Most Law Firm Marketing Talks to the Wrong People

Most law firm marketing is aimed at one person:

The prospect who is ready to hire right now.

But that is only a tiny slice of the market.

Most future clients are somewhere else entirely. They are confused. Curious. Avoiding the problem. Googling at midnight. Asking the wrong questions. Or not even realizing yet that they have a legal issue worth taking seriously.

That is why we are bringing this episode back.

This was one of the most downloaded episodes of Life Beyond the Briefs, and it makes sense why. It tackles one of the biggest blind spots in law firm marketing:

Your prospects are not all in the same place.

Some people need to understand the problem.
 Some need to understand their options.
 Some need to understand why your firm is different.
 And some are finally ready to sign.

If your marketing only speaks to that last group, you are missing almost everyone else.

In this episode, Brian walks through the prospect pipeline and how lawyers can create content for every stage of client awareness. You will hear how Gene Schwartz’s five levels of market awareness apply to law firm marketing, why most legal content sounds the same, and how to stop relying on “we care” and “we fight hard” as your only differentiators.

Brian also gets practical with video, follow-up systems, content tools, and why consistent lead follow-up can dramatically change your case signings.

If your marketing feels scattered, generic, or too focused on people who are already ready to buy, this episode is a useful reset.

Because great marketing does not just chase ready-now clients.

It helps the right people move from confused to confident, one step at a time.

To learn more about the GLM Tribe, visit theglmtribe.com

____________________________________
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

Transcript

Introduction to Prospect Pipeline

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Reefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kinds of law firms that they enjoy showing up to on Monday mornings. On a Friday, I do these solo episodes where I sometimes rant about things that are going on in my life, sometimes tell you about experiments that have worked or have failed in my own law firm, and sometimes uh reproduce content that we're using within Great Legal Marketing, and this is one of those episodes. So if you are a member and you haven't listened to the March module, which is about the prospect pipeline and you weren't on yesterday's call, number one, shame on you. Number two, you can find the recording of the call, the community call, in the membership site. And number three, if you haven't watched the module to begin with, this is uh going to be the audio from that module. So every month, uh, Great Legal Marketing rolls out a new module addressing some issue that will help law lawyers grow the law firm that they enjoy showing up to on Monday. And uh March's module is called the Prospect Pipeline. And it addresses the thing that I think many law firms get wrong in their marketing, which is that people, your customers, your clients, your future clients, are going to come to you at all different levels of awareness of problems and of interest in hiring your firm from lack of awareness, total lack of awareness that they even have a problem that a lawyer will solve, right? That's kind of the mass tort, Camp Lejeune, Talcum Baby Powder, like those those advertising styles of firms, and that's not most of our members, all the way up to I know I have a problem, I know I need to hire a lawyer, and I want you to hire my lawyer and every and I want you to be my lawyer. And uh kind of every level of interest in between. And most of our marketing, because it's now in 2025, a lot of it is outsourced to somebody else, most of it is speaking to people that are aware that they have a problem and are looking for a lawyer or are looking for confirmation that you are the right lawyer for their case. And in this module, we talk about how to craft marketing either in your social media or on your website or in your email drift campaigns that speaks to people at any level of awareness and any level of interest. And this really is the foundations that great legal marketing was built on. Back in the day, it was uh a company that taught lawyers how to write better yellow page ads maybe 20 years ago. And now it's a more holistic coaching, how to run a better business, how to live a better life kind of firm. But we still do, still do teach marketing, and that's what this module is about. And um, if you're not a member, I just want to tell you a little bit about our membership. Every month there's a new module that comes out. There's some worksheets and some homework that comes with it to help you implement the concepts that we talk about in your law firm. And then we have a community call. And before that community call, we solicit uh questions and comments from lawyers. And one of the comments that I found uh really interesting um this month is from a lawyer in South Carolina who asked, Listen, if I'm somebody who has none of these things in place, where do I start? And so if you stick around to the end of this episode, I'm gonna tell you exactly how I would answer Dan's question and exactly where he should start in his law firm. But first, let me play the module for you.

Five Levels of Market Awareness

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Gene Schwartz wrote a great book many years ago called Breakthrough Advertising, and in that book he talked about the five levels of market awareness. And I write about that in this month's article, which you'll see in the journal. And this there's five levels. Most of our members are not going to be creating content for five different levels of market awareness. But most lawyers, when they come to great legal marketing, they miss this golden opportunity. And that is that people come to us at different stages of their journey in terms of either solving their problem or maximizing an opportunity that they have. And while most lawyer marketing is like, in a crash, give me a call, like it's one stage of the journey, one call to action. Those of us who've developed sort of sophisticated campaigns over the years have marketing that addresses the prospect no matter where they are in what we call the moving crate of interest. And since you're typically not engaged in a one-on-one conversation, it's really through marketing, you have to develop all of this content, this material that answers them where they are. And you see a lot of advertising today, Brian, that we don't recommend, we don't use a lot, but it's addressing the person that doesn't even know they have a problem. So you see ads that pop up on Facebook. Hey, if you were stationed at Camp Lejeune between this date and this date, you may have a claim. Hey, if your baby has a cerebral palsy, like you may have a claim. Most of those lawyers probably haven't given a lot of thought to all the different other levels, and they're just trying to attract your attention and start or leave. That's not where we spend a lot of our time.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah, and okay, so I think let's start maybe by talking about what the five levels are. There's the totally unaware. You have a problem, or you may have a problem, you don't even know what the problem is. Were you at Camp Lejeune? Okay, your illness that you have may actually have been caused by this problem. Number two, you're aware of the problem, but you don't know that solutions are out there and you don't know what to do next. Number three, you're aware that there's a solution out there, you know that legal help exists, but you don't know how any of it works. Number four, you're aware what the solution is, but you don't know which provider to select is your solution. And then number five, you're aware that you need a lawyer, you have a pretty good idea of who you should be selecting, and you need the push across the finish line. And in the injury space, most of great legal marketing members are not marketing to the unaware client. That really is a mass tort space, right? Pointing out that something bad happened to you and you may have a legal remedy for it. However, our estate planning members are in that space, right? Are we where you are marketing to people who are unaware that this bad thing might happen to them in the future? And so if that's you, be thinking about what are the problems that your clients have that they don't even know that they have, and you can start writing some copy or shooting some videos that are addressed at that. But then most of this video and most of the call is going to be targeted at what most of our members are talking about, which is how do we market to people who are anywhere along that line of I know that I have a problem, but I don't have the first clue how to solve it, and I need that final push over the finish line before I hire the lawyer.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Because it really is hard at that first level just to get someone to have in their mind to start creating a problem in their mind that they don't even know that they have. Hats off to the estate planning attorneys. Many of them do this by offering seminars and webinars with cool teaser headlines about taxes or what's going to happen, how do you maximize your Social Security benefits and things like that. So it that's a double sale they make. But now let's talk about these people that they have a problem. So they've been in a car accident. In my case, maybe they've had a long-term disability claim denied. So you know something is wrong. Like they're not getting what they wanted, right? But as amazing as it may sound to most of us who live in this world of legal, it's oftentimes the first time that a consumer has ever had to deal with anything in the legal system, has ever had to deal with a lawyer, and they know something is wrong, but they just don't know what to do or how to start.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

And in fact, many of these people aren't even looking for lawyers. They're looking for answers to the problem that they have. And so this is writing content like how do I pay my bill after a car crash? Does health insurance, hey, how do I get my car fixed after a car crash? It's not how do I select the best lawyer because they're not looking for a lawyer, they're looking for the solution to the problem. And your job as the content writer or as the video producer is to be answering the question and providing them valuable information. And by the way, you're also a lawyer. And so if I've solved your first problem and I can help you identify or solve or partially solve the next three problems that you haven't even thought about yet, that leads you closer and closer to picking up the phone and calling me or filling out a form on my website so that my team can follow up with you.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

And by the way, this is where you have a tremendous advantage over non-lawyer marketers or marketing consultants, because you are the one that have been in on client consultations, oftentimes for many years. Today, we record all of our intake calls, and so the intake and sales team, they're listening to these problems. And so we have recordings, we have transcripts. In fact, we have AI that can go back over the transcript to identify like what are those questions that consumers

Creating Content for Different Awareness Stages

SPEAKER_02 8:57

are asking? And what I would ask you is don't make the mistake of just assuming that you know what's running through people's minds today, because it actually is really amazing when you go back and listen to these calls to listen to the problems or the things that are running through someone's mind that you would think, like, oh, this isn't a big deal, or how does people not know about that? For example, just even paying a lawyer in a person injury case, it's amazing that people they never heard of the contingent fee system, even though lawyers spent billions and billions of dollars on telling people that there's no fee if there's no recovery. And then the next sort of level is they figured out, oh, so this is a problem that legal can help me solve, but they don't know how it works. And so not knowing how the legal system works or how a process may work for a particular especially. So let's say a loved one's been arrested, they're in the jail, and you're just trying to figure out how to get them out of the jail. And so this lack of awareness of how the system works oftentimes, ironically, will lead to like a fear of calling and even talking to a lawyer because they feel like maybe they're dumb. Like, how could I not know how to get my loved one out of the jail when they've been arrested for DUI or something? So they know that help exists, they don't understand how it works. And so our job is to really lower that barrier, lower that resistance that someone has to just starting a conversation with us.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

And these are your process videos. These are all of your videos or your content that's explaining the process of the car crash claim from start to finish. What are all the things that you would need to do if you were going to send a demand package to an insurance company? What would you need to do if you were going to file a lawsuit? What is a deposition? What is discovery? Answering all of these questions and building familiarity with the legal system, all while building your authority as the person who has all of the answers is critical to moving these people who are in the stage where they know that there's a legal problem, they know that there's a solution out there somewhere, but they don't know what the solution is. Again, lowering the barrier to getting them to pick up the phone and call you for fear that they're going to be like me taking my card to a mechanic and not understanding the language. Did you miss this year's Great Leo Marketing Summit in D State? If so, shame on you. But I don't want the information to pass you by. We put together 122 pages of notes for notes for every single speaker who we had on our stage, including all of the breakouts. And this notes packet includes many, many, many other slides. And if you want that, or the only thing I need from you is your email address. If you go to gllmstummitnotes.com, that's www.glm or stomachnotes.com and bring me your email address or offer you 122 pages of action pack notes to help you build for your law practice. Or if you did attend this year's summit, you know you've already received the recordings of every session. But sometimes reading somebody else's notes helps information hit the brain centers in a slightly different way. So even if you did attend the summit, you can check this out. It's glm summitnotes.com. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

So let's pause for a moment talking about these different levels, Brian, because one of the things that you've become very good at over the last year and a half is using social media. So in in my day, I'm a little bit this is all like built for website. And then we started to build for YouTube. We built videos. But today there's so many different social media channels, and I think there's lawyers who do this information process very well, and there's lawyers who are still sitting at their desks in front of a bunch of law books talking about Code Section 8.0, whatever, under the Virginia Code, which is very boring. So what have you learned, picked up, been coached on in terms of using these other social media channels to impart this information to someone who has just entered our world?

SPEAKER_01 14:03

I have somebody else doing it for me now. Our friends Preston Schmidley and McBillie Sai at Authority Brand have been producing my short form content now, GLM-centric, right? How to run a law firm, how to manage your law practice for the last six or nine months, maybe a year. And that's going to pivot, and you'll see it pivoting shortly, and it's going to be more auto-accident-centric as we try to attract more of those clients into law firms. So, with that caveat, I would say that the biggest barrier to lawyers for creating YouTube videos or short form videos is that we want it to be perfect. And so you shoot it 12 times, and it takes you an hour and a half to create a 90-second thing, right? And then you spend time fiddling around with the captions and making it look good. Like the thing that I have gotten better at, I guess, over the course is shooting it one time, accepting 85% good enough as good enough, hitting post and moving on with my life. And the better that you can get at hitting post and seeing what gets traction and what doesn't get traction, the better videos you're going to produce. If you spent the next year and you just produced a video a day, you certainly would be better a year from now at shooting video than if you sat down and produced 30 perfect videos. So that's part of it. And then the other part is if I have an interesting conversation with a client or an adjuster, like just turning the camera on myself, answering that question and putting it out into the world.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Yeah, so anytime you start something new, and particularly this creation of video for Instagram and TikTok and YouTube shorts and stuff like that, it's gonna probably be horrible at the beginning. And honestly, like if you can go back on YouTube, you can look at my stuff from 15 and even 20 years ago. Like we've tried to delete most of it and try to hide it, but some of it is still there. And it's pretty horrible. The other thing I would say too, finding a team that can help you so that all you have to do is what Brian and I do, which is come down in this studio or one of our other studios and just shoot. And when we make something, we do a flub, we just pause and give some space for our editor. So we have a young man in the Philippines who does a lot of our video editing for Ben Glass Law and who's learning about graphics and presentation and thumbnail sketches and stuff like that. And we pay him to go on courses for this. So your talent as a lawyer is getting in front of the camera and trying to be interesting and impart some valuable information. Yes, we all like to learn how to edit and screw around with that. It's fun to do for a while, but it's not a high value use of your time. And there's these really good guys like Preston and McBillie who have been great coaches for us. And then having an outsourced team that can do it in the editing and go learn how to post on the different social media, that's just it's been really valuable. So all we have to do is come up with the idea. And Brian, I do the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Sorry. Just because I know 10 or 20% of the people that are watching this are gonna want to do that themselves. So I'll give you three tools that you can will let you do it yourself. Descript, which you and I use to edit podcasts, has a feature where you can shoot the video straight into your webcam. You actually can read a script that's on your computer if you want to do that, and then it's got a fix my eyes button and it'll pop your eyes up so as though you were looking at the webcam the whole time. Opus Pro is a short form AI tool where you can give it a long video. So we take our videos from the summit, upload them to Opus Pro. It cuts them into 60 or 90 second clips, does the captions automatically, it's got some B-roll feature automatically. And then a Vista Social is what I use as a social media scheduling tool so that when you shoot the 12 videos in one day because you're feeling good, you don't post them all in one day. You upload them all to Vista Social and you can schedule them throughout the week. So for the 10 or 20% of the people that are watching this that are gonna insist on doing it themselves, everybody's gonna try to do it themselves first time. Descript, Opus Pro, VistaSocial.

SPEAKER_02 18:04

And then what you want to do is you want to get into the habit of just listening to your life. And when you have these interesting conversations with clients or with claim suggestions, I know that you've even repurposed on like recordings of claim suggestions, and you redacted it appropriately, but it makes for an interesting video or an interesting audio. But just listening for the story, because I think as lawyers who are relatively sophisticated marketers as this group is, we want to go far beyond here's a statute, here's a rule, here's what contributory negligence means, and be able to tell stories. And then watching the other thing to do, Brian, is to watch some of

Social Media Video Creation Strategies

SPEAKER_02 18:45

these YouTube or TikTok viral artists, these people who are really good who have lots of listeners and lots of followers, and their stuff gets viewed millions of times, and try to discern like the patterns. Like, how are they getting you to watch all the way to the end of a three-minute video? There's certain psychological techniques, certain open loop, closed loop techniques that are using to get you to listen to. For example, you can say, Hey, today I'm going to talk about this, stay all the way to the end because I'm going to tell you about this. And that's how you, and you just go do it. And it's one of the easiest things. The other thing about this video creation is, of course, once you do the video, which is like the easiest part, somebody else can come behind and cut it and make the blog posts, make the article for your newsletter, make the article for your electronic newsletter if you're using an electronic newsletter. All right, so now let's go back to the levels. The the other the next level four is the product aware prospect. They know about law firms, they know this is a problem for legal, and they wow, you they went on the internet, and holy cow, like there's a hundred of us that look just like us or just like you. And now, how do we get them to pick us? And today we just got off a strategy call with our web marketing team. What are the differentiators? So let's talk just for a minute about how we think, how you and I think about the boldness with which we will announce or proclaim how we are actually different from other law firms.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

It's got to be different than best, right? Because how would you know? If you've been around for a while, I've been doing this chiropractor mailer campaign, and I've gone to lunch probably with 25 chiropractors in the last year or so. Every single one of these guys wants to tell you how they're the best, and their method is chiropractic strength straight from God. And they're all doing different types of chiropractic, right? And I think that's the same experience that the consumer has in legal, right? Every lawyer says, I'm the best. I have the biggest settlements, my team is the fastest, the most important.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

X number of years combined experience.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

And there's just no, there's just no way to tell. So the two things that we've done is we've on the injury side, we've stopped trading on best legal services and started trading on best customer service. And we stress that in initial phone calls. We ask people to highlight that in Google reviews, and then we use that as part of our sales pitch. Listen, I'm not gonna tell you that I'm the best lawyer because you you really you would have no idea. But what I can tell you is if you compare the service that you get of my law firm against service that you get from any other professional services that you might be engaged with, you're gonna find it to be better than everybody else.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

So that at least And we coach our team on this, and we have technology which supports it. So it's actually very real. And we don't just say it and let it hang out there. It's very real, and it's a very important part of the leading and management that Brian and I do at the law firm.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

But the point is it's a measuring stick that they actually can use because they're not hiring five different lawyers for their case, but they are maybe dealing with three to five different professional services over the course of the last year or two years. On the long-term disability side, our differentiator is objectively, we do more of this than anybody else. Right? You can show them the PACER report and we file something like 80% of all of the cases in Virginia in the space. And so we can objectively say we just do more than everybody else in our state.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

You can also look at things that that maybe other people could say, but they're not saying. So in the long-term disability space, once someone gets back on claim, we manage their claim till their term ends, which is typically age 65 to 67. And so we've done the math on that. And we've got $45 million of future long-term disability claims under management. I stole that idea from the wealth services industry. And how could we say that? Had my team do the math on a spreadsheet? Holy cow, that's a really big number. There's probably firms out there that have a bigger number than that. As far as I can tell, like we're the only firm in the country that uses that as one of their sort of primary marketing messages is not only do we file the most verifiable on PACER, just go and look, go do your research, but we've got forty five million dollars of future claims, clients who've trusted their future claims to us. And so Finding a way. Now it is more challenging to do that, I think, in the PI space, simply because there's more PI advertising out there. But I'll bet you in a lot of these other practice areas in the estate planning, you'll probably do this in the estate plan. Like if you have asset size, you could figure out a way to talk about how many total assets your clients have entrusted your estate plan building skills to. And I'll tell you that there's probably no law firm that is marketing on that number. Again, you always want to be truthful, objectively verifiable if need be, like if somebody comes and starts to ask. But most people aren't going to ask. And even the state bar, like when they see stuff like that, go check it out on Pacer, they're not going to go do that. They don't have the resources to go do that work. Anyway, so figuring out that differentiator, one of the first things I ever learned from Dan Kennedy was if you don't know what to say, look around what everybody else is saying and don't say that stuff. And so it's pretty easy to figure out like what not to say in the PI space or what everybody else is already saying. And then now trying to figure out, okay, what's the thing that may be true, maybe everybody's doing it. We use real paint, right? But nobody's actually saying it. And then the last part about this is really having a team that believes in the mission, right? So one of the things we talked

Differentiating Your Law Firm

SPEAKER_02 24:14

about recently at our group meeting in the law firm was our core values. And we talked about being confident, right? And we actually struck the word humbly. We said we were humbly confident, we struck the word humble humble because we brag. We don't want to see you walking into the wrong law firm. We feel that we owe a duty to you to not let you wander into the wrong law firm. And when you build a law firm that's truly the culture, and you hire people that truly believe that mission and they truly fulfill on that mission, then they get comfortable saying, yes, you've called the right place. These lawyers here are going to help you. They're really good at what they do. Let's just talk about the follow-up. Like you've had a conversation, they've heard the pitches, but they haven't, the per prospective client hasn't signed the electronic fee agreement, hasn't committed to you yet. We found over and over that when we weren't very good at follow-up, but then got around to it, there's a lot of cases where those lawyers think, oh, they must have signed with somebody else. And they didn't. Even just simple, more or less run-of-the-mill car accident cases, like people were still taking a long time to make a decision. And we when we developed systems and messaging to follow up with folks, excuse me, who had not signed with us the first time, and we increased our close rate on these claims.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Yeah, so that happened probably 18 months ago, 18, 24 months ago. We switched to lead docket. It's funny, I used to have in my old firm a cork board and three by five note cards. And that was my prospect tracking system. I'd write the name on, okay, I called them, send them an email, I called them, I sent them and then move them down the line until they signed. And now that's done electronically on lead docket. If you're not on lead docket, send me a message. I have an in, I'll get you a discount on your subscription. But that's allowed us to do uh to have the system that's already built out in our voices by text message and by email that operates on a on a five-day basis in the PI vertical. So it's phone call, email, text every day for five days after we've send them retainer agreement. And then depending on kind of the size of the case, the funnel gets a little bit longer after that or it doesn't. And then we just come back like once a month. We come back and we call everybody that in the last 90 days didn't hire us. And most of them aren't gonna answer the phone, and some of them will have hired another lawyer. But every time you do this, you're gonna pick up one or two cases that hit the their claim just went on the back burner. And because you followed up with them one more time, they're gonna retain you. And for us, every time that happens, it's another $18,000 fee. So having the team that's large enough and that you're paying well enough that will do this follow-up for you in so many solo or solo plus one team member lawyers like, I can't afford to have somebody who's only dedicated to intake. We're only doing X number of intakes a month, right? No, if you had somebody who was totally dedicated to intake, they would pay for themselves three times over within the first couple of months. So having that system is really good. And then again, the system, the electronic system that tracks that allows you as the business owner to go back in and make sure that it's all being monitored and done the way that you wanted it to do, be done. And it's you don't have the intake person who's just sitting there swinging their phones.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Let me just leave you with this. This is an evolving process of refining your methods, improving your people, and just making sure nothing leaks out of the bucket. We were in Miami recently for the National Trial Lawyers Conference. There are firms on stage that are bragging about spending 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, 40 million, 50 million dollars a year in advertising. And yet for every one of those big firms that may be in a state, there's hundreds of other firms. So there's tons of more cases. So no matter what your practice area is, like there is an untapped market that you can go and grab. And what we're really good at great legal marketing is figuring out like how do we compete without competing on the dollar spend. The vast majority of clients who come to Ben Glass Law come to us because at the beginning of the journey, someone mentioned Brian's name, my name, or the law firm name. Yes, they'll probably go and visit our various digital properties. Yes, they go into our sequences. But at the end of the day, we have built this community of people who trust us enough to say, I don't know if you have a case that Brian and Ben can help you with, but give them a call because they will try to help you. Either they'll be the ones or they'll send you someone or they'll give you some information. And that's really what we're building here. It's easy sometimes just to hand over your credit card, it can be very expensive to do that. But those lawyers over the 20 years or so, we've been running great legal marketing, who really work on creating content, creating messaging for the prospect, no matter where they are along that parade of interest, the moving parade of interest that comes from David Ogreby, they're the ones that over time doesn't matter what the media is, it doesn't matter if they cut off PI ads and Facebook, it doesn't matter if TikTok goes away. It just doesn't matter because they have human beings who know their name, know their story, and tell it. So make sure you get on the call this month. We'll we'll dive into this more deeply. We'll answer all your questions. And if you've got individual practice areas where you're having a challenge, kind of figure out like what could I do in my practice area to exploit these examples. That's the thing you want to do. So you want to get on the call, talk to us, and more importantly, talk to all the other people that are on the call. Because somebody in that call is in your practice area and they're a little bit farther along the journey than you are.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

All right, it's Brian back solo again. And like I said, uh after this module goes out to our members, we have a community call about mid-month and uh we take submissions and specific questions from tribe members so that we because if more information was all you needed, you wouldn't need a membership program. You can find more information on podcasts, right? You need information and activity that's gonna help you solve the problems that are going on in your firm. And so one of the questions that we got is from a lawyer in South Carolina who says, if you're someone like me and you aren't currently doing any of the things discussed in today's module, what is the most important thing to do first? Is it creating video content, or is it nailing down lead follow-up procedures, or is it something else? And Brian thinks that the most important thing in today's module is to nail down your lead follow-up procedures. If you do nothing else but fix your leaky intake and sales bucket, you will see at least a 25, maybe a 50% increase in your conversion rate, right? Because what do most firms do after a lead comes through the door and after we talk, and either our intake team talks to them, or sometimes they get to uh to a lawyer, and sometimes we send a retainer and then we follow up once, twice, maybe three times, and then we assume that the client has decided not to hire us or to hire somebody else or to just move on with their life or to solve their problem on their own or whatever, right? That's the wrong way to do it. So the way to fix your leaky follow-up bucket is to implement a system, and we use lead docket for this. You can use any kind of lead follow-up system you want. Ten years ago, um, when I was an associate at another practice, my lead follow-up system was three by five um uh index cards pinned to a whiteboard, right? And every time I called you and emailed you, I picked up your postcard or your note card, and I moved it over one slot so that I had tracking that I'd called every client every day, emailed every client, potential client every day,

Lead Follow-Up Systems and Final Thoughts

SPEAKER_01 31:50

and moved them down the line until they said no, or until they told me they'd hired another lawyer. And at a certain point you build up this bolus of potential clients and you can't keep calling them every day, but you move them into a follow-up sequence and you call them back every three months, every six months. And that might seem like overkill to you, except that when I started here, when I started at Benglass Law and we didn't have a good system like that, one of the first things that we did is we called back all of the people who had ghosted us within six months, and we signed up 19 cases. And at the time, our average number of cases that we were signing up every month was about 10. And so we doubled the average monthly cases just by going back through the pipeline of people who we had done a poor job of following up on in the last six months and asking a couple of questions. Did you solve your problem on your own? Did you hire a different lawyer? And if not, if neither of those things happen, are you still interested in talking with us about whether we can solve your problem? And that simple sales script and outsourcing that follow-up to somebody in the firm, assigning that follow-up to somebody in the firm and getting tracking on whether it was done doubled our average monthly intake inside of two weeks. And so if you don't have this process in place, that is exactly where you should start. It is easy, easy to think that you should go and spend another marketing dollar, should create another piece of marketing collateral, that you should create another email sequence, that you should shoot a bunch of video for YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, or create another article that's optimized for SEO, and all of that stuff is the wrong place to start if when somebody calls your firm, you do not have a process for getting them either to a yes or ultimately to a no. And if you can just fix that leaky intake bucket, you will increase your conversion ratio by at least 25, if not 50 percent. If this resonates with you, and if you need help with this, and if you want to get some individualized help and some community coaching from Ben and I, reach out to me. Um you can check it out, you can check us out, get more information at the GLM Tribe.com. Um, but honestly, the easiest thing to do is just email me or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to set up a 60-day trial for you. And if you haven't already registered for the GLM Summit, check that out too, GLM Summit.com. We are announcing an enormous name as our keynote speaker on April 1st, and so prices will go up on March 31st. If you're listening to the sound of my voice in the three days between this episode coming out and March 31st, and you made it to the end of this episode, you definitely want to get your tickets now. Until next time, have a great weekend.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

If you like Brian, he gives value. Did you hit the like button? Did you say thank you? Because that's how you say thank you. Did you share it with another attorney who you're like, dude, you gotta figure this stuff out. Listen to Brian, Brian will help you. Be nice, share, hit the thing, give a little love.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

I'm clipping that and I'm putting that at the end of every episode. So thank you for that.