and they've never done anything, never invested any time or energy or effort or money outside of digital marketing which is hard to believe, but there's certainly lawyers out there that have done that and they want to start building a referral networking base, what are the first couple of activities that they should take?
Speaker 1:So the first one is if you visit my website, firstcallfridaycom, forward slash resources, I give away free resources. You download it. I don't ask for your email and I have a referral target list template you can start with, because you can't start referral marketing without thinking through who am I trying to market to, and so you can download that. I also created a list of 50 activities you can do in person, in an email, on a phone call, on LinkedIn, to generate referrals, and so you can download that and say, ok, here are some steps that I can take listening to podcasts like this and just educating yourself on the different ways that you can do it. Follow me on LinkedIn. I share all of this stuff all the time. You can use any of it and it's free.
Speaker 3:Make sure that you go and download that resource before I convince Delisi that it's a bad idea to not make you trade your email address for the download.
Speaker 1:Well, because here's the thing If someone goes and they're like no, I have to give Delisi my name and my email, I'm not going to do it. I really just want to help people and I have not yet put together a email newsletter. I should, but I don't. So until then, just give it away for free.
Speaker 3:Awesome, awesome. All right, well, everybody, check out that resource. We'll link to it in the show description. Follow Delisi on LinkedIn and, if you hear this in time, get out to Las Vegas to see Delisi and I at Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing Summit. Again, I don't remember the date.
Speaker 1:It's September 23rd and 24th summit.
Speaker 3:Again, I don't remember the date.
Speaker 1:It's September 23rd and 24th, thank you. It's Monday, it starts at 10 and then it's all day, tuesday and then Wednesday we end a little early.
Speaker 3:It's at the Bellagio. I will be out there on Sunday and enjoying some time off. I'm bringing my wife out there. It's the first time that she's been to a legal conference that isn't ours and we're getting away from the kids and hanging out having some adult time in Las Vegas. So that'll.
