Should lawyers pause their ads for the mid-terms?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Make sure that if you’re using social media and AI, that it’s actually telling you what this person’s actually interested in because a lot of times it gets it wrong and the worst thing you can do is something like sending alcohol to somebody who has chosen sobriety.

Conrad Saam:

Which I have done. I have done that. That’s why I don’t send alcohol on it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A great way to be memorable.

Announcer:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote, market, and make fat stacks for your legal practice. Here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I’m Conrad Saam and I have my name inscribed on a small third tier trophy hidden somewhere in a bar in Ireland.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s amazing. And I am Gyi Tsakalakis with AttorneySync and I am left-handed, right-footed, right eye dominant, but bat and swing a golf club left.

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, have you ever played hockey? Do you play hockey lefty?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m right in hockey, like batting and golfing, but I ride a snowboard goofy.

Conrad Saam:

Well, you are multidextrous. I don’t even think.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Something’s wrong with me. But Conrad, more importantly, what is this trophy in Ireland all about?

Conrad Saam:

Well, this is one of the best years of my life. I played rugby in Ireland and we did well and I’ve got this little somewhere there’s a little trophy at some bar. I would love to go back to Ireland and find that and talk to my kids about how great I was back in the day, but that’s not going to happen.

Word is. The glory days. We’re always good. And tomorrow and as bad as it seems.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Speaking of a glorious day, that’s a glorious Hawaiian shirt that you’re wearing. Are you on vacation?

Conrad Saam:

I am, as every business owner knows, never really on vacation. And I’m so dedicated to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing that I’m recording to you from Myrtle Beach. I can see the ocean. I took a two mile swim this morning right before we recorded and it is glorious you have here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wow, that’s impressive. And listeners and watchers, this is our commitment to you that even on vacation after two miles of swimming, we will not miss an episode. What else are we talking about today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Well, as typical, we’re going to start with the news and then we’re going to talk about brand advertising in the background of the election and the changes in economics that are going to happen over the next four months. And then we’re going to talk about one of the hardest things that I can think through how to get your employees more involved in your law firm’s marketing efforts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s do some news.

Conrad Saam:

All right everyone, this is not a shocker to everyone, but we’re going to use this as a segue into our first segment. Election advertising spend expected to reach record high outpacing presidential years. So this coming election cycle with the Senate and the House both in play, depending on who you listen to, we’re expecting record levels of advertising spending coming from the political parties depending on where you are geographically. And we’re going to talk about later how or if you should consider this when allocating your marketing budget over the rest of the year.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In other news, a Michigan roofer is betting on community over private equity as reported on Click on Detroit. And I should qualify that is this news because this is actually a paid sponsored article and coverage on the local news here, but I though this was interesting because it’s an example of a roofer doing positioning around the anti-private equity local owned shop. Again, I think lawyers, we’ve talked about private equity, we’ve talked about consolidation, we’ve talked about national players. I think if you’re looking for an example, this might be a place to look at how this local roofing company is positioning itself as the local in the community we live here. And it’s funny because this is in my community and this was not the only one. I saw another one. I heard another radio spot on this from a different company that was in roofing.

And so I think some of these roofers are starting to, there’s more and more positioning around this. Whether or not anyone cares, I think is up for debate, but it’s certainly one positioning angle that law firms might consider.

Conrad Saam:

See, I think, and I hate to draw this back into politics, but I think this only becomes aware. It only reaches awareness among the general audience. And I was really positive on what was happening with the presidential move to ban private equity ownership of houses. And so had that gone forward, that would’ve been something that at least brought awareness to Joe Public about private equity and kind of that distaste for how private equity can ultimately end up having an impact on the end user. I don’t know. It’s just hard for me to swallow the concept that JoPublic gives a damn about who owns their dentist or roofer or law firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But they might care if it’s comparing anybody versus somebody who grew up in their local community.

Conrad Saam:

Ah, the local angle strikes again. For those of you who are waiting to hear Gy and I talk about the importance of local, you had an over under of four minutes in, bing, bing, bing, you just won. In other news, in our weekly segment on Google News, Google is testing AI summaries integrated into advertisements, which I think is a terrible, terrible idea. Imagine – What could

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go wrong?

Conrad Saam:

What could go wrong? Imagine running a very carefully worded ad only to have Google either violate your ethical requirements, say stuff that is not accurate, tell the end user that this is not the best. But yeah, that’s kind of where we are.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Keep your eyes on that folks. If you’re running ads on Google, go check out and make sure that your ads are being displayed as you want them to be. In other news, I would like to give a quick shout out to our friends at Michigan Auto Law for launching their 3K for free campaign. You can learn more about it at 3K4free.com. Essentially what this firm is doing is they’re like, look, in the state of Michigan, if you’re in a car accident, the state has legislation that you get up to 3K to repair your vehicle. And a lot of law firms, they charge to help navigate these claims, which are really kind of just statutorily defined. It’s just like work in the process. And this firm’s like, look, here’s one way we can give back to the local community. We’re going to help law firms navigate this no fee at all.

I though it was an example of really creative marketing. And I think that it’s a good example for folks that are looking for inspiration for ways to do some things that are kind of outside the box of the traditional free consultation. We fight hard and get huge verdicts.

Conrad Saam:

And finally, because we haven’t talked about AI yet, the University of Chicago unveiling a new strategy to deal with AI across all 1L sections prohibiting the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classrooms. There’ll be some exceptions. All exams will be in class without access to the internet, electronic files or apps. Interestingly, this is I think a major pedagogical question. How do we teach people to function in the AI world while ensuring that they’re not using AI to just function in the AI world? It is a, I’m glad I don’t have to answer this question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Same. Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

So we didn’t want to just do basic ad reads for an insurance company. We wanted to actually get real stories from ALPS Insurance. We’re here with Rio Lane, who has gone through some of the crazier stories that they’ve had and she’s going to share some of the dangerous things that can happen in this case when you are dabbling as a lawyer.

Rio Lane:

I’ll tell you a little story about a lawyer who dabbled. His name was Mark. Mark is a commercial litigator in Montana, 20 years in practice, five lawyer firm, a guy who really knew what he was doing. A longtime business client called him before a ski trip and asked, “Hey, can you throw together a quick will just in case?” Now Mark, even though he’s really good at his job, he hadn’t done estate planning in many years, but it seemed simple. He remembered enough, he wanted to help. So he said, “Yeah, no problem. I could do that. ” But it was a problem because the client died on that trip and Montana has strict will execution rules. Mark’s will conflicted with beneficiary designations on non-probate assets. So when the client passed away, the estate plan exploded into litigation. His heirs, they weren’t upset that Mark tried to help, but they were really upset that he got it wrong.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hot tip. State law matters, especially in simple matters. Dabbling outside your practice area isn’t a favor. It’s a misstep. Learn how to avoid those at alpsinsurance.com.

Conrad Saam:

All right, dear listeners, you know that I am fairly interested in what’s going on in politics and my worlds have delightfully collided in the upcoming massive expenditure that is going to be put forth from a pure brand perspective in geographically specific markets. If your state is not up for a Senate race right now, things will be a little bit tighter, but you’re still going to get a whole bunch of money spent on house races and depending on where you are, that may be a ton of money. I was talking to Gyi in the pre-show and I’ve been talking to a bunch of my clients about if you are a heavy brand advertiser, how do you look at and what do you do over the upcoming between say today and November 6th for your brand advertising? And this really just becomes a supply and demand issue.

The cost of these advertisements is going to absolutely skyrocket as new advertisers, those temporary advertisers every two years for about a four-month period, just go absolutely bananas in terms of flooding the airwaves, flooding the everything waves, the internet waves, flooding everything with ads. And so ad rates are going to skyrocket. And is now the right time to take a break with that branded advertising? The pure economics for me suggests if you are ever going to take a break on that brand advertising, now is the right time to do that. I would be curious, Gyi, you had a bit of a pushback on this and I’d love to hear more.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No breaks. There’s no breaks for brand. No breaks. Somebody from, I don’t remember, somebody on this lunch hour legal marketing podcast, I remember a while ago, but he said that when you’re branding consistency, even if you might not even like your brand, you cannot change it. You cannot stop. But seriously though, I think that a couple things, and you alluded to a couple of these things in terms of framing of this and to actually have something tactical that folks can take away just instead of like Conrad says put the brakes on and Gyi says no. One, this is going to be very location specific. And so you have to ask yourself question one, are you a national brand advertiser? Are you a regional brand advertiser? Are you a hyper-local brand advertiser? Because as Conrad mentioned, and should be of no surprise unfortunately in the way that our democracy works, there will be disproportionate amounts of political spending by state.

And in fact, we cited the CNBC article earlier and just to validate on Conrad’s point, the ad rates are going to be more than they’ve ever been, more election spending than ever before for any race, not just midterms, but actually more than presidential. And the states that they call out are California, Texas, my great state of Michigan, Ohio and Ohio. And so if you’re in one of those markets and you are a national advertiser, maybe I’m with you on that. Maybe that is a time to redeploy something else. I think the other question though, and I’d be curious to get your reaction to this, this also presumes that the way you’re buying media is not to a certain extent locked in for this period. So frame it up this way. And the article talks about this too, because they’re like, the ad rates are already up in July.

So let’s back up one even further step. If you’re advocating for pullback, when do you think the pullback should start? Because they’re talking about July already and that’s already in it. So we should have been having this conversation back in January perhaps.

Conrad Saam:

Whoa, better too little, too late. Too late than too little.

So yes, rates are starting to increase. I think the question is, you and I talk a lot about the difference between direct response advertising and these longer term issues with brand, these longer term tactics, one of which is brand. And so for me, let’s just very simplistically suggest that you have a reasonably well-known brand. And like SEO, these are assets that persist with time. They don’t persist indefinitely, but they do persist with time. I know who you are. And so all of that, you’re not doing that brand advertising to try and make the phone ring today. And you’re trying to use that advertising to make the phone ring over the next three to 18 months. And that’s the whole concept of brand awareness, brand affinity as we’ve talked about. My argument here for turning this down or even completely off is this is a short-lived adjustment.

It is a short-lived change.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s my question. Define short-lived. Till November 7th. Because again, they’re already talking about ad rates being impacted in July. So you got at minimum, July, August, September, October. And really, if you dig in, I’ve been have people call us out on this. I’d be curious the folks that have deeper research on this. My hunch is that, I guess I know from my own community, because we’re in a hotly contested battleground state, the political ads have already started. So you’re really talking about, you’re talking about six months, eight months, a year?

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no, it’s not a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Year.

Conrad Saam:

We’ve got four months between now and November 7th.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. So you’re talking about today, but my point is that you’re saying your thesis is start considering brand pullback based on election rates being impacted. They’re already being impacted. So again, this is really someone listening for this a year from now or next election cycle.

Conrad Saam:

No, no. If you’re listening just for a year from now, please skip ahead 10 minutes as we talk about how to get your employees more involved in your marketing efforts. No, but you’re going to see these rates are going to climb and climb and climb. Even if you want to make the very simplistic approach and say, we’re not going to advertise in October because the rates are going to be twice as high in October or three times as high in October.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So that’s what I’m trying to drive at though. That’s what I’m trying to drive at is your point here is you’re like, look, I think an argument for massive pairing back in October, that’s a different proposition than being like, “Hey, you need to start pulling back eight months before the election.” That’s a different

Conrad Saam:

Suggestion.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well,

Conrad Saam:

It’s not eight months before. I mean, we’re four months out. So sorry, let me be clear on this. You have to make this an analytical framework. You have to understand what your ad rates are. You have to understand what you’re paying. You have to understand what you’re getting for what you’re paying. And if you look at October, and you can tell me, and I don’t know this, I’m just using very round numbers to make my argument easier. The ad rates are going to be three times as high. And by the way, this is not just ad rates on television or billboards or Snapchat. That was my next

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Question for you. Let’s talk about it by channel. Let’s talk about it by channel though.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So this exists across all sorts of different channels. Not all channels. So for example, your pay-per-click rates for direct response campaigns will only be impacted if everyone takes their TV budgets and throws them into pay per click. So it’s not that there’s not a direct impact. There may be an indirect impact. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The political advertisers aren’t buying bottom of the funnel legal queries like Car accident lawyer near me. So it should have on your non-brand direct response to your point, it should not have. Election media buying should not have an impact on that.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no. It will. If you take, let’s say very simplistically, I spend $10,000 a month on television. I’m taking that $10,000 and I want to put it somewhere else, which is what I want us to get to. I’m going to put it somewhere else. I’m just going to throw it into my pay-per-click budgets. So now I have a bigger budget. So the other competitors

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are coming in. Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

That can have an indirect impact of impacting pay-per-click. It’s not direct, but it’s an indirect impact, which I don’t think doesn’t happen. And my argument would be very simplistically, in October, if rates are 3X what they are in your normal times from a brand perspective, I would consider turning that off because there’s no long-term impact in having a 30-day pause on your brand advertising and buying three times as many impressions starting on November 7th. I think that is a great model.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Would you pull all your billboards down?

Conrad Saam:

I don’t know enough about billboard advertising. I would make the same assessment, however. I think I would be very happy, which is again, using simplistic concept here. If brand advertising, regardless of channel, billboards, radio, Snapchat, display, OTT, whatever it might be, whatever is incorporated in there, let’s assume that that triples, I would turn that. I would turn all of that off for a month. You’ll not see a negative impact on that. And I would look to put that somewhere else, which is where we’re going to get into. How do I get my employees more involved in our marketing? Maybe that’s a place that we could put that money into somewhere else, which would be encouraging employees to get involved in your marketing. But I digress. I do not buy the argument that you would have a negative brand awareness or brand affinity impact by putting a pause on one, two, or maybe even three months of advertising depending on how strong you currently are.

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, again, I think the more that you tighten up the window, I think it’s a stronger argument, especially in the run up. But again, there are consequences, especially on longer term, and especially if you’re taking this position of I’m shutting all my brand advertising down. So I think it’s good guidance to say, “Hey, look, let’s keep our eyes on the cost of these things and where it’s outrageous.” Yeah, I think in many cases for a lot of advertisers, especially more local and regional advertisers, it becomes an even bigger issue where you’re like, “Yeah, this is making up an outsized percentage of my budget and these costs, it doesn’t make sense for me to bear these costs.” But to Conrad’s point, I think the thing that I’d be more focused on is just deploying those resources in a different way. And remember too, that there’s ways to do advertising, even brand advertising that are going to mitigate the impacts of the election buys.

And so first-party audiences, email campaigns, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do that still maintain your brand. I mean, when I think about this, we’re really talking offline media, we’re talking CTV. And I think that if you’re in a very contested market, you’re talking about the types of things that the election folks are playing into. I’m not as concerned about other competitors coming in. Look, there is limitless money, especially in personal injury media buying. I don’t think you’re going to see… If someone pulls their TV and dumps it into pay-per-click, I don’t think you’re going to get much of a bump out of it because the rates and the market share acquisition are so outrageous already as they are, at least in non-brand direct response world. So I think it’s good to keep your eye on it. I think it’ll be something, but it’s certainly more, this is a much more salient point for offline media buying and all the places that the elections are driving up the prices, both from a platform perspective as well as a geographic perspective.

So good thing to keep your eye on.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we are going to segue this into a beautiful conversation about where to put money that involves getting your employees, your staff more involved in marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, last time I checked, we are running out of tickets for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit.

Conrad Saam:

I have three tickets left there in my pocket. Please Venmo me $2,000 to get one of the last three tickets.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But seriously, we’d love to see you in Nashville from August 11th through 13th. We’ve got an amazing lineup. We’re so grateful for everybody who’s contributing. Head over to lunchhourlegalmarketing.com to learn more.

Conrad Saam:

And I’ll tell you this, one of the things that we have really very deliberately done is to make sure that the vast majority of attendees are people who work at law firms as opposed to vendors who work for people who work at law firms. And this is really concentrated. The vast majority of people, I want to say it is over 85% of the people who are coming to Lunchhour Legal Marketing Summit work inside a law firm. They’re managing partners, they’re director of marketings, they’re VP of marketings. So I would fully encourage you to recognize that this is going to be a more concentrated, better networking, curious group that is not going to try and take you out for an overpriced dinner to get you to buy their AI.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, the next segment of this episode is inspired by our friend David Vicnair. I’m just going to read the post so that it’ll frame it for folks. Posted this on LinkedIn. Every person at my firm has a $600 budget to buy gifts for clients. They decide to what to send, why to send them and do it without approvals or oversight. The only rule is that the gift can’t have any Scott Vicnair branding. No mugs or swag with their logo. They want every gift to be something specific for the client. So if a case manager knows a client likes coffee, they might send a $20 Starbucks gift card. If someone just had a good call and wants to send a candle, they send a candle. No reason needed. I’m going to stop reading. There’s some more to it there.

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, in my experience, it’s really difficult to get people to actually spend. I mean, 600 bucks, that’s actually a sizable budget. I don’t know how many people that they employ over at Scott Vicnair Attorneys, but this is a sizable budget per person. And so I would be curious as to your thoughts on how do we get people to engage with this? How do we get people to actually participate? It’s a nice idea, but is it just a cute, nice idea or does it actually do something?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, maybe I should have read the rest of this post actually because – No, no, no.

Conrad Saam:

I like that you don’t because we can rely on David’s ways of how he tries to get people involved if we

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Run out of ideas

Conrad Saam:

Ourselves.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. Well, this is the first thing that I love because I think this goes to the root of the answer to the question is that he writes that sometimes people go over budget. So in his culture, the culture that he’s built, the team he’s built, whether it’s incentivization, all the things that we’re going to talk about to try to get people to get more involved, it’s obviously working for him because people are going over budget. So they’re spending. They’re engaged with this program. And in fact, he says that sometimes the paralegals ask to borrow the lawyer’s budget because the lawyers don’t use theirs as much, which is the classic tale. How do you get the lawyers more involved in… Lawyers have huge growth objectives and want to have very little engagement in their growth. And so I think this is a great question for David.

I would say that to me, it’s a mindset thing. It starts with a mindset. And again, we were talking about this in the pre-show. A lot of firms, when we talk about things like automation and AI and blah, blah, technology and all this stuff, the lawyers say, “This is amazing technology. I never have to talk to a client again. I never have to have a human being do intake again. I never have to write another follow-up email.” And to me, and again, that’s one direction to go. And believe me, you got strength in numbers. There’s plenty of people that go in that direction. But it starts with the mindset of that we’re actually a service business. We care deeply about our clients and that we’re investing in these relationships and not just the owner of the firm, but it’s institutionalized. Everybody in the business has that mindset.

And I think that’s more… We can talk strategies and tactics, but I think that’s more in the firms that we talk to, that is more important than any kind of gamification you can do to get people engaged, in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:

One of the things that he mentions in here is not putting your logo on things and coming up with something that’s much more personal. It requires thought and it requires knowing the client. I love this concept. I just find it hard to actually get people engaged. At AttorneySync, do you guys have a policy around gifting?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We do. Or a

Conrad Saam:

Program?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We have very similar. We have budgets allocated and my experience is similar to yours in that it’s a challenge. And again, look, empathy to the people in the trenches. They’ve got their heads down. They’re doing the work. I think that one, the more friction you can remove so there are gifting platforms that I think that are helpful. In fact, did we use one and I’m blanking on what it is. What is it? I was going to ask

Conrad Saam:

You. Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I’ll have to look that up. But the people in leadership roles also in the company try to facilitate some of the heavier lifting on that so that it doesn’t fall on the front lines. But I think the big thing is the challenge that I always have is this is that, and you’re talking about getting the engagement. It’s helping team members connect the dots on the value of this investment. Like you said, it does take time. It takes though. And I think that’s one of the things with the gifting platforms I think is so important. When you choose, just make it easy for folks that are listening, they’re trying to follow along here. You send somebody an Amazon gift card, it’s one thing. You send somebody a thoughtful personal gift, that’s a different thing and it has a different impact.

Conrad Saam:

I’ll tell a story. We’re literally dealing with this right now. We have a client who’s getting married and we can send an Amazon gift card or something or something on the registry that’s just like, no way. We’re working on getting a… There’s a vintage limo service. So they’re old white British cars, Jaguars and stuff that they’ve got all their stuff set for their wedding. We’re not going to get in the middle of that. But for their reception dinner, what we’ve got on behalf of our client is we’re getting the bride to be picked up in a vintage limo for the reception dinner. And that will be part of their memory, which will hopefully remind him that Mockingbird gives a shit moving forward. So I love the personalized things. I think coming up with something very personal is very, very difficult. I’m going to ask a sweeping generalization question.

The easiest thing that is not personalized but is always meaningful or I believe is always meaningful is flowers. I’ve sent flowers, but it is typically, I don’t think I’ve ever sent a guy flowers. Although we’ve sent people flowers to give to their spouse. We send people flowers the day before Valentine’s Day to give to their spouse on Valentine’s Day so it looks like they remembered. So that’s one thing that we’ve done. But it’s typically a gender-based gift and it’s somewhat thoughtless, but always comes across, I believe, as somewhat meaningful. Do you have any kind of the easy go – to Twos for men. I used to do alcohol, but I don’t do that anymore at all because it’s sola inappropriate.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Depends. Again, this is the whole thing. It depends on who you’re giving it to. Someone that enjoys whiskey. I send you a whiskey, it’s gotcha. I know. Are you upset about me for doing so?

Conrad Saam:

No.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No.

Conrad Saam:

But you’ve got to know that I like that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so that’s the thing.

Conrad Saam:

Flowers are the easy button, right? It’s the one

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Easy button I have. Again, I already said, I think that the gift charts are probably the quote unquote easiest, but the second easiest would be just be platform because platform, they’ve got all of these different gift options. You push buttons and it happens. But I’ll say this, I think, and this is one of the great things about the other side of none of us have any privacy in social media and AI.

Conrad Saam:

That’s true.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You use social media and AI? You can find out a lot about somebody’s interests, especially for people who are active online. Yeah, no doubt. We definitely, that helps support us. Now, like I was talking about earlier, not on this episode, but on this idea of trust but verify, make sure that if you’re using social media and AI, that it’s actually telling you what this person’s actually interested in because a lot of times it gets it wrong and the worst thing you can do is something like sending alcohol to somebody who has chosen sobriety.

Conrad Saam:

Which I have

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Done.

Conrad Saam:

I have done that. That’s why I don’t send

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alcohol anymore. A great way to be memorable.

Let’s poke at this for a second because again, I think the real root here is, and this is based on your experience and my experience and with our clients’ experiences, is this idea of getting people to actually engage with the program. So we talked a lot about kind of reducing the friction, so trying to make it easier. What about incentivization? What about tying… I’m just making something up here because we’ve seen this gone wrong too, so there are trade-offs and we can talk about that too. But what if in this case you got a 600, for every $600 in budget that you spend, we’ll match it and give you $600 for actually taking the time to make the thoughtful gift? I just made up that number. Maybe you only give $100. I don’t know. You figure out the economics.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So certainly money talks. Money is an easy – Money makes the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

World go around.

Conrad Saam:

Money either solves problem. It makes the world go round. And I always talk about money problems are solvable. You either have the money or you don’t. And so that is certainly one way to solve that. I think what you’d miss there is I think you have the emphasis on the gift. I’m making a gift. I don’t think you have the emphasis on that personalized gift. I love those little moments of brilliance where you’re like, “Ah, I should send him a blah or this would be really meaningful if we did X.” And so I think you miss that little kind of creative spark.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But maybe what you do is maybe you make it a contest and everybody votes for the most thoughtful gift at the company and the winner of the thoughtful gift wins a prize.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. I like that. Just

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Getting creative.

Conrad Saam:

Getting creative.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But to your point, incentivization has issues, right? It might take the thoughtfulness out of it. What other problems have we seen with incentivizing in the context of gifting and/or service experiences in general?

Conrad Saam:

Well, our good friends over at Google stupidly said that you can no longer incentivize people for having their name mentioned when they leave a review. So I can’t miss this opportunity to say how stupid and shortsighted Google’s policy on that was. If that’s the door you were opening up for me, I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Appreciate it. That was the door. That softballs pitching you in. And not just their names mentioned. They’re actually saying we don’t want businesses to pay their team members for going out and procuring reviews. Right. Doing a good job and then asking for reviews and getting paid because they bothered to ask.

Conrad Saam:

Which is why Gyi and I think this is so utterly –

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Treasurable.

Conrad Saam:

I will tell you this. I think one of the best ways to get people to send gifts is to have this as the domain of an executive assistant. It’s something that even if you use a platform or if you send flowers or whatever it is, if you can turn the friction so low that it is, “Hey Bill, please send Mary Jones a thank you gift for $200 and she liked flowers or she went to the University of Michigan or she believes in don’t shoot the whales,” whatever it might be, that’s something that you could do. And it makes it so easy. It just becomes someone’s job to fulfill that. I like that approach. And that’s frankly what we do. You can always send executive assistant a request to send blah, blah, blah flowers or whatever it might be. And I do like seeing those things that are not the easy button on flowers, but that tends to be the most frequent gift that we send.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And in prepping this segment, we wanted to call out David’s post and as inspiration for folks. But it’s not limited to gifting. This idea of engagement, it really spreads through a lot of the firms that we talked to, even into the marketing more generally. Maybe a couple notes or tips or tactics on how do you motivate other people at the firm to get engaged with growing the firm?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I’ll give you two tactics that I really like. And I can’t remember. We’ve talked about this maybe three or four years ago where there was a firm that had a goal for delivering X number of reviews to other small businesses locally. So it highlights the importance of reviews. It highlights the importance of being grateful. It highlights the importance of doing a great job internally to earn those reviews. So I personally, and they did, I think it was like a team-wide bonus or something along those lines to make that happen. I thought that was a very, let’s start by giving back to the community perspective as opposed to me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Another version of that, which I have seen and talked about on occasion, you and I, Gyi, we talk about the importance of local engagement all the time.

And we also talk about how this is typically done by the face of the firm. It’s the woman on the logo who everyone knows, and it’s kind of built around that face of the firm. But that puts a lot of onus on that person and it really separates… I mean, it literally separates the importance of community engagement from everyone else in the firm with the face of the firm. So the obvious thing that you can do is something along the lines of, okay, we are going to sponsor a local charity and every month a different person in the office can actually determine which local charity that we are going to get involved in. They will also be required to build content around that both for themselves as well as with that local charity. So there’s a content element to this, there’s a give back element to this, there’s employees being engaged that’s built into this.

There’s a, this is a great place to work because we can actually choose what we support elements of this. So there’s all these kind of components that you can do to kind of systematically ensure that your employees are getting involved in a localized charity. I love those things.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love that too. I think the natural alignment because you’re supporting your team in the organization’s purposes, causes that they’re passionate about too. In fact, we do that. We do donations, charitable contributions on behalf of our team members. Even though we’re not local, I think the local play is even more effective in the law firm context. And again, I don’t want to be platitudey about this, but I keep coming back to this same idea. So I kind of lean into this human nature aspect to it of you’ve got to connect the dots as to why your contributions engaging in business development strategies, marketing, service, gifting, blah, blah, blah, how they benefit you. And I think so many firms, it’s like there’s this wall between we’re over here trying to grow the firm, we’ve got growth objectives, and then we’ve got the operations side of the house.

And there’s not much transparency, there’s not much collaboration. I think the more that you get your whole team to understand that the health of the organization and the growth of the firm directly impacts them because of things like comp raises, bonuses, investments in training, investments in events, investments back in the firm, you’ve got to really tie those things together. And just like any other objective you’re trying to achieve at your firm, if you don’t have scorecard metrics and goals that are clearly identified and circulated, institutionalized and managed, that’s where people fall off because they’re like, “I’m doing my job. I get paid to do my job. You’re asking me to do all this other stuff. This isn’t my firm.” But it’s like, do you understand that the growth of this firm impacts your growth directly? And in some cases, I think part of the problem, we talked about this in the summit last year, some of the problem is that firm owners aren’t actually connecting their team’s growth to their firm’s growth, right?

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So now

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re – Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Watch Gyi open up a can of problems with his last statement. Enter MSOs because that financial ownership, and I say this because I think for legal, you have your hands tied as an industry in that you cannot tie the growth of the firm super directly to the personal financial situation of most of your staff. That flip is open to almost every other industry. So without ownership in a firm, you have to… Let me put this differently. Let me look at it from a different angle or a different lens. You have to very deliberately be thinking about how to demonstrably tie the growth of the firm to that individual’s personal growth, both financially and professionally. And that is very hard when it is not possible to tie the growth of the firm to the individual through equity. And that is one of the arguments for the MSO model.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re right. But there are certainly without actually violating fee sharing with non-lawyers, I think there are plenty of creative ways to do incentive programs and bonuses and things like that, but ultimately you cannot offer stock options in your law firm. I think what I was really reflecting back on is that even in a bonus context or even in an incentivized program for gifting or whatever, a lot of these firms, they just don’t think of it in that mindset. They don’t think like the more clearly that I can connect my team’s success to my firm’s success, you want to flip the switch on engagement? That’s how you do it. You show them that it’s in their own self-interest to engage in the programs.

Conrad Saam:

100%. I suspect that requires deliberate culture and that most firms don’t think about it that way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally agree with you. At least that’s been my experience. And with that, we come to the end of this episode of LunchHour Legal Marketing. Thank you for listening and/or watching. Please do subscribe if you stumbled upon this episode. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a review, send us feedback, send us questions, send us topics, and join us on Thursdays for office hours. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing saying Farewell.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going back to my vacation.

Announcer:

Yeah money, make a world go round.

Conrad Saam:

That was a good segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, it was great.

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