Reaching out to potential clients

Here’s what you should do if you’ve had head your head down for a few months finishing a large case or transaction and it feels like your referral base feels languid.  The single most effective effort will be for you to list everyone who referred you a case or whom you represented in the past couple years and get back in touch with them.  We’ve got a form on our website you can use to organize this effort – click here to download.

What is hard here is that you have to a good reason to reach out to every single one of these contacts… a reason other than “Hey, send me a case.” There are only three reasons to reach out that don’t look self-serving— to Invite the person somewhere they’d enthusiastically want to go, to Introduce them to someone they’d find personally or professionally helpful, or to send them Information that will help them with their day-to-day life or work.  These are the “three I’s”.  Avoid awkward random lunches and breakfasts that have no purpose other than your solicitation in exchange for buying your contact a burger.  Who enjoys that?

That it takes you a week or two to develop the list and then several weeks or a month to work through it makes sense.  Of course, once you get through the list you then have to set a time to again go back through it in about 180 days.  Your initial outreach is just the beginning of a never-ending cycle of contact.  Of course, a firm newsletter containing info on cases and issues, including those in your practice area, would be helpful in maintaining greater frequency of contact with all of these contacts so they don’t start referring matters elsewhere.