When you decided to follow the path to becoming a lawyer, what did you envision as your primary job duties? ‘Sales’ probably wasn’t on the list.

However, like a salesperson, being a lawyer involves building relationships, commanding trust, and getting clients to say “yes”.

How To Sell Your Legal Expertise

Luckily for lawyers, effective sales is about asking questions, not performing a song and dance. Asking the right questions puts you in control of the conversation while showing what a caring lawyer you are. Asking pointed, strategic questions is the best way to influence prospective clients and referral sources.

As you are well aware, clients may understand the symptoms of their legal situation but not the cause. Your attorney sales strategy (i.e., asking questions) is how you uncover the cause, which is likely a problem you can help a client solve.

While you didn’t go to law school to become a salesperson, you need both marketing and sales to build a successful law practice. While sales is about the questions you ask, marketing is about the message.

Sales without marketing is too difficult, and marketing without sales is cost-prohibitive. Now that we’ve discussed the importance of sales for your practice let’s talk about marketing.

Marketing Isn’t Advertising

Marketing involves everything you and your firm do to tell people about the firm and its practice areas. This involves narrating messages about who you are, what you do, and the unique value your firm delivers.

Your marketing messages can be delivered through your website, social media posting, blogging efforts, client communications, as well as branding, and law firm public relations. As potential clients become more familiar with your law firm and its brand through marketing, selling your services becomes much easier.

Any firm interested in growth needs a targeted legal marketing strategy that includes individual lawyer marketing, law firm marketing, website SEO, and social media video marketing. But how can all of this be accomplished?

Law Firm Marketing SMART Objectives

Your marketing objectives need to identify specific and measurable objectives for the growth of your law firm. This can be accomplished through SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.

In order for your law firms’ marketing efforts to be meaningful, you need to be very specific about the goal you’re trying to achieve. Next, each objective of your marketing goal needs to be measurable.

The success of your efforts will depend on setting attainable goals. This will require a thorough review of historical and current client engagement to determine what, in fact, is achievable. You also need to be realistic with goal expectations. Unrealistic goals will never lead to attainable results.

Finally, your marketing objectives need to be assigned a time. Open-ended goals are meaningless. The only way to measure the success of your firm’s marketing efforts is with a predetermined start and end time period.

To summarize, you may not have gone to law school to become a salesperson, but the success of your firm depends on your selling ability. Your digital marketing strategy goes hand in hand with your ability to sell your services. This involves marketing your firm to build credibility, followed by asking the right questions in order to qualify and close the deal with new clients.

If you’re looking to grow your law practice learn how to establish a strong and effective sales and marketing strategy.