Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

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One of secrets of highly successful attorneys is that they make time to plan for the future of their law firm. We recommend meeting at least once per quarter with your senior partners (even if you are the entire partnership) to evaluate your achievements, set new goals and work on your law firm marketing plan for the next quarter.

I was recently coaching a partner in a small west coast practice about their law firm marketing plans when he said, “I'm not sure I see a point in setting goals because everything seems to quickly conspire against us and we easily get so caught up in the day to day operations of the firm that we don’t have time to focus on our goals. Then by the next time we meet, the priorities have all shifted."

Perhaps you can relate. It’s easy to set goals; the hard part is staying focused on them long enough to accomplish them and to make them big enough to be meaningful.

Here are 4 tips to creating your law firm marketing plan, staying focused and achieving your goals:

1. Ask someone to hold you accountable. Accountability is key when it comes to keeping your commitments. Whether it’s your business partner, an attorney in a different firm, or one of our law firm marketing business coaches, set up a regular time to meet with someone you trust and who has your best interests at heart and request they keep you accountable. Simply knowing that they will ask you about your progress every week can make a big difference to a lot of people.

2. Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals. This often used acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Timed.

A good goal needs to incorporate all of these criteria. It is not sufficient to say “I want to be a millionaire.” That statement may be measurable, but does not include time frames, it does not lay out a specific game plan for how you will accomplish this goal, and it may not be realistic for you at this point in time.

An example of a SMART goal is: “I want to meet 4 different potential referral sources every month for the next 6 months, educate them about my firm, and ask them to send me business.”

3. Make your goals smaller. While this may seem contradictory at first, we have found that sometimes setting a goal that’s so big that it feels unreachable  actually kills your motivation. Break your long-term goals (“I want to be a millionaire.”) into smaller ones that you can reach on a regular basis (“I want to get my law firm’s website launched in the next 60 days”).

For example, gaining 50 new law firm clients within 12 months may sound overwhelming, but this works out to about 1 per week. If you only convert 50% of prospects who come to your office into paying clients (because you have tracked this information) then you only need 2 new people to walk in your door per week in order to achieve your goal.
 
4. Focus on the right goals. Whenever I have a coaching client that goes more than 2 weeks without achieving the goal they set in their coaching session I start asking questions to determine if this is a goal they really feel passionate about. If there is no commitment to a particular goal it will be very difficult for most people to devote time to accomplishing it.
• Do you really want to grow your law firm?
• How fast?
• How big?
• Over what period of time?
• What do you believe this will give you?
• A sense of accomplishment?
• More freedom?
• More stress?
• More power?
Before you commit time, energy and resource to a goal, make sure it is something you truly care about and that will make a noticeable difference in your practice.

Don’t just measure how many phone calls come into the office daily. Measure what percentage of people you spend time talking to are qualified prospects versus just the usual suspects.

Don’t just measure how many “unique visitors” your website receives. Measure how many website visitors actually pick up the phone and call you or email you for more information.