How to you focus your LNC services to meet your ideal client’s needs? First, you must listen to them.
Learn to Listen to Your Ideal Client’s Needs
Your approach needs to be in plain English. It needs to speak directly to the heart of a specific kind of buyer about their specific kind of problem. It’s not marketing speak. It’s not clever copy. This is more about copy listening than about copy writing.
Your clients and prospects are giving you information all the time. Think about and write down what they’ve told you about their complaints, problems, and symptoms. You should end up with 30 or 40. Pick the best 5 to 7. These are your 5 selling points that you can use as bulleted items.
Your ideal is to have a prospect think, “This person really gets it. She’s speaking my language.”
The best compliment that you’re going to get is someone calling you to say, “I was just on your website, and I felt like you were talking to me. That’s exactly what we’re going through, and that’s exactly what we’re up against. I wish I had found you three years ago. This is perfect.”
That’s the reaction that you want. Write your five bullets without clever copy writing or manipulative sleazy techniques, but just by re-listening in your mind to all the folks that you’ve already worked with.
What is important to your ideal client?
Do you want to work with plaintiff medical malpractice attorneys? Defense personal injury attorneys? Workers compensation attorneys? Find out what is important to your ideal client’s needs.
Here’s the template.
• “Are you suffering with this?”
• “Are you frustrated about that?”
• “Are you tired of this?”
• “Do you want more of that?”
• “Are you concerned about this?”
• “Are you noticing more and more of this?”
• “Are you hearing this in the hallway?”
• “Are you seeing this in meetings?”
You give them a very personal experience of the fact that you get their problems. You’re totally in sync with their heartaches, headaches, gaps, and challenges.
Here’s something to contemplate. “Experts win on a value and generalists die on price.” You must be an expert in a fairly narrow niche. People who generally do what you do are a dime a dozen, but true problem solvers are priceless. You should position yourself as a problem solver.
The key to doing this successfully is clarity. Articulate clearly and powerfully that you can solve these kinds of problems. You’ll win more points by being clear about how you define yourself and the confidence with which you do so.
You need to be specific and focused because there’s no such thing as a general answer to a specific problem. Why? People don’t pay for general answers to their very specific problems. The two main purposes of all of your marketing is to convey two ideas about your ideal client’s needs.
• I know what you’re going through.
• I can fix it.
Breathe, Focus, and Let Go of Self-Blame
Once you’ve decided to make a change, reboot your marketing, focus on your ideal client, start taking the revenue side of your business more seriously, or whatever has priority for you, the first step is to take a deep breath. Mentally, physically, spiritually, and psychologically, get re-centered and let go of some of the craziness that you may be experiencing in your business right now.
You may be unfocused. You may be doing too much low-fee work. You may be stuck with the wrong kinds of clients. You may be taking on the wrong kinds of cases. Now after your deep breath, I would also recommend that you stop beating yourself up about all those things just for a moment. I want you to not only take that deep breath, but I want you to stop self-criticism. End negative mind chatter. Stop trying to rewrite the past. Give up asking yourself why strategies that worked for other people don’t work for you.
Instead, focus on the many strategies you can adopt.
Get a ton of helpful marketing advice in Pat Iyer’s new 2016 book: Legal Nurse Consulting Marketing. Grab it here.