"x x x.
Here are the top four reasons clients are walking away from your firm without writing you a check:
- Lack of perceived value. Many lawyers have written to us saying they can’t raise their fees because they struggle enough as it is to engage clients at the low fees they are charging now. But, listen, that’s the wrong way to think — when prospects leave your office without writing you a check, it’s almost never about your fee. It’s always the perceived value of what you are offering, compared to the cost you’ve presented. This is a fee quoting problem, not a pricing issue. You simply do not know how to present your fees in a way that makes sense to your prospects so they can easily say yes. This is easily solved byincreasing the value of what you provide, learning how to communicate that value and shifting up the way you quote your fees. (Feeling stuck around this? Get in on our next training call on this topic.)
- Distrust. Take this as a baseline: your prospects don’t trust you. You are a lawyer. You may be the most trustworthy person you know, but the reality is that the media (and the old law business model) has poisoned your prospects mind. It’s up to you to shift this on a one-by-one-by-one basis. Your prospects may like what you have to say, but in the back of their mind your motives are always in question. The best way to ease the mind of your prospect is to set clear expectations right from the very first phone conversation. From there, be sure to exceed those expectations time and again.
- Mismatch. Ideally, you are identifying a mismatch well before your prospect ever gets into your office. With a strong client engagement process that screens out folks before they get on your calendar, this will happen a lot less.It’s a waste of your time to see people who aren’t a match for you, so the question becomes how can you spend as little time and energy as possible weeding out the mismatches? A great client engagement process is your answer. x x x."
