Tip #2 - Past Customers are Marketer's Gold

All investigators and servers eventually get hired by a law firm, or receive referral work, who by all measures seems to have little future need for your services beyond the job they called with.

No South Dakota law firm serves too many defendants in Spotsylvania, VA. So why bother following up with them? Well, there are several reasons;

1. Giving them a price list and a full description of your services may in fact cause them to hire you in the future. You never know, and they never may have anticipate it either, but they may need you again, even if just as a point of contact for your state or region.
2. Providing contact information, and making sure you are in their database of contacts is important. If another business or professional seeks a referral from them for someone in your area or expertise, making sure they have your contact data will help ensure they can accurately refer you.
3. Keeping them aware of who you are means you can still ask them for a reference down the road.

The list goes on. The single most important reason however, is that marketing is a numbers game. Two factors combine, to make recontacting and actively marketing to past clients so effective.

First, if someone hires you once they are statistically more likely to hire you again, as opposed to a business who never needed your services. This is a simple fact. That's why your insurance goes up if you have an accident. You're more likely to have another than a driver who has never had one. It doesn't mean you will have another accident, it just means that you are more likely to.

Second, everyone knows that if you pitch a product or service to say, 1000 people, someone is likely to have some interest in what you offer. Assuming a process service company can build a database of law firms and other servers from years of past business, they can then begin periodic mailings or other marketing drives to this group.

You can send 500 post cards to random law firms, or you can send them to 500 law firms that once hired you. Your response rate will be dramatically higher with past customers. For instance, the random list might include 35 law firms that have never litigated a single case! Every one of the firms on your past client list has had to have at least one paper served...

SO - carefully gather data about past customers, and market to them. And if you want to take it to the next level, you should also actively gather, retain, and market to people who called for a quote, but never sent the work. They too are more likely to need you, and respond to you in the future.

Remember to attempt to mail the list at least once a year with first class mail, so you can keep up on address changes.... - but that's list maintenance, and that's for another post.

Tip #1 - Marketing to Attorneys

The biggest single mistake most people make when marketing to attorneys, is well marketing to attorneys.

Let me give you an example. Say that you are lucky enough to run into a politician at a dinner event, you can try and bend his ear about pending legislation on process service regulation. You'll have to compete with 50 other folks for that ear. But, if you are savvy, you can look around, and in a corner, away from the crowd, you can locate a key staff person, probably calling ahead to the next destination in some quiet corner, on her cell phone. You can go bend their ear, knowing your message will be heard, by the one person who actually counts, the gatekeeper.

So here's the lesson. Try focusing mailings, and other pitches on legal secretaries and staffers. If for example, you send post cards, these gatekeepers are the ones who see the post cards, and toss them. Not the lawyers. But with a pitch like, "saving your firm's money on process service may save your promotion," or "stop struggling with service rules, we do it right the first time", may appeal to them.

So does, "stop calling around, we'll do all the leg work for you", as most attorneys are clueless about how much time staff often wastes on process service logistics, or finding the right expert or investigator. But the staff knows, so these pitches work.

So remember, when an attorney is your target, aim for the gatekeeper.