What’s in your business plan: Competitive Analysis

 
Any external factor that might prevent your firm from achieving its goals can be considered competition. This includes other firms offering services similar to yours, but it can also take the form of more indirect challenges, such as:

• • Limited need for legal counsel in an industry or geographic area
• • An economic situation that makes counsel unaffordable
• • Lack of understanding about what services are available or needed
• • General distrust of the legal profession

 Your competitive analysis begins with learning as much as possible about other firms similar to yours and determining your strengths and weaknesses relative to them. Then evaluate other factors that might prevent clients from hiring your firm. Your plan should include strategies and tactics for addressing all of your competitive challenges.

What’s in your business plan: Market Description

 
Since it’s impossible to promote your services to everyone, you’ll want to focus on a limited area which you can effectively serve, usually a geographic area. Within that area, you’ll specialize in practice areas based on your – and your associates’ – experience and preference.

Clearly defining your market, or target audience, will help you focus your limited resources on achieving your firm’s objectives and reaching those prospects most likely to become your clients.

The tactics you’ll used to promote your services to this audience should also be outlined in your business plan, but will be developed in greater detail in your marketing plan.

What’s in your business plan: Description of Your Practice

 
The description of your practice expands on the description in the Executive Summary. Don’t hesitate to include everything you can think of to help clarify what your firm is all about. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses as well. This will help as you develop your goals and assess your market, competition and prospective clients.

It’s also important to remember that some of the people reading your plan may not have the high level of expertise – and technical vocabulary – that you do.

Write it so that a potential investor with no in-depth understanding of the law will be able to understand exactly what your practice is all about. If you need to use technical terms, be sure to define them.

This holds true for your entire business plan. If your readers have trouble understanding your practice because they have trouble understanding the language you’ve used, you reduce the chance of having it accepted by those involved in implementing it.

What’s in your marketing plan: Developing your marketing materials

 
At a minimum, your marketing materials should include stationery and business cards. These should be consistent with your firm’s brand image, values and message.

If you go this low budget route, you’ll also need a high quality color laser printer to generate correspondence, proposals and a capabilities brochure for your firm.

Capabilities Brochure

Adding a capabilities brochure is the next step. It can be as simple as a folder with resumes of the partners or as complex as multi-page, full color booklets with inserts. It’s really up to you and your budget. It should present your core values, brand message and all the pertinent information about your firm a prospect will need.

Remember, most people don’t deal with attorneys on a regular basis and may feel threatened or intimidated by having to consult one. You should work to make the experience – from first contact to final invoice and customer satisfaction follow-up – as positive and reassuring as possible. Satisfied clients pay their bills and generate referrals.

With these materials, you’re ready to provide comprehensive information about your firm to anyone who asks. And, twenty years ago, you could have probably built a successful practice with these simple tools and referrals from satisfied clients.

But, times have changed and to be competitive, attorneys must do more. That brings us to the on-line extension of the promotional brochure: the website.

Website

As with your promotional brochure, your website can be as simple – or as complex – as you want it to be. At a minimum, it should provide all the information you have in your capabilities brochure: contact information, resumes of the partners, areas of law in which you practice, geographic areas you serve and as much information as you’re willing to share about your practice. And, of course, it should be consistent with your core brand values, your message and all your other marketing materials.

Much as prospects seeking legal advice once turned to the Yellow Pages – and still do – more and more of your potential clients are searching online for the right attorney to represent them. You need to be where your prospects are looking, if you want them to find you.

By the way, be sure you’re listed in the telephone directories for your area under the areas of law you practice, if that fits with your business and marketing strategies. If you can afford an ad, all the better. But don’t let the sales rep push you into something that stretches your budget. There are many ways to better spend your limited marketing funds

For creating your website, you have several options. If you’re technologically savvy and want to take a crack at it, you can design your own website using software such as Dreamweaver® from Adobe® – not for the faint of heart – or the software provided by the web hosting site you select – surprisingly easy to use, in most cases.

Keep in mind that time you spend developing your own website – or any other marketing materials – is time you won’t spend practicing law and, therefore an expense instead of revenue. My advice is to find someone who knows how to do all this stuff and has worked with attorneys before, then pay them to do it. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches and be better off in the long run. Designers almost always charge less than attorneys do!

If you hire someone to develop your website, be sure to have them create it in such a way that you can easily add or change content – without having to own the software they used to create it. Otherwise, you may find yourself going back to them again and again for every little change you need to make.

 With stationery, business cards, an informative capabilities brochure and a website, you’ll be set with the basics to begin effectively marketing your practice. There a many more options, but like cars, your marketing plan can run the spectrum from small and affordable to large, luxurious – and expensive. It all depends on your business and marketing goals and which options will best help you achieve them.

The need for consistency drives our behavior and willingness to commit

 
Chapter 3 of Influence by Robert B. Cialdini looks at our need for commitment and consistency.

Most people have a strong need to be perceived as consistent in their attitudes, behavior, beliefs, etc. According to psychologists, this need is reinforced because 1) society values a high degree of personal consistency, 2) consistent behavior is generally beneficial in daily life by providing a convenient shortcut in dealing with complex issues.

Inconsistent people are unpredictable and often frightening – you never know what they’re going to do. Most of us don’t want to be perceived that way. We want to be liked and accepted, so we conform our behavior to our peers. If you ever want to see this principle in action, behave in a way that’s inconsistent for the group you’re with and watch the response.

Coming from an artistic background, I may be a little closer to the eccentric end of the spectrum than many people and I really enjoy throwing out a curve ball occasionally, just to see what happens – wicked, I know, but so much fun!

I also wonder how a strong adherence to consistency works with the concept of learning from one’s mistakes. The need for consistency would lead us to conclude that, unless an action has strong negative consequences, we will continue to do the wrong thing just because it’s what we’ve always done.

This behavior is reinforced by the second reason as well. If it’s an easy solution to a complex problem, we’ll probably continue doing it, even if it isn’t the best solution.

I’d like to think that we grow and learn from our experiences, but my hopes aren’t high, given the social and personal pressure exerted on us to be consistent.

Where this fits into the marketing scheme of things – if you haven’t guessed already – is that once a small initial commitment has been obtained from someone, it is much easier to keep them moving forward towards the ends you want to achieve. As long as your requests reinforce their need for consistent behavior, most people willingly agree to them.

This is true whether you’re marketing a product or service, questioning a witness or presenting an argument to a jury.