Join us for the latest episode of Your Practice Mastered podcast. In this exciting Throwback Thursday edition, your hosts, MPS and Attorney Richard James, unearth invaluable insights from the archives! Hear a tale of an attorney's annualized sales skyrocketing to a hefty $3.5 million, and learn from a firm's transformation journey soaring from operating losses to hefty profits. Witness an 11-step masterclass unveiling the mastery of lead conversion and riveting system building. Take advantage of this. Tune in, engage, and elevate your law practice to unprecedented heights.

Richard James: And I'm Richard James. And today we're going to talk about what we call it. Throwback Thursday, where we're going to go back in time a little bit, Michael.

MPS: Yeah, throwback Thursday, going back to some of the old pieces of content that many of you law firm owners probably haven't had the chance to enjoy or listen to yet.

But Rich, why don't you tell them a little bit more about that? Yeah, look, I've been doing this for, what, 15 ish years. I've got over 120 pieces of content that I put out there for members way back when or for public consumption, but they've been lost in a black box or the mess of the internet and difficult to find.

Richard James: And so now we're going in and finding evergreen content that are eternal truths about what you should do to maximize the performance in your law firm. Build systems that run your law firm, allow people to run your systems. And I'm teaching these, what we'll call miniature master classes on how to accomplish this system building excellence.

MPS: Yeah. I mean, look, there's value bombs dropped in each of these. They've been highly curated from us to make sure we're getting you the most value possible. And we have one asked around here. We call it the gentleman's agreement. And so we invest our time, money, and resources in producing excellent content for you.

So if this isn't your first time listening or watching to the pod, all we ask is that you go ahead and hit that Like Button, you Comment Down below if you've got any questions or you're enjoying it. And depending on the platform you're listening or watching on, you hit that Follow or Subscribe Button and turn those Bell Notifications ON.

And Hey, feel free to share it with your other law firm owner peers. Doesn't hurt, but we appreciate you guys. I don't know about you, Rich. I think we let them jump in and enjoy this.

Hello everybody. My name is Richard James. For those of you who don't know who I am, my goal is to work with entrepreneurial minded attorneys to help them build the systems in their practice. That can develop a law firm that supports their lifestyle rather than completely undermining their lifestyle and for me really it's all about It's about these systems one at a time and today we're going to be unpacking one particular system. Which is the system of lead conversion from the phone the number one challenge I found with law firms is that their phones are broken.

That's correct. This system works. Even if your firm is already doing so well, you don't believe you need more initial consultations. Now, some of you call them potential new clients, some of you just call them appointments, some of you call them initial consultations. I don't know what your language is. My language is always initial consultations inside my Perfect Client Life Cycle, which I'll talk to you about in a little bit.

I talk to them about this concept of appointments, so setting appointments. So we often time refer to them as sets. For those of you who were just at Partners Club not long ago you'll recognize that headline, right? So I use the formula that we learned at Partners Club about how to write a good headline.

You know, it was this idea of what it is that we're going to talk about by when are we going to talk about it without having to do something? And then even if right, so if you're astute and you're from partners club and you're in our world and you saw this last couple weeks ago at partners club.

So you want to make sure you take care of that sooner than later. We're going to have exciting topics there that I won't get into right now, but know that you're definitely going to want to bring a guest somebody who's important to you and that is helpful in implementing all of the concepts in your business.

All right. So you can actually just rock and roll with this and you can put it in play. Now, for those of you who are in my world. You've heard me talk about this before, but what I noticed at Partners Club as I came up, the people came up to me in the hall and they were talking to me about software or they were talking to me about setting appointments.

They're really not understanding all of the steps the way that I have them worded. So I'm going to take some time. I haven't done an 11 step process in a long time. And so I'm going to take some time and I can unpack what these 11 steps are so that you can. Understand what my words mean. If you're using software to manage this, that's great, but still you or whoever's managing the team, whoever's answering the phones really needs to understand why I built these steps the way that I did.

And in part that was because they made me feel real special because they brought me over to where they had my 11 steps already on the wall. So they broke these 11 steps out and they put them on the wall. And that didn't shock me as much as did the fact that when I asked them, you know, why such a big deal over the 11 steps, because to me, it just seems second nature.

They said, you know, they've worked for a lot of call center worlds where they were answering phone and setting appointments for professionals like doctors or nurses, doctors or dentists or attorneys. And a lot of the other things that the other call centers had them do didn't work. And this formula actually works.

And because they were compensated or bonused on how many appointments they set and how many appointments showed up, they love this system. So this, what I'm about to tell you works in real time. It works every time, but you have to understand it. And the person who's going to own it, you, the owner have to know why we did what we did.

So who's going to benefit more from the most from this is designed for anybody who sets appointments. So if your firm tends to hire your consults, you know, somebody dials in, let's say you're a DUI firm and somebody dials into your office and you attempt to sell them your services to our DUI right there over the phone, or somebody dials into your office and so there's social security disability or PI, and you don't set a consult for them.

We have 11 step structures or 13 step structures for all different variants, so for collections, for making the sale, for doing different things. This particular 11 step structure we're talking about right now is about setting the appointment that will actually show up to the office. Now I'll kind of unpack that for you a little bit more.

So here's why this is important. This is a system inside of all the systems that I teach. So I teach entrepreneurial minded attorneys how to build systems in a law firm that will set them free. And my goal is to truly get them towards freedom. But there's many different systems that they need to know.

Coaching their kids baseball team or whatever, that's not even an option for them. Or, they don't have any money. So, they're not making enough money, the money they deserve to make, the money that, after all the money they've invested into time education, both in time and in real dollars. They don't make the return on their investment or maybe they don't have a system to retire.

So I can see a lot of you on video. Hi, Jeff Kelly. And we're going to start in the same way that we always start and we are going to raise our right hand and we're going to take this oath. Now here's what I'm going to have you do. Okay. Cause every one of you right now are thinking some version of, but wait a second, Richard, you don't seem to understand.

You know, I answer my own phones. This isn't going to work for me or Betty, who's been answering my phones for all these years. She has her way of doing it. She is not going to change the way she's doing it. Or, you know what? This might work fine in that big city like Phoenix, but you know, in Paducah, Kentucky, this ain't ever going to work.

So my point is you're somebody out there right now is thinking my business is different than yours. So we start the same way we always start so i'm going to unmute everybody real quick and we're going to take this oath together. So it's going to sound like a cacophony, but we're going to do it I'm going to unmute everybody again.

This system works time and time again, but it is only one little piece of the puzzle, but it is a piece of the puzzle that can make you more money today. Like today, if you're not doing this, if something's broken, if your number of appointments that you're setting as compared to the number of leads that you get are not high, like high, like 70, 80%, we've got a problem.

But there's a bigger point here. I've been doing more and more reading about the legal zooms of the world and the online competitors are starting to creep up. And more and more of your competitors are getting more savvy about their marketing and advertising.

I'm seeing it out there more. I'm hearing the cost per client acquisition is going up. If you don't maximize the number of people who pick up your phone and call you into appointments, we're missing a huge component of this puzzle. Think about this. Sally Smith is struggling financially. She's got credit card debt and she's being pounded on by, by creditors.

And the person that was answering the phone wasn't well trained. And there's lots of things that I mean by that. Sometimes Sally picks up the phone and she calls and it goes right to the attorney's cell phone voicemail and the voicemail is full. Sometimes Sally calls the law office and the law office doesn't answer.

It goes to the law office voicemail and they have to call her back. Sometimes Sally picks up the phone and calls the law office and the law office automatically puts them on hold because the same person that's answering Sally's call is answering everybody else's call in the firm as well, or maybe also.

Sally might call and the phone may ring 10 times before it's answered, in which case Sally is already questioning whether this firm is for her or not. This comes under the concept of micromanaging the client experience and inside of micromanaging the client experience, we are going to want to maximize the way in which we set appointments.

And the reason we want to do that is because Sally needs help. And your job is to believe that you are the very best firm to help Sally. And in order for Sally to get that help, we need to get her to the next stage in the process. The phone calls job is not to sell Sally unless that's your model. If your model is setting consoles, the phone calls job, it should just set the console to get them to the next stage.

*****

Okay, so we're going to talk about the lead conversion machine. That's really where we are. In this conversation, in the systems that I teach you to build this global system is called the lead conversion machine. And so some people might go, well, I don't really know y'all that well. Why should I listen to you?

I'm not gonna get into a whole big, lengthy story. Just know that for those that need reminding an attorney saw me speak from the stage a decade ago. Asked me if what I told talked about really worked and I talked about all of this then and I said yes. And he said prove it. I said, what do you have in mind?

I went to work with him. We shared a desk kneecap to kneecap and within two and a half years. We built that to three and a half million dollars in annualized sales. And that was literally just two guys sharing a desk growing it into 19 employees and two and a half years later. That's one part of the story.

His sanity numbers were horrible. He was losing money every month. And so Bert and I really talked about well. How do we increase conversion across the board and one of the first things that we did. Was look at teaching him these 11 steps and so he would take his team members and he would put them on my what?

So it says it here that before Bert was scheduling about 40 to 50% of all of his leads into consults. After they put the 11 step system in, they were scheduling over 80% of their leads into consults. Now that alone, just do the math. I mean, I don't know how many leads you get, but just run the math on that to see what the end net result is in client value for you as a firm, and how that affects your profitability.

But he believed in it so much that he actually went ahead and built software for it. So I watched Bert build this software to automate my 11 steps. He was so happy about it. One day he called me and said, Hey, I want you to see something. He showed it to me. And he really wanted a beta test.

And because he did that, and because his staff responded to it so well, he decided to build software to automate this process, actually created an entire new company. He's become free from his law firm. He doesn't practice law anymore. Somebody else actually runs his firm. He keeps his eyes on what we call the key performance indicators, but now he spends the majority of his time building this company called 4iiz, which is designed to develop software to help clients actually automate these 11 steps, but that's not the point of today's call.

The point of today's call is for you to understand what the 11 steps are because it can't automate them until you know what they are and you've really. Inside you've decided that you're going to do this. You understand the reason for it .Okay wow, we're up to 81.

So to be clear, this is the path that I see that all leads take as they go through your law firm. So first they raise their hand, they become a lead, and then they convert to an appointment. Whether they do this on their own, because you've got some software on your website that they do this with, or they do this you know, because you have a pick up the phone and call them I don't, doesn't really matter.

What we're trying to do today though is, increased the number of conversions we get because of the use of the telephone. Now, the next stage is increasing the show rate. So the number of people that set appointments as compared to the number of people that show. And the next stage is increase the number of new clients.

This is something you should know weekly, by the way but we have them do it at least on a monthly basis. So they know it at least four times a year, they're going to get this done. All of you should know these numbers weekly. I run our numbers every week. And I actually see my numbers every day.

So basically what this is saying is we take the number of new leads. We put them here, the number of new sets, put them here, number of new shows, number of hires, number of paying, number of referrals. And then this little conversion here, this is where all the magic happened.

And if a show rate was 50%, which is marginally horrible, but let's say it's 50%, that means instead of 20 people showing up, 40 people are showing up. And let's say that 50% of the people he met with hired the firm. And so instead of 10 people hiring the firm, 20 people hired the firm. We literally doubled the number of new clients.

Or they're living month to month, kind of like, you know, they're scared when payroll comes around, if they're going to hit it they work at least six days a week and their profit is really low. They just have the paycheck or their draw that they take from their business, but it's not significant.

And if they had to pay somebody to replace themselves, there wouldn't be any real profit for them to live off of as a business owner. And what we find is if we do nothing between now and in the next three years, we're going to have at best the same results, if not no change the definition of insanity, but where we want to get our members to and all the people that I work with to the real goal is to help you get healthy.

Ultimately, I want everybody to get to freedom where you've got a million dollars in personal wealth and I'm not talking about because your value of your house went up. I'm talking about cash. Okay, you work three days a week. Because you want to stay active in the business and you like the business, but not because you have to be there.

And the business gives you what we call passive income. Now why this is so important. You know, it's funny. Ron Morton, I don't know if Ron's on the call. Sorry. I got a lot of people on here, Ron. Ron Morton had me come on and be a guest at his law student as his law school. Yesterday, so Monday.

So I, at eight o'clock in the morning here, I jumped on and I did a webinar or webcast, similar to this, for his law students. And I asked them, you know, how many of them consider themselves entrepreneurs? And only one hand went up. And then I asked, well, how many planned on going out and opening their own firm right after they graduated from law school?

Every single hand went up. So, they don't see themselves as entrepreneurs. They didn't think about it from a business perspective first. And they all expected to go out and open their own law firm. It had been the first time, by the way, that I ever talked to law students. And I had always worked with attorneys who came to me after a significant amount of pain in their life, and they wanted to solve a problem.

It's not on purpose. And so they find themselves in chaos very, very quickly, even if they're excellent attorneys. And they find getting their way out of freedom takes a long time if they ever figure it out. Many attorneys never do. But you're not many attorneys. You're here. You're on this call because you recognize there was something inside of what I teach that is going to paint this path.

And what I want you to do is I want you to experience freedom, not within three years. I want you to experience freedom within a couple of years. You know, like I heard the story at partners club a couple of weeks ago, David Brennan was doing $150,000 a year when he met me. And that was just a couple of years ago, and he did just a million dollars last year.

Great things are happening, and it's happening inside of a year. So it's possible we've watched it happen and it's possible for you to this is the one step that you need to master along that path. So let's get going. By the way, if you're new here and you're stuck and you want more you can this is my only pitch okay, you can go to TheRichardJames.com/PPGP personalized practice growth plan. You can schedule some time with us and we'll kind of unpack your practice and figure out what's working. And it's not working and we'll and we'll invest some time with you. It's a 20 minute call we can figure it out. That's as big as the pitch gets let's get into the 11 step structure of the call.

All right, so the first thing it says, I'm going to, I've broken these out piece by piece. The first thing it says is stop pre-frame your state and then we get into smile, ask the referral question, introduction, harvesting of data, relationship building, book discussion, asking for the order, choice of something and something, let them know the process.

That's the section that I really need to make sure is scripted and it is memorized. I would also say that the introduction should be scripted and memorized. And as silly as it sounds, the smile should be scripted. And memorized. You can hear when I'm, and you can see me, but you can hear when I'm smiling on the other end of the phone.

Man, I understand we're busy people, but I'm telling you, not only is it costing you real money. It's costing you the real goal here, which is you can't help that client because if they lose respect for you or lose trust and they leave you can't help them. So let's get into this. All right, let me just stop any, by the way, we have a chat section for those who don't know down the bottom, some kind of housekeeping stuff.

There's the you can raise your hand. So under your participation, you can raise your hand. Raise your hand and I can see you raise your hand. So later on when we ask questions, there's also a chat section. You can go ahead and type in the chat. If you have a question, you want me to stop. I'm not watching you on video to see if you wave your hand at me.

All right, stop pre-frame your state. The most important thing that the person who's answering the phone has to know is they have to stop and pre-frame their state. What I mean is, when the phone rings, I need them to become like a pavlov dog. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful manner. I need them to hear the phone ring, and I need them to go, oh, this is a potential new client.

Let me freeze whatever else it is I'm doing, turn off my cell phone, close down the other screen, bring up my contact management screen, whatever it is I've got to do. I just got to pre frame my state and say, okay. I am going to stick to the 11 steps. Let's have the 11 steps up on the wall. If I'm using software that's managing it like four hours, great.

*****00000*****

When I was a young man, I was in the funeral business. When I first started in the funeral business, I lived above the funeral home, and my grandmother lived next to me. And we had one line that rang kind of at everybody's house. My uncle's house, my grandmother's house, and my apartment. And like, she lived in an apartment next door to me.

She said, you know, I think I could help you with your with your phone problem. I go. All right, what do I have to do? She goes? Okay when the phone rings and it was this big old, you know the rotary phone three click click click click four click click and it rang it like vibrated you out of bed and when the phone rings, what I need you to do.

The phone won't ring more than three times. If it rings three times, it goes to answering service. If it goes to answering service, that's no bueno, no good. So, you've got to answer it on the third ring, or pardon me, you've got to answer it before the fourth ring. So she said, when the phone rings, you immediately have to swing your feet around the bed.

She goes, and you have to sit up and you have to practice. You have to say, Stroke Funeral Home, Stroke Funeral Home, Stroke Funeral Home. And I would do that. And you had to get the frog out of your voice, right? And so I was practicing. She told me to practice Stroke Funeral Home. She goes, on ring two, you would pick up the phone and you would say, Stroke Funeral Home, this is Rich.

And she was proud of me and my uncle was proud of me. Now, I'm 22 years old. Fast forward three years later, I get married. I'm 25 my wife who never stayed over the funeral home before not because we wouldn't be willing to but because my grandmother stayed next door and that was a no no, had never stayed in my bed.

I freaked her out, right? I make that story. It's kind of funny. I couldn't hear you laugh. I'm hoping you laughed a little bit. It's a true story It's not made up. She will tell you it if you meet my ECIB my east coast italian bride together now 32 years married 22 years 23 years this year. She would tell you that is a true story. But the reason I tell you that is because my grandmother was wise enough to know. That what I needed to do was I needed to pre-frame my state.

I wasn't pre-framing my state. I didn't understand the importance, you know, she put it to me like this. She said, honey, somebody just lost their mom or dad and they're calling you and you answer the phone like you're in a drunken stupor at three o'clock in the morning and you just smoke a pack of Marlboro.

I did because this is probably the most important part. If you get this wrong, if you're not ready to rock and roll answering the phone or making an outbound call, I'm telling you what. The rest of this isn't gonna work, which is why I say it's great to have a software that manages and it's great to know the 11 steps, but if you don't own this as the owner, if you don't make sure they know what they need to do and why this is so important to them, if you can't illustrate to them in a way that my grandmother illustrated to me, this is going to fail in your firm.

Okay. But if you get it right, if you can get the emotional connection across them, this is going to work in your phone. And by the way, if you're one of those attorneys, I don't like, I guess I didn't mention this. The number one sin attorneys commit in a law firm almost every time is until they have came into our world is they answer the phone.

And the goal of the phone call is not to give legal advice. The goal of the phone call is to get them to the next stage in the perfect client life cycle, which is setting the appointment. So if you're a person who already still answers your own phone, I'm telling you no matter how good you think you are at this, you are making a mistake.

Number one thing, now they're all going to complain, because they don't want to look at themselves all day long. Because they're going to tell you that they can't stand looking at themselves. Maybe they don't like pictures, maybe they don't like how their hair looked that day. I promise you, they will give you every reason why a mirror seems childish.

But if you would put a mirror in front of them, they will talk to themselves. And they love talking to themselves and they can see a smile. My wife, my ECIB was my number two sales rep. I say she was my number two. I would love to say she was my number one, but I had a sales rep back when I owned pet supply companies that was just far better than anybody else I've ever met in my life.

And my wife, having no experience in this whatsoever, stepped in and quickly became the number two rep. And she will tell you the reason why she became the number two rep is because I took a huge mirror. It was one of those 36 by 24s and had a really nice frame and I put it up right behind her cube area, behind her monitors.

How does she do it? Well, she's good, but she tells you that it's because she knew she smiled. Put a mirror on your desk. I promise you it will work. Ask the referral question. Most people get this wrong. Now I wrote these with my understanding in mind, which is why I want to go through these with you. Normally when people read this, they hear, oh, we're going to ask how they heard about the firm.

I prefer tracking not by report in that way. I prefer tracking with actual tracking, tracking phone numbers, tracking URLs and the such. But what I want this to do is I want to set up the stage called building a culture of referrals. So when you build a law firm in the beginning stages, you're doing an awful lot of advertising.

And when you're doing the advertising, the advertising is costing you a lot of money. But after you start to serve your clients over the years, your referral rate will start to go up. The number of referrals you receive as compared to the number of clients that you hire will start to increase because you'll serve your clients well and they will spread good word about you and other referral partners will do that as well.

The question is, who referred you to our firm or who referred you to Attorney Smith, or who you turned you to? Mrs. Jones, however you say it. Right? But who referred you to our firm? Now that question implies that we expect and expect, pardon me? We expect and we accept referrals. Okay. Who referred you to our firm?

Okay. So they're going to say, well, Oh, nobody. I found you on Google. Oh, that's okay. I just wanted to make sure I determined if somebody sent you over because Attorney Smith likes to say thank you personally to the people who send clients over to our firm. So now we've told them something else. We get enough referrals that we know to ask about it.

Oh, how does he say thank you.? We've done a lot of psychological subliminal things that aids in the number of referrals that we start to get. Because from the very beginning of the relationship with us, from the very first phone call, we've started the building the culture of referrals. That's what that question's about.

Not, did they call from Google, did they call from the TV. It is the referral question. Most important part is who referred you to our firm. Step number three, the introduction. This is another one of those places that you want to memorize. So inside of the call, people have taken, you know argument with me, attorneys have argued with me that, that three and four could, should kind of get reversed and you'll see why in a second.

Zero dollars in sales to three and a half million dollars in annual sales, right? So that's my really really quick elevator speech. So we need to know what yours is, you know, attorney smith has served over thirteen thousand one hundred and fifty clients. Since he's been in practice. He focuses only on family law and he has a holistic approach to divorce.

That's a lousy, but you get my point. Okay. So you want to make sure we know what the elevator pitch is. And so they need to know what that introduction is. And if we, and if attorney Smith wrote the book on the subject, we want to include that into this mix. And we'll talk about that in a second. So the introduction, never guess what we're going to say.

But I do like structure because I like flow. So when we smile, right? So if we go back and we smile. And we ask the referral question. So it's, Oh, who referred you to our firm? Oh, you called on Google. Oh, no worries. Mr. Smith just likes to say a personal thank you to anybody who referred a business.

Oh, okay, that's your cell phone. Great. So is that the primary number you'd like us [00:43:00] to call? And so now we're going into harvesting of data. Listen, if you call AT&T or Verizon or the cable company or any well trained big dollar organization, what's the first thing that they do? They make sure they harvest and update your data.

What is your address? What is your email address? What is your phone number? Why do they do that? Well, they do it so that they make sure that your records are complete, but they also do it for a reason that they never admit that they're doing it. And if you're a new lead in that world, or if you're a new lead in your world, you paid to make the phone ring.

So if you're a personal injury attorney, you may have paid $300 just to make that phone ring. Some clicks, sometimes people pay $150 just to get a click in personal injury on a pay per click ad. But you may have paid $300 or more to get a client to actually pick up the phone and or prospect to pick up the phone and call your office.

Because if for some reason they get off this phone call and they don't set an appointment, or they set the appointment and they don't show up, or they show up and they don't hire the firm. We want to be able to communicate with them, as I like to say, until they buy, die, or unsubscribe. And I want to be able to do that with as many formats as humanly possible.

So I need to make sure that I have their email address, that I have their cell phone number, so I can send them a text message, so that I have their physical address, so I can send them an unconverted lead direct mail piece, and so on, and so on. So harvesting every single piece of information about every single lead, every single time, is a fundamental.

I'll say, Hey, how many leads do you have? And they will instantly go to the calendar and they will start counting the number of appointments they have in the calendar. And I'll say, well. Why are you counting the appointments on the calendar? Well, that's our leads. Does everybody that calls your office schedule an appointment?

And they say, well, no, I imagine not. Well, how many people do you have that call the office that don't schedule an appointment? And oftentimes the answer is, I don't know. They have no idea because they don't have this system in place. So a system of harvesting is essential. It's one of the three primary components to building any system.

I said that this 11 step process is going to help you set more appointments, it's going to help you get more people to show, and it's going to help you get more people to hire the firm. And that's what this does. Relationship building. Step number five. It's where the rubber meets the road. This is where your the person that's on the phone in your world says to the person that's calling, whatever they say some open ended question like, tell me what's going on for you.

Why did you call our firm today? And they tell them something, right? I just got sued. My spouse just filed for a divorce. I got a DUI last night. I don't know what it is. It doesn't matter. The next question out of your rep's mouth, this is the writer downer. Tell me more about that. Now it's a question statement.

Oh, no kidding. Tell me more about that. What was going on? You were going out with your friends. Oh, what was a bachelor party? Oh, well, who got married? Oh, well, my best friend got married. Oh, are you married, too? Yeah, I'm married, too. Oh, so your wife let you go to a bachelor party? Yeah. You guys have kids? Yep.

So, all of a sudden, tell me more about that. I just asked more questions. Be naturally curious. People don't want to hear you talk. People want to hear themselves talk. And they want, for the first time, probably since whatever happened to them happened to them, they want to be able to tell their story to somebody.

Because Sally built such a rapport with them that Sally's the one that they wanted to see, not the attorney, not Mr. Jones, not Attorney Smith. They wanted to talk to Sally because Sally made them feel good. Building a relationship is the number one job. It is not most important to get off the phone fast.

I don't care if initial consultations take 10 minutes, meaning setting an initial consultation on the phone. I don't care if it takes 10 minutes. I don't care if it takes 15 minutes. I need a relationship built. Now, you've got to learn how to control the call. Got to make sure we're not just chit chatting and we're going to make sure we bring it back to the main point.

They need to know where every single problem is in that book. And they need to say to them, Oh, you got a DUI and you're a nurse and you're worried about losing your license? Oh, no. You know what? Attorney Smith, he wrote about that in his book. I'm going to send you a copy of it but you should write this down page 23.

He talks all about losing your professional license if you get a DUI and what you need to do. And as a matter of fact, I'll probably send you an electronic copy when we're done too, but I want to make sure you know that that's in the book. And so we just tie the book in. We reinforce the authorship celebrity expert.

And what I mean by that is if they're not a salesperson, make no bones about it. The person answering these calls needs to be a salesperson and the person doing the selling is the person doing the asking and the person doing the talking is the person doing the buying. That's the rule. And so on a sales call, you have to ask for the order.

That's a choice of something and nothing. Well, nothing's good for me in the next couple of days. Or, would you like to schedule an appointment? That's a choice of something and nothing. That's a yes or no question. No. The question should be, Hey, we've got some openings this afternoon. It looks like you're going to have your foreclosure happen on Tuesday.

Today's Thursday. Mr. Smith has got some openings this afternoon or tomorrow morning, which would be better for you to save your house? See, that's the choice of something and something. That's something and nothing. Always the choice between two. And then when they say, well, morning would be better. Oh, great.

Don't just give them the choice of one. Because if you give them the choice of something and nothing, there's a possibility that they say nothing. And if they say nothing, people love to say no! And once you get them down the path of saying no, before you know it, they are going to say no, and they're going to leave the call.

You have to control the process, which is why I want somebody who has sales experience setting appointments specifically if they have appointment setting experience even better. Okay, let them know the process. This again was another highlighted section. This is a memorization section. What I mean by that is in many cases, your law firm will send a confirmation email that you'll want them to give, you'll give them directions on how to get to the firm.

It's going to have a link to some directions. In addition, we'll send you an email that will also have linked to directions as well as a link to the book that we talked about that Mr. Attorney Smith wrote. You can look at that right away. I'm also going to send you the book in the mail with some other information that you might find interesting.

You should have that within the next 24 hours. Don't worry if that doesn't show up until after your appointment. That's okay. And finally, I want you to know that at our firm, we like to remind you by the phone. We like the in person touch. And so we'll, somebody will be giving you a call to remind you about your appointment.

It bridges into the next question, which is the, do you promise? So I just told them all the things I'm going to do. And I say, now, Mr. Smith, just real quick, I want you to know that we don't take these appointments lightly, and Mr., Attorney Jones only has so many spots, I just, if you could make me a quick promise, if for whatever reason you can't make it to the appointment, would you please be sure to call us and let us know?

Yes, you have to say promise. Okay, because if you don't say promise. We don't trigger the psychological advantage the promise gives inside of the human brain. Humans keep their promises for the most part. And so when we ask them to promise something they know psychologically that this is a big deal. And if they can't make it they are going to call you and reschedule and more likely than not. They are just going to show up because they made a promise to you.

Ask the promise question. Promise you it will work. Finally, recapping the relationship. Recapping the relationship is this. This is where we basically take the problem that they told us they had. So we found out that they have a DUI. We found out that they have a nursing license and they've got, they're married and kids.

And so what we've just done is we've let Mr. Smith know that we've been listening to him. Because nobody listens to anybody anymore. And we've let Mr. Smith know that his situation is important to us. And we've just put a tidy little bow on the entire process. And what happens when you do that is people show up to their appointments.

By the way, if anybody from 4iiz is on the call, if you're listening, it's a great idea if we can, if whatever they wrote in the relationship section, if they wrote something in there, we could have it show back up for them again. I don't know if we do that right now, but I think it's a great idea. I just thought of it.

Anyway, that's the 11 steps. Okay. The 11 steps. Upsetting a console each and every one of them are vital and they stack on the one before we've got some time. It's top of the hour. I've set this for a little bit after i'm happy to answer anybody's question If you want to raise your hand you can if you're new in our world and you want to schedule a personalized practice growth plan with us to see how your firm is ranking kind of in the realm of this 11 steps or anything regarding systems.

Any questions? Oh, there we go. Translating. No questions. Just a comment. The 11 steps work. Great. Thank you. Let's see, Fran. Let me unmute you. Oh, Hey Richard. Can you hear me? I got you. Yes, ma'am. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what 4iiz does with regard to the scripting, because I've talked to them just a little tiny bit, but I'm not clear on what their software does.

They use a database on the back end and what happens is when the phone rings the screen pops up for the person answering the phone, and it just walks them through step by step. And so the most important part about 4iiz, the reason Bert designed it was, he found when he used the 11 steps, the conversion went up.

But when he found when they, his staff, when his conversions went down, he goes, well, I wait, we're using the 11 steps. Why do the conversions go down? And then he pulled the calls to inspect his staff like I teach him to do. And he found his staff stopped using the 11 steps for whatever reasons. They just forgot.

So it forces compliance to stick to the eleven steps. And the eleven steps have a script there for them to read from until they've memorized it and they own it. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Thank you. You're welcome. Anything else on that? Not for me. Okay, great. All right we'll mute Fran. I'll lower Fran's hand.

Anybody else have a question? Let's see promise the question works. There's no written book Oh, if there's no okay, so Pierce if there's no written book you skip this step. Yeah, but you know what Pierce I would say like if you don't have a book maybe you've written an article or maybe you have a, maybe a blog post that you've written or somebody's written for you.

So feel free to use whatever you have I'm a fan of a book. If you're in my partner's club program, I'm a fan of the book so much. I actually wrote the books for you. You get them as being a part of our world. But if you don't have the book and you have something else, use that if you don't have something else, then take it out for now.

But I would recommend finding a way to adding this in. I mean, it's a whole part of another system called the lead generation machine where we use a lead magnet to generate more leads. But yeah, if you have nothing, skip it and it's okay just know that it's a piece that it will help.

It is not vital, I think what you're really asking or what I'm going to answer, maybe you didn't ask this, but it's not vital to the 11 steps working, but it does add a tremendous amount of juice. From the squeeze. All right, let's see. Dalia, thank you. I promise the question works. Miracles. Very helpful.

You get a transcript of this and it'll be up on the dashboard for you. You know, I think we put last month's up the next month or whatever. If you're not a member in our world and you want a copy of this you'll get an email. Later that says you can email me the Richard at TheRichardJames.com that's Richard at TheRichardJames.com and I'm happy to get you a recording of this. No problem. Any suggestions to fill dead air while inputting information? Yeah, great. Great question. Mr. or Mrs. Turner. Great question. So When you have dead air, I don't often have dead air. I've got a lot of hot air, I'm told, but it happens.

Just tell them in the beginning of the call when you're doing your introduction just add in there and by the way as we're talking I'm gonna either be taking some notes or filling out some information. So if you hear some dead air, that's why you hear it So I overcome the objection before it happens. That being said, I don't want a lot of dead air, but if I'm going to have some, I let them know in the beginning of the call that that's going to happen.

It's just, these kind of stick out in my head. Howard Snader used to answer all of his own phone, criminal guy. So he thought it was really important that he answered his own phone. And not just like DUI stuff, like felonies, murders, you know, all sorts of stuff, right? Answered his own phone. And he was scheduling about 50% of his consult, or 50% of his leads into consults.

And he was doing that because, you know, they would call while he was in court and he'd call them back later that night. First of all, his life was a mess. It never worked the way that he wanted to. Everything was upside down. Most importantly, he wasn't getting back to people in a timely manner.

Now, the reason why I'll actually believe it. It's because back then Howard was actually getting all of his leads from referrals because many of his lead sources that dried up his website got whacked by Google. He didn't have any other direct mail and any other lead sources today. He's got a few of them, but then he didn't.

And so he was getting most of his leads by referral. So I don't doubt that all of his leads were scheduling into appointments. They had somebody else do it. I promise you it's the number one thing you want to do to improve your business. You stop answering the new inbound calls. I know it's tough. I know you're going to believe nobody else can do it like you can.

As my good friend, Scott David Stewart, attorney out of Phoenix would say. If you're going to build your law firm into a business and you want to gain your freedom, you're going to have to become okay with the fact that other people are going to do it about 85 to 90% as good as you are. And that's got to be okay.

Okay, that kind of sucks, but I get it. Yeah, it'd be ideal, right? So i've done it, you know, I own funeral homes for 12 years So I was on call 24 hours a day seven days a week. My wife is what is a licensed nurse for years. She was either on call or had nurses that were on call for her it's a living hell.

Nobody wants to do it. It's a pain in the ass Excuse my language as to who's going to take the phone that night it's just miserable experience. If your calls have really, really high value volumes and you really get a lot of after hours calls that are going to convert, it may be a strategy that you need to implement.

I will say this though. If you're going to use an answering service, whoever they are, don't assume just because they answered the call and set an appointment or whatever that they actually follow these 11 steps because they usually won't be able to for lots and lots of reasons. So you want to make sure you nurture that lead after it comes in by somebody else in your firm calling them back even the next morning to reaffirm the appointment, to rebuild those 11 steps again, you want to run through those 11 steps, even having the answering service answer it.

Obtain answering server. That does not know 11 step. Yeah. Does 4iiz allow for calls to be transferred to a different number? Sure. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. 4iiz is just using the power of your voice system. So it just ties in and all the power you have with your voice system and more comes with the 4iiz capability.

So they weren't open on nights and weekends initially. And my answer was, well, why? Well, because you know, law firms are pretty much nine to five. And I said, yeah, but our clients aren't nine to five. So I initially was open a one night a week and I was open for four hours on a Saturday. I ended up two nights a week after the two and a half years, I was open to two nights a week and on Saturdays.

So that's why our show rate was so bad, which meant. We could very well schedule five or six appointments on a Saturday and maybe we'd get skunked on a Saturday which would really tick off the attorney or we'd schedule some appointments for a night and people would get, wouldn't show and the attorney would get really ticked off.

So what? I mean, it sucks. Now, the good news is it wasn't the owner of the firm. It was an attorney that I employed and they weren't happy with me, but that's the gig. We're in the consumer business. And we did everything we could to try to make sure the people showed up. But I don't know the exact math, but it wouldn't surprise me.

A night and weekend appointment and listen, it wasn't fun for me as the business manager. I was I worked from home but I would get on the phone I get on my computer and I had cameras in all the offices with microphones and so I would listen to the consults and I would listen to. What was going on in the office and I would inspect what's going on in the office and I had to be doing that. On Saturday morning either me or the owner would take turns watching from the house to make sure everything was working the way we wanted to work.

I mean that's a pain in the neck, but I was committed to building the most prestigious law firm in Phoenix that was going to serve our clients and I was committed to serving as many as we possibly could and you know, within by year two and a half, we were serving 125 families a month.

If you're a partners club member or associate member, junior partners club member of ours, This will be posted on the queue. You will get a transcript of this. You'll get a recording on this for you to play in Automobile University. If anybody has any questions or follow ups on this or they want more, don't forget if you're a junior partners club or your partners club, you have access to your staff trained.

That's the program I ran for a couple of years where I have actual trainings of people of live firms with live calls that I did and that's a really great resource for you to tie into. I really highly suggest that you tie into that. Ron, that was kind of you to say. Great job. I do my best for you at all times.

You get the most of me, even when it's chilly in Phoenix and I got to bring the East Coast into everybody's world. All right, everybody. Make it a great day. Hope it's warmer where you are than it is where I am. See you next time.