Everywhere you turn there are potential clients ready to hear about your law practice. Are you ready to deliver a pitch that will impress and persuade them to consider doing business with you? Below are three secrets to crafting an elevator pitch that will make potential clients eager to learn more.

Secret #1 – Create Multiple Pitches

If you’re serious about creating a powerful elevator pitch, the first thing you must embrace is that no one pitch will fit every client. That’s why you need different pitches for different clients. Make a list of the type of clients you want to attract.

• What are their legal needs?
• Are those clients ordinary individuals or businesses?
• What is the income of those potential clients?
• How well does the potential client understand the law?

The profile of the clients you want to pitch will determine the content of your pitches.  For example, how you pitch a business bankruptcy client will be very different from how you pitch a consumer bankruptcy client. Give the wrong pitch to a client and you risk losing their business.

Secret #2 – Share The Reason Why You Practice Law

People do business with professionals who are passionate about what they do. For attorneys who want to craft extraordinary pitches, telling the tale of why you practice law is critical. Unfortunately, this is often challenging for some lawyers. Here are a few tips for incorporating this important information into your pitch.

• Tap into your original enthusiasm for law. Why did you go to law in the first place? And if you’ve changed practice areas since your first venture into the legal world, why did you choose the practice area you’re in right now?  Did you become a family law attorney because you want to help others through difficult divorces?  Did you become a bankruptcy attorney because you want to help financially struggling people get a fresh financial start?  Get honest about your motivation and transfer that authenticity to your pitch.
• Keep your explanation simple. While your process of discovering your motivation for doing what you do may include a lot of personal and professional history, this isn’t something you need (or should) share in full. In other words, don’t waste time explaining how your impoverished childhood became the impetus for your life as bankruptcy attorney. Instead, simply say “I help families use bankruptcy to escape the poverty debt creates.” That’s a lot more powerful that just saying you’re a bankruptcy attorney and rattling off your qualifications.

Secret #3 – Explain How You’re Different

When you’re pitching potential clients, you’re one in a million other attorneys trying to get their business. Even if you’re not directly there with other attorneys, you can safely assume that your target has heard a few lawyer pitches before especially if they’re in the middle of a legal crisis. To stand out from the “white noise” of lawyers offering their services, you must show how you’re different from everyone else. There are so many ways to differentiate yourself from the pack, but it’s important that your unique position matter to the target. When crafting your pitch, identify all of the ways that you are different from the average attorney. Do you have more experience? Do you have a unique life experience that puts you in a better position you to help the client? Are you faster? Are you cheaper? Do you services that are more personalized than the average attorney? Oftentimes there are several ways that you’re different, so when you’re delivering your pitch be prepared to highlight the difference you believe will matter to the target. For example, if a potential client lets you know that they’re having trouble finding an attorney because most of them are “legal mills” then you know that your personalized service is something that will matter to that person.

Crafting a powerful pitch will give you a serious advantage when trying to win over new clients.

***

Chelsey Lambert is Vice President of Marketing & Communications at Smokeball, a provider of practice management software for small law firms, based in Chicago, IL. Her mission is to help attorneys, and legal professionals understand the technology that is available to them, how to use it, and the positive impacts it can have on their business. After leaving her role as a Practice Management Advisor for the Chicago Bar Association in 2014, she continues to speak and write for legal organizations across the US, on technology, hiring, marketing and small law firm best practices. In her spare time, she enjoys a good yoga class, volunteering, and taking in the sunshine on Chicago’s beautiful lakeshore.