Are You Approachable Enough?

If your marketing efforts are fizzling, you might start by asking your friends, coworkers and loved ones to tell you if you are approachable.  (If they are afraid to answer, you may assume the answer is “no”.)

I talk to a lot of lawyers about marketing their practice and I often quote the advice that I first heard from John Jantsch over at the Duct Tape Marketing Blog, which to paraphrase, is that marketing a law practice is about getting people to “know you, like you and trust you.”  Many lawyers, if they even think about marketing their practice at all, focus only on the first one — getting people to know them.  But knowing without liking and trusting is notoriety, which is not particularly helpful to the cause of marketing.  Unless you happen to be a gangster rapper.

Leaving aside the somewhat thorny issue of earning trust, I want to spend just a moment on the issue of being liked.   Here’s everything you need to know on the subject:

Building a practice is more like high school than college.

It’s true.  Remember high school, when new wave rock ruled the airwaves and your haircut looked like this?  (Dating myself a little here.)  Revision:  remember high school, when grunge rock ruled the airwaves and your haircut looked like this?  (Apparently, it is dead musician day on Law Practice Matters — does anybody know if that the guy from Flock of Seagulls is dead?)

Anyway, back to high school.  Remember how much you cared about being liked?  Well, welcome back to high school.  To make matters worse, it was hard enough for most of us to be well-liked then, and that was before law school which ain’t exactly three years of Dale Carnegie.  So what’s a lawyer — one who cares about marketing her practice — to do?

Focus on improving something you can control:  your approachability.  Stop scowling all the time and complaining about clients and telling family members that their arguments lack binding precedent.  Focus on opening up a little and being a bit less frightening.  I’m not saying you have to go cry on Oprah or anything, just come down off of DefCon 1 once in a while.

But what if you’ve forgotten how to be nice?  What if law school and law practice have permanently excised that faculty from your repertoire?

There are some good resources out there to help you remember how to get back in touch with your approachable side.  Rohit Bhargava, author of “Personality Not Included” and the Influential Marketing Blog, posted recently on approachability and included a neat little video of a kid selling stuff in India and showing better marketing skills than most of us do in our practices.  If you’re really far gone and need serious approachability remediation, check out Scott Ginsberg, author of a bunch of books on approachability and the blog Hello, My Name is BLOG.

Be more approachable and watch your marketing efforts bloom.

Gotta go, time for 4th period French.