USING INFORMATION TO MARKET AN LNC PRACTICE PAT IYER www.patiyer.com USING INFORMATION TO MARKET an LNC Practice Using Information to Market a Legal Nurse Consulting Practice by Pat Iyer These are advanced marketing techniques you may use to market your services to lawyers and law firms and get new lawyers to pay attention to you. I will also cover the process of nurturing the clients that you have to stay in front of them so that they don't call the next nurse consultant who just happened to send them a brochure. Many legal nurse consultants market by sending out sales letters and follow with phone calls to get an appointment. In this approach, the LNC hopes the attorney will pick out him or her over all of the other LNCs who are also sending mail to the attorney. This chapter looks at the secrets of information marketing, which provides an alternative way to approach attorneys. It is based on the concept that you demonstrate the value of your services when you provide helpful information to attorneys. The techniques in this chapter take work. They are more time-consuming than doing mailings. But they work. Work Product First and foremost, the most effective marketing strategy is to have a well written and presented work product. All of the advanced marketing secrets in this book will not do you any good if you are not excellent at your craft. You will get calls from attorneys who have seen your reports and want to hire you. When I asked a client for a comment about the importance of writing skills he said, “It’s important to remember that a report that a legal nurse consultant or expert writes, could be seen by ten or twelve attorneys over the course of the litigation. You have that opportunity to impress other potential clients with your skills.” If you’ve written that report well; it’s free of typos; it’s got great content, and it shows your analytical ability, it is marketing for you. If it’s poorly written, it’s going to turn off other people, who could be potential purchasers of your service. 2 If you need to buff up your writing skills, get Patricia Iyer, Writing Handbook for Legal Nurse Consultants at www.patiyer.com. This almost 600 page book and two DVDs give you the tools to write proficiently. I also cover this subject in Honing Your Legal Nurse Consulting Skills, at www.patiyer.com Expertise We've built our business at Med League based on a combination of factors: my publications, success as an expert witness, the skills of the expert witnesses we provide, great customer service, a customer-oriented approach, newsletter mailings and exhibiting at trial lawyer conferences both regional and national, followed with mailings. How can legal nurse consultant demonstrate expertise? In addition to a sample work product and marketing messages, how does the legal nurse consultant get beyond the brochure mailing and the cold-calling into other methods of marketing? Notice Me, Notice Me! For most small business owners and legal nurse consultants who market, the marketing is sort of ad hoc. It typically is in the form of a brochure which is all about me, me, me, (that is the nurse consultant). He or she typically touts how many years they've been doing it, where they went to school and how many degrees and initials they have after their name. That style of marketing consists of the LNC just begging to be noticed and hoping when that brochure comes across the attorney’s desk, that he or she actually has a need that day. At a National Speakers Association Conference, I heard Orvel Ray Wilson, one of the people who co-authored Levinson, Smith and Wilson, Guerrilla Marketing, talk about your marketing materials. Every time you see the word "I", figure out how to use the word "you" instead. He was very adamant about get rid of the "I,"I,"I," focus. This “notice me” approach is contrasted with information marketing, which is creating something that makes the attorney think that you are the wise man or woman at the top of the mountain. You do that by not telling the attorney all about you, but by providing information that is helpful to the attorney. For legal nurse consultants most small business marketing and advertising practices in general just are not that effective. Apple or Allstate can spend millions and millions and millions and people will recognize your brand and your name. But if you're one of us, mom, dad, running a small business trying to make do, we really have to figure out how to get attention. We need to figure out how to really deliver a value before somebody actually needs us. When that time comes and that case comes into the attorney’s office, you want to be the only one she is thinking of. This results in more predictable success than 3 sending a brochure here or a little gadget here, or the attorney seeing you at a conference someplace where you're at a table as an exhibitor. Recognize the Needs of Prospects Legal nurse consultants have huge knowledge about the things lawyers need help with, so how can you really position yourself as an expert? This chapter offers several suggestions of how to use the information marketing approach. For example, does your website contain the most frequently asked questions that you get from your clients versus a picture of a gavel, stethescope, courthouse, and you? By providing answers to frequently asked questions, you are saying to the market you know what's running through their heads; you know what questions they have. What you are trying to do is instantly provide the answers to those questions and give your client a way to raise her hand and tell you who she is and ask for more information. Here is a methodology for crafting messages to your prospect. First do research. Look at every single legal nurse consultant website and brochure, booklet, whatever they have that you can find. You want to know what messages are being sent to the marketplace. Look at the common themes, and determine how you can be different. Think of your prospect’s problems. Here are three examples: 1. An attorney sitting in the office with cases, some of which involve areas of medicine, typically needs to get up to speed on a certain area of medicine. She may have a medical malpractice case and wants to know what's involved from a scientific or standard of care perspective. She has to explain that to the client in a relatively efficient way. That's the problem running through her head. 2. Another problem that might run through the attorney’s head is, "I've got all these cases and they're getting backed up. I get new sets of medical records coming in every day and I don't have time to go through them all. I can't read half of them because their handwriting is bad. The electronic medical records are a mess because all they're doing is cutting and pasting." So the second problem would be the attorney needs somebody who can take all of those off of her desk and give her something that she can read and understand and explain to an insurance adjuster and client. 3. The third big problem that preoccupies the plaintiff attorney (in particular) is, "The insurance industry and the guys I'm up against, they all have unlimited funds. They seem to have unlimited experts. I need somebody who can actually go out and do the hard work that's involved in getting legitimate expert witnesses.” 4 The attorney really does not care about your background. She does not care about your big long list of services if it isn't emphasizing one of these three problems as examples of her needs. In fact, the more services you list on the front end of your marketing, the more you shout, "I'm just very average and I'm just like everybody else." She does not really care about your guarantee. She just needs work taken off of her desk. You can certainly show to your lawyer clients your breadth of services and your whole team later, but right now she has problems she needs solved. She is concerned about doing all of this efficiently. She knows the high costs of litigation. It does not do the attorney much good to have a legal nurse consultant track down an expert who either isn't qualified to testify or who she pays a bunch of money to and then she finds out that the doctor would never testify for a plaintiff or he hasn't done an operation in 14 years. The attorney is relying on a legal nurse consultant to solve those problems for her before they get to her because what she needs upfront is good medical information, quality experts, and someone to explain this all to her. Marketing Materials Given the need to assure the attorney that you understand his problems, your materials should say something like, "You and I both know those medical files are piling up on your desk just waiting for you or some young lawyer assistant who doesn't know any more medicine then you to digest them. We can make it easy for you." Demonstrate your expertise by showing what your timeline product looks like. Show the attorney that when you deliver a report it's easy to comprehend, even for a person who does not know anything about medicine.