The 19 Steps Law Firms Use to Consistently Close Clients

  a question that's asked all the time is. Should we use a different script than the 19 steps if we were closing a deal or a new matter with an existing client?

So if you are a firm that sells multiple matters to a single client business, transactional, sometimes asset protections, sometimes estate planning, certainly there are other features, maybe it's the same client, but different practice areas.

So you're a BK firm and you have a PI situation.

You're a family law firm, and you have an estate planning situation,

should you use a different script, than your existing script?

And so this question came from Joel Silverman. An entrepreneurial Attorney of the year finalist with our world.

He's built a very successful practice in the estate planning business transaction, as well as some estate litigation world.

And he has several clients who they do business with over and over and over again,

they were taking their referrals and they were sending them directly to their attorneys rather than their non-attorney closer. And so he was like, Hey, my attorneys are pushing back because our referrals are going up, thank goodness. But now they're getting crowded.

And I had taken away all the consults from them and now they kinda like that and they want my non-attorney closure to do it.

But I'm wondering.

Is that okay? Should we use a different script?

And of course the answer is absolutely,

it's okay. just because they're a referral, doesn't mean they should go to the attorney, the sale is fundamentally the same. The difference is we have a relationship with them already, so we can leverage that relationship, but we should follow the same fundamental structure.

And the script should be slightly augmented for a referral.

So you should have different scripts for different situations, and maybe it's different practice areas, A different script for cold traffic as compared to a script for warm traffic.

and I'm just gonna outline for you what you should pay attention to inside the 19 steps.

Here's the basic 19 steps framework that we use.

And so the question is, would we do step number one, housekeeping? Well, of course we would.

We would still make sure we talk to 'em, except it would be in a much more casual tone.

So when you build a script, it's important to have a tonality key. And so you're developing this tonality key.

It's casual, not so formal, not as if they don't know you.

It's like, Hey Bob, you know, we record these calls for training purposes.

Are you okay with that? It's less formal, right?

And then setting expectations, right?

So step two, are we still gonna do it?

Well, absolutely. The difference is that we are gonna do it in a way that is, again, casual. Rather than saying, now we're gonna be together for about 20 or 30 minutes.

I'm gonna say something like. Hey Bob, listen, we should be able to bang this out pretty quickly.

Let me figure out exactly what's going on for you, and then we'll start to see what your options are.

Bob knows us, right?

And then we bridge over their story. That doesn't change.

Develop their hell, meaning we wanna know what their pain is. Why are they dealing with this issue? What are they afraid of?

Getting into their heaven, understanding what a wind looks like.

All that's gonna still happen in a more casual way.

We're wanna have some history about who this client is, an attorney salesperson should be doing some homework, but that should happen all the time.

We should always be getting prepared for sales calls before the sales call, right?

Talking about the firm's origin story,

I'm not gonna be as formal with this and get, our firm is blah, blah, blah, has served over 395,000 clients and discharged million dollars in debt.

I'm not gonna do that. It's gonna be more like.

Hey Bob. Good news is what we did for you last time, You liked the experience. Right? Great. Well have the same thing with this. We're gonna treat you the same way, and we're gonna end with a question.

And so you want us to do as good of a work in this job as you did in the last one, right? Or something very casual.

And then we're gonna move into their options.

So they have to understand what their options are, and we have to understand the services and our benefit statements.

That's not gonna change 'cause it's gonna be relevant to their case.

I can tone it down a little bit. So it's doesn't feel as much like a sales call as more a relationship.

Then we're gonna quickly talk about the investment, and I'm still gonna get quasi permission, and then I'm still gonna offer whatever the guarantee is for that particular service offering that we have.

Know that if they bought from you the first time and you offered a guarantee, and you don't offer a guarantee on this one, they might go, Hey, is there a guarantee?

So you should go, just like we offered you last time, we have the same guarantee with this situation.

And then we're gonna provide the investment. Now moving forward, I should have his credit card on file.

I'm gonna say, Hey, do you want us to use the same visa you have or the Amex you have on file?

Or if you guys have an invoicing issue like you have a larger client and you invoice over, you offer them terms of some sort, well then you're gonna just fill in the same terms.

If you have an opportunity to discount for paid in full, you're certainly gonna give 'em that opportunity rather than paying over time.

Just because they're an existing client may not mean that they don't need a payment plan.

You're gonna summarize the relationship and explain the next steps. All of these things are still going to happen, right?

So now that I've shared that 19 steps with you, I hope you understand the way in which we go about building this script and structure out isn't going to be different except in tonality, familiarization, as well as just making sure we're doing our homework about what they purchased from us before, what matter we serve them with before, so that we can have an intelligent conversation when we're working with them.

We don't want to say something stupid and reference something that we already did.

Here's an excellent example of what not to do. So, as many of you know, I was in the funeral business I was never really great with names.

And there was a window where I had two funeral homes and my uncle had one and I was helping him build that. And we decided to cover for each other and take two weeks on and two weeks off. So we would work for two weeks and we'd have two weeks off. Imagine 26 weeks of vacation year.

Sounds amazing. Right?

We would work 90 hour weeks and every Sunday we'd get together and he'd hand me the pile of files and we would go through them one at a time to make the transition.

you would go on this two week stretch when you worked with very little sleep working, until you took your two weeks off.

Needless to say, by the way, end of that story is, it didn't last more than a year because it was so exhausting.

back to my point, how do you make a stupid decision?

You mix in a dash of overworked, complete exhaustion, burnout, and not a very good sharp brain for names to begin with.

This guy comes up to me at one of the funerals I was holding and we were just making small talk.

And I know I had buried his wife's sister.

And I said to him, Hey, how's Sally doing? And he looked at me, he goes, well, you should know you guys buried her about six months ago.

When it comes to meeting with existing clients, we better have our act together. And faking it usually doesn't work. It's gonna get you in trouble.

You wanna make sure you're going into every sales situation fully prepared and knowing what was going on, With the services you sold them previously.

Alright, I hope you got a laugh out of my pain.

I've been doing this a long time. I've made every mistake there is to make.

If you'd like to learn more about how to develop the proper scripts in your firm, maximize your close rate, the amount of money you get paid as a down payment if you're a fee-based firm, and get some consistency in your sales process.

Go ahead and visit us at the law firm secret.com. You can, schedule a 10 minute call with us.

If we're a fit, great.

If we're not a fit, no big deal, we can step aside, but at least we can take 10 minutes, see if we're a fit for one another, and if we are, we can learn to take the next step.

Hope that helps make it a great day.