Andrew Stickel

Hey everybody. Andy Stickel here. I am taking a look at this flier here, which, I believe, is actually mailed through the post office to potential clients trying to get them to attend a free seminar where you are teaching about living trust and long-term care and all that type of stuff.

Overall, I think that the content in here is actually really good. There are a couple of things that I would probably do just to make this pop a little bit more and probably have a little bit more of an impact. And I think a big part of what’s going to actually increase the effectiveness of this flier. I’m not saying this flier is ineffective. It might be effective., but one thing you can do, especially if you are mailing it to people, the one thing that you have to do is actually create some sort of curiosity. Because whenever you mail something, the biggest obstacle is always getting people to actually open the thing that you’re sending out, and the way you do that is by inserting some sort of lumpy object into the flier. Here is a perfect example. A criminal defense attorney could do something like put one of those green army men inside the envelope, where you can go on Amazon and buy a bag of probably 500 for $20, maybe even more than that, and you can put a green army man inside of the letter. And then people get it and see this lumpy package and they’re like, “What is inside of here?” And then you can tie it together saying, “We’ll go to war against these criminal charges” or something like that. You could do a pen. There are all kinds of stuff that you could put in there. But that’s one way that you can actually increase the open rate of these just to get more people to see them. Now, once people do actually see them… For me, initially, the biggest problem that I have with this is that it’s like a giant block of text. And I think the content in here is actually good. But most people don’t want to read a giant block of text. You guys have obviously done your homework on this. “Learn why a will is not enough.” I’m guessing that a lot of people that you talk to probably think that a will is enough and they have a will. “Don’t lose what you’ve worked for to long-term care, the probate courts, and the IRS. Attend our free seminar on living trust and long-term care to learn the benefits for you and your family. No planning equals big problems. You may have heard about living trust. You may have been told that they are only for the wealthy. That’s not true.” That’s actually a really good objection. So what I would do is I would probably set this up more like an infographic rather than a just big flier like this. I would definitely add some more color to it and I would add a lot more bullet points that allow people to categorize things.

MythBusters – break it all down

“You may have heard about living trust before and you may have been told that they are only for the wealthy. Not true. If you own a home or more than $80,000 in assets or if you’re 40 years old or if you have kids…” Do you know what I mean? You could have a section that says, “Who needs a living trust?” or “Who is at risk of losing tens of thousands of dollars if they don’t have a living trust?” and then have some bullet points with checkmarks–homeowners, small business owners, parents, anyone with more than $80,000 in assets, anyone over 40 years old. You can do that type of stuff. Now, another thing you might want to really focus on is to think about all the things that they could lose. Fear of loss is a very powerful motivator. “Learn the truth about Medicaid and how to protect your assets. You will also learn about how the Medicare and Medicaid systems work and how a properly written plan can help avoid losing all of your assets if you need long-term care in a nursing home stay.” What I might do is I would probably tie this more to a number. I would say, “How to lose your assets? Did you know that the average nursing home costs $650 per day? And the average person has $250,000 in savings, which basically means that they have two and a half years in a nursing home and then they’re out of money. And then they’re going to have to go into Medicaid and they’re going to have to lose their assets.” Do you know what I mean? I would do something like that. A perfect example is – this isn’t in estate planning – we had a client who does nursing license defense. So he actually defends who are in danger of having their licenses revoked by the state nursing board. What we did is we created a presentation for him that basically showed… Now, remember, fear of loss is extremely powerful. It’s an extremely powerful motivator. The average that he defended was around 40 years old. The average nurse works until they’re maybe 65. We were able to figure out that, on average, if you lose your nursing license, it’s going to cost you about $400,000 over the course of your career. And that’s what we really led with. That was our big marketing message. It was basically, “Look. Yes, it costs you $4000 for me to defend your nursing license. However, that $4000 pales in comparison to the $400,000 that you’re going to lose if you lose your nursing license.” You can do that same type of thing with this. And you don’t even necessarily have to talk about the cost of your services right now. Really, this is just about, “Here’s how the average person loses x amount when… They lose 35% of their assets when trust has to go into probate or when a will has to go into probate.” That’s one of the things that I would do. I would probably make this a lot more visual. I would break it up with bullet points. “You may think that it’s only for the wealthy…” That’s actually a great point. For estate planning clients, we’ve always had somewhere in there, “Most people think estate planning is for old, rich people. Well, that’s not true. Because if you have kids, if you have a small business, if you have $80,000 or more in assets, if you’re over 40, you want to make sure that you have this in place.” I think it’s good. I would just make it a little easier to digest the information with bullet points. Let me just read a little bit more here. I’m having a hard time going through this whole thing just because of the fact that there’s so much text. I really like the chart that you did. “With living estate planning, your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate. You can preserve your IRA and retirement accounts and reduce income tax to beneficiaries. You’ll avoid guardianship if you become ill or incapacitated. Your estate will run as you direct it. You can avoid spending down all of your assets.” The other thing that I would do absolutely is I would take this into an app called the Hemingway. Let me pull this over here. And here’s what you have to remember: most people read at a 3rd-grade level, believe it or not. And you also have to remember that a confused mind always says no. You go to the Hemingway app. Let’s take even just these bullet points right here. Let me copy this and paste that in here. What Hemingway app allows you to do is it allows you to simplify your writing. It’s hemingwayapp.com. It’s free. You can see this actually written at a 10th-grade level. You can see right here – it’s highlighted in yellow – one of the sentences is hard to read. What you want to do is you want to take this stuff in here and you want to de-lawyer-fy it. Basically, what I mean by that is stop writing like a lawyer and start writing like a real person. You don’t want people to have to work to think about what you’re trying to say. “Your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate.” Let’s see if we can get rid of that quickly. “Your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate.” That’s pretty good. Then I would go to this next one here. Actually, some of the stuff here… Let’s see. “You can preserve your IRA.” That’s not highlighting. I’m copying from a PDF. This is actually pretty good. I’m just taking some examples here. Let’s see if we can do this one. “Without a proper plan, the government can decide if you live or die.” I would say, “Without a written plan…” “Decide if you live or die…” That’s good. “The court system will decide what happens to you and your money if you become incapacitated.” You could see this is a long sentence. I always say, “the courts.” Or you can even say, “a judge.” “A judge will decide what happens to you and your money if you become incapacitated.” “The courts will decide what happens to your assets and your family when you die.” You can play around with this. Like you can see, it’s still a Grade 5 level right here. You can play around with that. And it actually is pretty decent now that I’m looking at it. But that’s the whole thing. You want to make sure that this entire thing runs through the Hemingway app and there’s no color anywhere. You want to aim for a 3rd-grade level. 5th grade is okay. But you always want to aim for 3rd grade. Because you gotta always remember a confused mind says no. Let’s see. Another thing that you could do also is you could add a frequently asked questions section. The frequently asked questions section would be really helpful. What you can do is take every objection that people would have for coming to the seminar and answer them infrequently asked questions. “Is there going to be a sales pitch?” “Are you going to feed us?” A lot of times people do these things at Ruth’s Chris Steak House and everything. These actually might not be objections. Let me think about this. Whatever the objections are. “How long is it going to be?” I don’t know. I’m drawing a blank right now. But anything you can think of that would be an objection, which would be a reason why somebody would not come to this. I would create a frequently asked questions section for that. To summarize, basically, I think you’ve got a lot of really good stuff here. What I would really do is I’d really focus on probably making it more visual, breaking it up with bullet points rather than just big paragraphs. Everything that you have written here, I would also run through the Hemingway app. And if you can get a graphic designer… But I think that you can go to Pinterest, for example, and you can see examples of infographics. Let me just show you. These are infographics. You can have stuff that looks like this. It just looks really nice. And you can get a graphic designer. You can basically put all this information in there and you can have a graphic designer create a flier that looks really good like this with all that information. You can go to Upwork. Actually, one that I really like is graphically.io. This is a company that we’ve been using lately where, basically, it’s like all you can eat graphic design and it’s $299 or something. I’m not affiliated with them. This is just who we use. It’s really cool. How much is it? $149 a month and it’s unlimited graphic design. It’s really good. That’s what I would do. I would probably do that. And then I would also add a frequently asked questions section with questions and answers basically addressing every single objection that somebody has as a reason that they wouldn’t actually come to this event. Another thing you can do is if you have people that have RSVPed for this… I don’t see any instructions. Oh. “Seating is limited. Call to reserve your seats now.” Here’s the other thing I would do. I would go back through the last several of these that you did where you sent out this flier and you had people that RSVPed and then didn’t show up. I would call them and ask them why they didn’t show up. Because what will happen is you’ll start finding objections that you didn’t know existed. That’s something that I would definitely do.

Address your objectives!

Once you know those, then you can actually go through and you can address those objects. Because this entire thing is about objections. One objection is, “I don’t want to read this thing.” “Okay. I’m going to create an infographic and I’m going to break it up using bullet points.” The other thing you could do – and this might be really beneficial also – is to do an ask campaign. I want to show you exactly what that is. I did a presentation recently. Let me see if I can find this. I did a presentation recently where I did a webinar and it was all about Reviews software. Let me see if I can find this on my Google Drive here. Basically, I was creating a webinar where I was going to teach lawyers how to get more reviews for their law firm. And at the end of it, I was going to sell a brand new software that I’m currently developing. It’s a software called Review Judge. I did a big pitch at the end of it and ended up making about $50,000 on the webinar. But what I did prior to the webinar is I sent this survey out to a lot of people. I sent it out to like a thousand people and I got probably like a hundred responses. But these responses are what I based the entire software stack on. Everything on the webinar was based on these answers. Because once I knew what the problems were and what the concerns were, then I could tailor my message to those exact things. If you take a look at this… “Do you want to get more client reviews for your law firm?” The reason I ask this question is that if the answer is no, then I know to ignore the rest of their response. You could see I got 89 responses. “What do you think are the biggest benefits of having reviews for your law firm?” “What’s holding you back from getting/having more reviews?” “Is there anything outside of your control that is stopping you and what?” “What have you tried before that hasn’t worked?” “What’s the number one thing you want to learn?” “Have you ever spent money on a review software?” “What’s the number one fear that you want to avoid at all costs?” “Name three more things you want to learn.” “If you’d like to participate in the webinar, leave your email here.” And we got a ton of responses. And based on these responses, we were able to see recurring themes. And based on those recurring themes, I was then able to craft my presentation and address all the issues and concerns and desires and fears that people had. And the result is we ran an hour-long presentation and made about $50,000. That’s really the best way to do presentations. And that’s how I would do yours. Not even just getting people there. But I would also do a survey like this. That way, you can use that information and put together a better presentation because you already know what people are thinking. There’s a lot more if we could get into this. Sorry. I was a little bit scatterbrained. It’s the end of the day for me. But hopefully, you got some value out of this. If you have any questions, just let me know. Thanks.

Do you tell potential new clients what your law firm’s prices are before they come in for a consultation? Do you list your prices on your website? Should you do this? Well, in this video, I’m going to answer that exact question.

My name is Andy Stickel and I’m the author of “How to Get More Law Firm Clients Without Losing Time & Money or Getting Screwed by a Marking Company”. Now, lawyers ask me all the time, “Should I reveal my prices before somebody actually comes in for a consultation?” The first thing I typically ask them is, “Well, what are your prices?

The difference in what you say and what people hear

What do you charge to represent a client?” The answer nine out of ten times is, “Well, it depends.“ It’s never just, “I charge $5000 for a case.” Every once in a while, you get a flat fee. But typically, they’ll tell me something like, “Well, it really depends.” It could range anywhere on the high-end to $8500 and maybe the low-end is $2500. What a lot of lawyers want to do is they want to tell clients this, that their prices range. The client says, “How much do your services cost?” And you say, “Well, it all kind of depends on your circumstance. It could be anywhere from $2500 to $8500.” Now, the problem with this right here is that you say to the client, “It could be anywhere from $2500 to $8500.” What the client hears is $2500. They heard $2500. They did not consider the fact that it could be $8500 because they want to hear the best-case scenario. No one wants to spend money. The reality is that your prices are probably going to fall around here. They’re probably going to fall in the mid-range. What you now have to do is you now have to take a client who is price framed expecting to pay $2500 and you now have to convince them that the same service that they thought they were going to spend $2500, you have to bring them up here. You gotta get them to spend $3500 or $4500 depending on what the actual price is for their circumstance.  And this is very, very, very difficult to do. Now, conversely, if you are going to price frame, you can price frame on the high-end because it’s super easy to have someone who thinks they’re going to spend $8500 and it’s really, really easy to bring them down to $3500 or $4500 because they assume that they’re getting a discount. The problem is that a lot of times, lawyers will reveal that price and they’ll give a range. They won’t actually tell an actual price.

The wise way to handle your pricing

First of all, I don’t think that you should reveal your prices. But if you are going to reveal your prices, you want to always make sure that you’re revealing the higher price and you’re not saying it’s a range. And then when you actually talk to the client, then they will be price framed positively where you can actually lower them from the higher price to the lower price. It actually feels like they’re getting a discount. And if you think about major retail stores, that’s exactly what they’re doing. For example, everything at Kohl’s is always on sale. Everything is always on sale. It’s always marked at $10 and then 60% off. “This pair of socks normally retails for $10 but you’re getting it for $6.” What they’re doing is they’re price framing you. That pair of socks was always $6. It was never $10. But now they’ve assigned it a higher value so, in your head, you look at it and you say, “Oh, wow. I’m getting 40% off. That’s great.” Now, if the sign said, “This pair of socks is $6” and then it rang up at $10, there’s no way in hell you’d ever buy it because you’re price framed the wrong way. This is a mistake that I see lawyers make all the time.

Get those prices off your website!

The first thing I would do is I would remove your prices from your website. I would tell your staff. When someone asks what the price is, I would say, instead of giving a range – which will shoot you on the foot nine out of ten times – what you should do is you say, “Well, our prices are very custom and they depend on the exact circumstances of your situation.” Rather than just giving everyone a blanket price and have people paying for things that they don’t necessarily need or things that they don’t use, say, “What we like to do is we like to actually listen to your circumstance, learn about what you need, and then come up with a price that actually fits the circumstance. We’ll be able to give you a more accurate price once you actually come in and meet with the attorney.” That’s a much better way to set the expectation rather than saying, “Oh, our prices are anywhere from $2500 to $8500” or whatever the actual range that you tell people because you’re shooting yourself in the foot and you’re price framing people. I hope this helps. I hope this gives you some clarity as to why you shouldn’t reveal your prices. And if you are going to reveal your price, always reveal the top price. Never reveal the lower price because it’s much easier to get sales when you’re bringing people down rather than trying to have them have a thought in their head that service is worth one point and now you’ve gotta convince them that it’s worth potentially thousands of dollars more than they had already mentally prepared themselves for. If you use that and then you tell them that you’re going to give them a custom price when they actually come in, then not only will they come in a better frame of mind but they’ll also be much more receptive to your pricing just because of the fact that you’re telling them that this is a custom price that’s just for them. Hopefully, this helps. If you have any questions about this or you want to learn more about getting more clients for your law firm, then be sure to pick up my book How to Get More Law Firm Clients Without Losing Time and Money or Getting Screwed by a Marketing Company. This book is completely free. All you have to do is go to freebookforlawyers.com and just pay for a teeny tiny shipping charge. It’s $7.95. And we will send you the book, completely free, right to your door. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. And let me know in the comments if you tell your prices beforehand or if you make people come in to actually reveal the price. Hope you guys have a good day. I’ll talk to you soon.

Hey. My name is Andy Stickel. If you have a problem where clients will book consultations and then not show up for the consultations, then I want you to watch this video right now. I am going to give you the solution and teach you how to get more clients to show up to consultations.

The thing you have to understand is that the more personal contact that the client has with your law firm, the more likely they are to show up for the consultation. What do you need to do? The first thing you need to do when you book the consultation is to make sure that you get their cell phone number. Actually, you can do it the same day that you booked the consultation or a couple of days before the consultation.

What you want to do is send them a text message. On this text message, you actually want to record a video – it can be a short video – that just says, “Hey, Mike. It’s Attorney John Smith. Looking forward to our consultation this coming Thursday at 2:00 PM. Be sure to bring your arrest report. (Be sure to bring whatever it is that you need to bring)

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at the office, 407-123-1234, or you can text me back at this number. I look forward to seeing you on Thursday at 2:00 PM.” If you send them a personalized text message, they’re much more likely to show up.

Another thing you can do is actually have someone from your office reach out and do the intake for them over the phone before they actually come in. The cool part about that is now, they have given you all this information. They’re complying more. It’s a compliant step. Because they are actually giving you information and they’re taking more steps, they are much, much more likely to show up for the consultation. Those are two things you can do if you’re having problems with lawyers or with clients not showing up for consultations.

Now, if you have any questions at all, leave me a comment below. Otherwise, you can send me a direct message. I’ll help you out. I hope this video helped you. I hope you are having a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.

I see lawyers making this same mistake over and over and over again. You see, in the ’70s, people had an attention span of 12 minutes. Today, with the Internet, that attention span is 9 seconds. So you have got to get right to the point with your ads for your law firm. And if you don’t, if you screw around for the first 15, 20, 30 seconds, you’re going to completely lose your audience. Now, that’s just one part of creating social media campaigns that actually work for a law firm, that actually get clients. And there’s a lot more to it. It’s actually really simple. 

Learn how to do it from the pros!

People usually make it a lot more complicated. Just like talking way too much. So if you want to learn the step by step strategy that we use for me, for my clients, for my coaching students that generate tons and tons of clients for law firms, then what I want you to do is click the link included with this video, enter your information, and watch the training on there. Bring a notepad. Bring a pen. Take really good notes. And you will learn exactly step by step how to get clients for your law firm. You’ll see all the stuff you’re doing wrong. You’ll figure out how to pinpoint the people that you’re actually looking for, how to find them on social media, and how to put a message in front of them that they will actually pay attention to. So click the link included with this video, enter your information, and watch the training today.

Are you one of the many law firms who, when you have potential new clients come in the office and you tell them your pricing, after the consultation, they say that they’re broke and they don’t have any money? Well, I’m going to tell you in this video a very, very easy solution to that problem and how to get more clients to actually sign up who initially tell you that they don’t have any money. So this happens all the time. I talk to lawyers all the time. They say that they get lots of leads. But the clients, they just don’t have any money. Or the leads, they just don’t have any money. They’re all broke. So a lot of people don’t realize that there’s something out there called PayPal Credit. And what’s really cool about PayPal Credit is that it doesn’t actually use your credit score when making a decision. So even if someone doesn’t have perfect credit, they can typically still get approved for PayPal Credit. And we’ve gotten people approved up to, I think, $7800, maybe even more, on PayPal Credit. But definitely at least $7800. So most of the attorneys watching this that charge fees are going to fall within $7800 or probably even higher. I’m not sure exactly what the limit is. And you have to sell it in a specific way. You don’t just say, “Hey, pay us on PayPal.” What you do is you say your price. And so you say, “Okay. So for us to represent you in this matter, it’s going to be $4000.” And then the lead is going to say, “Well, that’s just too much money. I just don’t have that kind of money.” So what you say is, “Well, what if we were able to give you six months, no interest, no payments? That way, we can get started today but you don’t have to make a single payment for six months and you don’t have to pay any interest for six months? It’s basically the same as cash for six months.” Most of the time, people are going to be like, “Well, yeah, that sounds great.” So you say, “Okay. Cool. Well, we have a relationship with PayPal Credit. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to send you an invoice real quick. And then on that invoice, there’s going to be a link at the bottom that says, ‘Pay now with PayPal Credit.’ So all you have to do is you click on that link. And you can do it while you’re sitting here. You get an instant approval. They’re just going to ask you a couple of questions. And then we can get started on your case.” And what’s cool is that you don’t have to wait six months to get paid. You get paid right away. And the potential new client doesn’t have to make any payments and doesn’t get charged interest for six full months. And this works really, really, really well. But you have to actually sell it in the right way. So if you do it in that way, you’ll get a lot more people that come into your office and say they don’t have any money that end up leaving as clients. Now, maybe that’s not your problem. Maybe the problem that you have is not getting enough leads in the first place. I can help you with that as well. So if you’re interested in learning how to get more leads coming into your office so that you can then get them to pay you using PayPal Credit, then what I want you to do is I want you to click the click included with this video, enter your name and your email address, and I’m going to take you to a free training about an hour long that’s going to show you step by step how you can get clients for your law firm without losing time, without losing money, and without ever getting screwed by a marketing company again. So click the link included with this video and watch the training and then implement the steps and then start getting more clients to pay you using PayPal Credit. I hope this helps. I hope you found this video enjoyable. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I’ll talk to you later.

In this video, I’m going to give you a simple tip that, if you use it correctly, will allow you to close way more clients that come into your office. It works most of the time and it is so easy to do you will wonder why you have not always been doing this. In fact, I gave this tip to a lawyer and the next 20 clients in a row that came into his office hired him. Are you ready for this tip? Well, when someone comes into your office and comes in for a consultation, the first thing you should always do is give them a compliment. Now, I know this seems really simple but there’s a little bit of psychology behind this. People buy things from people that they like. One of the ways to make people like you is to make them feel good about themselves. People don’t remember exactly what you say, but they do remember how you make them feel. So if you open the conversation by giving them a compliment, then they are immediately going to like you. So if you can make them like you, then you have a much better chance of getting them to actually hire you. So it’s a really, really simple adjustment. Just find something to compliment them on. Don’t be creepy about it, guys. But find something to compliment them on and people will like it. Think about the last time you bought Girl Scout cookies from a co-worker. Even though you really didn’t want any Girl Scout cookies but you like the person that was saying, “Hey. Here. Buy these Girl Scout cookies.” So if you give a compliment, you will get way more clients to sign up with you when they come into their office. Let’s say your close rate is 75%. Maybe you can get to 85%. Maybe you can get to 95%. No one closes at 100%. So you can absolutely use this. Now, if your problem isn’t your close rate, maybe your problem is actually getting more leads in the first place, then what I want you to do is click the link below this video, enter your information, and I’m going to take directly to a training where I’m going to show the three secrets that you can use to get more clients for your law firm. The training is going to show you how to build a machine, a law firm lead-generation machine that will get you, clients, for the rest of your career without paying for it. So I hope you enjoyed this tip. I hope you use it. I hope you get more clients. Click the link below this video. Watch the free training video, and let me know if you have any comments or any questions in the comments below. I’ll talk to you soon.

Examples of compliments:

• You are very detailed. This will make our work so much easier.
• Thank you for being prompt, I see you value your time.
• Have you worked in a law office? You seem to know your way around the paperwork.