You had one job. You still do, and you always will.
I’m talking about persuading prospective clients who need your help to choose you as their lawyer and to sign up. Now, not someday/maybe.
If you don’t do that job, you’re letting them go their way without getting the help they need (and want, but may hesitate to get).
If you don’t persuade them to take action, their problems might worsen. Become more painful, more difficult to solve, and more expensive. They might also lead to secondary problems.
Yeah, a mess.
If you don’t do everything you can to make the case, create urgency, and make it easy to say “yes,” you’re doing them a disservice. (You’re not doing yourself any good, either).
Don’t wait for them to figure it out. Tell them. Give it all you’ve got. Tell them how it is and how it might be, without sugarcoating or equivocating. They need to hear this from you and hear it often.
They need to hear it in your posts and articles. They need to hear it in your presentations. They need to hear it when you speak with them and write to them.
Give them the facts, tell them what to do, and why.
That doesn’t mean being obnoxious or sounding like a broken record. You should talk to them as you would a friend who is in trouble, or might be, and needs your advice and help.
It also doesn’t mean showering them with nothing but doom and gloom. A litany of what might happen if they don’t act, try to fix it themselves, hire the wrong attorney, or wait too long.
Important points, but nobody wants to listen to a never-ending stream of awfulness. Too much of that and people shut down. And unsubscribe.
So make sure you also give them a healthy dose of benefits and happy endings. The good things that happen when take the action you recommend.
The trick is to know how much of each and how often. The answer to that is a big fat “it depends”.
But you need both. The bad and the good, the warnings and the solutions.
And you need to keep at it until they hire you.
Their future (and yours) depends on it.
