What Color is Your Waiting Room, and Your Business Card, and Your Letterhead, and Your ...

Have you thought about what your marketing materials’ color says about you?

In North American mainstream culture, the following colors are associated with certain qualities or emotions:

Red -- excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
Blue -- (the most popular color) trust, reliability, belonging, coolness.
Yellow -- warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
Orange -- playfulness, warmth, vibrant
Green -- nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
Purple -- royal, spirituality, dignity
Pink -- soft, sweet, nurture, security
White -- pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
Black -- sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
Gold -- prestige, expensive
Silver -- prestige, cold, scientific

Market researchers have also determined that color affects shopping habits. Impulse shoppers respond best to red-orange, black and royal blue. Shoppers who plan and stick to budgets respond best to pink, teal, light blue and navy. Traditionalists respond to pastels - pink, rose, sky blue.

Who Can Your Potential Customers Call?

Ethics considerations aside for just a moment, can anyone imagine a law firm doing this?

Here are over 100 people from around the world that know our software better than anyone else (except us of course). Feel free to ask them about our software, our service, tech support, anything you like. There is nothing better than getting an answer from someone like you!

Via Church of the Customer.

Edit Your Dictionary

Here are four words to take out of your vocabulary:

I have removed several words from my own “client relations” vocabulary through the advice of friends, colleagues and books I have read over the past few years. These words tend to put the client on edge, and especially for a new client, can form a barrier across the relationship that you are trying to form with them.

The words:  Just, Honest, Simple, and Actually.  Check out the post for the reasons why.  Here’s what the author has to say about simple:

The great thing about the word simple is that it almost always can predict that the future of your statement will be anything but. To say something is simple, implies that it is too small for the client to worry about, but what really ends up happening is that it is usually this item that the client will fixate on because you have tried to downplay it. This word also comes in the synonyms of easy, no problem,and likity split. Yes, I’ve really heard a colleague say that last synonym before!

What words should lawyers take out of their vocabularies? 

Do You Value What You Do?

Sean D’Souza gives some more advice on pricing.  What stood out for me was this quote:

First you must value your own stuff.
Then they’ll value your stuff.

Let me introduce you to ...

Ever wanted to introduce two people, but couldn’t figure out how to send an e-mail to both of them at the same time?  Me neither.  But if you want to make introducing two people even easier, with some Web2.0 goodness thrown in, check out You Should Meet.  If anyone out there knows somebody I should meet, give the (free) service a whirl.  My e-mail is Matt “at” LexThink.com.  I look forward to meeting them.

Wanna Get Your Business on TV?

I just found SpotRunner, a web-based service that will help to put your business on TV.  Pick a pre-produced ad, add your name and contact info, choose your network and TV schedule, and go.  Very cool, and pretty cheap too.  From the website:

It used to be difficult - and expensive - to advertise on television. Only big companies could afford to do it because it involved hiring an ad agency to make the actual ads, and a media buying company to make sure they got on TV at the right time. Now Spot Runner does everything for you, and at a price any business can afford. Here's how:

The Ads: We have a vast library of world-class ads. You choose the ad you want and then personalize it by adding your company name, or images of your products, or details about an upcoming promotion. We charge you for making those personalizations, and for getting your finished ad ready to be broadcast on television.

The TV schedule: Once you've chosen your ad, we help you create an effective schedule of TV networks and times to ensure that your ad is seen by the right people. Then we send off your personalized ad and make sure it runs where and when it's supposed to. Our prices include all the time and effort it takes to do that.

Most ads can only be used by one local business at a time. In other words, once you've purchased your ad no one else in your area can use it. There are some exceptions to this, but when you choose your ad you'll see your options for exclusivity, and you can protect your ad as much or as little as you want.

More Speaking Tips from Bert Decker

Bert Decker has several great recent posts that have been sitting in my “to blog” folder.  I’m going to lump them together here:

The Power of the Pause:  Practice pausing. Non-words are just pause fillers, and extend beyond the typical “um” and “uh” to “you knows,” “ands,” “okays,” “right” and the like. All anyone has to do is practice leaving pauses of two or three seconds after each sentence. In this exercise the speaker will at first feel the pauses are excruciatingly long.

Quick Tip: The Rule of 40: Whenever there are more than 40 people in a room of any size, use a microphone.

Impact with Technology:  Remembering that you are the presentation, develop visuals that enhance your point of view. After all, visuals are important:

• 55% of believability comes through the visual
• A 500% average increase in retention occurs when visuals are used in a presentation
• 83% of what we know is learned by seeing and observing

If you do presentations or public speaking, Bert’s blog has to be on your “must read” list.

Crayon Your Way to Better Presentations?

Here’s an interesting tip from the Sales Presentation Training Blog:

Write your entire presentation out and then get some colored markers. For example, for all the facts that you have written down, highlight them in red. Next, color all your humor in green. Lastly, color all your audience participation in blue.

Ok, now step back and look at your work of art. What, you don't see any green for humor? Where is the blue, for audience participation? Even if you are giving a sales presentation to manage $50 million dollars for a pension fund, you will be amazed by the audiences receptivity if you make the presentation about them. Red is a nice color but make sure your presentation has some green and blue to involve your audience.

Try the same thing with your marketing materials.  Use highlight all of the sentences talking about you (your technology, your offices, your expertise) in red, and all of the sentences talking about your clients (their needs, their testimonials, their satisfaction) in green. Too much red?  Maybe you need some new marketing materials.

Is it all the same thing?

Will lawyers ever realize that it is all the same thing:

We don’t spend 2 hours every day on marketing, we spend all day on marketing. We don’t spend 1 hour every day figuring out the best way to communicate what our products do, we spend all day figuring out the best way to communicate what our products do. We don’t spend 3 hours on interface design, we spend all day on interface design.

When the edges are blurred, and one thing is many things, you can achieve so much more with less time, effort, and people.

Good work for clients is marketing.  Sending a fair bill is client service.  Returning telephone calls and e-mails is relationship building.  It is all the same thing.  Go read the original post and the comments.  Great Stuff!

Knowledge Arbitrage for Attorneys

Writing about 10 ways to get more ideas, Rajesh Setty shares a gem that should be in every lawyer’s toolbox:

4. Harness the power of association

The more you associate things the faster you will get new ideas. Knowledge arbitrage is one way of associating things. Here is a simple way to develop your association muscle. List all the people that are close to you in your network. Also list their current projects and interests - basically list what matters most to these people. Once you have this data handy, whenever you meet a new person, see if there is a match in the interests of the new person and one of your earlier contacts in your network. If there is a mutual gain possible, connect these two people without expecting a gain.

The hidden benefit from the above mentioned approach: The more you do this, the higher the chances that the power of reciprocation will kick in and more people will be introduced to you. The more new people in your life, more fresh perspectives they will bring into your life. In turn, more new ideas will flow in.

This is one of the best ways to keep your existing clients happy and to get more.  Can you go though your client list and compile your clients’ current projects and interests?  Do you collect this information in your intake process?  You should.

Technorati Tags: knowledge, networking, relationships

Price like a Professional

Sean D’Souza gives some advice on raising prices in The Price is Never Wrong.  A comment to the post caught my eye:

Adam Kayce writes:  Darn good point. Every time I’ve raised my prices, not only do I make more money (which is nice), and not only do I seem to get more business (also very nice), but two other things rise, too: what you call “respect”, and “business self-esteem”.

People see me as more of a professional, the more my rates increase. It’s all perceived value.

But also, as I charge more, I give more - and I see my work as more valuable. That’s the business self-esteem rising. I believe it, so I embody it, and the value of the work increases. Great cycle.

I’d never thought about how pricing relates to business self-esteem before.  What do you think?

Technorati Tags: pricing, value, services,

Be the Same and Be Second

Found this summary of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing on Mike Vance’s absolutely fantastic MineZone Wiki, where there are dozens of business book summaries.  Here is one great nugget:

If you're shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the market leader.

• "You must discover the essence of the leader and then present the prospect with the opposite. (In other words, don't try to be better, try to be different."

WWJDTMAC - What Would Jesus Do to Market a Church?

Do you think legal marketing sucks?  Then read Church Marketing Sucks, a great new blog focused on — yep, you guesed it — church marketing.  Great blog design too!

Seed your clients for better marketing.

Could a law firm bring in its target clients and ask them for marketing advice?  Here’s an introduction to how it just might work:

Rather than simply offer free samples, previews, test-drives etc to opinion leaders, the idea of seeding trials is to create goodwill, loyalty and advocacy among the opinion-leading 10% of your target market by putting the product or service in their hands and giving them a say in how it is marketed. By involving opinion leaders in this way, by effectively inviting them to become part of your marketing department, you create a powerful sense of ownership among the clients, customers or consumers that count.

The reason this works is called The Hawthorne Effect.  Here’s a fascinating example from the article:

Back in the 1930s, a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School were commissioned to run some employee research for the telecom giant Western Electric (now Lucent Technologies). Conducted as the company’s production plant in Hawthorne, near Chicago, the research program involved inviting small groups of employees to trial various new working conditions before rolling them out to the general workforce. To the researchers’ amazement, whatever was trialed the participants seemed to like, to such an extent that their productivity increased! For example, when researchers invited participants to trial working in brighter lighting conditions, productivity increased. But then when they trialed dimmer lighting conditions, productivity also increased. In fact, productivity kept increasing in successive trials of working under progressively dimmer lights, until the lighting was no stronger than moonlight! In another trial, the research participants were invited to test working shorter hours, and sure enough their productivity increased again. Indeed, subsequent trials showed that the more breaks the research participants were given and the less time they worked, the greater their productivity. But then, when the researchers asked them to trial longer hours, productivity went up again – to an all time high.

Technorati Tags: marketing, seeding, professional+services, law, hawthorne+effect

Are You N.A.A.?

Mark Merenda gives some great advice on law firm taglines, and then shares this story:

It put me in mind of the — much shorter — tag line of a young attorney whom I met at a NAELA event at Hilton Head Island, S. C. in May, 2004. His business card read (with a change of names to protect the guilty): Joe Jones, attorney at law, N.A.A. 

I asked what the N.A.A. designation stood for. He said, "Not An A**hole."

Promotion Progress

Don Dodge hits the nail on the head:

The web, and more specifically blogs, have made it simple and cheap to promote your product. And it can all happen in 24 hours...without ever leaving your computer screen. This is transformational. It has been happening gradually over the last 5 years so we haven't really noticed how dramatic the change has been. It is huge.

Don't Just Pitch, Pitch In!

Patrick Lamb passes on a great tip from an article by Charles Green about how a law firm, given 90 minutes to “pitch” themselves to the General Counsel of a Fortune 50 company threw the pitch away — and hit the ball out of the park.  From the GC:

Then came firm three.  They said, 'We have 90 minutes with you .  We can either do a standard capabilities presentation--which we're very happy to do--or we can try something different.  We suggest that we get started on the job, right now--as if you had already given us the contract--and begin the job, right here, right now.  After 85 minutes, we'll stop and you'll have firsthand experience of exactly how it feels to work with us.'

Consider this approach for your next pitch — and let me know how it goes.

Marketing 101: Know what urgent problem your're uniquely solving.

Dave Pollard sums up marketing 101:  “Know what urgent problem you’re uniquely solving.”  Dave continues:

Over the years I have advised many entrepreneurs, worked with a lot of consultants, and coached executives. All three groups repeatedly make the same mistake: They try to introduce 'solutions' that are really interesting, quite feasible, and well within their area of competency, but which fail to uniquely solve an urgent problem (in the eyes of whoever is paying for it).

Here’s another nugget:

Unless you're willing to resort to such advertising hype, and burn a lot of bridges behind you, you need to focus on offering products and services that meet real needs. And if you're wise, you'll focus on urgent needs before important ones, because to most of us, there is always tomorrow to look after that important need, while the urgent need must be addressed today.

Go read his entire post.  It’s really great.

The Marketing Concept - Ron Baker

The Marketing Concept by guest blogger Ron Baker

There is only one boss:  the customer.  And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.  -Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart (1918-1992)

I miss Peter Drucker.  He was one of the few management consultants who had original insights, could write without making his readers feel like they were watching a fly ascend a drape, and has taught me so many lessons there is no way I can even separate his thinking from my own.  He deserved a Nobel Prize, and it's a shame he didn't get one (they are not given posthumously).

One of his lessons was you are not in business to make a profit.  Profit is merely oxygen for the body; it is not the reason for being.  Profit is nothing more than a lagging indicator of what is in the hearts and minds of your customers.

He indefatigably pointed out that "there is only one valid definition of business purpose:  to create a customer."  This is known as the marketing concept. 

The purpose of any organization--from a governmental agency, non-profit foundation to a corporation--exists to create results outside of itself.  The result of a school is an educated student, as is a cured patient for a hospital.  For a law firm, a happy and loyal customer who returns is the ultimate result.
 
The only things that exist inside of a business are costs, activities, efforts, problems, mediocrity, friction, politics, and crises.  There is no such thing as a profit center in a business; there are only cost and effort centers.  In fact, Peter Drucker said in a 1997 interview, "One of the biggest mistakes I have made during my career was coining the term profit center, around 1945."

The only profit center is a customer's check that doesn't bounce.  Customers are absolutely indifferent to the internal workings of your firm in terms of costs, desired profits levels and efforts.  Value is only created when you have produced something the customer voluntarily, and willingly, pays for. 

For example, cosmetic companies, as Revlon founder Charles Revson pointed out, sell hope.  What makes the marketing concept so breathtakingly brilliant is the focus is always on the outside of the organization.  It doesn't look inside and ask, "What do we want and need?" but rather it looks outside to the customer and asks, "What do you desire and value?"

Your firm exists to serve real flesh and blood people, not some mass of demographics known as "the market."  In the final analysis, a business doesn't exist to be efficient, to do cost accounting, or to give people fancy titles and power over the lives of others. 

It exists to create results and wealth outside of itself.  This profound lesson must not be forgotten.

Thank you Mr. Drucker.  R.I.P.

Technorati Tags: peter+drucker, cost, profit, law+firm, ron+baker

A Different Kind of "Yellow" Pages

Looking for that next great place to … uh … “reach” your male customers?  Decent Marketing may have just the ticket:  Heat Activated Urinal Billboards.  I know, you are wondering how it works, aren’t you?

The heat in a male's urine will deliver the message and the automatic flush from the toilet will re-set it for the next unsuspecting visitor... A perfect repetitive marketing tactic.