Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

To market yourself effectively, you need to have a unique selling proposition or "USP." This will differentiate you from other lawyers and raise your profile with potential clients. But actually originating new business happens during your follow-up steps, when you use your UFT or Unique Follow-Up Technique.

As a guest on the webinar "Follow-Up Strategies That Turn Meetings into Matters" presented by business development specialist David Ackert, I stressed that you need to have a follow-up schedule after the initial meeting with a potential client. It should include a carefully-timed series of record-keeping, thank-you and connecting activities. Key among those is your UFT.

Your UFT will be tailored to the situation. An effective Unique Follow-Up Technique is based on questions that you asked during the initial meeting about the other person's activities, interests and anniversaries. The information enables you, for example:

• To send congratulations about a workplace milestone.
• To invite the other person to a social event, mixer or presentation.
• To offer free training to give in-house lawyers CLE credit.

It has to be a value-added follow-up, so that you are giving something of value to the prospective client. If there is no value then the other person may view your follow-up as pestering. In the webinar, we covered a dozen UFTs but here are my favorite three:

• Give a magazine subscription about an interest the other person mentioned. For example when I learned that a prospective client liked to see Broadway plays in New York. Accordingly, I got him a subscription to the New Yorker, which reviews plays. Every week time the magazine arrived it represented a weekly reminder that I had listened to him and paid attention.
• Something special that you create.  I'm reminded of the partner in Chicago who would visit clients with cinnamon rolls that he personally baked. He would deliver them in person when he happened to be in the neighborhood, to the delight of everyone in the prospective client's office.
• A gift certificate for movie tickets for prospective clients – and their families.  For example if you give a person enough certificates to take their kids to the Muppets or Hugo, you've given them something that the entire family will appreciate.

What are some other examples of UFTs that you've tried?