Why Referrals Still Beat Ads for Law Firms | Delisi Friday

You have probably heard the same advice a hundred times.

Run more ads.
Post more content.
Buy more leads.

And if you are being honest, you already know that does not always build the kind of firm you actually want.

That is why we are bringing this episode back.

It was one of our most downloaded conversations, and it still matters because it gives you something most marketing advice does not. A real framework you can use to build a referral engine that compounds over time.

Delisi Friday walks you through two things that can change the way your firm grows.

Better intake.
And the CORE method, which stands for Create Once, Recycle Everywhere.

That means asking the right questions when a lead comes in so trust starts right away. It means following up in a way that keeps you top of mind instead of disappearing after the first conversation. And it means turning one good idea into weeks of content without wearing your team out trying to come up with something new every day.

If you have ever felt like your marketing is busy but not building anything durable, this episode is for you.

Because you do not need more random marketing activity.

You need a system that helps the right people remember you, trust you, and send you more of the right cases.

And when you build that on purpose, referrals stop feeling lucky and start feeling repeatable.

Connect with Delisi:

Website: https://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

Transcript

The Power of Former Client Referrals

SPEAKER_01 0:00

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_02 0:40

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 Deleci 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, Deleacey breaks down why your best clients still find you on Google after a referral, one intake question that every firm should be asking, and how to turn a single piece of content into a piece of marketing with their COR strategy. Create points, recycling everywhere. We also dive into simple but how points and retreat keep clients coming back and sending more people eat away. So stick around, hit play, and get ready to shift from random access 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 Deleacey coming soon. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Delease Friday of First Call Friday. Delecy and I were just getting to know each other off air before recording, and we're gonna 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. Deleisi, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Hi, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

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 how you got into the legal marketing industry and what your role is today with helping lawyers.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

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 Spence. Or I kind of hesitate to say that now because we lost him recently and God bless him. But I grew up watching him 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 Callen of Callen 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 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_02 3:21

Here's what I'm well, I gotta ask you this first. Did I mishear you or were you born the dad day that your dad became a lawyer?

SPEAKER_01 3:27

My dad became a dad and a lawyer on the same day. I came early.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

My dad tells a story of being, see, now I'm not gonna remember the story, either being sworn in just before I was born or just after I was born. But you're so your dad had to had to decide between like swearing in ceremony and staying at the hospital, or how did that work?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

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. I'm like, yeah, personally and professionally.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

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_01 4:13

So that was actually on accident. Funny enough, no one's ever asked me this question. And there's a I'm gonna tie this up for you. I used to be a headhunter. And when I was a headhunter, I loved 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 gonna have 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. 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 I listened.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Very cool story. And if you don't know Michael Cowan, he's host trial lawyer nation. He runs the big l big rig trucking school.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Big rig boot camp.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Yeah, I should have just let you do that. Yeah. 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 uh our lawyer that has a trucking practice, and I'm uh he probably handles cases outside of Texas, but we we know in the industry that they're 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 Sumarov in Iowa, there's Michael Cowan in Texas. Um, 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 help Michael develop his reputation and 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_01 6:19

Yes. So I created Bangoring Boot Camp and Trial Orientation. 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 gonna 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. So I told Michael, okay, we're gonna 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 gonna think like a marketer. Let's record it and figure out how many different ways I can use this piece of marketing. 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 the 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 Ghee and Conrad, when you go online and you search your name, I guarantee you if you have a podcast, all that content is gonna 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

Create Once, Recycle Everywhere Strategy

SPEAKER_01 8:15

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_02 8:31

And I've and I've guessed it on tons of others. And so the thing that I would say, if you you know, you 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 Buzz Sprout account, it's probably a hundred to a hundred fifty dollars 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 which you'll get uh 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 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_01 9:18

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. 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 listen 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_02 10:49

I routinely ignore those. And listeners should know that I reached out to you. Did you miss this year's Great Loom Marketing Summit in DC? If so, shame on you. But I don't want the information to pass you by. We've put together 122 pages of notes. I got 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, the only thing I need from you is your email address. If you go to glmstomitnotes.com, that's www.glmstummetnotes.com and trade me your email address. I'll send you 122 pages of action pack notes to help you build your law practice. If you did attend the tier summit, you know you've already received the recordings of every session. But sometimes reading somebody else's notes helps the information hit the brain centers in a slightly different way. So even if you did attend the summit, you should check this out. It's glmsummitnotes.com. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

You did.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

As I was giving the example, I was like, man, people are gonna think I came in and But you know what, 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, 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? Because when you when you are coming directly in, or even worse, when you have an agency coming directly in and making the ask for this person is so great. Once you have them on your podcast, like they're in the beginning, yeah, a podcast host will do that. But after enough shows, like, no, I I it's 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 it's funny how many parallels there are between, and I guess this is all real relationship building and it'll tie back into referrals, but this demonstrated knowledge of the person that you're reaching out to in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like the clients who are gonna call you because they need a lawyer, they're gonna, well, not all of them. Some of them are gonna do homework before they call you to see if you're the right fit. Some of them will not.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Well, your best but your best clients have done some homework, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

I don't know. This this world has changed in the last 10 years and certainly in the last five post-COVID, where I am shocked at 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? Um, if we were to go back and look at all of our data from you know 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. 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 gonna 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_01 15:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

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 gonna just do it themselves versus calling me. And I'm like, ooh, 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_02 15:49

So here's my my thesis for LinkedIn is this I don't use LinkedIn to acquire Virginia car crash cases. It happens occasionally, and probably every other month I'm getting a message or phone call from somebody who I've got a relationship with, um, 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, your trucking lawyer, right? FTCA lawyer, Arissa 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, uh John Howley is a whistleblower in New York. Um, other than people that that do that, I don't know anybody else that does it kind of. 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'll 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 become 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_01 17:29

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. I'd love to see if we can hop on a phone call or a Zoom

Getting on Podcasts the Right Way

SPEAKER_01 18:12

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. 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 and 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_02 19:24

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 gonna 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 gonna share as a comment, but I'll send us I really love what you said there. But other than that, I don't do it at all. Because there, 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 uh I don't know, is it a is it a number of DMs? Is a number of time uh amount of time spent doing that? Like what's what is your recommendation to your clients for that?

SPEAKER_01 20:04

I don't have a it's almost like a how much is my case worth kind of question. Sure, probably I'm gonna say it depends, Brian. But 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 an 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, um, 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_02 20:56

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_01 21:03

You might not enjoy doing all the things, but I could tell you the stories, Brian, where our time 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_02 21:27

By the way, if 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? Because there's 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_01 22:05

And sometimes ROI is hard and tracking it is hard. And 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, Google brought that case in, but you have no idea Deleisi actually referred that person. They just happened to use Google to find your phone number.

SPEAKER_02 22:39

For sure. So we we built into our intake script who can we thank for the referral? Um, because that does two, it 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 like and trusted you, right? Um 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, another authority building tactic that you can put in your toolkit.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

I I love that. Everyone should do that. Attorneys should do that. Just so you know, uh you mentioned that on a previous podcast and I heard it and I was like, ooh, that's brilliant. That's actually a question. In order to schedule a meeting with me through Callenley, who can I thank for referring you? Because I heard it from you.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

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_01 23:28

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 who 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, Deleisi, 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. 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 you're part of your KPIs is to do a put. No, that's never gonna work. It's gonna sound horrible. It's gonna 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 gonna be successful. That's what

Building a LinkedIn Referral Network

SPEAKER_01 24:42

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_02 24:51

Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

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 people in it. And unless they had a horrible experience, they're the first person who's gonna 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_02 25:58

So we do uh we still do the hard copy print newsletter that goes out once a month. Um, we do, we do Starbucks gift cards on uh on your birthday uh for clients and for former clients, I think to like maybe to a one year out or something like that. Um 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 skill set, right? And so we've we've empowered the team to do that. They have some resources to do it. And now I don't have like it's it's burdensome for me to have to think about what am I gonna get somebody? Because I spend so much time. What if they don't like it? Like, 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 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_01 27:02

For my clients?

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Well, just 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 uh for a couple of years now, we've sent a chiropractor newsletter, invitations for lunch, that kind of thing to to drum up PI business. And it's worked to varying degrees, but we've had a hard time doing 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. 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 other referrals that they sent? And so we think, like Lauren, my marketing director, has has just brought this big contacts thing to us in our last meeting, and we think that's gonna be the solution. But it took us a long time to find it. So maybe there's something else out there. What are you telling people? 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_01 28:26

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_02 29:22

Uh handwritten with like T T T Y N is the way it's called, right? And it's a fake fake handwriting. Yes. I don't know that we that I have, I know that I haven't used it, but I'm I'm familiar.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

I love handwritten. I have literally used it to send out tens of thousands of mail pieces in 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 was 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

Leveraging Gifting for Client Relationships

SPEAKER_01 30:12

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_02 30:26

And that goes out for handwritten and there's no thinking.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

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 Deleisi, 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 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 hand's 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_02 31:24

Yeah. And and, you know, I'm not big enough that I don't know what marketing is doing. I consider myself, you know, super CMO in my law firm. And so, and most small law firm owners actually want to be the chief marketing officer.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

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 do 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? Because the more you have someone help, the better.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

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 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 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. Now it's much, much harder to track, right? There are some ways around that, but it is harder to track. And 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 real 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 gonna provoke a phone call, usually. And so you do have to play the lung 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_01 33:10

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. Um, and some of them don't. So it is kind of hard to track sometimes when it comes to referral marketing because it it is a long game.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

You're almost better off not getting that immediate result though. You know, for the to 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 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_01 34:16

So the first one is if you visit my website, firstcallfriday.com 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, okay, 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 of the time. You can use any of it and it's free.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

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.

Tracking Referrals: Systems and Solutions

SPEAKER_01 35:11

Well, because here's the thing: if someone goes and they're like, oh, no, I have to give Delisi my name and my email, I'm not gonna do it. I really just want to help people. And I have not yet put together an email newsletter. I should, but I don't. So until then, just gonna give it away for free.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

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 I don't remember the dates.

SPEAKER_01 35:40

It's September 23rd and 24th.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

It's Monday, it starts at 10, and then it's all day Tuesday, and then Wednesday we end a little early. It's at the Bellagio.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

I will be out there on Sunday and um and enjoying some time off. Um 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 um, and we're getting away from the kids and hanging out, having some adult time in Las Vegas, so that'll be great. And I'll see you there.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

I will see you there. 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_02 36:22

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