eDiscovery Daily Blog

• November 2, 2011

 

Last week, we started talking about techniques and mechanisms for one-on-one marketing to individual attorneys and litigation teams in your firm.  Here are a few more tips:

• Be enthusiastic about what you do.  It’s contagious and it will get others excited about your offerings.
• Be prepared for objections.  If you’ve been working with attorneys for a while, you know what objections might be raised to using your services and products.  Be prepared to address them.  Some of the repeated objections I’ve encountered are:
  • “My client won’t pay for this”:  Be prepared with cost information and cost analyses and comparisons.  You know that what you do fosters efficiency and saves money in the long run, so have the information you need to demonstrate that.
  • “Only an attorney can do this”:  Be prepared to describe a process that will make them comfortable and ensure them that substantive decisions and answers remain in the hands of attorneys.  Have testimonials from other attorneys in the firm that rave about how well it worked for them
  • “I tried that once and it was a disaster”: You may face some attorneys who have had a prior bad experience with the services you offer.  The costs may have been out of hand, deadlines may have been missed, or a database may have not been useful.  Be prepared to discuss the mechanisms that are built into your approach for controlling costs and meeting deadlines.  Be prepared to discuss the planning and design steps that you take to ensure that a database will be useful.  Be prepared to discuss the approach you take to monitoring service providers to ensure that they live up to the commitments they make.
• Provide references.  When you’ve done good work for someone, ask if they will serve as a reference, and have references on hand for potential new clients.
• Make “Getting that first sale” your primary objective.  Don’t try to sell them the whole ball of wax.  Identify what they need right now and focus on that.  Focus on solving an immediate problem.  If you get your foot in the door with one task and you do a good job, getting them to buy off on future work will be easier.  And, don’t give them too many options unless that’s necessary.  You are the expert and you know the best options.  If you give them too many options, the decision will be harder to make.

So far, we’ve covered several mechanisms and techniques getting new customers.  Tomorrow we’ll start talking about techniques and mechanisms for keeping your existing customers. 

In the meantime, we’d really like your input on how you’ve approached marketing in your firm.  How much marketing do you do, and what’s worked well for you?  Please share any comments you might have or let us know if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.