marketing strategies

One of the marketing strategies I teach in the CLNC^® Certification Program is to network with everyone who comes within three feet of you. In this quick video, Catherine Cass, RN, CLNC shares how she used this marketing strategy right out of the Core Curriculum for Legal Nurse Consulting^® textbook to land a lucrative testifying expert position – even before she’d left the CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminar in Las Vegas.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Success Is Inside!

Phil Newman, RN, CCRN, CLNC, shares how he applies the old “lunch and learn” concept to attorneys. He also discusses how to get into the offices of attorney-prospects after meeting them at his legal conference exhibits.

 
Congratulations, Phil and thanks for sharing two effective marketing strategies for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants.

Success Is Inside!

Exhibiting is one of the most effective marketing strategies for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, but only if you follow up. After any event (seminar or conference), the attorney-prospect is going back home to his hectic routines. No matter how much you hit it off in person, you will need to be persistent in your follow-up to recapture the attention you had when the attorney was thinking about you and your CLNC^® services, not about upcoming depositions, trials or briefs.

Certified Legal Nurse Consultant Dorene Goldstein proves how following up paid off big for her and will for you too:

“I spent more than a year marketing to a group of attorneys who are now among my biggest clients. I met them while exhibiting at a legal conference and they expressed interest in my CLNC^® services. After the conference, I followed up with a phone call. The next month I did the same. Six more calls and six months later, when most people would have given up, I made the decision to continue to pursue these potential attorney-clients because I knew they were hot prospects, even if they didn’t know it. All I needed to do was get into their office and show them how I could help them with their medical-related cases.

My persistence paid off when one attorney-prospect took my call. I was ready with my script and set up an appointment to meet him in his office. Today they are my biggest client. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d given up. I learned from this experience that when you continue to follow up to pursue a big opportunity, it will pay off big!”

Dorene Goldstein, RNC, CLNC

Success Is Inside!

Like most women, I’m a sucker for a gift with purchase (GWP) at a makeup counter. I never met a GWP offer I could refuse, so I try to steer clear of the mall when I know they’re being offered. Tom’s been shopping with me so many times that if I forget to ask for my GWP, he’ll often pipe in before we close the transaction with “is there a gift with that?”

I have a great sales rep, Lisa, who I’ve known for a long time. Once, she tried to sell me a new product which I refused. To my surprise, when I got home that very product was in my bag! That’s right, the actual product, not the small sample of it. She’d even tucked in a note telling me she was sure I would love it. I had no choice but to experience it and now I’m a believer. That free gift turned out not to be free at all because I love this product so much I’ll probably be buying it for the rest of my life or its life.

This same marketing strategy works for your legal nurse consulting business too. You should be educating your attorney-clients about every one of the 32 CLNC^® services you offer. If they’re stuck on using the same 3-5 CLNC^® services, gift them, and I don’t just mean a small sample. Go ahead and do that whole set of requests for production, (not just 5 examples of what you are able to do). Remember not to bill them for it, but remember the small note that reminds them that this time it’s a gift. And this is a gift that should bring you a huge return. If you do it well, the attorney will be hooked and expecting it (for your regular fee of course) on the next case and every case thereafter.

I am certain that if Lisa had never given me the product, I would never have tried it. She is smart enough to know that sometimes even a sample is not good enough. I had to fully experience the product to fully appreciate it. One of those tiny two-use samples wouldn’t have converted me like having the full-blown experience.

If you believe strongly in what you have to offer, you’ll find a way to get a CLNC^® GWP into the hands of your attorney-clients. Create and deliver your CLNC^® GWP today. Warning – if your attorney-clients like it too much, you may not have time for your own shopping anymore.

Success Is Inside!

On February 4th I gave an assignment for all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants attending the 2009 NACLNC^® Conference to go see the movie Slumdog Millionaire and to identify Jamal’s maverick entrepreneurial moves. For those of you who couldn’t join us in San Antonio, read the brief overview of my conference opening below.

I will start by confessing that the only reason I saw the movie was because of the acclaim it was receiving. Frankly, I didn’t have the high hopes for Slumdog Millionaire that the critics had. It was directed by Danny Boyle and the last movie of his – Trainspotting – I walked out of.

Set in Mumbai, India, Slumdog Millionaire unravels the main character Jamal, who lives in a slum and against all odds, escapes by evolving into a true entrepreneurial maverick. The movie opened with a torture scene and just when I was packing up my popcorn to leave, suddenly the scene switches to Jamal, as a little kid, diving into a filthy toilet, and before I knew it, I’m sitting back down, laughing so hard I’m falling out of my seat.

What made it funny is – it isn’t even a toilet. It’s a squat hole with a 4-foot drop into a pit – filled with you know what.

Locked in the outhouse for this squat hole, Jamal’s first maverick move is when he plunges himself through the squat hole and literally, into the sh*t. Covered head-to-toe with excrement he uses that to his advantage to push his way through a crowd and ask a famous Indian movie star for his autograph.

And some of you are afraid to walk up to an attorney in your best suit and ask for a case.

Then, after losing his mother at age 5, he and his brother survive by scavenging dumps for scrap materials to sell.

You already know that some of the best marketing strategies are free. But when’s the last time you made a maverick move and scavenged your old attorney-clients for new cases?

Soon the brothers are abducted by a gangster who steals children off the street with the plan of maiming them and sending them back out to beg. Jamal doesn’t mind begging – but he’s not about to settle for being maimed, so he and his brother find a maverick way to escape.

Let me ask you, are you settling and accepting something in your CLNC^® business that you shouldn’t?

We next see Jamal stealing shoes at the Taj Mahal to resell in the market.

Overhearing the guides taking tourists around the Taj, Jamal, in another maverick move, promotes himself to self-professed and self-educated tour guide, filling the tourists with facts he makes up as he goes along.

When’s the last time you tackled something that you’re not an expert on? That’s maverick.

As an uneducated young adult, he works as a “tea wallah” delivering refreshments to employees in a call center. A job he uses in true maverick manner to locate his missing brother and, against all odds, to catapult himself onto the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

On the show, the host secretly tells him the answer to a question but he doesn’t trust it. He goes with his gut and this uneducated slumdog chooses a different answer instead – and wins. That’s a true maverick.

When is the last time you ignored someone’s “expert” advice and came out the winner?

Now I’m not advocating you start running scams on your attorney-clients or make uneducated guesses about your cases. We will leave that to your competitors.

What struck me about the movie was the spirit, the life force and the maverick qualities embodied by Jamal. His entire life he faces terrible adversity and yet you don’t see that stopping him.

One door closes in his face and he forces another one open, each time using his life experiences to succeed.

Let me ask you: What would your CLNC^® business be like if you never gave up?

Now I know this is just a movie. But what if you allowed yourself to have Jamal’s maverick entrepreneurial spirit?

Like life, Slumdog Millionaire is not all feel-good. Parts of it are painfully harsh. But in the end, it’s the story of a little boy who teaches you the greatest tools of the entrepreneur – maverick persistence, hope and optimism.

Jamal never gave up hope, never gave up trying and never gave up on himself.

Two of the child-actors in the movie were actually from the slum and ended up, against impossible odds, walking the Red Carpet, spending a day at Disneyland and receiving a hero’s welcome when they returned to Mumbai. If opportunities are there for the slumdog Jamals of the world, why not for you?

This story reminds me that life is meant to be good.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

What’s stopping you?

Go out.

Get started today.

My motto is: We are nurses and we can do anything!

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Thanks again to all for a great Conference. Comment to share your best maverick entrepreneurial techniques you learned from Slumdog Millionaire.