If You Are A Lawyer And You Want To Find Hidden Money
You Must Speak To Your Old, Disappeared Clients -
Even If They Don't Want To Speak To You. 93 per cent of all Legal Practices forget about clients that no longer buy.
Clients that used to buy from you that no longer do is called attrition. You can call them "gone aways" if you want to. As long as you don't refer to them as "gone always".
Most Legal Practices do not know what their attrition rate is – never mind what to do about it.
Simply by finding out what your rate is and which clients are no longer actively buying from you will help you massively. Because when you know who and how many there are you can do something about it.
What are the main reasons a client leaves your protection* in the first place?
Something happened that meant they stopped buying for a while and they just never got round to buying from you again
They had a problem with you which you don’t know about and they stopped buying they don’t get the same benefit any more from what it is you sell
They don’t feel appreciated by you any more and another lawyer makes them feel better
Once you stop dealing with a Legal Practice, it’s easy to stop thinking about them entirely.
At least 50 per cent of attrition is non-action, a temporary stop to something that becomes permanent unless action is taken.
Your brain is bombarded everyday with thousands of messages. Are you going to think about "that legal practice I used to use" over breakfast?
Take this example. I used to go to football matches. Now my son is old enough to go, I might start going again. Perhaps if I was contacted by the club, (that holds my data) - maybe with a special offer.
But asking me to think about it amongst the millions of other things we could be doing, find the phone number, choose a match, get the right seats, organise parking, pay a substantial amount for tickets for a match , which he may or may not enjoy, - it’s just too much effort.
That’s why you need to have a client attrition prevention system in place.
Most unhappy clients will not tell you they are unhappy. They stop doing business with you. Research indicates that 96 per cent will not get in touch once they have had a bad experience and 90 per cent won’t come back again
On average those unhappy clients will tell 9 other people.
For every complaint received there are more than 25 complaints that are not received.
Sixty eight percent of people stop doing business with a company because of indifference.
Problems do arise because of staff shortages, grumpy clients, inexperience, or simply over promising and under delivering.
But you never intentionally went out of your way to cause problems. And as it’s your Legal Practice that is stopping people doing business with you, you can do something about it.
Simply by contacting them, you will start to change the way they feel about you. If they were dissatisfied, then you rectify the situation. They then become loyal advocates.
If they left because their circumstances have changed you still have an opportunity to ask for referrals. As long as they were happy with you then most people will oblige, if you make the effort to ask them.
The secret message that your Legal Practice needs to deliver to make people buy from you again is honesty.
You honestly want to know why they have not been buying for a long time. If they have a problem or difficulty that prevents them from benefiting from your service then you would like to know. Remember, focus on them.
Depending on what you find out, you’ll then have to do something. Fix something, replace something, apologise or do anything to get them to engage with you and start buying again.
One of the great reasons to get in touch is research. You’ll find out things you never knew.
Things that will affect all clients of your Legal Practice whether old or new.
Go through your old clients today. Contact them to see if there is something you can do for them. Remember, if you can halve your attrition rate of 20 percent and you have 100 clients, that’s like adding 10 new clients every year. You’ll double your business in ten years even if you do nothing else.
Take a look at how one company Legal Practice keeps in touch with "gone away" clients.
Always make sure you start with the most recently inactive clients as these are the most likely to become active again.
When someone comes back to you, how about sorting our some welcome back pack to make them feel special?
And what about the lost cause? Thank them for telling you what you have done wrong. Thank them because they have just shown you a gap in your product or service that you can now plug, for the benefit of all clients.
Make sure you reward the lost cause. Because they will not stop talking about you to all their friends an acquaintances.
No one likes to leave a relationship on a sour note so make it a sweet one. This is what Great Legal Marketing is all about.
*The reason that clients are "under your protection" is because this is what you do for clients. You look out for them, you think about them and you save them from things going wrong.
Otherwise you would call them customers and all you do with customers is transact - which is a commodity and always open to cheaper competition.
