If you want to make next year better than this year, start by taking a look back at your practice over the last 12 months. Look at every new case or client and figure out where they came from.
Who referred them? How did they get on your list? What did you do to get them to call?
Do the same thing for repeat clients.
Also look at the quality of those clients. Some clients are better than others. They hire you more often, pay higher fees, and provide more referrals. Which of your new and repeat clients fall into the category of “better”? Where did they come from?
Grab your calendar, your bank statements, your website statistics, your notes and records, and take a mile high look at what you did last year and your results.
Look at your networking, speaking, writing, and blogging. Look at your keywords, your content, your offers.
What worked for you? What worked better? What worked best?
Look at your professional relationships. Who provided referrals or other help? Who referred more or better clients? Who provided you with important intangibles–support, ideas, friendship?
(Note to self: “Make sure to keep better records next year so the next time I do this analysis I’ll have everything in front of me.”)
You can see that some things you did this year worked great, many didn’t work at all, and most fell somewhere in the middle. The same with your relationships.
If you look hard enough, you will see that although a lot of things produced a lot of results (clients, money, subscribers), a few things produced the majority of your results. You may find that
- Eighty percent of your results came from just twenty percent of your activities
- Eighty percent of your referrals came from twenty percent of your clients and professional contacts
- Eighty percent of your income came from twenty percent of your cases
- Eighty percent of your new subscribers came from twenty percent of your posts, keywords, speaking gigs, ads, (etc.)
Or not. It doesn’t have to be eighty percent and twenty percent. But it is almost certain that a big percentage of your results came from a small percentage of efforts or sources.
Identify the activities that produced most of your results so you can do more of them. Identify the handful of referral sources that sent you most of your referrals or your best referrals, so you can strengthen your relationship with them and leverage those relationships to meet their counterparts.
If you want next year to be better than this year, you need to find what worked best and do more of it. To find the time and resources to do that, cut down on or eliminate things that didn’t work, or that didn’t work as well.
For me, one thing worked better than any other. My twenty percent activity was writing. The books, courses, and blog posts I produced brought me more traffic, subscribers, and revenue than anything else I did. Knowing this means I can make next year a better year by being more prolific.
I know where to focus. I know my priorities. I know where to spend my time.
How about you? What will you do more of next year? What can you cut down on or eliminate? How will you make next year better?
The Attorney Marketing Formula comes with a simple marketing plan that works. Check it out here.
