Most firms have a marketing plan they have not opened in a year. It was long, it was expensive, and it went straight into a drawer. Allan Dib wrote an entire book to fix that, and the fix starts with the format.
A plan you can see on one page is a plan you can share, update, and reference. A forty-page plan is a document you file and forget. If the plan is too heavy to look at, it stops being a plan.
Nine boxes, three phases
Allan’s framework is a single page split into nine boxes across three phases: before, during, and after.
Before is how people become aware you exist: your target market, your message, and your media. Who you serve, what you say, and where you say it.
During is what happens once someone raises a hand: capture the lead, nurture the lead, convert the lead.
After is where the real money is: deliver a world-class experience, increase client lifetime value, and generate referrals in a deliberate way.
The box most firms overwork
Ask a firm about its marketing and you will often hear the same thing. We get everything through referrals. In the nine-box model, referrals are box nine. A firm running only on referrals is working one box out of nine and hoping it holds.
Referrals are powerful, but they put your growth in someone else’s hands and can take ten to fifteen years to build into steady flow. As Allan puts it, the oxygen of business is cash flow. You have to control your own lead flow, not just wait to be sent work.
Be specific, and play the long game
Two ideas from the episode carry most of the weight for a law firm.
Be specific about who you serve. A prospect does not search for a lawyer. They search for a personal injury lawyer in their city. When your message is specific, the right person thinks that’s for me. When it tries to speak to everyone, no one feels chosen.
And nurture the people who are not ready yet. Only about 3% of your market is ready to hire today, and everyone fights over them. The larger group will be ready in thirty, sixty, ninety days, or two years. Stay useful and stay in front of them, and you become the firm they already know when the moment comes.
Sales as diagnosis
One more reframe worth keeping. Allan describes sales as diagnosis, not a script. You ask questions, the client talks most of the time, and by the end they have usually decided for themselves whether it is a fit. For lawyers who dislike the salesy part of intake, that is the whole unlock.
None of this requires you to become a marketer. It requires one page, filled in with specifics, and a plan you will actually open again.
If you want help turning your expertise into a marketing plan the right clients respond to, take a look at the Authority Tour (https://conroycreativecounsel.com/authority-tour/).
