The Dumbest Myth in All of Marketing

Grassroots marketing is appealing because it’s a way to make the most of the relationships you have with your clients. And it’s a way to get clients without advertising. There was a time, not that long ago, when all lawyer marketing was grassroots marketing.?It had to be.

Yes, advertising and SEO and chat boxes and clicks are all vital, dynamic media; expensive, complex, useful as well as voracious. They devour your mind, attention and money. And, they bring you cases.

Grassroots marketing also brings you cases, maybe not as many as you’d like right now.

Personal Injury law firms make great efforts to connect, show empathy, stay in touch throughout the conduct of the case, include the client as their case progresses, get a great settlement and remain connected after the case closes.?

But there’s also a disconnect. And all along, “goodwill” is like a proverb.

“Take good care of them and they’ll take good care of you” is the underlying assumption. Goodwill somewhere along the way is going to translate into money. And, if and when it does, it’s because someone told someone else.

So that means you nurture folks because it’s good and right to do, and—because you’re hoping for referrals.

But the most weird, wrong and near universal delusion is that we need to and can stay “top of mind”. Did you ever stop for three seconds and consider how goofy that is? It would require serious brain damage for it be true.

Poor Joe, he’s a monomaniac. He’s been officially diagnosed. All he can think of is Schecter, Main, Ponce and Jablonski. He doesn’t even eat. That infernal law firm is at the top of his mind twenty-four hours a day!

Oh no! How to get it off there?

I’m guilty of repeating this outrageous fallacy for decades, so I won’t judge you if you ever thought it made any sense.

But seriously, how do you “stay” top of mind with a person you talked to six months ago, never mind two years ago? Do you have any idea how many thoughts ago that is?

According to Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University, a person has 60,000 thoughts a day. That’s about 22 million thoughts a year. How you gon’ STAY top of mind? You can’t and you never could and honestly I’m embarrassed I did not see through this sham sooner.

If You Can’t Stay Top of Mind, Can You Influence Your Client So That You Come To Mind Again? And Can You Make It So That It Happens At The Perfect Moment?

Data retrieval is a function we all know how to do. If six months after a case settled the client was asked the name of the law firm they’d worked with…they would be able to easily retrieve it. If you asked them the name of their grade two teacher it would probably take two or three seconds to pull it out of the depths of their grey matter.

Absent a retrieval action, the name of your grade two teacher is like a book in row 125,567,870 section ZZAA in a gigantic library. It may never come to mind ever again. Imagine trying to keep your grade two teacher’s name top of mind along with your favorite law firm and three or four quotes from ‘The Great Gatsby’. It shows a basic lack of understanding of how the brain works.

The challenge is we have a tiny brain in a gigantic universe with a tremendous amount of incoming and very little time. We have to be very selective about what we focus on otherwise we’d be swamped. We’d probably fall down twitching, requiring medical attention.

Okay, so you can’t stay top of mind. So what can you do?

You can plant triggers.?

Referrals work on triggers. A trigger is what causes something to come to mind. Goodwill without triggers is like a bank of embers losing heat over time, ready to light a dry stick if one ever comes along. But if no triggers happen, no flames happen and the embers cool.

When the brain has a specific reason to remember a thing, and an associated reward, it will come to mind. And that’s the critical distinction we are talking about today. 'How to stay top of mind' (you can’t!) versus 'what would make you come to mind'?

A young girl asks her mother, “Mom, what do people think of me?”

Mom replies, “Honey, mostly they don’t”.

Then she grows up and becomes a powerful, successful lawyer and wants to know how to get someone to think of something months after she last talked to them. So she asks her wise mother, “Mom, what is the mechanism that will cause the desired thought, image, feeling or association—or for that matter law firm—to come to mind with perfect timing?”

Mom says, “Honey, now that’s a really good question!”

So what does make the desired thought come to mind? It can be any number of things but not all associations are equal.

For example your name. Your brain is programmed to place a high priority on your name. You could be asleep in a foreign airport with serious jet lag and a hangover. There could be two songs playing from different speakers coming at you from different directions, carts going backwards beeping, people nattering in seven foreign tongues and a baby crying.

Suddenly an announcement and the sound is distorted, fuzzy, and the announcer totally mispronounces your name. You sit up ramrod straight in a millisecond because your brain places top priority on your name.

It’s called reticular activation, a deep and fascinating subject.

Okay, so we have established the principle. So now, how can you PROGRAM a trigger into the minds of your clients and staff? How can you speak to the deep mind individually and collectively?

Given space constraints we can talk about a clue or two. If every time a staff member brought in a case, you made a visible fuss about it and told the staff member how wonderful they were for making sure their friend was looked after—and many others could see it happening—that would drive noticing in the others. They would see a highly prized feeling land for their coworker. Praise, and recognition for helping others. That’s highly significant and the brain would prioritize that.

There Are Two Factors in Every Referral

Noticing and willingness. If a person does not notice there can be no referral. If a person notices but hesitates for any reason there can be no referral.?

Nothing works like feelings. As Maya Angelou famously said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

With that in mind, not all feelings are equal. Getting your client to associate the act of referring a case with powerful positive feelings is the secret. There are many ways to do it, but that in a nutshell is the secret of generating referrals.?