0:00:05.1 Sarah Zwiefel: Hello, and welcome to the Applying Sales Funnels to Your Law Practice Webinar. My name is Sarah Zwiefel, I help maintain the attorney experience at ARAG, and I'm here to introduce our speaker today. The presentation will be about 30 minutes and then we'll have time for questions at the end. So if you think of questions during the presentation you can submit them using the questions feature. Our speaker today is Paul Wright, he is the founding partner of the Wright Firm in Dallas, Texas, where he practices in estate planning, probates and tax. He is a licensed Texas Attorney and a certified public accountant. He is board certified in estate planning and probate law by the Texas Board of legal specialization, and he is a frequent lecturer on his areas of practice as well as how technology impacts the practice of law. So he has been an ARAG network attorney for many years, and he is also ARAG advisory board alumni. So with that, Paul, I will turn it over to you.
0:01:15.2 Paul Wright: Thank you, Sarah. Guys, thank you for letting me speak today. It's a topic that is... Is really near and dear to my heart. This topic, and the presentation actually came out of a presentation that I presented to ARAG. And so with that being the case, let's get started because I love my area of practice, but I really love practice management and legal tech that's applied to law. And really what we're gonna talk about today is a framework... A framework. Some construct really, that I would like to share with you all and hope that you can take it and apply it to your practice. Kathleen, let's hit that first slide.
0:02:00.6 PW: So law really is about people, and it's about developing relationships and community with people. And so when you think about the concept... Some of y'all may have heard about the idea of the red ocean and blue water concept. And that is, just summarizing it, that in some markets, they are so saturated with people that because everyone's fighting over the customer that the waters become red. And so the idea really... And it started from my search for what is a process where I could seek out the blue water and really design a client base where I really kind of eliminated competition. And so I started searching things like click funnels and sales and marketing, and different sales methods that could aid a legal practice. And what I really looked at was the fact that most of the time in law, we have great training in technical areas of the law, very little training in practice management, very little training in technology and almost little or no training in sales and marketing.
0:03:10.9 PW: And so I like the term legal sales. And I know that when I mention this to some lawyers, some layers are a little bit offended because they'll basically say, "Well, wait a minute, this is not a sales environment." And I argue that it absolutely is. In fact, if you think about the ethical constraints for business development for lawyers, it is inherently sales and marketing-related. For instance, we have rules regarding communications concerning our services. We have rules regarding communication regarding clients in your specialization. How firm names and letter heads are configured and whatnot. How we communicate with clients. We are one of the highest paid communicators literally, as a profession in the globe... Or on the globe, but yet we don't know how to communicate. So the idea of looking at or using a sales funnel really came out of that. And so... Kathleen run the next slide.
0:04:14.5 PW: So most of us when we were brought into law and we started looking at our practices, most of practices are really structured like this. It's the pipeline. And you have always heard basically, you gotta fill the pipeline. You gotta keep work coming in the door. You have to basically keep your pipeline full. And I will argue that, today, that is the absolute wrong approach. What you need to do is you need to think of it as being more or less a funnel. And the funnel really by design, has some components that I'm gonna review with y'all today. And incidentally, this is coming out of... A lot of this material is coming out of a book that I hope to have out hopefully, in the next year with more detail about this. And think of the pipeline. Think about how your practice is structured now. Now let's talk about how we're gonna super charge it with a funnel. Kathleen next slide please.
0:05:11.4 PW: When you think about a funnel, and when you get into sales funnels for selling in non-legal areas, most of the time, all that they talk about is this structure. Which is really more or less an intake funnel. So we call this the front end of the funnel. This is where you capture lead and traffic sources. And so as a law firm, when you're looking at traffic sources, you want to open up the funnel and go broad. So you're gonna look at things like, from an old school method of Bar involvement, Bar referrals, blogging, business cards, doing charitable giving and sponsorship activity.
0:05:51.2 PW: Click funnels, which are different than sales funnels. Click funnels work with your web-based applications. Things like client referrals and client relations, client satisfaction surveys, client data mining and harvesting. Things like court appointments, collaborative engagements, continuing Ed as a way to develop clients. Cross-marketing, digital ad campaigns. And so each one of these ideas is really designed to drive traffic and drive traffic specifically into your funnel. So once you get into the funnel... Let's go to the next slide.
0:06:30.9 PW: You're gonna look at basically what your traffic sources are, and I can sit and I can talk about... Do a whole presentation on traffic sources, and they are just amazing the way that you can develop business. And so when I talk to my associate attorneys and they're like, "How do we develop business? How do we develop our book? When do we start working on our book?" I'm like, "You start working on your book, the second you're licensed, and you keep an organized list of where you're getting your work from to see what traffic source is leaning to the development of the business to get in your funnel. Once you get it into the funnel, then basically you look at things like lead response management." So there's a lot out there on lead response management and client intake, but the problem with it is, is that it really stops there. And so lead response management is how long it takes you to actually communicate with a client. You can't communicate fast enough. And one of the things that we found is, and we're gonna talk about capture loops in a little bit, but is that the client assumes that you're gonna call them quickly.
0:07:48.1 PW: So we used to have a rule in the firm. It was a 24 hour-response, rule which was if someone came in, you had to call them within 24 hours or by the next day of business. But what I found is if you wait that long in this environment, you're not gonna get that client. And so from a sales perspective, once you get them in the funnel, then you need to think about how you're gonna do lead response management. It could be as simple as a text. It could be something that's automated. It could be just a phone call that says, basically, "Hey, I received the message. Unfortunately, I'm tied up this afternoon, but I will get back with you either later this evening or in the morning." You have to basically respond to the lead. So we have had the issue as a firm where we have generated so many leads that the leads at times can overwhelm the funnel. And so one of the things that you have to think about when you get this going is process, procedure and how you're gonna handle it because if you don't have a client-intake process, if you don't have a client-engagement process, you're not gonna be able to handle the leads as they come into the front end of your funnel. So let's go to the next slide.
0:09:08.6 PW: So when you think about a funnel, and I'm gonna show you the full thing put together at the end of this, it's that you think about the fact that the center or the pipeline that we used to refer to it as, the pipeline that is, is the client experience. That's really post-engagement, post-basically signing an engagement agreement and actually meeting with the attorney, so to speak, from the first meet. So what we're talking about now is case evaluation, pre-trial, getting into the case from an advocacy standpoint. So you have client lead generation. You have client engagement and retention. Then you have advocacy resolution within the pipeline. You have billing, and then ultimately you have closing the file. And so, again, this is more of a construct, a way for you to think about how to handle your practice. I'll give you some practical tips. So one is, is that you can... There's a lot of project management software out there. Asana is one of them where you can basically track leads, and you can utilize it to do follow-up. And you can utilize it to basically enhance the client experience at the front end of it and throughout the engagement process with the client experience that you can have questionnaires, you can have a follow-up.
0:10:37.9 PW: So to the extent that you can automate this, that you really need to start looking at automization. Excuse me, and one of the things I'll also say is that right now, the way law is structured is a lot of the applications that we need to really fill the entire sales funnel are not there. They exist in pieces, but as a whole, something really needs to be developed to take into account the full funnel, if you will. And so what have we done as a practice? Well, we have literally tried to process drive everything. So for instance, in an estate planning engagement, you have the initial call. You have information pieces that go out to the client. You have the immediate call-back, the immediate schedule. The client is basically given the information that they're gonna need to start the process. They're given questionnaires. Then you have to dock at a follow-up. So when you're getting into what I call advocacy, which is not just core advocacy, it's really the client experience, you're gonna have to do things like immediately set up follow-up.
0:11:48.0 PW: What I've really found is, is a couple of things. And I think that Arad was the one who taught me this is that, for instance, on the initial outreach to the client, is that instead of using the word "consultation," you use the word "case evaluation," and you find out that the client will be more than apt to even pay an evaluation fee when they may not like the idea of paying a consultation fee. It's weird, but it works. The other trick that I've found is, is that you have to utilize follow-up as your ally. You have to immediately set a follow-up appointment after your initial call. If you've set that follow-up and it doesn't have to be anything major. I've found it can be as simple as a text. It can be as simple as just a 30-minute follow-up telephone conference within about seven days of the initial contact, you're gonna have a higher case retention. Let's go to the next slide.
0:12:47.1 PW: Okay, so one of the things that we talk about a lot is the idea that the front of the funnel, when you basically bring in the client is generally dealing with lead source management is generally dealing with all the... Like I say, all the crazy ideas that I come up with to generate clients, everything from basically wrapping a car, it's amazing how many clients, new clients we get off of the car. It's shocking to me, actually. But when you're doing that and you start getting the client in, now you have to have a practice management system, there's a lot out there that will help you manage the amount of client information that comes in and keep track of your follow-up and really more importantly when you're getting into the funnel, really keep track of the leaking funnel, as I could call it, And so leaking or leakage can occur on the front of the funnel, it can occur through the client experience, and it also can occur in the back end. And so client retention, that said there is huge, but it's not just client retention from your one end and done, and you basically have this client engagement satisfied and you wanna keep them for the next one.
0:14:14.6 PW: A lot of what we found is, is that clients will call a law firm and then they'll cancel their appointments, and then they're just lost. And so I've developed this strategy, you call it capture loops, where you basically, if someone falls out of the funnel, you have to have a capture mechanism to be able to return the call and basically get them scheduled or re-engaged in the funnel. And so one of the things we do is the minute that someone cancels the appointment, we basically reach out to them and we say, "Okay, you've cancelled your appointment today... Hey, is everything okay?" And then a lot of times they'll say, "Well, no my parent has something going on or whatever... A child has something going on." We'll say, "Okay, can we reschedule this?" And if they say, "You know, I'm not really not ready to reschedule it but I want... I wanna come in and talk to you guys. I just can't do it now." And they go on a separate list essentially to capture them and then call back, and you basically call them back within, again, at least seven days in to get it reset and then to follow up until you close that loop.
0:15:25.2 PW: So basically, it's just like you're taking someone's deposition and you're basically always closing a loop, so on every client engagement you want to get a retain, a not retain or the client's not ready yet, and so you basically keep following up with them to capture that engagement and you can see this in the initial intake, you can see this where people drop out of the pipe, the center of the funnel, if you will. Just because of the fact that they've got a lot going on now, we seem to have a lot of people in the estate planning side that will start the engagement, but then they're kind of lost, so you really have to organize it did that with a practice management software. And what I tell folks too is just kind of on a low-tech side, is that Excel is a wonderful thing being a CPA, I love Excel, and basically it comes with Office 365, and so a lot of times you can utilize that in a really simplistic form for developing sheets to basically handle each step of the funnel, so again, thinking about the client experience, the journey, the engagement as being one of retention of the client, servicing the client, and then the area that almost no one talks about really is this back end of the funnel.
0:16:49.9 PW: And so why do I like the back end of this funnel so much is because you're dealing with building community, you're dealing with building an ecosystem out of your client... Existing client base, so it's client retention, you end up with client re-engagement, you end up with utilizing that to get reviews, which are incredibly helpful today. And so I'll give you a, for instance, a lot of times when we get into the engagement, we really like to think of a legal engagement is being a story, so of course, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Oddly just like our funnel. And so when you get to the end of the story, we like to reach out, we like to send a closing letter, the closing letter obviously denotes to note to the engagements over and that basically the client's legal matter has been resolved, and we... In that letter, we also basically say, "Hey, if you had a good experience, basically, we'd like to know about it," and so... It's shocking to me. I've had some of my associate attorneys where we've really got into this process, and again, in each one of these steps, we have designed a process, and they can go from no reviews to five reviews in just a couple of days, so literally...
0:18:11.1 PW: It's shocking to me how they can really use to develop reviews, and then of course, you can also back end things like net promoter score, if you're utilizing it, promoter score at this end of the funnel, and then frankly, what happens is once you develop this... Call it like client caring ecosystem, is that it really does lead to a lot more work, shockingly. I'm just reminded that probably, I'm just gonna guess now that probably every day that I'm betting that I'm probably averaging at least a half a dozen, that's a day of folks that say, "Hey, I utilized Paul, we utilized a member of the firm to do this or that, or the other thing, we had this new matter," and it's because of the fact that in a very kind of an old sales way, is that we're really staying top of mind with the clients by continuing to seek re-engagement. Let's go to the next slide.
0:19:19.0 PW: So again, we're talking about capture loops, the capture loops, and again, I'll show you the full schematic at the end of this, is that when you're looking at capture loops, you're looking at ways to re-engage the client, and that is people that have fallen out of the sales funnel, people whose engagement may be over, and there are just any number of ways you can do this from a someone who's just fallen out or leakage in your sales funnel, is that you can simply have a call list to call back, very simplistic, utilizing Excel to keep that list.
0:19:51.7 PW: The other way you can do it is you can re-engage them by things like simple newsletters. You can do things like direct messaging, holiday text. It's shocking. I'll tell you this, it's shocking to me, 'cause typically, I reach out to my clients on most of the major holidays and wish them a Merry Christmas or Happy Hannukah, or Thanksgiving or whatnot. And literally every one of those reach out ends up generating new work. And so a lot of it is, again, just staying engaged with the client. And so I've kinda developed this concept really called capture loops to really keep the client involved.
0:20:33.7 PW: Let's go to the next one. Okay, so the back end of the funnel is equally as important as the front because of the fact that, again, every story has that beginning, middle and end. And so, Kathleen, let's show the full schematic now. So when you end up with a legal law funnel, as I call it, is that you end up with being able to put the experience together from the client. So conceptually, this is what it really looks like. And what again, I found over the years is that most people will have the pipe approach where it's basically just a strip in and out, it's not building community around your law practice. And so what this does is you can see it basically takes each step to the process, and I always call it legal R&D, front end and back end of the funnel. Because what I'm trying to figure out, in the front end of the funnel is what works to get the clients that I need, where are the good waters for fishing, and on the back end, what I'm trying to do is do legal research, so to speak, and by legal, I'll tell you what I mean in just a second, to see why the client like the experience, what can we do better about the experience and then what would lead the client to really have a better experience.
0:22:01.8 PW: And then a lot of times you ask the follow-up question, which is, "Hey, if you had a really good experience, do you have anyone you'd like to refer to the firm because these are the areas of law that we cover?" And so this is really cool to me because we survey clients and we like to figure out what the client liked about the experience, what the client did not like about the experience, and we also wanna figure out what the client knows and what they don't know, I'll give you for instance, as at several years ago, I started thinking, Well, okay, I need to design sales pieces to take a lot of the... To communicate, really when I couldn't, because it seemed like that most of my consultations in the probate area were lasting longer than two hours, because a lot of people had just a ton of tax questions, they had questions about the process, they didn't know, and so what we did is we started surveying clients we're like "what do you know about probate?" 85% of the people came back and said they had no idea what it was, they had no idea how long it would last or what it cost or... So we started asking them, "What can we do, what would be helpful to you to be able to... What can we deliver to you, give us top three words we can deliver to you... " Peace of mind came back. Number one thing, right, everyone, peace of mind.
0:23:22.0 PW: The end of this, either an estate planning or a probate process, you can give us peace of mind, so we design this piece to call it the peace of mind process, and we basically send it out on the front end of the funnel, and we basically said, "Okay, you have a probate case, this is what you need to know before you even come and meet with a lawyer," and what we found is it led to really more rich and deep conversations, it gave the clients... The potential new clients was called the PACS, it gave them more information and it actually shortened the initial meetings, the evaluation meetings, and so we took that experience, we basically said, "Okay, let's start designing stuff from a process standpoint through each phase of the funnel, and then ultimately take that area of law specific.
0:24:12.6 PW: So if you come in with an IRS problem now, you're gonna get specific information tailored to an individual tax problem, tailored to the information that we need, and then basically, we've got that for each area, and then ultimately, as you see, you're gonna follow it through where again, we've got these great traffic sources that we developed, we're being responsive with the leads with clients, we've got client intake documents, we've got engagement from the standpoint that we're talking to them continuously through the process, we're getting engaged, so we have formal engagement agreements for each area that are template driven from whether you have a husband and wife, whether you have a single person, etcetera, so that our paralegals will know which documents to go through, we have advocacy basically where the clients know what we're gonna do and we're communicating with them, we have resolution then we have billing where that our clients are getting the billing, 'cause again, within the funnel a bill is a way of communicating with a client, we bill twice a month, and we found that billing twice a month.
0:25:23.4 PW: That basically, it really increases our rate of collection and it lets the client know what's going on, and we've kind of found to that within this, because clients get used to that communication they say "Oh we could call and ask" "Hey, I don't know if I got a bill for the last cycle is it coming and then closing the file. Again, I think it's just from an ethics standpoint, everyone should have a file closing and retention procedure and process that the client needs to know about. Again, client retention where basically... Your re-engagement with them seek reviews, I think those are helpful. And then referrals, because even for us.
0:26:04.4 PW: It's just... Again, it's just shocking to me the number of referrals that we get... Direct referrals from just doing good work. And then finally legal R&D. Figure what's working for you, figure out basically what you need to improve on... And again, for us... I say, we always have this idea that improvement is really continuous. So we're really never happy with where we are, we're always trying to develop this approach to basically stay engaged and then build a community around the practice. Now, I'll tell you with a little bit of time left, what are some of the ideas really for the future that we're looking at. A lot of firms who really have conceptualized this idea and have used it without maybe having a graphic for it are doing things like getting into subscription models, going away from hourly billing because now they're engaged and the client knows what they're billing.
0:27:05.9 PW: They're doing things like within the subscription model, annual events, monthly Zoom meetings, education pieces, so that the client basically stays engaged. And it's really... For instance, general knowledge... Particularly in the tax area with PPP this year, who knows what's going on? Well, there's stuff coming out daily. And you find that a lot of clients, if they're engaged in the process, basically, they may want to know that piece. So just like ARAG is having this event today, to give you guys kind of like the broader approach to what really is kind of a law funnel. What does it look like, and how does it work? And how can I work for you? Again, you're doing that with your client base. And what I found is it's just amazing because the clients love it.
0:27:56.4 PW: They're like, "Hey, the last lawyer I used, drafted a will and just sent it to me and I never heard from them again." Maybe I got this instruction piece, but I didn't know that there were some changes in the law, and I didn't know that basically, that you guys would reach out after the fact. And so again, I think we may be running up on 30 minutes, and so with that I will turn it back to Sarah and to Kathleen and see if we have questions.
0:28:32.3 SZ: Yeah, thank you, Paul. That was fantastic. So we will open it up for questions now. We wanna be mindful of everybody's time. So we'll give it about 10 minutes if we have some questions. Just a reminder that you can enter your question in the chat on the side there. So let's see. One question that we did have Paul, "How did your firm learn how to do some basic marketing to generate leads?"
0:29:04.7 PW: Oh, that's a great question. So I will say this, coming out of public accounting we had a lot of really good marketing presentations and training to... How to develop clients. And so I really think that a lot of lawyers... And I'm gonna answer this question going a long way around the barn, is that... We really have a lot of... I guess in lots of the law firms I've been with, you get to the point where you're a partner or you're about to be made partner, and they look at you like, "Where is your book of business?" And inherently, that person kinda looks around and goes, "Well, no one ever taught me how to sell or market." And so what I should do and early on is taking the approach that I'm gonna start training my young associates and my baby lawyers on how to develop leads, how to develop their own marketing program, if you will, to be able to go out and get business and then start small.
0:30:08.5 PW: So a lot of it is through training. A lot of it is through... I'm a huge reader. I pretty much read every book on sales and marketing that's out there. And then a lot of times you have to go outside of the law to find good stuff to now bring back in and train on. And you really have to train. So I'll tell you something that... So I realized in the estate planning area, that for my estate planning associates that they really needed about three key contacts... See... This is so funny, how the Rule of Three is so prevalent in our life. And so... I said, "Okay, you need to develop these three leads and it's gonna take a while and we're gonna be behind you, and... " So basically, so they started developing this leads.
0:30:53.9 PW: Well, they've been deputized and told that they can market, that they can go out and basically have coffee with someone and they can... It's part of their requirement as being an employee or a lawyer at the firm. And so a lot of it, I think, is how do we learn? Trial and error. A lot of it is being supportive and being in a firm environment that will support trial an error. And tell folks that it's okay to go out and do this, but then also do it ethically... And so... I say a lot of... Over what... 22 years, a lot of trial and error.
0:31:29.4 SZ: That's great information. Next question we have is from Alise... Elise... I'm not sure. I'm sorry if I mispronounced that. What is the name of the lead tracking, Osana?
0:31:42.7 PW: Asana?
0:31:42.8 SZ: And then she says... Yes. And then she says, "What's the best program to keep track of all clients?"
0:31:48.8 PW: So... Okay, so that's a really good... That's a great question. And there's a lot of good software out there from like... Asana can basically track projects. There is... Salesforce... We've kind of gravitated with Asana because... It's interesting with COVID and stuff, we're all working remotely. But our idea was before COVID that you should be able to practice law on a beach. And so we have multiple offices in the Metroplex. So from day one, we wanted our associates to be able to practice from anywhere. So the reason we used Asana was that you can essentially be at home and you can look at everyone's work list, and you can look at... From a project management standpoint.
0:32:33.2 PW: I'm not sure that I would get too caught up on a particular application as much as I would make sure that that works for you in your size of the law firm. And I'll give you the for instance, because for some folks, if you have Excel... If it's just like you and a paralegal, that may be perfectly fine. But what we were finding is... The reason we started using the Asana is that we had so many leads coming in that. That basically... We got to the point we really weren't able to mentally track them.
0:33:07.5 PW: And so there's this great book out there called The Checklist Manifesto. And if you haven't read that, I'd definitely go and read it. And it's gonna tell you that you need to have, again, a process or a checklist for everything, and be able to keep track of all the clients. Because once you get going... Like for instance with ARAG it will overwhelm you if you don't have a system set up. And that's why we started using Asana.
0:33:36.0 SZ: That's great. Well, we've got a lot of questions here. So we'll try to get through as many as we can. Another really... A great one is from Jacob. He says, "How is a solo practitioner able to balance all of this time marketing and doing the actual work for clients without working 80 hours a week?
0:33:52.1 PW: Is that... Was that...
0:33:53.6 SZ: Seems to me that marketing is a full-time job in itself. I feel like a lot of attorneys on our network experience that...
0:34:00.3 PW: So that was Jacob, right?
0:34:01.8 SZ: Yes.
0:34:02.0 PW: Yes. So Jacob, one of the things that... So I started my own practice. And so I like to say that for the first about 12 months I was a solo practitioner. And one of the things that I found is that you aggressively have to balance your life through a schedule. And so if you just wake up in the morning and you start doing marketing or admin stuff, you will go poor. And so literally what I found is, is that I would have dedicated time... Because only have so much bandwidth. And you have to do billing if you're a solo practitioner, you have to do marketing, etcetera. So what I would do is, I would save the... What I called the good time, the thinking time for the morning when I was basically fresh and do legal work then. And then in the afternoon, basically... What? Around 4 o'clock, I would schedule myself out to do a lot of sales and marketing.
0:34:48.7 PW: The other trick I also say is that you have to aggressively manage production time. And so what we've done is, and all of our employees were just like, "Yah." Is that we don't schedule on Friday. We don't schedule at all on Friday. And it takes almost like an act of Congress to get an appointment on a Friday. And the reason we do it is because we use Friday for doing production work, doing things like developing marketing pieces, organizing, and then basically even doing marketing things. So what you need to do is start. Is you need to pick again, like the Rule of Three, if you're gonna develop a lead source. So for instance, every area of law is different, you can't treat them the same. Criminal is different than probate, is different than tax, is different than family. So what works for one won't necessarily work for another.
0:35:42.8 PW: Like for instance, I can do a seminar on estate planning and I can have 30 people show up. I can do a seminar on bankruptcy... No one wants to show up and admit they're filing for bankruptcy. I've tried it and failed miserably at that. And so what you have to do is you have to just pick three times a month and schedule it out. If you wanna go have coffee with someone... But it has to be scheduled, so you know exactly the time that you have to allocate to billable work, getting your administrative stuff done, and then also doing sales and marketing. And again, you can put math to all this. So again, it's time management and basically... And just making sure that you're... Mindful of your schedule.
0:36:28.4 SZ: We have another question here from Philip. He says, "What are your thoughts about using social media for generating leads?"
0:36:35.1 PW: Boy another great question. I think that social media... At least for me, I think Facebook works to the extent that you're doing campaigns. It can really work. At one point, we were doing so much pay-per click, but I think we had our own rep at Google. We've since backed off of that a little bit. And the reason that I like to use social media is to engage with other professionals. It's shocking to me... If you... Sarah knows this... If... In a non-COVID environment, if you're on Twitter... Legal Twitter, as I say, and you go to the ABA TECHSHOW, or you got to Clio or you go to any of the conferences you're gonna know literally like a hundred people there from the time you basically get to the hotel on. Primarily 'cause you already have met them really informally through... Kinda, as my wife always says, developing your social game.
0:37:33.1 PW: And so I think that it really lets you develop leads with other professionals that can lead to work. And so I found that's a really good way. It's also a really good way to engage with existing clients. But... Again, every area of law's different. It works for some, it doesn't work for others.
0:37:55.1 SZ: Michael asks, "Any less known places for top of the funnel traffic?"
0:38:01.7 PW: Any less known places?
0:38:02.9 SZ: Yes.
0:38:05.1 PW: So... Well, that's a great question. So I like... Just 'cause I really like sales and marketing. I like just all the weird ways to do sales and marketing. And I think there are a ton. I'll give you a few... You can do digital graffiti. A lot of times if you can leave digital graffiti on some apps. If you go to the court house you can put digital graffiti down that basically... It's almost hard to really scrub, that says, "If you need a... You need a divorce lawyer, call, whatever." So... I don't think there's probably any regulation on digital graffiti. That's kind of a neat way. I think that... Again, I'm shocked about the fact that I can wrap a vehicle and drive around town and basically, get all these people call that say, "I want you guys to handle my divorce 'cause I saw your car."
0:39:01.7 PW: That's shocking to me. I think what I call like micro-marketing is a really neat thing. For instance, we all have communities. And the communities really are built around an interest. So for instance, you have someone who is in a motorcycle club, that is a reality and a subset that can be marketed to just like someone who's in a fishing club, who's in a church group, etcetera. And if you can find.
0:39:33.9 PW: Periodicals and things that are marketed to that particular sub-group or culture, if you will, you will find it. It's a whole lot better to generate business. I'll give you one. I'm Catholic. I'm in the Catholic community in Dallas, and it shocks me that the church bulletins that they're generally are ads and they're just little tiny ads you can buy, and I've had them in every parish vault and I can get for years. And I am literally told and it just shocks me the number of people who are like, "You know, Paul, I was sitting in church and I've been staring at these bulletin for years. And every time that I go to church, I think, Gosh, I haven't done my will, and I need to call this guy." And it's shocking to me because it's like the same story over and over and over again. You're looking at really a micro-group and you can get into micro-marketing. I think there is like... I could write in the book, there's just a ton, a ton of sources that I put in the book.
0:40:42.1 PW: I like the idea of freemium. I like the idea of giving stuff away. I don't think that is used very often, and here's another thing that I'll tell you is that to the extent that you have a client that calls up with a legal need and you're like, "Wow, that's really interesting." Start keeping a list of those, we'll call like, subset, those really specific legal issues and then start writing about them in your own blog. When blogging really first came on, I did a lot of it until of course of my time's constrained too, but one of the things I was shocked is, is that I would get all these clients that would call based upon really specialized blog entries. And so there's another one. Again, I can talk about marketing ideas forever, though, so I'll stop there.
0:41:30.9 SZ: Yeah, that's fantastic, Paul. Thank you so much.
0:41:34.7 PW: Sure.
0:41:35.6 SZ: So we have a couple of more questions, but I wanna be respectful of everyone's time. So if we weren't able to answer your question, we will follow up with you after the meeting directly with an email. So Paul, I wanna thank you for sharing your time and all that information with us today, and I just wanna remind everybody that you'll receive an email this afternoon with a link to this presentation as well as all of our past webinars that are available on our website. But I just wanna thank everybody for attending and again, Paul, thank you so much.
0:42:11.8 PW: Thank you guys. I think that Sarah and Ara can, of course, share my information. It's right there in the slide too if you need it, but again, if you have questions about sales and marketing, I'm happy to help. I really do. I love this area. I think it's one of those areas that should be taught more in law schools, and there should be more CLEs and really the soft skill development for lawyers. And so if you have questions, by all means, reach out.
0:42:39.8 SZ: Great, thanks so much, Paul. Thanks everybody.
0:42:42.7 PW: Thank you, Sarah. Thanks guys. Everyone stay safe.