Interview

A marketing strategy I teach in the CLNC^® Certification Program is to show the attorney what you can do. Telling is not enough. Carol Ann McLawhorn, RN, BSN, CLNC used this principle with an attorney-client who hired her to consult on a case and set a budget. Carol Ann knew she could do more, so she did just that.

Watch her video to see how the attorney responded.

Congratulations, Carol Ann!

Success Is Inside!

Vickie,

I live in Las Vegas but grew up in North Carolina and still have plenty of contacts there. Many of those contacts know attorneys. One friend even works at the courthouse. They have all offered to put me in touch with attorneys they know. Should I make a trip to North Carolina to interview these potential attorney-clients face-to-face or should I contact them by phone and email first?

Joseph, RN, CLNC

Hi Joseph,

Congratulations on recognizing that friends and contacts everywhere are valuable to expanding your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting business. Aim to set up 4-6 interviews over a 2-day period. Call or email the attorneys to schedule interview dates and times. You have a higher probability of successfully getting a case if you can get your foot in the door and meet the attorneys face-to-face. Alternatively, if the attorneys trust your contacts enough to hire you based on their references and an email, schedule a telephone call or Skype interview and go for it!

Congratulations on making the most of this great opportunity.

Success Is Inside!

Carol Ann McLawhorn, RN, BSN, CLNC shares a story about an unorthodox interviewing style she accidentally used with an attorney-prospect. While this is definitely NOT one of the interview styles we teach at Vickie Milazzo Institute, she did land a new attorney-client.

Watch Carol Ann as she bares all in this unrated video:

Congratulations, Carol Ann!

Success Is Inside!

When you walk into an attorney-prospect’s office you will want the attorney to view you as a professional who produces quality and professional work. To accomplish this goal, it pays to be prepared. One Certified Legal Nurse Consultant shared with me how she learned this lesson the hard way.

“The biggest mistake I ever made was with my first attorney interview. When I first sat down, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had forgotten how to start the interview and how to sell my service as a CLNC^® consultant. The situation only got worse as the interview continued.

On my way out of his office empty-handed, I recalled the story about the minister who decided he would not prepare for his lesson, but would let God speak through him. Sunday morning came and when the minister got up to speak, God did speak to him. God said, “You are not prepared.” That was exactly how I felt, very unprepared. I thought I could waltz into the attorney’s office without practicing beforehand, and everything would go smoothly. But that’s not the way it works.

Before my next attorney interview, I re-listened to Vickie’s CLNC^® Certification Program and practiced interview questions, opening lines and closing comments. When I arrived for that interview, I was very prepared and I walked away with a case. Whatever the assignment, I have learned to always be prepared.”

Learn from one CLNC^® consultant’s mistake to ensure you walk out of your next attorney interview with a case.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share what you will do to prepare for your attorney-client interviews.

Marketing your CLNC^® business successfully to attorney-prospects and attorney-clients requires that you provide a safety net and build trust. Here are some strategies for achieving both:

1. Make a professional first impression. In doing so, you have begun to construct a safety net for the attorney-prospect, ensuring the attorney that he is making the right decision in hiring you for his medical-related cases.

2. Communicate. Listen carefully to the attorney-client’s needs and demonstrate your understanding of those needs as you proceed through the meeting. Ask questions to clarify specific points. Confirm the attorney-client’s expectations regarding the CLNC^® services you will provide and the schedule for its completion.

Stay in touch. Provide an easy way for the attorney to reach you and notify you of any changes in needs or the case. When you deliver your work product, make it clear that you are available to collaborate on any necessary additions or amendments.

3. Guarantee. This step may seem risky, but think about how much more secure you feel about purchasing when you know you can return a product that fails to meet your expectations. For example, if your report failed to meet your attorney-client’s expectations, wouldn’t you be eager to correct any problems? Then why not offer that guarantee up front, thus satisfying your client’s psychological need for security?

Guaranteeing satisfaction does not mean you would compromise the integrity of your opinion or work product by adding something you know is incorrect or misleading or by making inappropriate changes. Nor does it mean you guarantee your work product will win their case. It means you will make any corrections or additions needed to the research, wording or format to guarantee the client gets value for the dollars invested. You aren’t offering to revise your work product endlessly either. State a specific time period, say two weeks from the date of delivery, during which the guarantee is in effect.

4. Start Small. Before you get to those bigger projects and cases, you may have to build trust step-by-step. Customers generally are more comfortable starting a new relationship on a small scale. When a woman buys a new line of makeup, in addition to being sure the color is right for her, she wants to know if the makeup suits her skin type, contains sun protection and holds up during the day. Likewise, a new attorney-client wants to make sure your product will perform as expected. The attorney wants to know:
• Will your work product meet expectations?
• Will your report be supported by appropriate standards and research?
• How conscientiously will you meet deadlines?

A woman at the makeup counter might start out with a smaller container or trial size of a new product. Similarly, an attorney might suggest beginning with a brief report and ask for a quick turnaround. Recognize this as an important step in building a long-term relationship.

5. Deliver. Actions sell and quality counts. Your attorney-clients often deal with people who talk a good game but who don’t deliver on promises. By turning in a quality product on time, or even ahead of deadline, you reinforce that the attorney has made a wise buying decision and can depend on you for bigger and bigger projects and more medical-related cases.

When you provide a safety net and build trust, hard-sell is never necessary.

• Every time you present yourself with professionalism, you sell.
• Every time you listen intently and affirm the attorney-client’s expectations, you sell.
• Every time you deliver a quality product, you sell.

Every step of the way, you build into your attorney-client relationship a sense of trust and dependability – a safety net.

Beginning with that initial interview and that first small project, you can create a mutually satisfying, long-term business relationship. And a few loyal, lifetime attorney-clients will make your legal nurse consulting business prosper. You won’t need dozens. Soon you will find attorney-clients relying on you, recognizing your CLNC^® and nursing expertise and your ability to make them look good. They will begin to trust that without your help and expertise they could miss significant issues and even lose cases.

Success Is Inside!

Purchasing any service or product is an emotional event. A customer buys not primarily to own the item or have the service, but to meet emotional needs: to seek comfort, reduce stress, fulfill social needs, achieve something significant, change status or lifestyle or even invest in the future.

Your attorney-prospects are no different from any other retail shopper. For example, a woman shopping for lipstick at a makeup counter is satisfying the emotional need to feel good, look pretty or just indulge herself after a hard week at her job. When attorneys purchase your CLNC^® services, they are satisfying emotional needs that are high-stake such as:

• Properly representing their client,
• Winning the case,
• Attaining partnership status,
• Garnering referral business from other attorneys,
• Maintaining their comfortable lifestyle, and
• Fulfilling a deep desire to be a winner, not a loser.

They need to believe and validate that they are making a wise choice when they hire you. Your attorney-prospect is shopping and shopping is legal.

Understanding that successful attorneys use emotion in buying decisions just like the rest of us gives you an edge in marketing to them. Credentials and qualifications are nice, but that’s not why attorneys buy. What does sell is getting the attorney-prospect to connect emotionally with how your nursing experience and credentials will make a difference in his medical-related cases.

So how do you get the attorney to shop ’til he drops on your next interview? By tapping into the five senses.

1. Sight. First impressions are everything. As much as 55% of a decision is made before either person says a word. Fair or not, people size you up and form an impression of you within seconds of meeting you. We all do this. Remember that blind date you had years ago? You knew instantly, and before words were exchanged, whether you would have a good time or even go out again.

Are you neat or sloppy? Do you stand tall or slouch? Are you carrying an organizer or a handful of loose papers?

Before you go on any interview, take the time to check out your physical appearance. Dress professionally and conservatively. Pay attention to details – trim your nails, polish your shoes, and buy one powerful business outfit. Then stand tall and walk with confidence.

Pay equal attention to the appearance of your promotional package. A sloppy or amateur promotional package suggests that you are an amateur legal nurse consultant who will submit a poor quality work product. Use the promotional package developed by the Institute or hire a professional designer and copywriter. Your promotional package must look as good as you do.

2. Sound. Another 38% of a first impression comes from how we speak. When we’re nervous, we naturally tighten up and our voices turn squeaky. We talk too fast, stumble over our words or forget entirely what we intended to say.

Have a written checklist of points you want to make. Rehearse these main points well in advance of the interview. Read them again shortly before you enter the meeting. Then relax and concentrate on listening to the attorney. Taking your mind off yourself to pay attention to what the attorney is saying will help you relax. Focus on the attorney, not your state of discomfort and you will conduct a much stronger interview.

3. Taste. How do you respond when a prospect offers you coffee, tea or a soft drink? If the attorney is having something, I recommend you have something too. People associate positive feelings and emotions with their favorite drink, so go ahead and have the same drink unless it’s just not palatable to you. For example, a cup of hot tea symbolizes both relaxation and renewed energy to me. While accepting a drink may seem like you are imposing, it will not only relax you, but will also create an immediate bond between you and the attorney-prospect.

4. Smell. Avoid heavy perfumes and colognes. A scent you find delightful might turn another person’s stomach. Any heavily applied scent will be distracting. Usually, the best choice is to avoid perfume and cologne altogether.

5. Touch. Offer a firm handshake. Once you’ve finished with the introductions, confidently place your promotional package and sample work product in the attorney-prospect’s hands. Like trying on a lipstick color, sampling any product makes the buying decision easier. When the attorney touches your business card, introductory letter, brochure and sample work product, he sees and feels the professional quality you deliver.

One of the biggest mistakes I see beginning legal nurse consultants make is neglecting to put together hypothetical report samples. With your sample in the attorney’s hands, that attorney holds a report similar in size, weight, texture and content to the reports he needs and you can provide to help win cases.

The ability to give your attorney-prospect this hands-on, multi-sensory experience of your work product is the advantage of one-on-one selling. A smart CLNC^® consultant takes every opportunity to capitalize on this advantage to help the attorney-prospect make a positive decision.

Yes, shopping is legal, but make your next interview more than a shopping experience. Make it an emotional confirmation of the attorney’s need for your CLNC^® services and validate that you are an investment in the attorney’s legal practice. If you succeed in doing so, the attorney will shop ’til he drops with you and smile while he does so.

Shopping anyone?

Success Is Inside!

Okay, that’s a question that a lot of new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants might not know how to answer. In the world of digital media and MP3s, we no longer have to deal with skips in the middle of a song like we did when we listened to CDs or LPs. I’m so glad the days are gone that I have to worry about washing the lotion off my hands before handling my Prince CDs, or having to carefully slide an album like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” vinyl album into its sleeve and then into the album cover at just the right angle to keep it from catching and scratching one of the tracks.

Digital media and the iPod^® have not only changed how I listen to music, but also the way that I think of music. Since music has become ultra-portable, it’s changed air travel, working on the road and vacationing by giving me the ability to add a soundtrack to my life at any time that I want without disturbing other people. If this wasn’t the best invention in the world, I’m still waiting to see what it is going to be.

Most of us have our own soundtrack running in our heads and sometimes that soundtrack has a loop in it, causing us to hear the same information, right or wrong, over and over. Sometimes, that soundtrack has a skip in it and that skip causes us not to hear what the other person is saying over and over again. There’s a high potential for looping and skipping that can happen to legal nurse consultants too, and when it does, there’s a need to stop it.

As a CLNC^® consultant you’ve been trained to carefully listen to attorney-prospects when you’re in an interview, to relax and not to get so caught up in the soundtrack of your nervousness that the attorney becomes invisible to you.

If an attorney says “You’re hired,” you don’t respond “Thank you, but I have to finish explaining all 32 CLNC^® services I provide as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant” and then loop back into your script. You’ve got the job – stop, skip the script and start discussing the first case.

Likewise, have you ever fully and completely answered a question for a patient, friend, family member or other party but they didn’t listen to the answer and loop back to ask you the same question again? Or they make the same statement they just made and, no matter what response you make, they skip processing your response to loop and repeat the statement? They become so caught up with the looping in their heads that their soundtrack skips your answer.

In some situations, repetition can be entirely appropriate. I love listening to my twin brother Vince’s “True Hollywood stories” from our childhood in Louisiana. Each time he embellishes a little bit more and it’s fun calling him on those embellishments. One of my staff members has heard my “war stories” almost as many times as I have and to her credit she always laughs as if she’s hearing them for the first time.

But, there’s a big difference between repetition for its own sake and repetition due to lack of focus. I was mentoring a CLNC^® consultant over the telephone on some issues regarding her legal nurse consulting business. She kept trying to go back and rehash the issues we’d just discussed. I realized that if she was that unfocused with me, she would certainly be that way with any attorney-client or -prospect. I called her on it and challenged her to focus for our next telephone call by outlining her questions and checking them off after being answered and avoid the rehash. To her credit she did pretty well.

Recently at a live event I spent some time answering a woman’s questions. I went through all her concerns and questions and I thought she was satisified with my suggestions. To my surprise, the next day she asked me the same questions again. I politely told her that no matter how many times she asked me, my answers wouldn’t change. I later found out that after talking to me, she also approached Tom with the same questions. He politely told her to follow my advice. The internal loop of her soundtrack and story were causing skips in her listening and in her processing of the information she was receiving.

In your career as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you’ll run into plenty of situations where repetition is necessary in education or the case review process. But in other situations, before you start repeating yourself, ask yourself why and if it’s really necessary. It may not be. I repeat, ask yourself why you’re about to repeat and see if it’s really necessary. It may not be.

You will have many opportunities to loop and skip. I challenge you to be like an MP3 in your business and personal relationships for the next three days and let me know the results.

Success Is Inside!

Certified Legal Nurse Consultant David Kuntz

During my career as an ICU nurse, I was always looking for ways to better myself. I took and passed the CCRN exam, but to my dismay I received no recognition from the hospital administrators for this accomplishment. I tried management and found that I was working more hours and getting paid less than the nurses on my unit. Then something happened that changed my career. I tore a ligament in my hand while restraining a patient. I could no longer lift anything over 25 pounds. I was devastated. My ICU nursing career was over. I spent one and half years on light duty and was told that I had to find a different job or the hospital would settle with me. After months of searching, I landed a job in IT as a clinical analyst.

At home after my surgery I had time on my hands, or in my case – hand, so I started to search for different ways to use my nursing knowledge. I came across legal nurse consulting on one of my searches. I spent hours researching legal nurse consulting. The spark was lit and grew with every bad day I had.

It took me five years until I finally decided to just go for it. I enrolled in the CLNC^® Certification Program in July 2009 and immediately started the home-study course. I finished it in a week and was certified the following weekend. I then worked on the NACLNC^® Apprenticeship Program. It took me a little over a week to finish and at that point, I started getting my promotional materials, sample work products and letters refined and ready to send to attorneys.

I started sending out material toward the end of August using all of the techniques I learned from Vickie. One goal that was foremost in my mind was to have a case before I attended the CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Program in October.

I was nervous before I made my first phone call to an attorney, but I kept remembering that they are people just like everyone else and that really calmed me down. In that first call, I introduced myself and gave a brief synopsis of the material I had already sent. I asked for an appointment and the attorney said, “Sure, come in at 4:00pm.”

Now I was really nervous. I looked over the sample interview questions in the online NACLNC^® Community and realized that I knew this information. I met with the attorney and the interview went so well, he is sending me a medical-malpractice case.

Two weeks later, I called another attorney to follow-up on my promotional material. He told me he didn’t receive it, so I presented a short version of how I could assist him. He asked me to set up a meeting with his secretary. The next day I went to his office and he walked into the conference room with a case in his hands and a check for $1,500.00. Inside I was doing cartwheels yet I remained composed until I got in my car and was heading home. The following day I talked with a different attorney and he wants to use me on two cases.

From the end of August to the first week in October, I was able to obtain three attorney-clients.

My first goal was met. I followed what Vickie taught and used her techniques. If everyone follows what they learn in the CLNC^® Certification Program, they will be successful in this business. Vickie and Vickie Milazzo Institute have already done the hard work; all a student has to do is apply what they learn from the CNLC^® Certification Program.

Guest Blogger Profile

David Kuntz, RN, BSN, CLNC has 17 years of nursing experience. He is the owner of David Kuntz and Associates in western New Mexico and specializes in medical malpractice.

Alissa tells us in her video how her Certified Legal Nurse Consultant Certification made her stand out from hundreds of other candidates during the interviewing process and was a determining factor in getting her new job with a major insurance company. Congratulations Alissa!

Success Is Inside!

Sometimes we get so caught up in marketing to prospective clients that we forget one of the most lucrative marketing sources – our existing clients. Focusing your marketing efforts on your existing and prior clients will often yield a much higher return on your efforts than prospecting for new clients.

It takes time and effort to create a business relationship with a stranger. Creating and mailing your marketing packets, making phone calls, scheduling and attending interviews and doing the follow-up can swallow precious time you could be devoting to working on cases.

New Certified Legal Nurse Consultants will have to market to new attorneys, but even experienced legal nurse consultants sometimes forget to go back to those existing clients to ask for new business. We’re in a relationship business and I like to think of relationships with attorney-clients as long term. Once you’ve invested the marketing time and money to create a relationship, it is nothing short of criminal to abandon it.

If you’re serious about your CLNC^® business, it’s time to sit down and mark out an action plan for creating new business from old attorney-clients. They already know you so you can easily glide past the gatekeeper. Assuming you provided the excellent work product attorneys expect from CLNC^® consultants, the attorney should be happy to take your call.

Set a time to get together with the attorney. If the attorney is too busy for lunch, try a morning meeting and bring coffee and bagels. When you meet, remember your positioning strategies and your interview techniques. Focus the meeting on the attorney-client. Ask what kind of cases they’ve been working, what’s coming up and what their needs are.

Remind them you have a wide range of CLNC^® skills and offer to help in any way you can. Mention the fact that you belong to an association of more than 6,000 Certified Legal Nurse Consultants whom you can call on to quickly answer any question they may have. Be flexible and think on your feet. Every attorney has different needs and you might be surprised at the niches you have yet to fill (and may not have even thought of).

If the attorney is too busy to meet with you, send a handwritten note and attach an article they may find interesting, something on standards of care, changes in hospital policies (not your own) or let them know about non-reimbursement for “never events.”

Remind yourself that you already know this attorney so you’re not asking a favor, you’re not trying to establish a new relationship – you’re just retying the connection and seeing how you can help. Time spent remarketing will be rewarding for the attorney-client as well as for you.

Off to climb the right CLNC^® tree!

Success is Inside!