This past weekend I attended a tradeshow promoting Alert Communications’ attorney answering services. Based on the traffic at our booth, I’d say it was very successful. Many well-qualified candidates interested in using our services stopped by to ask questions and learn more. But since I would like some sales figures to confirm our success, I won’t make a final decision until we’ve done some follow up, and I see those final numbers in a few weeks or a month.
As I said, we had a lot of traffic. The people were very nice and had a lot of great questions to ask us. Are you available 24/7 Do your agents speak Spanish? Can you schedule appointments for me, and how do you do it? What makes your service different from other call centers/answering services?
All the visitors spent a lot of time explaining their situation and gave us a chance to tell them how our lawyer answering services could truly help them. But guess what the most popular question was — How much is it?
That same question was asked in a variety of ways. I quoted rates, explained our services are month to month and did my best to help them see our value. I made a point of explaining that our attorney answering services are designed to help them capture new clients they might otherwise lose. And I pointed out that additional business would pay for the cost of our services. I was doing a good job, but not nearly as good a job as my existing clients did for me.
It was great! THEY were great! Many of our clients stopped by our booth to say hello and tell us what a great job we do. On several occasions, I had 5-10 people at my booth when an Alert client stopped by to sing our praises. This was live, word-of-mouth advertising that was better than anything I could possibly say to prospective clients.
Our current clients explained how great our staff is, how friendly they are, how our account managers help them and — best of all — how they had no idea how many calls they were missing until they started using our services. They went on to say their practices were growing because they were no longer missing those calls. If only my cell phone shot video, I would have some great video testimonials for our Web site!
While there are any number of effective online, electronic and printed ways to advertise in today’s business world, I have to admit there’s still nothing that beats the impact of word-of-mouth advertising.
If you don’t know what your clients are saying about you, it’s time to go find out.
Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications. Alert Communications is a 24/7 bilingual inbound call center, specializing in professional attorney answering, virtual receptionist, Spanish answering and business answering solutions.
