Estate planning attorneys, stop spilling your candy. No more providing unpaid consulting. Why is it that so many estate planning and elder law attorneys feel the need to spend so much time educating their clients, whether in their marketing or in their sales meetings? Even I think it stems from the belief that if a client just becomes educated, if they fully understand the concepts of estate planning and elder law, that making a decision to move forward with the plan will become obvious. But is this true? Let's be honest. If your prospects came into your office and they were fully educated on all of these details and all of these different scenarios of how they could potentially plan, they would be an estate planning attorney and not be in your office. Listen, it's not their intention. It's not their goal when they engage with your marketing or when they engage with you in an initial meeting. It's not their goal to leave your office with their own JD so that they can go home and draft their own estate plans. That's not why they're coming to you. They're coming to you because they're not educated, because they can't draft their plans on their own, and an hour-long meeting is not going to be enough for you to shove the years of experience and degree that you've accumulated over the years into their brain. It's just not going to happen. But why do so many attorneys persist? I think it goes back to just the traditional model, and the traditional understanding of what is up here is of value. So I'm going to put that out there and then, once you see the value, you'll want to move forward. It'll be obvious to get an estate plan, a trust, whatever it might be, whatever the prospect has learned through the educational process.

But this just isn't true, my friends. What motivates people? What's the issue at hand? And it's not that the prospect is uneducated. Instead, it's that they haven't made a decision yet to move forward. Whatever the issue is in their life hasn't become a must yet that they need to make that decision to move forward. So, as an estate planning attorney, our job, your job, is not to educate the prospect. You don't need to give away hours of time educating your prospect about the different aspects of estate planning. Instead, they need to educate you. You need to learn from them what's important to them. You need to learn from them who's impacted by their decisions. You need to learn from them how long this has been going on. How long have they been worrying about this. What are the consequences? What's day-to-day like? What's the future look like if they continue down the same path of not planning, if they let these things fester, if things play out how they typically play out, what's the consequence? Your prospect needs to have clarity on those things and provide that clarity to you, and then, once we have that value from the prospect, once we have that information now, we can connect the dots.

I think a lot of times we fall into trouble when we try to put the cart before the horse. We tell the prospect hey, get educated, here's everything you need to know. In fact, if they visit your website, what are we telling them? Well, in most instances, when prospects visit an attorney's website, it says we do estate planning, we do probate, we do elder law, we do special needs or whatever the thing is. And then there's information about that practice area how a trust works, the difference between a trust and a will, what probate's like, when does a state go through probate? That's not what they're looking for. That's not going to motivate them. There are other reasons why they're visiting that site and the fact that they don't have a trust is not the number one reason. They're wanting a trust to do something for them. The trust is a means to an end, so we have to find out what the end is and lead with that.

Whether it's in our marketing material that'd be, your Facebook posts, your website content, your blog articles, your email content, what you put out there onto LinkedIn, if you're doing a podcast, if you're shooting videos on YouTube everything needs to be about that end result. So think about your prospects. What are they going through? What stage of life are they in? Maybe think about the young family with minor children. What are they concerned about? Think about the family with adult children. What are they concerned about? Think about the folks that are nearing retirement. What's their worry? Think about the folks caring for an aging parent. What's their worry? Think about the folks caring for an aging parent. What's their worry? Think about the aging spouse. What's on their mind? What's keeping them up at night?

If you can diagnose these things, which you should be able to do as an estate planning attorney start thinking about those issues of personal impact. They're down there, below the service level problems, and they're down there below the surface level problems, and they're down there below the intellectual reasons. So you have to get past both of those to the issues that really matter to people. And when you do that, your firm is going to be completely differentiated from everybody else. What's the number one way that prospects make their decision? When everybody else looks the same, when all of the attorneys are saying here's what you need to know about estate planning, here's how many years of experience I have, what do you think? Well, how is that prospect supposed to decide? Well, I'll tell you the number one way is to call and say how much do you charge for an estate plan?

When we focus on spilling our candy, when we provide this unpaid consulting, when we put the education before the prospect, we put the education before the needs of the prospect and what they're wanting to accomplish, we put the cart before the horse and we plant a seed in the prospect's mind of I can't make a decision yet, and if I do make a decision, I want to find the cheapest option. That's the mentality that we put into our prospect's minds when we market in that way. So if you're seeing prospects coming in and they're very concerned about the price, they want to know the cost. Seeing prospects coming in and they're very concerned about the price, they want to know the cost of the program. If they're very concerned about being able to make a decision, they don't have quite enough information yet. They need to think about it a little bit more. They need to do more research, they need to consult another professional, they want to get a second opinion. They do that because they've been overwhelmed, overloaded with education and information. And if they have any conception that maybe they've missed something or they misunderstood something or they dazed off a little bit while you were talking and providing this very important information information if they feel like they didn't accumulate an A in that professor-student frame, if they feel like they aren't able to pass the test, they are not going to make a decision.

Listen, folks know a lot about themselves and very little about estate planning. You need to get them talking about themselves. You need to speak on the issues in your marketing that speaks to those issues of personal impact so it grabs their attention. They can see a way out. They can see the solution is available to the problem that they're dealing with on the day-to-day. This is where power comes into your marketing.

Listen at Integrity Marketing Solutions. We understand these issues. We understand what causes fee pushback. We understand what causes people to want to think it over. What commoditizes a service like estate planning? And we avoid those things. We focus our attention on solving problems for prospects and presenting our clients as the solution.

Listen, at the end of the day, all the other estate planning attorneys out there are talking about what they do and how long they've been doing it. What are their credentials? That's what they do for their marketing. Our clients are different. Our clients say, hey, here's what you're probably going through, here's what you're going to be facing in the future, here's what you're going to be facing in the future and here's how you can solve it and find resolution and meet your goals and avoid all the bad stuff. We position the firm as the problem solver, more as the doctor instead of the professor.

So if you think about the frame of the conversation, if we're focused on education and our marketing and our sales opportunities, then we're setting the frame of hey, I'm the professor, you're the student, you pay attention, I'm going to educate you. Well, what's the transaction in that relationship? What's the next step that the student is supposed to do? Well, it's not make a decision, it's to just retain the information that was presented by the professor. That's the goal. So when you set that frame and you reinforce that frame in your marketing and your sales opportunities, when you're done providing the education, the prospect got what they came for, they got what they needed, they got the candy, they got the free consulting, they got the free information in the education and as a student, all you want to do is retain that.

Now, on the flip side of that, if we set the doctor frame where you're the physician and they are the patient, the natural progression of that, the natural order of that, is to for the doctor to diagnose by asking questions, poking around, does it hurt here, does it hurt there? How long has it been hurting there? What else is going on? Diagnose and then prescribe some sort of remedy, some sort of solution. The natural progression after that is for the prospect to take the medication or schedule the surgery or whatever the case may be. There's something for the patient to do beyond just retain the information. There's a prognosis, right. There's a prescription, there's action that needs to be followed, and it's just known and embedded into the psyche of every human. So make that change.

Recognize that you can't just give away all of your free information. Hold on to that. That stuff is valuable. But when you provide that information, when you provide the education, connect it to exactly what the prospect was talking about. Lead with those things in your marketing and you'll see the lead flow continue to come in consistently.

Better reviews the people that talk about how you solve this issue for them, not just that they had decent documents at a fair price. That's not the review we want. We want the review of Mr Smith. Attorney Smith took great care of me and my family made sure that I didn't have anything else to worry about. I have 100% confidence in the future of my legacy. That's the type of review that we want and that's what you'll get.

When you leave the candy in the bucket, don't spill it all over the table. Hold on to it until the end. Stop providing unpaid consulting, whether it be in your marketing or in your sales opportunities. Focus more on the prospect in front of you, what their issues are, what they're hoping to accomplish and what the consequences are of not moving forward with that plan. What happens if they don't? What happens if they do? Get your clients and your prospects clarity on that, both in your marketing and your sales opportunities, and you're on the road to success and winning. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you haven't already like, subscribe and follow for more tips on how to grow your estate planning practice profitably leveraging the internet. We'll see you later.