Excellent marketing requires excellent metrics. That’s why it’s important to identify the source of every initial consultation. You’ve got to ask them how they found you. You can track everything if you try hard enough.

There are some great tools for measuring your marketing. Google Analytics, for example, is a great tool for measuring the effectiveness of your website.

But what about lunch? How do you measure the effectiveness of your referral source meetings? How do you know if you’re doing a good job helping other professionals make referrals to you?

You’ve got to carefully track your relationships with your referral sources. You need a record of every relationship and you need to track the clients generated by that relationship. You can do it with a simple spreadsheet or you can implement a relationship management system like Highrise or BatchBook.

Dig in to the stats as you gain data. Figure out where you’re winning and losing. Are you great at getting the referral source to send you business and weak at converting consults to clients? Are you wonderful at getting the referral sources to introduce you to other referral sources and poor at getting the referral sources to actually refer? You’ve got to dig in to find out where you’re succeeding and failing.

You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. You need information in order to modify your strategy and tactics. Lunch, just like most other marketing activities, is measurable.

Take the data and use it to improve your weaknesses and capitalize on your strengths. Think of lunch as a game and keep improving. Set goals and work to meet them. The greater your understanding of the metrics the faster you’ll see improvement in your performance.

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http://www.lugaluda.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mark-Dreier-mark-drier-mark-dreier-swindler-.jpgI know one personally. She’s a terrible lawyer. She can’t read and understand a court opinion. She misreads statutes. She’s an embarrassment in court. Her pleadings are poorly drafted. Her correspondence is filled with errors. She says things in chambers that make her look like an idiot. Her objections are overruled. Her court appearances are dominated by illogical arguments.

She’s a really crappy lawyer.

Her clients, however, love her. They refer business to her like crazy. She spends nearly nothing  on marketing and is making a freaking fortune. She can’t see a new client for weeks because she is solidly booked.

How is it that she is such a bad lawyer yet is so successful?

Here’s the deal. She does things that make it clear that she cares about her clients. She rants and raves in court, like a maniac, on behalf of her clients. She crosses over every line and gets personally involved with her clients. She laughs with her clients, she cries with her clients. She returns calls, she calls at night, she stays on the phone forever. She loves her clients and it shows. She knows it and her clients know it. She’d do anything to help them. They are her friends.

Her clients love her. They love her when she wins, they love her when she loses. They know she’s committed to their cause. They know she did her best, even when her best isn’t good enough.

It all makes me wonder whether she’s really a crappy lawyer or whether I have ideas about what’s important that might be irrelevant. Who sets the standard for crappy? Lawyers or clients? Maybe my idea of crappy doesn’t really matter?

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Happy Saturday! Every Saturday I publish links to some of the things I’ve come across that might interest you. These are things that caught my attention this week. I’m publishing these links without much comment so you’ll have to click on them if you’re curious. I also include a picture I like.

By the way, I’m going to be at ABA Techshow in Chicago and would love to chat with you if you’ll be there. I’ll also be, very briefly, at the ABA Family Law Section meeting in New Orleans. Let me know if I might see you at one of these events.

Dining Etiquette: Don’t Spit Food on Your Prospective Client and Other Basic Rules – another of my articles for SmallLaw on Technolawyer.

The Choice between Yes and Yes: A Psychological Revelation – old stuff that you should never forget.

How to Give Yourself a First-Class Online Business Education – great stuff.

Google’s Click-to-Call Advertising Goes National – folks keep telling me I’m wrong about the importance of mobile to our practices. I really think I’m right, but what do I know?

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Applications to Grow Your Business – great list of products that will help you get away from your dependence on the I.T. guys.

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