Do you want more clients? Of course you do.
How do you get more clients? Convince them that you are going to provide more value to them than the cost of your services.
In order to build your practice, you must have the mindset that you can and will create value for your clients. If you don’t, your body language will convey it and your potential clients won’t hire you. In order to successfully close clients, you must understand how you create value for them and you must firmly believe in the value you create.
Sometimes it’s easy. If your practice is in personal injury, its easy to see that the insurance companies will do their best to underpay claims. Without you and your knowledge of the system, your client will have a hard time standing up to the insurance company. As long as you can increase the settlement by at least as much as your fee, you will provide value to the client.
Sometimes its a lot harder. If you are practicing family law, the money the client is spending on you is coming straight out of the property they are dividing with his / her soon-to-be ex. How can you explain your value here? In some cases, you may be lucky and the client is so overwhelmed with the process that they are willing to pay just to make that pain go away. Or, you may have a child custody battle that the party just can’t put a price on. For more tangible things like property division and spousal support, show the client the cost of fighting up front. Help them understand that giving up more of the property or paying higher support may be cheaper than the cost of the fight. By developing a range of outcomes, the client can determine the value of your services.
Often, in the legal context, value comes from the elimination of pain. Help identify that pain and help your client determine the value of eliminating it. This is something that you can use your website and your blog for. If you’re giving away things for free, you would rather not be doing it on an in-person basis that takes up your time. If you help educate your client as to which pain is worth your time to solve, when they are ready to solve that pain, they are very likely to come to you.
So, work on your value proposition. Know it and believe in it. Communicate it in everything you do. It is the most important thing you can do to turn your potential clients into paying clients.