I almost always have almost all the clients I want to serve at any given time. New and old attorneys alike often ask me how I manage to get them. I tell them, “I wear a white hat to help me market by welcoming attractions.”
If they ask what I mean, I tell them, “Get a cup a coffee and sit, because this’ll take a minute.”
I learned most of my marketing methods from my father, Leo, who could sell ice to an eskimo in a November snow storm. I was a precocious reader and, when I was 10 or so, after I’d read all the volumes of Childcraft Encyclopedia, he started me reading the salesman’s PMA trilogy, The Law of Success, Think and Grow Rich, and Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, plus Dale Carnegie’s book How To Win Friends and Influence People. From both Dad and Hill and Dale, I learned two things:
- The law of attraction essentially states, if you think positively enough about something and proactively and persistently work for it, you will eventually attract it to you;
- Winning friends is the best way to start using the law of attraction to attract success; and
- You have to use what you’ve got to get what you want.
Why focus on making friends first before making them clients? Because as my Grandma Rose taught me before she died when I was seven, “You have to make money off of your friends, because your enemies don’t come around.”
Moving on. Merely thinking about attracting people is useless, unless you actually welcome them into a relationship with you. Intentionally welcoming attractions is what really makes things happen.
The goal of intentionally welcoming attractions is building a relationship with whomever you are attracting. The most effective marketers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty of them, put themselves just enough in other people’s way to attract prospects ever-so-subtly into a conversation and build that first conversation into a relationship.
One method I’ve seen taught over the years is the S-E-E method. Smile, Eye-contact, Enthusiasm. When you see someone coming your way, smile at them, make good eye contact, and be enthusiastic about starting a conversation with them. Nowadays, however, people are put off by, to the point of even being prejudiced against, aggressive salespeople using the SEE method too enthusiastically. Instead of being attracted to such a SEEing person, they quickly move the other direction. (Think about that guy trying to sell you Direct TV in the main entry aisle of Sam’s Club.)
The best marketers overcome this prejudice by using a “stranger magnet” that is very subtle, but also very effective. For example, 40 years ago when I was a teenaged wire rope distributor, I went to a day-long PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) seminar in Atlanta and met a real customer magnet. I could tell it the minute I laid eyes on him.
This guy was a tall, well-dressed fellow with a huge diamond ring on his hand that visibly showed the words, “World Champions.” It turns out he was a relatively unknown professional basketball player (his name escapes me now) who turned to selling life insurance after his pro career fizzled out. He was lucky enough, however, to at least have been warming the bench on a winning team once and he had the ring to prove it.
That ring was his conversation-starting stranger magnet. After watching him for a few minutes, I walked up and told him I thought he used that ring like a champion salesman. He explained to me the details of what he was doing, how he was doing it, and why.
He always wore his championship ring and he always wore on his right hand. When he was standing around in a crowd, he would stand with his right foot forward, holding a drink cup in his right hand, with his elbow close to his side and bent so the cup, his hand, and that ring were in front of his right chest. Then he would just wait for people to notice it.
As soon as anyone passing by saw it and smiled and said anything close to, “Man, that is a nice ring,” this guy would cast his hook by moving the drink cup to his left hand, gaze down at the ring just a second, extend his handshake palm down, saying, “Yes, it is,” and then he would ask the admirer, “What’s your name?” While he kept hold of the their hand, he’d ask “What do you?” The answer was quickly followed by “How do you do it?,” which eventually led around to “Who does your insurance?”and then he just reeled that prospect right into his boat.
A minute into the conversation, he’d pull a card case from his pocket and ask, “Do you have a card?” and, if they didn’t hand him one, then he’d take two of his cards out of the case, turn them over onto his card case and sign the back of one. Then, he’d slide the signed card behind the other one face down, hand them and his card case over to the person, trust his new friend with his nice 14-karat-gold-plated Cross pen, and invite the prospect to write his or her name, address, and phone number on the back of his unsigned card while they continued to chat.
I told him I thought his shtick was impressive and then he taught me the rest of the lesson. “Yeah, but you got to follow through on your shot or you’ll never score with it.” I asked him what he meant.
He explained follow through. He sent every person who gave him a card a personal note within the next few days and included a signed basketball card he had printed up himself with a picture of him in uniform, resting his hand on a basketball, with his team ring on the same finger on which the new friend had earlier been admiring it. Then he would call that person a few days later to make sure they got it. During that call, he’d suggest they get together and talk basketball, which, more often than not, resulted in a conversation about insurance.
His ring was his magnet for welcoming attractions, starting conversations, and building those conversations into relationships. And it is the perfect way to find, attract, and develop new customers and clients, whether you are selling advertising on your AM radio program or wire rope or new home construction contracting services or Macintosh software programs or family medical services or electronic health records or divorces or estate plans or anything else. I’ve marketed all those things and more simply by welcoming attractions, getting contact info, and following through with subsequent meetings including soft-selling whatever I was doing at the time.
Now, anyone who looks at my slightly under-tall, slightly over-weight, slightly bald (okay, very bald), near-sighted self will never think I have a world championship ring to use as a magnet. But I have used many other things over the years just as well to welcome people into my circle as friends and let them buy goods and services from me later on.
At times, when I first started traveling the mid-south selling cable to dragline owners and operators, I used my youth as my magnet. People thought it was nice that a 16-year-old kid was out there servicing their needs as well as I was. Ten years later, when I was selling people on letting me build them houses in Nashville, I walked around malls and let my wife and our new first-born son do the attracting of other new mothers, some of whom it turned out wanted to move out of their currently too-small homes. And, I’ve discovered several other magnets in 28 years of practicing law as well. But none of them has been as successful as the one I discovered by accident and am working with now–my white, Panama straw, riverboat gambler’s hat.
For thirty years, I wore a black beaver Stetson fedora. It was hot as can be, so I would take it off and carry it a lot when I should have been wearing it full time. I would wear it a while and then carry it a while as I walked to the office and the court house and back again. And no one ever said a thing about that black hat.
Then, in the summer of ’13, I developed a pretty good-sized squamous cell carcinoma on the middle of the top of my forehead. After I had it removed, my wife, the loving family physician that she is, sent me to Elvis’ milliner, Alvin Lansky, the owner of Mr. Hats, on Highland just north of Poplar in Memphis, and told me to tell him to pick me out whatever hat I would love to wear the most, because she was not going to let me out in the sunshine again without it being on, and she was dead serious about it.
Now, those of us who wear hats know one thing — a person doesn’t pick a hat to wear, a hat picks a person to wear it. And you will know when the hundredth hat you’ve tried on has picked you, because several other hat lovers in the store getting their own hats will be watching you as much as you’ve been watching them and, eventually, when your hat picks you, several of them will look at you from across the store and say, just loud enough for you and everyone else to hear it, “Umm-hmm. Now that’s your hat.”
I must have tried on several dozen hats that afternoon until, finally, this white Panama gambler’s hat jumped out of Mr. Lansky’s hands and on to my head and a smile beamed across his face as he then looked around the store at some of my fellow shoppers, some of them men and some of them women. And then the other salesman in the room nodded his head just a little at me with silent approval. And then another man, who was accompanying his wife to buy her a new spring-summer church hat, said, “Looks good.” And then his wife, a well-dressed woman, who looked 100 percent like she knew what she was talking about, winked her left eye at me as she tilted her head down a bit, leaned back, and raised her right shoulder and bobbed her head back and fort sideways, exclaimed, “Hon! You are WEARIN’ that hat!”
I was absolutely amazed over the next several weeks at how much attention this crazy hat was getting me. Guys would stop and say, “Nice hat, man.” And other women would confirm the first woman’s reaction saying such things like, “I so love a man who can wear a hat like that.” And one even said, “You look so much like Rhett Butler in that hat it makes we want to get out my Scarlett one.” After that one, I told the story to my wife Susan, hoping to make her insanely jealous. Later that evening, after she was done reacting, I told her, “I am NEVER taking this hat off again.”
The deputies in all the Shelby County courthouses would compliment me on my hat and, when people in the courthouses needing a juvenile court or general sessions attorney would ask them, they would point down the hall in my direction and say, “You need to go get that lawyer in the white hat.”
I thought it was because it I was such a good and well-renowned lawyer until one of them finally told me the truth. He said, “Nah. It’s just that you were so easy for them to spot in the hallway crowd, so we’d just point them to you so they would quit asking us, ‘Now, which one are you talking about?’.”
Regardless of the deputies’ motives, the hat was bringing me plenty of new clients. The men said they wished they could pull off the look. And the women who complimented my hat almost always allowed me to tell my wife they liked me as much as they liked my hat.
But then, I changed my practice:
- from Memphis to Baltimore (by way of Easton);
- from focusing on the divorce and family law controversy aspects of LifeCycle Law to focusing on the LifeCycle Planning aspects, which is like Business Planning, Estate Planning, and Elder Care combined, except that it spans from the cradle to the grave and before and beyond; and
- from being office-based to being virtual and meeting clients wherever they wanted or needed to be met.
Despite the changes, however, my hat continued to be a “new friend” magnet. People would continue to comment on it. So, I decided to use it to its best advantage, like that basketball player I met forty years ago used his ring. And my hat has helped me market by welcoming attractions just like his ring helped him.
Here’s how the standard female version of an initial encounter goes. It is as cheesy and hokey as can be. But it works for me, and as long as it continues to work, I don’t intend to fiddle with much.
I’m usually sitting in the “front room” of a Starbucks, as far away from the front door as possible, but still before service area begins. I’m sitting or standing at a table facing the crowd. Probably, I’m typing on my computer.
As soon as I hear the front door open, I’ll look at whoever is coming in, cast them a small smile, often accompanied by discreet nod of head, which movement of the hat catches their attention. And then I go back to my screen.
Quite often, a person will come over to me and say something nice about my hat and how such a thing tops off a well-dressed man. When I reply, “Well, thank you very much, ma’am. That’s very kind of you. That means my hat’s doing it’s job.”
“Oh, really?” the person will ask, “What’s your hat’s job?”
I reply, “To make nice people like you come over and say, ‘That’s a nice hat,’ so I can make a new friend.”
After hearing my cultured drawl, they almost always smile and say something like, “Well, you both look and sound like a nice Southern gentleman.”
Whether they ask my whereabouts or not, I’ll usually reply, “Well, I am from Natchez, Mississippi, ma’am. We’re friendly people. Where are you from?” (Yes, I know that leaves the preposition dangling, but it’s a casual conversation.”
From there we might play the geography game, but then the conversation almost always rolls back around to my hat when the other person makes a departing comment, such as “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I loved (sometimes only liked) your hat.”
“Well, thank you for saying so, because whenever I tell my wife someone else likes my hat as much as she does, it makes her insanely jealous. She always wears colorful hats and scarves covering her hair and everyone loves just them the heck out of them. So, whenever someone tells her they love my hat, it makes her insanely jealous.”
This usually makes the other person laugh and sets up the final step in firming up the new friendship, which is getting a name and phone number.
I’ll suggest they shoot a picture of me on their cell phone and text it to Susan’s cell phone and tell her they love my hat. Almost everyone is willing to go along with the gag, which results in them knowingly giving Susan their cell phone number.
And then comes the follow through. Susan shoots a screen shot of the picture, which captures the sender’s cellphone number and what the sender said about me or my hat, and then she sends it to me. Once I have the person’s cellphone number, I’ll send them the following text message:
Hi. I’m the nice lawyer in the white hat. My wife smiled at your shot of me. Thank you for playing. As a token of appreciation, please enjoy a free eBook copy of my life-changing motivational book, “Great! All The Time!,” which you can safely download as a PDF using this link: https://lifecyclelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Great-All-the-Time-E-Book.pdf
My book teaches people how to find peace and satisfaction through a purpose-driven use of life’s precious resources. It’s a workbook that involves writing letters to yourself to discover what’s your “Cha-ching!” (whatever makes your register ring) and to help you figure out how to get it.
Here’s how this approach works for me in real life. On a recent Wednesday morning I was sitting on the long bench on the right side of the Starbucks in Woodholme Centre next to the serving area counter. In walks a nice woman, who exchanges a glance with me and proceeds to order her latte. While she’s waiting to pick it up, she strolled over, said she loved my outfit, agreed to help me make my wife jealous, snapped a shot, and sent it to my wife, who sent me this screenshot, from which I extracted the number, and then at 10:18 I sent the above thank you note and book link..
At 10:21 am, the middle-aged woman responded:
Wow! Thank you so much. I am grateful!
Then, at 10:33 am, she texted back again.
Your book is amazing. I am on page 17. Will resume focusing on it after completing some thing on my ‘to do’ list for today. You and your wife have a great day!
Today, two days later, after giving her some time to work through the book a bit, I texted her back to follow through some more:
Hope you’re enjoying the book. I’d love to read a copy of your first letter if you want. Here’s a shot of my wife Susan in a Wrapunzel scarf so you can see who my competition is and what I’m up against. She’s a great family physician who works a Mercy Personal Physicians at Overly. If ever you need a new doctor, she’d be a great match for you and she’ll never tell me you joined her practice.
She hasn’t responded back yet, but 9 times out of 10 people continue the textversation. Usually, after I tell them about Susan, they ask me what I do and that’s when I tell them I help people plan for all the bad things that can happen to them over the rest of their lives and hope that none of them actually do happen except dying of old age at their own leisure and on their own terms.
Eight times out of those nine who read what I do continue to talk to me and most of the time I end up becoming their LifeCycle lawyer.
So, that’s the story of both how I get almost all the clients I want and why I wear that darned white hat everywhere except inside a courtroom.
What’s you marketing secret?