In Parts 1 and 2 of this five part series I explained the psychological problem many lawyers face that inhibits their relationship building marketing. It’s that their ‘ego’ which doesn’t want to hear the word ‘no’ rules the roost. And the ego provides many good reasons to avoid ‘no’. So the lawyer who wants to market more needs some ‘workarounds’.

The first workaround was to Make Marketing A Time Management Policy and the second was to Be An Evangelist For Yourself. Here is another idea.

Play Games With Yourself.

The idea here is to change the focus of what you’re doing. When marketing instead of thinking of yourself as a marketer, think of yourself as a production line supervisor. Your objective becomes to make a certain number of contacts per day or session. The principle is that if you make enough contacts (read, kick up enough dust) the law of averages will turn your way and you will get your fair share of success. Obviously quality is important in contact, but generally speaking if you’re reading this article you probably have enough human relations skills that they’ll carry you if you focus on quantity of contacts.

Step one is to decide what your production target is. I suggest picking a number arbitrarily so that your ego is not involved in the decision. For example you could decide to make 37 cold, warm or follow up contacts every week. That means you would either see, talk to, leave messages for or write to 37 people every week. This might include really pleasant contacts like breakfast, a mid morning relationship building coffee, lunch or dinner. Or it might be tough slogging, cold calling a list of “suspects” (people you suspect could be clients), most of whom are not interested. This is not about what you do. It is about quantity of doing. By the way as you do more you’ll learn more about what works for you. Some people never learn their optimal marketing technique because they never fail, because they don’t try enough alternatives.

Program in a reward for when you finish your allotted number of contacts. Your goal is train yourself to be motivated to make the calls. The reward could be almost anything from a possession like a book, food like ice cream or a twenty minute personal and pleasurable phone call with a friend or loved one. If you do something nice for yourself everyday as a reward, you’ll train yourself to be motivated to do the work.

The last element in playing games with yourself is to create a scorecard. This might be as simple as a diary or as elaborate as a big chart on the wall of your office. The last idea is nice because every time you look at the chart you’ll be reminded of your past success and that will motivate you to try and try again.

 In the next articles in this series I will lay out two more things you can do to overcome call reluctance and market yourself more.

Jerome Shore is an Executive Coach in Toronto, Canada. Clients to look to Jerome for help with Marketing, Leadership and Stress Management. He can be reached at coach@coachingclinic.com or 1-416-787-5555.