the [non]billable hour

Does Your Firm Know Customer Math?

Jackie Huba has a great Q and A with Jeanne Bliss, the author of "I Love You More Than My Dog": Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad."  There's a lot of meat in the interview (and probably in the book as well), but the real nugget is this reminder to pay more attention to serving existing customers than to pursuing new ones:

Q:  Do companies need to be customer-driven to grow?

A: Companies forget that customers keep them in business.  Customers who love companies grow them.  To understand this, think of customer math -- a rigorous way to track incoming customers by volume and value and then reconcile that number with the lost customers in that same period, comparing incoming and outgoing customer volume and value.  The ‘aha moment’ comes when the math reveals that company marketing dollars are spent replacing customers lost rather than growing the business with the addition of new customers.  In essence, many companies are running in place. I believe in elevating customers as the asset of the business.  That means creating a competency for rigor around a) identifying and getting rid of those things driving customers away; and then b) getting really great at specific things that create a distinct memory and impression about a company and its people.  We forget the fact that it’s the creation of those memories that we make on purpose or accidentally through our operations decisions or policy choices that connect or repel us from customers.

More on this in a few weeks...

Keep Your Clients Healthy

John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing, tweeted this "killer retail traffic strategy" that could work for law firms:

hook up with RN and offer flu shots in your store or business.

Could you offer a free flu-shot to your clients?  Especially if combined with a legal check-up, too?

Ask Your Clients What Surprised Them

Paul Graham collects some sage advice from the founders of startups he's helped fund.  Preparing for a talk, he sent emails to all the founders and asked them "what surprised them about starting a startup?" According to Paul, asking what surprised them amounted to "asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them."

This is a very powerful question that should be on every lawyers post-matter client survey:

What surprised you the most?

Like Paul, you're asking your clients in a polite way about the things you got wrong (or that they think you did because you didn't communicate well).  And I'm quite certain you'll get powerful, surprising and sometimes harshly critical responses -- which are just the types of feedback you can use to eliminate surprises in the future for you and for your clients.

Why Lawyers Procrastinate

Can the source of lawyer procrastination be traced to law school?  Joel Spolsky, in his always-insightful Joel on Software Blog, takes on colleges teaching computer science, and squarely blames them for turning out students poorly prepared to tackle time-based, collaborative projects. 

College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute. Until you’re a senior in college, you’re very unlikely to have ever encountered an assignment that can’t be done by staying up all night....

Students have exactly zero experience with long term, team-based schedules. Therefore, they almost always do crappy work when given a term-length project and told to manage their time themselves.

If anything productive is to come out of these kinds of projects, you have to have weekly deadlines, and you have to recognize that ALL the work for the project will be done the night before the weekly deadline. It appears to be a permanent part of the human condition that long term deadlines without short term milestones are rarely met.

Lawyers, does this sound familiar?  I'm doing some more thinking on this, but it seems to me that law students not required to meet deadlines (and work collaboratively) are ill-prepared to become good lawyers.  Your thoughts?

Motivational Interviewing for Lawyers

I'm helping facilitate a workshop later today titled "Working with Difficult Clients" for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri's annual conference.  One of the exercises we'll be doing teaches how lawyers can use Motivational Interviewing techniques to get better responses from distressed clients. 

Here's a quick way example of Motivational Interviewing questions (be sure to ask them in this order):

How important would you say it is for you to ______________?

On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all important and 10 is extremely important, where would you say you are?

Why a 3 and not a 0?  OR: Why an 8 and not a 10?

Give this method of questioning a try next time you're talking to a client.  It is a great way to understand what they think is important, and most importantly, why they feel that way.

Twenty Ideas

Here's a handout I've been using to supplement my presentations titled Twenty Ideas.  I hope it is useful to you.

Download Twenty Ideas

Free Webinar and Kansas City Keynote This Week

If you'd like to hear (or see me) speak, you've got two opportunities this week.  The first is a (free) webinar tomorrow at 1pm Eastern and the second is in Kansas City on Thursday, where I'll be keynoting the Kansas City Solo and Small Firm Conference.

In both, I'll be sharing innovative strategies lawyers can use to build their practices, identify their ideal clients and thrive in this down economy.