How to grow a probate practice: #2b Make your phone ring with business

This post is Part 2 of the series, How to Grow a Probate Practice. Because of its length, I’ve broken it into two posts. The first half was posted yesterday.

Yesterday, we started examining a hierarchy of the quality of the referrals you could receive as a probate attorney and, accordingly, which ones you should try to get. To review, here’s the list:

Hierarchy of Referrals

1. Referrals from other probate attorneys
2. Referrals from other attorneys who don’t practice probate
3. Referrals from other professionals, such as financial planners and accountants
4. Referrals from acquaintances and referral networks (e.g. BNI)
5. Calls from advertisements
6. Internet referrals

Today, we’ll examine #3 through #6.

3. Referrals from other professionals

The professionals that I have in mind here are mainly financial planners, accountants, and real estate agents. Of these three, I’ve received quite a bit of business from financial planners, so I’ll focus on them. There really is a lot to say about creating a referral network with financial planners. You’ll have no trouble getting connected with them. Just mention that you do estate-related work in a networking meeting (e.g. BNI, the Chamber, etc.) and you’ll likely have a lunch meeting set up before it’s over. Financial planning is volume work, so financial planners will eventually have clients who pass away with estate-related issues. Therefore, it is good to form relationships with these people.

Referrals from financial planners can be great with some caveats. The quality of their referrals greatly depend on the person referring to you. Avoid know-it-all financial planners: they will consistently give your potential clients bad advice and incorrect information about the probate process. The will create untold problems for you.

You want referrals from financial planners who are still hungry to learn and are genuinely interested in doing things right for their clients. There are a lot of financial planners out there, which means there are a lot of bad ones. Be discerning.

I’ve found it beneficial to focus my time, for probate referral purposes, on just a few financial planners, rather than a lot. This is different than if you are trying to get a lot of estate planning work, where more financial planners in your referral network is probably better. The reason I have limited my focus on fewer financial planners for probate referrals is that you’ll find there is a certain amount of education you need to provide the financial planner in order to get good referrals long-term.

I’ve also tried to find financial planners with a similar worldview as mine and similar approach to client service. Plato has been credited with the saying, “Birds of a feather, flock together.” If you work with like-minded financial planners, the clients you get from them will tend to be the same way. This will make your life easier.

A final caveat is that you need to make sure that your financial planners know your business model: presumably billing by the hour. This is usually quite a bit different than their business model. This is relevant because you can get yourself in situations where you are giving away a lot of free advice to their clients if you haven’t clearly established your ground-rules with them.

Spend the bulk of your time (maybe 60%) seeking referrals from categories #1 and #2. Those have the biggest upside. This category is perhaps worth spending about 20% of your time on.

We’ve discussed what I call the Top 3 in the hierarchy list. Now for the rest more briefly.

4. Referrals from acquaintances and referral networks

I want to save you a lot of wasted time. Some people swear by referral networks such as Grapevine, BNI, and the local Chamber of Commerce. They are probably great for practice areas like family law and business law. However, I have not found them to be very good for probate work. There may be good reasons to be involved in networking groups, but seeking a stream of probate referrals is not one of them. Be cautious about the amount of time you give to these groups. Many of these groups require a pretty hefty commitment of time. A weekly hour lunch meeting really adds up over time when you calculate driving time and lost time as you transition between coming and going. This is #4 in the hierarchy, don’t make it #1 in the amount of time you give to seeking referrals.

5 & 6. Calls from advertisements and internet referrals

These two really aren’t referrals in the traditional sense. But I wanted to include them on the list to give you guidance on how to rank your probate marketing efforts. Take another look at where you are spending your marketing budget. Include lunches and coffees you do with attorneys and other professionals. Does it mirror my referral hierarchy list?

The common mistake is this: you’ll spend so much money on advertising and you’ll get so little return. I’m not advocating abandoning advertising. But be careful that you don’t spend so much money there that you don’t have anything left to target the Top 3 categories in the hierarchy.

Having said that, note that my Hierarchy of Referrals list is based on the quality of the referrals you receive. I’ve found that calls you receive from advertisements are of much poorer quality than any of the 4 categories above it. People who call you that have no relationship with you or anyone you know (like a financial planner) may turn out to be good clients. But it is hit-and-miss. You can’t live on probate ads alone.

Generally, advertisements are more effective in lower-density areas in terms of population and attorneys. Attorneys outside the metro-area may find that ads work quite well. But if you are in the metro-area, unless you have a way to target a niche group of people (e.g. placing an ad in a church bulletin), you probably won’t get a return on your money.

I’ve found that internet referrals are the worst quality referral. By internet referrals, I mostly mean online ads such as Google AdWords. I tried Google AdWords for a while. Our firm spent less than $200 targeting specific keyword searches and we received a number of phone calls. Not one of them became a client. As a general rule: internet referrals are fickle and want free advice. They are often do-it-yourself people. If you get a probate through an online ad, be sure to get money up-front in your trust account and have them sign an engagement agreement, especially if your proposed PR lives outside your area.

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So that’s it. The best way to make your phone ring with new probate business is referrals. Follow the hierarchy of referrals to know where to put your efforts.

Have advice to add to the discussion? Share it in the comments.

There’s one more thing that I think is crucial for you to get more probate work: You need to be an expert.

Next Tuesday, I’ll tell you the quickest way for you to become a probate expert. It is easier than you think. In the meantime, I plan on dropping another Bonus Tip between now and then.

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Categorized in How to Grow a Probate Practice, Probate Practice and tagged as probate