Key Strategies for Positioning Your Law Firm for Growth with Doug Reifschneider

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Doug Reifschneider:

Hi, my name is Doug Reifschneider. I’m a fractional chief marketing officer, known as A CMO with Chief Outsiders. Chief Outsiders is the largest fractional CMO firm in the country. We’ve got about 110 plus CMOs. We also offer chief sales officers as an option. Myself, I grew up in the restaurant industry, so I’m very knowledgeable about multi-unit, brick and mortar marketing for all kinds of businesses and franchising, et cetera, and happy to be here today.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you so much, Doug. We talked for a minute about Chief fractional CMOs and we I think will sprinkle that throughout our conversation because it’s something that’s really popped up in the last few years that people are doing more and more. It makes so much sense and I actually see law firms even doing this, doing kind of fractional services as well. Fractional, CEO, fractional whatever. And it makes so much sense. I think it comes back to my days of working hourly way back fresh out of college and realizing how backwards that felt. So for people who are good at what they do, working hourly punishes, you end up getting more and more expertise, getting faster and better at what you do, and then you’re basically making less money for your hourly work. So for fractional work, you are getting paid for what you’re doing and we have this service as well.

We call it our marketing co-counsel plan and where we set up a whole year of strategy and we’re going to dig into that. So today the title of the show is Key Strategies to Position Your Law Firm for Growth. So we’re going to talk about strategies, positioning, growth. It all comes back to the marketing funnel. So that’s kind of a big intro. So sorry for going on for so long, but let’s talk about how you get started with this whole idea of sitting down and doing kind of a big marketing strategy. Let’s say you’ve got a new client, where do you start?

Doug Reifschneider:

So if we’re actually brought in for that type of an engagement, we start out with the concept that our company’s based on and it’s in a book called The Growth Gears. And the Growth Gears are a simplified approach to how when you start trying to figure out strategy and positioning and whatnot, you have to understand your customer. That’s the first C need to understand the competition because what are they doing? What’s their messaging look like? How are they positioned? It also understands your company because when a company understands their vision or they have written vision, mission and core values, that’s golden. Sometimes we go into engagements where that’s not there and we have to start at that spot too. So once you understand your company, you know what your competition’s doing both from an advertising perspective, a messaging perspective, all that sort of thing, and you understand how they go together, that starts to set you up for growth Gear number two, which is strategy. So the strategy is where you start to actually work on Depositioning as an example, when you’re working on marketing strategy, the whole point about marketing is getting the right product to the right customer at the right price, at the right time and the right place in some cases locational businesses. And to figure that out and to really make it work, you’ve got to have a very unique proposition. You can’t be like everybody else. There’s a concept out there with EOS, I don’t know if you’re familiar with entrepreneurial operating system,

Karin Conroy:

Is that

Doug Reifschneider:

They help small businesses operate more professionally. And one of the things they do is they make you in the series of workshops, come up with three uniques. And I can’t tell you how often most companies go our people is our unique, alright? That doesn’t mean in some cases it’s true. But I’ll give you an exaggerated case of where that’s true. If you’re running, if you’ve started a security firm and you run personal security for celebrities, people with money, whatever the case may be, and you’ve gone out and you’ve hired a bunch of operators from the military seal team, Delta Force, stuff like that, your people really means you’re going to probably provide this great service. Now if your competition is John Bubba from Athens, Georgia and he hired all his football player friends as security, their people while big and strong may not have all the other expertise to be a great security firm. So that’s where their people in situation one is better than situation two. So the point of that

Karin Conroy:

Isn’t that risky to have your people as your main point of differentiation because then as soon as they leave, then what?

Doug Reifschneider:

Also a good point. So one very often everybody says it is and it’s not. And then two, because there is a flow through in all organizations, you’re absolutely right.

Karin Conroy:

Okay, so people say that it’s their people, it’s probably not. Does that mean that they don’t have a point of differentiation or they just haven’t defined that? Or what do you usually see

Doug Reifschneider:

In the case of attorneys? That’s where people could actually be a point because if the attorneys have chosen one line of work, whether it’s case law or whatever else, all the different disciplines and lawyers, attorneys, and I don’t know them like you would know them, that’s where that could work. If your people actually have that expertise and you can get around that turnover thing that you just discussed, it’s usually better to be positioned on what you do best for your customers because at the end of the day, we’ve got another concept that Chief Outsiders called Pain and pleasure Island. Customers have a problem, they’re in pain, they’ve got some kind of an issue, there’s a boat you need to get to Pleasure Island to where you solve the problem and stop the pain. And that’s what great marketing will do is get you from Pain Island to Pleasure Island.

Karin Conroy:

So I’ve heard this described also as being a painkiller versus a vitamin. So where vitamins, we all know we probably should take them and if we take ’em fine, but I don’t necessarily, there’s some that I can kind of feel, but if I miss my vitamin today, it’s not going to change my day that much. It’s not going to really impact in an urgent way anything that happens to me today. But if I am in pain, I want a pain killer and I want it now and I want it to fix this so that this pain stops intruding on whatever’s happening to me today. So a lot of places are starting out with their messaging as vitamins, we are going to strengthen your bones. And if people are like, oh, that’s great, but I could do that today or I could do that next year, and I don’t care.

I see this a lot with estate planning firms. I know I need a will, but there’s no sense of urgency. If I get the will today, I’m probably going to be alive next week so I could do it now it’s going to sit at the bottom of my to-do list for probably the next 18 months or more. But if there is a sense of urgency and there’s a pain to it and there’s a solution to alleviating that pain, I feel entirely different about this. I want to get off that pain island and over to the pleasure island instantly. I now am urgently seeking a solution and this is not a vitamin anymore. This is something that I have a problem and it’s impacting me. And so I think that’s a really good place to start. And for the record, I didn’t come up with that one.

Doug Reifschneider:

May I borrow it? I’ve actually not heard. That’s awesome.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, absolutely. Of course I’m borrowing it. But I think in terms of positioning, that’s a real point of differentiation also where you’re kind of saying the same thing everybody else’s and you’re a vitamin and all of that versus I’ve got a solution and it’s urgent, I’m adding this sense of urgency to it and I’m alleviating something that’s really painful. So from the beginning, we can use that as sort of this beginning understanding of positioning and how that changes the way people think about your interaction with them. So then how do you move people through the overall strategy to get them from this idea of I need marketing to getting them through spending some time with strategy and to the growth outcome that they usually are starting with. Usually I’m guessing your clients come in the same way. I need more clients, I need them now, and I think what I need is social media maybe or SEO or they have a guess of what they need in terms of tactics.

Doug Reifschneider:

Yeah, great question. And what you just described is what we call random acts of marketing. So without, oh,

Karin Conroy:

I love this.

Doug Reifschneider:

Without strategy in place, you tend to do that. So a lot of chief outsiders clients have been in the B2B space and they typically have grown from an entrepreneur started selling widgets, right? Saam Smith sold widgets and he sold a lot of widgets. And then one day his company got big enough, he needed to hire a salesperson to do some sales because he needed to manage a company. Or it doesn’t matter that salesperson does a great job, sells more stuff, they keep selling more widgets, he gets kind of stuck, they hire more salespeople, and then someday they finally meet a plateau and they start hearing things like, Hey, we need a website or we need a brochure for that conference. We’re going to next month. And all that stuff without the insights and strategy we talked before is random acts of marketing without any kind of point. It goes back to the ready, shoot, aim, and very important to get that in line.

Karin Conroy:

I see this all the time and what it sounds like when I first have a conversation with a client is we have a website and it doesn’t do anything, or we tried X, Y, Z didn’t do anything. And so it sounds like there’s this sort of religion that everybody believes in and they’re like atheists.

Doug Reifschneider:

That’s where data

Karin Conroy:

Comes in. It’s like, exactly. So how do you explain what mistakes they’re making when they come to you and they say those kinds of phrases, I know how we say it and I know what’s happening there too. As soon as they say things, I’m like, okay, I know exactly how to diagnose this and why you’re saying that.

Doug Reifschneider:

It varies by client, by industry. But the bottom line is when we go in with most of our assignments or engagements, we go in with that strategy process in mind inside strategy, execution, but we’re looking for quick wins and the quick wins are going to be, and it’s going to depend on the chief outside and again the industry, the experience, but we’re going to check the website, get in the GA floor, we might do some website checkers to see if it’s fulfilling page speed insights, and we’ll check the website that way and we’ll look at any other data they may be able to share with us and find out if what they’re saying or what they perceive is true. Because theoretically perception is reality. They have facts to prove otherwise,

Karin Conroy:

Right? So what we will typically also do is we talked about, I was going to pull this back over to the funnel, and so we kind of talked very broadly about this funnel, and usually if people will come in with this very narrow focus on where they think the problem is, and oftentimes that’s not even it, they think the problem is the website and the website should just be this engine that just pulls leads out of the ether. So instead typically there’s some hole in that in their overall marketing funnel that is the problem. So let’s talk broadly through what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen mistakes and we were also talking about that bottom of the funnel before we started recording. And can you talk a little bit about your experience with how you can turn things around or make improvements, especially down there? I feel like that is really a missing area that people kind really forget about or set to the side. And just as a recap, the bottom of the funnel is the post-purchase. So they’ve already been a client, you have probably finished their case and been paid. And so as far as you’re oftentimes as far as the firm is thinking about this client, your work is done, but in terms of your marketing, it absolutely is not done. And so Doug, where do you guys offer suggestions, strategy, input about that bottom area of the funnel?

Doug Reifschneider:

Great question that customer nurturing in all industries is very, very important. And depending on the lifetime value of a customer and legal circles, I’m not sure how that pans out. And I’m sure it varies by discipline because of the dollars involved, et cetera. But it is about following up with your customers while they are engaging with them, providing if they’re a current customer and they’re providing birthday cards and things like that. Just to know that you’re human and that you care is very important because at the end of the day, and this goes with all industries, so even the one I came from experience can be more important than the actual, in my case, food restaurants. But in the service for lawyers, what about the experience with a great, when that customer walks in the front door, does the receptionist give them a hearty smiley greeting, welcome to a b, C law, or do they have to wait an hour of their valuable time because somebody thinks they’re too busy to serve them, or if they made a 10 o’clock appointment, are they in at 10 o’clock? Things like that at actually that’s where some of the marketing that comes on post-purchase is more operational driven than marketing driven, but marketing can still drive emails and the Christmas or holiday cards or birthday messages and things like that. And the whole point is to engage with the customer in a human way and not just be so black and white and drone on about whatever the topic is and whatever the need is.

Karin Conroy:

I think that’s a really good point about how I think there’s a lot of points in that funnel where your marketing strategy is absolutely tied to your operational systems and there should be a good amount of automation in your marketing or it’s not going to happen. Let’s be honest. We are busy doing the thing that we’re doing all day. We shouldn’t have to, A lot of these things should be automated in order for them to happen on a consistent basis. And so that repurchase area, we all have heard all these numbers about how many of your current and past clients drive your future business. So that’s obvious. That’s not something I need to recap here, but the process to make that happen should be an automated process. You should have checklists, you should have automations, you could have emails. But like you said, I feel like making it feel really human, not just as robotic.

We worked with you. This issue that you came to our firm for was probably significant if you hired a lawyer for it, whatever it might be, whether it was your business, whether it was your family, whatever that might’ve been, we realized that you don’t want to hear from a robot, you’re going to hear from us. You’re going to know some suggestions about how we might work together in the future. We’re here to understand the broad picture of potential risks you might face in the future, whatever that might be, to stay top of mind. So I feel like that’s one area where people are just leaving money on the table.

Doug Reifschneider:

Well, you’re exactly right. To your point, if you automate that process, you’re a large enough law firm, you’ve used Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, some customer relationship management platforms are CRMs, they can be very automated. And the beauty about AI coming on board is personalizing those message. It’s going to be easier as time goes on, but if you don’t add some personalization to it in a human way, it will come across too robotic and just too basic as an email that lands in an inbox for, you’ve got a client for a year and you send them a birthday message, that birthday message if it’s not personalized in some way is going to come across pretty robotic. And you need to be careful with how that happens and how you automate things to your point.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. Okay, so we talked about random acts of marketing, which is also just like shiny object syndrome is our version of that where you just get distracted, you lose focus. So how do you avoid that? How do you make sure that you stay focused or how do you talk to your clients about making sure that they kind of stay in their lane?

Doug Reifschneider:

The E to that really is communication. So if we’re in as a true fractional executive, we’re on their executive team, we’re participating their weekly or biweekly executive team meetings. We’ve probably got at least a weekly check-in with the CEO. And it’s all about communication and then positioning in those conversations because it is easy for a CEO to go on to the next shiny things. I mean, I had an engagement at one point where I think we were the shiny object for a while, and then something else came along and we didn’t have as much access to ’em anymore. I guess you probably run into that a time or two too.

Karin Conroy:

Oh yeah, I’ve been doing this long enough. I feel like there are few experiences, few situations I haven’t seen. So for me, I feel like a lot of that is driven by them being worried about whether it’s showing the results or that it’s working or whatever, but just being worried. And so how do you bring them back to this idea of the strategy and alleviate that concern or worry or fear or whatever so that they recognize what the kind of path and the goals and do you have metrics and reporting or how do you show the value and show the progress and the growth and all of that?

Doug Reifschneider:

Yes, because the chief outsiders, we do an engagement. It’s usually, well, it’s always based on deliverables. We don’t based anything on hourly rate. For sure. You have to back into that to figure out how much time it’s going to take to finish a deliverable, but you bill accordingly. And so those deliverables will usually have metrics attached to them and whether it’s, let’s say there’s an SEO metric on the website and you want to find out that now it’s GA four, it’s duration, not how we measure with universal analytics, but now it’s how much time they actually spend on a website versus picking off right away

Karin Conroy:

Just overall traffic.

Doug Reifschneider:

And well now with GA four, it’s all about engagement time as opposed to land on a website and then go off and the time on is like three seconds. You want it to be three minutes or five minutes, whatever. So you provide, if we don’t provide those metrics upfront, we do as we get in, because sometimes what we don’t know, we don’t know, but when we build the plan, it’s based on deliverables and every deliverable will have some kind of data attached to it. Usually. Sometimes it’ll be subjective, it might be, Hey, we’re going to help you source and hire somebody to replace us when we’re done in six months. So that’s an update on the status of applicants or something. But there is, to your point, that’s where the weekly check-in, and we usually keep pretty good documentation of how we’re doing there. And there’s some of my counterparts go to some really deep detail that I will say I don’t necessarily go into. It’s like make your eyes cross. They’ve got so much detail in how they’ve done things, but the point is we provide updates on those deliverables, which are usually based on the appropriate metrics.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. Alright. So you’ve sat with, I was going to say a firm, but typically you’ve sat with your client and figured out, do you set up set of goals based on monthly, quarterly, how do you guys organize that piece of it so that they can kind of know what’s going on, but also not be on that hamster wheel of like, okay, now this week and that week, and what’s the typical timeframe that you recommend for them to expect results?

Doug Reifschneider:

Depends on attack. So SEO is near and Dhir to my heart because of my multi-unit background. I’m big on local SEO and locations and having your nap and having Google business profiles, all that stuff, that takes time that can take three to six months. So you’ve got to try to set that expectation. Some CEOs don’t want to hear it, but that’s the expectation. If you’re going after pay per-click, and you’re going to do that on not kind of midway through the funnel and you’re trying to do some ads on Google, that’s going to be, at least you can report quickly on your cost per click and cost per lead and attach that to the website, see if it’s actually creating demand generation or lead generation and put numbers to that. And every other thing works that way.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I think that’s really important also to realize that all these different parts are going to take different amounts of time. So if you’re doing some local SEO, this might take this amount of time. And then your email marketing, if you’re sending an email newsletter to a bunch of past clients that might take a week and all of a sudden you’ve got some results, all of a sudden if it’s really well done, that could be a pretty nearly instant result. If you’ve got a very clean well done offer. That’s correct. And that’s the right way of doing it because that’s the whole point of the funnel where you’ve got things kind of moving throughout and you should have clients at all different stages of that funnel. So we keep talking about the funnel, and I’m going to keep doing that this whole year

Doug Reifschneider:

If I may,

Karin Conroy:

But I just want people to,

Doug Reifschneider:

I may back up a little bit. To your point, when people are looking at those random acts of marketing we talked about before, it’s like, should I do this or should I do that? Nowadays, there’s so much going on. If you’ve got a well orchestrated marketing engine, the answer probably is yes, depending on where that tactic fits in the funnel and it should be going on all the time because it’s not like, Hey, we do no marketing and now we’re going to do pay-per-click. And that’s all you do. You’re going to fail. If you only do SEO, you’re going to fail. You need to do all of this nowadays in a digital world, and it’s got to be orchestrated to fit in the funnel that you’d like to talk about. We’d like to talk about.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, and I think just to add to that, to do all of those things with seven or eight different companies or people, you’ve got your IT person, you’ve got your SEO person, you’ve got your website person, you’ve got an email person also doesn’t make sense. So that is just a disaster. And the likelihood of there being to come back to your point about communication, like coherent communication, coherent strategy plans, even a coherent platform that everybody’s using to organize everything is not high. So once again, putting it all under one umbrella, one strategy, one funnel that hits all of those just comprehensive parts of your client journey. And I hate using the phrase client journey, do you have a better one that you found? Because I haven’t found anything better, but for some reason it’s like nails on the chalkboard for

Doug Reifschneider:

Me. It’s the industry that you’re in, but a client is a customer. So if perhaps to your point about we haven’t gotten into this words matter, law firms thought of their clients as customers, there might be a different mindset and it might work better. And I’ll give you a perfect example. Karin, in the restaurant business, most people, most restaurateurs consider the people that come in their restaurants as customers. But if you change that mindset to guests, that makes a whole different, and the change that I’ve worked with so much, typically talk about multiple locations, we’re going to go hit some stores, we’re going to go visit some stores, store, store, they’re restaurants. If you change the narrative to restaurants and yes, versus customers and stores, that makes a difference organizationally, if you can get it in there. And I would assume that with law firms the same could be instead of clients now, hey, they’re customers we’re going to, or maybe because they’re coming to the office, maybe they are a guest, maybe we should look at it that way.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I think that’s great because just the idea of sales and you being a business is sometimes tricky to talk to law firms about, especially more established like the partners who really want to believe that people are hiring them for their reputation and their experience, which they are, but they are not going to hire you if they land on your website and it looks horrible and you say the wrong things and you have a horrible presentation and positioning. So they really are customers. These are not going to be family members. These are people who are going to pay you for a service

Doug Reifschneider:

At the minimum, their prospects at that stage, and you want to move them through the funnel down to purchase with log content and other things you do in the middle of the funnel to get somebody that’s landed on your website to actually go from a prospect to a customer or a guest.

Karin Conroy:

I like that. I like the idea of the guest because it also really reinforces the middle to the lower part of the funnel that we were talking about too, where I was picturing when you said that higher end hotels where they just really take care of things and they’re thinking about details before you do. And that’s the idea with a great law firm, is you’re taking care of those clients and they’re assuming that you understand the law and what they might need more than they do. And so if you can present that and promote that in a way that, Hey, we worked together last year and this law changed and it may affect your business, and I want you to know, because I’m here for you, I’ve got your back, and give me a call and we can talk about it. And bam, there’s new business. Great

Doug Reifschneider:

Example. Yeah.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. Awesome. Okay, so you mentioned it earlier, and I’m excited about this book, but it is now time for the book review, and we’ve got a whole library on the site, and I’ve mentioned it pretty much every episode, so people are probably used to it now. But tell me about this book that you are going to recommend and review.

Doug Reifschneider:

The book is called Degrowth Gears. I referenced it earlier as the basis for how we build our processes at Chief Outsiders, and we have a fractional chief marketing officer deal and explains the detailed or detailed explanation, although it’s still, it’s easy enough car to read on an airplane trip. You’ve got a two hour, two or three hour flight. Fast read is probably get it done in an airplane read. And because they simplified it, there’s a lot more to it and that’s why we’re here. But for a CEO that doesn’t know much about marketing or an attorney that doesn’t know much about marketing, understanding that they need to go through the first gear, which is the insights gear as we discussed before, learn about customers, competition and company to go to the strategy gear to let that information inform strategy so you know what your offerings are or what they should be and how you can change them, and how you should position yourself, what your brand strategy looks like, et cetera.

And find out what’s really unique in your messaging to where you then go to the execution and figure out which parts of the tactical marketing things you do will impact which parts of the funnel. So awareness is one thing in a market versus what you’re going to do with customer nurturing with email, or you can actually do email blasts and it can be an awareness thing, but probably not very successful, right? Sure. So the growth gears goes through there with some great examples and some manufacturing and some other industries on how things work and how we’ve got a four matrix deal on how to pick offerings and whatnot. So we’ve got workshops and things up the Yin yang on our Dropbox site, et cetera. But the book itself written by Pete Hayes, who is the co-founder of Chief Outsiders, and then our current chief marketing officer of All CMOs, Pete Hayes, the co-founder, art Saxby.

I said that wrong, sorry. So Art Sacks, he’s the co-founder. Pete Hayes is the CMO of All CMOs. They wrote this book several years ago, and it’s based on research from the business school at University of Texas. Because what they found was that great operators, people that were great at operating their business like operators, and in this case attorneys, they’re really good at what they do in the operations. And some of the things we’ve talked about, some of your clients may call their clients customers or guests, et cetera. They’re really good inside the four walls, but they very rarely look outside the window. It’s outside the window that you can start to see what other things, how your competition behaves, what’s going on, et cetera, to figure out how to move forward. And what they found in this research was, and I forgot the numbers, I’d have to open the right page and I don’t want to or your listers with that, but there’s a delta that’s fairly significant on marketing, and people tend to look out the window more often where that’s why in some industries, CMOs are becoming CEOs and then operators and financial people, they tend to look inside.

So you really want to take that look outside the window approach, which is why Art Saxby called us Chief Outsiders. We come from that outside approach, right? Oh, I love that. And then use that University of Texas research that was done about 10 years ago and the basis for why they wrote the book, the Growth Gears.

Karin Conroy:

So as you were talking, it was sounding to me like this sort of surface level intro to some of the marketing classes I took in my MBA, but then as you were describing it, it’s this marketing strategy and theory and how it works and why it works and why you need to have all these pieces combined with operations, which I hadn’t put those two pieces together, but that’s really what these fractional CMO programs are doing. They’re taking all that strategy and the execution. So there’s the strategy, there’s what’s the second step thing?

Doug Reifschneider:

First growth gear is insight, second is strategy.

Karin Conroy:

Got it. Okay. So looking outside is the first thing. That’s the outside power looking outside the window. The second part is the strategy, and then is the execution. Do I have that

Doug Reifschneider:

Right? Yes. But technically the insight, you’re looking inside and outside. You are looking at your company, but you’re then looking outside for the competition and what you should be doing for your customer.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I think all of that is so many conversations that I’ve had where they come and these potential clients or prospects are talking to me about how things aren’t working like we were mentioning before. And it’s because they’re missing those pieces. It’s because they haven’t really looked at how, for example, how their website compares to their competitors. So are you saying the exact same thing as the guy down the street? Do you have just a horrible picture of the skyline that the other guy used as well? How are you doing things that are different combined with what’s happening internally that might have some holes or things that need to be fixed or repaired or added to? Okay, that’s awesome. The growth gears, we will add that on the show notes in the library. We’ll promote that on social media and all that stuff. So if you’re listening to the show, you’ll find the links easily. It’ll be there and easily found. Alright, so Doug, what is one thing that works when it comes to marketing strategy, positioning, all of this good stuff we’ve been talking about.

Doug Reifschneider:

The one thing that works is understanding the customer. You need to know what your customer really wants. What is their pain and how, which boat will you use to get to their pleasure island? So you satisfy that pain issue that we talked about earlier. That’s the one thing that works, but it’s not an easy process. It’s going to be a combination of meetings, conversations, maybe in our case we might do workshops, whatever, but it takes a lot of expiration both internal and externally to figure out what that is. Because if you are same like everybody else, you’re not going to get anywhere. And it’s the companies that truly differentiate themselves that make the biggest difference. And then of course, there is something to be said for the great execution, both tactically and operationally, because you could have some of the best positioning and messaging, but you don’t follow through. It doesn’t work. So you’ve got to have it all put together. But the one thing that works, I know for sure if you figure out what your unique proposition is, your unique selling proposition as used to call USP, you probably heard that when you did your MBA or there’s other terms for it. That’s the one I was most familiar with.

Karin Conroy:

UVP. Yeah, unique value proposition, but it’s just your uniqueness. Whatever the unique thing is that you talk about,

Doug Reifschneider:

You nail that. And to find out what that is, you need to talk to your customers. Do you voice the customer, do interviews, do focus groups, do whatever you can. And if you’re on a budget, there are inexpensive ways to do all of that. And then once you think you’ve got to figure out, go back and test it with them. See if does this resonate with you? Test it. Test and learn. Because one of the brands I was with in my past when we first came up with that USP, and it became a tagline. It had one set of four or five words, and now it’s about six, seven years later, the message is the same, but the words have been tweaked, I think at least twice, maybe three times. Because you learn what works and what doesn’t work as you do research and understand your customers. So understand who your target customer is and understand what they need to get from Pain Island to Pleasure Island.

Karin Conroy:

I’ll say too, for most lawyers, they’re usually coming to you with a pretty clear pain. They’re not usually coming to you just to say hi or check in. It’s not like you go to your dentist just to get your teeth cleaned. It’s not like that. So this piece usually, even though it seems challenging when we sit down with clients, this is usually the easier part, especially if we’re talking to criminal defense attorneys, personal injury attorneys where people have literally been hurt. That’s the easy part. And so if you have any experience with this, which you should, that’s the easy part, go talk to one or two of those great clients that you’ve had. But what you don’t do and what the mistake that we see all the time is you don’t base this off of John Smith’s website down the street, who I think John Smith is doing really good. So I’m just going to look at his website and then I’m going to keep sending you that link and say, Hey, can we do what John Smith is doing? That’s not what you do. And that is exactly the opposite of every successful accomplishment you’re going to have with all of this positioning that we’re talking about. So you have to kind of put Horse Blinders on and ignore John Smith’s website because John Smith’s website is working for John Smith.

Doug Reifschneider:

John Smith is not for you. What they do it one thing, but trying to duplicate it is a bad idea. And I agree with you 100%.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, you’re going to just completely put a grenade in all of your efforts, and it’s going reverse everything that you’re trying to do, so awesome. Okay. Doug rif Schneider is a fractional CO fractional CMO at Chief Outsiders. This has been a great conversation. I feel like we really covered very broad concepts and tactics, but also the strategy in how to make these things work for a lot of firms who kind of start with this place of feeling really stuck and not knowing

Doug Reifschneider:

Why it’s exactly. Go through insights, learn some strategy, put it to execution, and you’ll build a growth engine. Awesome. Thank you very much for

Karin Conroy:

Having being here. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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