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Introduction and Welcome

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MPS: Hey, Law Firm Owner. Welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast today. We've got actually a special host, but I'm MPS.

Richard James: and I'm Richard James and MPS. Today, we're going to have a great conversation about the small big. It's a book by Cialdini that helps law firm owners figure out how to get massive results from small changes, not just in lead generation, not just in lead conversion, but actually in workflow, document harvesting, pricing, everything you can possibly imagine.

Our guest host, Will Grafton, is going to walk you through this step by step with his partner in crime, Blaine Elkers.

Understanding 'The Small Big'

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Attorney Will Grafton: We are here to talk about the small, big. Blaine had a great presentation of on the topic in Dallas. We're going to just start off with a quick video to introduce the topics. For those of you who haven't read it, we will be highlighting a couple of areas that you might be able to make a small adjustment in how you do things and get a big impact.

Psychological Studies and Influence

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Narrator: We'd all like to be a little more influential and persuasive, but how? Recent [00:01:00] research from studies conducted by social psychologists, behavioral economists, and neuroscientists. show that the traditional approaches we typically rely on to influence others, like informing or incentivizing people into change, are in many cases ineffective.

In today's super information overloaded world, people are much more likely to be influenced not by the request or the proposal you make, but by small changes you make to the way your request or proposal is framed. There's a name given to the small change that makes a big difference to your influence.

Blaine Oelkers: We call it the small big. Dr. Robert Cialdini, I got a certification from him, and actually I'm getting a new certification through him right now. He's well known in the science of influence, persuasion. He's got a different book. He's really famous for this book called Influence, and so he has a new and updated version.

This is what kind of put him on the map. Then another book that we've had, that we've talked about before, is called Pre suasion. So he has another book. All about the things you do right before you ask somebody. And he, and he does everything with scientific studies So the study I like from persuasion was you never walk through the [00:02:00] mall?

And then people are there with a clipboard and they ask you if you would take a quick survey Yeah. yeah, so they did an experiment with that and, and, and they were getting about 29 of the people Would do the survey but it went from 29 to almost 80 And they only changed one thing two and a half times to, to three times And the one thing they changed was the initial question they asked.

They just said, excuse me, do you consider yourself a helpful person? So when someone, now, most people would answer yes to that and the minute that you answer yes, now you want to be consistent. So then if they asked you to take a survey, and you just agree that you were a helpful person. That's what shot it way up there.

There's a lot of, that psychology and that's a small big right. You add one kind of persuasion question it can dramatically change. He's a psychologist but he studies social psychology and he's a teacher. And he was the teacher and still is [00:03:00] a professor at ASU, but he took three years off to go study influence.

And so he went and got jobs at selling of timeshare, different sales positions, and all these people that were high influencers, he went through and that's where he developed the six principles. And then later he added a seventh one. I like it because he always has some kind of a scientific study to back what he's saying.

Practical Applications in Law Firms

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Attorney Will Grafton: One of the examples that they use in the book, they start, they talk about the J. C. Penny example, right? And how JCPenney decided that they were going to go to these everyday pricing model instead of having something 19 that would be 20 or it would be 15 or just 19. And turns out they wound up losing a lot of money in large part because of that strategy.

It went from this very precise seeming number 1999 to a rounded number. It seems like there was less effort into that pricing model. And so I think the perception [00:04:00] for buyers was it's not as important or it's not as Detailed and maybe it's more of a guesswork and maybe it's not really worth that.

Blaine Oelkers: This idea of the small change to the framing of things when you're framing a consult and you're framing your fees Right having a very specific fee is gonna have more authority more pull than a round number, right?

So this idea of having a specific precise number That's a small big that could help you in anything that you're pricing.

Attorney Will Grafton: I think Tom Rich did a presentation of this back in August of 2019 where he talked about the psychology of pricing and how people see 2, 495 as being the same number as 2, 000, but 2, 500 they see is almost as the same significance as 3, 000, right?

It's like for our firm, for example, we price our attorney's fees for some Chapter 7 cases at 2, 495 because it's more than its perceived value. To a lot of people and going even [00:05:00] 5 higher would mean that we have, would have a perceived value of 500 more.

Blaine Oelkers: The collateral you're putting into this is you thinking through, where can I use this?

How can I use this? And you're going to make more profit and you're going to have more influence because you're putting some time into become what Chaldea likes to call the detective of influence. What do people think about this idea of a precise number? Or are you using precise numbers? Or you say our attorney's fees are 500 an hour.

Is that better? Would it be better to say our attorney fees are 518 an hour? Right? According to the study, if you used an exact number, they'd be, they it would have more authority because they'd be thinking, Oh, the reason it's that number is because they worked a bunch of things into what that really should be.

Building Rapport and Commonality

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Attorney Will Grafton: What small steps can lead to big leaps when building relationships, partnerships, and teamwork. And the theme of this is using what we have in common to help build relationships. And they gave a couple of examples and some of them were quite interesting. One of them was in the context of sports fans.

They had someone dressed as a Liverpool fan pretend to fall [00:06:00] down and hurt themselves outside of a Manchester United crowd and literally everybody walked by them and left them injured. But when they re staged it as somebody who was wearing a Manchester United jersey, an overwhelming majority of people stopped to help.

The commonality is what motivated people to be more willing to help. So how can we use that in our practices, right? One of the things that is suggested is that when you notice something that you might have in common with a prospect or an employee, team member, to use that as an opportunity to build rapport. But the one caveat there is that some of the research found that the more rare this commonality is, the better it is at building rapport. Oh, you have five fingers on your hands. That's great. I do too. That's not going to get you anywhere. But, if you're in a town of the Ravens fan and Somebody comes into my office and they're wearing a saint's Jersey, right? I grew up a saints fan, [00:07:00] but that's a commonality that I can grab onto and use to build rapport.

Blaine Oelkers: Make sure that you're looking for that commonality that's authentically there, right? With the people that you're meeting with, because it will dramatically raise that up and you can do it. In different ways of service to I know some of you have people come into the office and you have a menu, a menu of items, right?

But if there's some significance for if you have a couple of different types of water, bottled water, sparkling water, right? But then, and maybe there's some different sodas, right? you can pre frame that, right? You pre think about it so that whatever they come into your office with, there's something about that beverage that you.

Have a connection to in some way, right? So again, you could pre frame some of this stuff as well and think it through beforehand, which again is going to increase your success in interacting with those people.

Ensuring Client Compliance

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Attorney Will Grafton: What small bigs can persuade people to keep their appointments with you? Maybe we're the only office that has this problem where anywhere from 30 [00:08:00] to 50 percent of our appointments just don't show up.

Is that just us? No, Jeff is smiling. He gets it right. Umberto. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably not just us.

MPS: If you're following along with Will here and you're trying to figure out how to apply all of this to your law firm, head over to TheLawFirmSecret. com, we'll walk you through the next steps of how to start applying all of this excellent information.

Attorney Will Grafton: One of the other things that they talked about was, and I believe Blaine, you mentioned this, was one small change that doctor's offices made was on their appointment reminders. They just called them by their first name.

Like, hey, this is your reminder for your appointment tomorrow, right? As opposed to Mr. Grafton, your appointment is tomorrow.

Blaine Oelkers: Yeah, that was in text messages. It went up dramatically Yeah. The test where they use the full name. They use the last Mr. Mrs, but then just using the first name alone had the greatest response.

And anywhere you can get that commitment and consistency anywhere you can get them more involved. So the science [00:09:00] shows if they write it down. so the doctor's office, they don't say, here's a piece of paper with your appointment on it. They give them a piece of paper that's blank, or there's a little notepad there.

And they write it down like the act of them writing down their appointment is a good one pausing rich has the training where you have that commitment question and you say, look, if you're not going to be able to make it, would you have the grace to give us a call to let us know that you can't make it and you wait and then they give that commitment verbal response?

Yes. And then that's your opportunity then to say, look, We love working with people like yourself who let us know when things aren't, when an appointment's not going to work out. So you can anchor it in there a little bit as, as well. And the other thing in that chapter, which I really liked is the nuance of someone's more likely to show up to an appointment if they feel like a personal question that they have is going to be answered. That could be an extra work on the intake side. If you do uncover something where you say, look in that consult, we're, you know, you have this question of X, we're going to get that [00:10:00] answered. And now, and if you noted that, then when you do the appointment reminders to, Hey, we're excited for you to come in and get that question you had, which is blah, blah, blah.

Jump the research in how many people, the percentage of people that, that showed up, but just that commitment question, just getting the verbal commitment from them.

Attorney Will Grafton: What question do you want to make sure it gets answered? At your appointment, I like the idea of that personal question and then reusing that in your reminders and your priming calls and reminder sequences.

That's a great idea.

Blaine Oelkers: If you have a master checklist that wasn't too overwhelming and they say, okay, let's go through this. Now from you, we need items 1, 3, 6, and 7. Can you check the box there or circle those if they're involved in the creation of it versus just giving them the list. You can figure out how to get them involved.

And sometimes it's interesting if the list psychologically has 10 things, but you only need three, or maybe if you do need 10 things, maybe the list has 15 or 20, so they can see, hey, you don't need these other things. Again, it's all kind of the pre thinking. Where could we have [00:11:00] our clients, or maybe even a prospect, where could we use this idea of setting up small step concrete plans?

Making sure that your client knows, okay, where am I going to get those documents? By when and how and they, have a little, again, involvement in that. So you might have the checklist and then have a where, when, how, okay. Where do you get that from? When do you think you can have it to us by, and what method are you going to give it to us?

And now you just walked them through it. You literally, you can have just those little columns, but it could be the where, when, how document. So that, could be helpful. Or you could just have a little section to the right where. where We're at the top. It says where, when, how, and again, and if they go through their mind and they see that in their mind's eye, the compliance goes through the roof.

The big delay comes from you not getting X. That's the one to start with. That's the one to say, okay, let's put some new plan in place next week, tonight, tomorrow, whatever, put something new in place where you're having them create, or at least just think through. If they just thought through that and just took some [00:12:00] notes, I think you'd see a bump in the numbers.

Attorney Will Grafton: Like. Many of you, we have problems with clients complying with our requests for documents, and we have a whole team of people whose job it is to help get documents from people. Most of them are pretty good about it, but every now and then we run into people who just seem to get overwhelmed. And our team lead, mostly on her own, came up with a strategy that kind of falls in line with this.

And what she'll do is break the document checklist down into bite sized chunks, right? And she'll start with one thing that is not going to expire quickly, let's say tapped for terms, right? And then she'll get this person on the phone or have them in the office, and then they will plan out how this person is going to go about Getting these tax returns that they have otherwise neglected to get to us even as far as, okay, let's look up the number for your tax preparer so that you can call and request an extra copy [00:13:00] since you seem to have lost a copy that you had and work with them on and then just breaking it into smaller increments, I think really helps.

And I don't think you need this for every client, but when you're having that difficult client who's not complying, sometimes. Breaking things down into the more manageable and then having them participate in the plan of how am I going to get this to you is very helpful and has been very helpful with some of our more non compliant clients.

Perceived Value and Bundling

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Attorney Will Grafton: What small bid could end up getting you a lot more for much less, right? A couple of the examples that they use in this chapter or the one that really jumped out at me was a promotional offer and this was back in the early 2000s. Think back was a. An mp3 player, an iPod by itself, or an iPod bundled with a free music download.

And so the giver of this promotional item attached a greater value to the iPod with the free download, with the included download of [00:14:00] music as having a greater value. The recipient, even though it was the same iPod that came with an additional item of music to actually play on the iPod. Attached a lower value to the bundle that included the free music than the package that was just the iPod.

On a similar vein, there was a proposed fines for, I don't remember what it was, might have been littering. It was either 750 or 750 plus two days of community service. The people imposing those sentence thought that the 750 plus two days of community service was a higher penalty. But those who would receive the sentences attached a lesser thought that the 750 plus the two days of community service had a lesser punitive value than just 750 fine that blew my mind. The idea here is that if you take one thing that has significant value and bundle it with something that has less value, then the value of the entirety is almost averaged in the mind of the recipient. And so that led me to think. Are we hurting the perceived value [00:15:00] of our services if we add in value adds?

For instance, with our firm, when you file for bankruptcy with us, we do a free credit review with you after your case is over, right? Are we lowering the overall perceived value of our service by bundling those two things?

Blaine Oelkers: The crowd goes silent.

Attorney Will Grafton: Right?

Blaine Oelkers: Yeah. And did that

Attorney Will Grafton: blow your mind too?

Because it blew mine.

Blaine Oelkers: And at the end of that chapter, they talk about trying to get the best of both worlds there where you keep your offers to a single thing. And then on a targeted basis, you have the add ons that you use not with everyone, but sparingly when it makes sense, when it could appear to add more value.

Attorney Will Grafton: And they also talked about having tiered levels of offerings, right? Oh, you just want the regular bankruptcy, that's our basic package. If you want the gold package, it's, and you could even charge slightly more for it. And then our platinum package is just slightly more than that. And it [00:16:00] includes all the things that you might've otherwise just bundled in from the start.

Team Building and Gifting

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Attorney Will Grafton: What small changes can have a big impact when it comes to positioning you and your team as experts. Diplomas and certifications on the wall is a big way to do that.

Blaine Oelkers: One of my favorite studies done on that was in a a real estate office, where they just took the first person, they just took, when the incoming calls came in, they actually were able to, by changing one thing, increase the amount of signings but I think it was 29 to 30 What happened is, that when the incoming call, that front door was open. Office person who is answering the phone when they were going to hand the call over to someone else. They did one small sentence to structure the authority of that person, right? Okay, I'm going to transfer you to Will. He's actually done hundreds of bankruptcies just like yours.

They just plant a little bit of authority all along the way. Like all along the way, but starting with that first phone call. So the only thing they changed [00:17:00] was that, and then that person felt like they were going to the right person. Or yeah, attorney Grafton wrote a book about that. And in chapter six, he talks about that.

So when you have the console, they ask him about that or something like that.

Attorney Will Grafton: What small bid can lock people into your persuasion attempt. And it talks about. Getting people to make a public commitment. Encouraging clients to set goals or deadlines in writing or during meetings to enhance their commitment to the process.

Right? And so when you've got that difficult client and you've gone through all the steps and you just need this last thing, right? Get them to write it down. Hey, could you just, let's just write this down that this is what we're going to do next. And this is how we're going to get your case across the finish line, right?

And have them write it down because look, nobody wants to acknowledge that they're dishonest, right? Blaine was talking about this example as people were coming in before we really got started of the survey takers at the mall. Now, there's a section of our, the mall, I don't really go to the mall anymore, but there's a section of the mall that if I were to go to the mall, I would not go through this [00:18:00] section because there is a line of people there with clipboards trying to get you to take a survey.

When people say, everyone wants to say that they're a helpful person, but now that you've said it, Are you really just going to walk away and not be helpful and answer these few simple questions? It's, I'm not asking for a lot of your time, right? And so this, it's the same principle. They make a public commitment.

They make this public statement saying, yes, I am a helpful person. Yes, this, these are the documents I'm going to get for you and I'm writing them down. This is how I'm going to do it. And I'm writing it down. Right. They're not going to intentionally deviate from that commitment.

Blaine Oelkers: A hundred percent. If they make a public and voluntary commitment, that power of, commitment and consistency is super high.

And this idea of this pre question that we'll just caught up, there's another book, a 400 page book called pre suasion that Sheldini wrote. And so he's got a 400 page book all about, it's the question that you ask right before that makes all the difference. So when you're going in all your interactions with prospects, clients, [00:19:00] onboarding, all that, you could be setting that up through pre suasion.

And the other thing about that book, it's the context. That creates the reality. And it's what you do right before. If you take Cialdini's class, he's a professor at ASU. He may be retired out now, But anyway, in his class, on the first day of class, he would have students, they would come down to the front of the room, and he would have the hot bucket of water on one side, the bucket with ice cubes in it on the right side, and you would come down to the front of the class and you put your hands in each.

Right? So I got this one's in hot one's in cold, right? Or warm and ice cold. Then you lift your hands out. And you put both hands in the center bucket. Now the center bucket is room temperature, but that's not how it feels. you have two different hands, one feeling intense heat, and one feeling intense cold in the same water.

The water is the same, but you're feeling two different things, strictly because of the context of where you were. Right before you put your hands in that. And [00:20:00] that, example, I never forget that. It's such a great kind of a word picture, but you can try that yourself. I have the hot and the cold. And then when you thrust the hands in the center bucket, you're literally feeling the perception of the reality is totally different for each one of your hands and your, your brain hurts after that, but anyway, the context and the persuasion, super, super powerful.

I think everything we talked about today. You could drop in the team lens and look at it through the team lens. So this implementation intentions, where, when, how someone says on your team, they're responsible for this. Okay. Where do you see yourself doing that? When, how, I think a lot of this stuff, you can just drop in that lens, right?

Are using the first name or are they making a public and voluntary commitment to get it done? Is there a sense of authority, everything we're talking about here? I think you could use with the team.

Attorney Will Grafton: So we talked earlier about building rapport, right? Finding that commonality. We're with our team as much, or not in my case because I work with my wife, but for a lot of us, we're with our teams more than we are with our [00:21:00] family. Use that time to find that commonality and build rapport.

Blaine Oelkers: Companies like even at Richard James, they have a team spreadsheet. And so if you had a team spreadsheet and people could fill in, right, their birthday their anniversaries, right, but you could also go deeper if you're looking for more liking, more connection, right?

Favorite sports team, favorite holiday, favorite candy. Now, you may end up using favorite candy to get them that on their birthday. And again, it can just be stuff that the team decides, Hey what, column do we want to put in here? Something's come basketball seasons coming up. What's your favorite basketball?

I don't like basketball. Okay, then, you know that right, but you can have a lot of fun in using these principles to build that camaraderie and that teamwork to where people are going to dig in and work harder and try to do better because they feel like They're on a team that knows them and knows them.

Attorney Will Grafton: Well, how about we combine Joey Coleman [00:22:00] and Robert Cialdini and talk about the reciprocity Of gifting to your team in order to get back from your team. Right. Joey Coleman talks about it's not a gift. it has your logo on it. Right. I love the idea. There was a firm who was in partners club for a few years.

They were a PI firm out of West Virginia, the Miley firm. Some of you guys might remember the Miley's from way back. But they did this thing where they registered their logo with Albin or Lanzer, one of those companies, right? And they gave their team the ability to go and order out of the catalog with their logo on it.

I was like, that's great. I want to do that. So we uploaded our logo, got it all approved, got the embroidery done, and nobody wanted it because it was our logo, It's not a gift if it has your logo on it. You can use the idea of gifting, like true gift to create. A feeling of reciprocity with your team.

Blaine Oelkers: And again, back to this. If you had a spreadsheet that the whole team could see, you could [00:23:00] put a column where each person picked out a 50 gift. that they, a gift they would like, and then as a team you could figure out what, does that person need to do to earn that gift? The idea is that you're giving them something they want, right?

Or if the team can accomplish this goal, they get the $50 gift, not with your logo, it's up there choosing. But what's interesting about having them put it in a spreadsheet is now if they have to go to Amazon, you say, go to Amazon and find a $50 gift, something about them, and it might be a gift for their kids.

Now you know that. Or for their pet, or you begin to know each other. By having those shared experiences, right? So snappy. com is a great site for team gifting. All right. So tell me about snappy.

Attorney Will Grafton: So snappy, you can go in and set up your profile. You can upload your logo and have things with your logo on them, but you can also just put a dollar range.

For each member of your team and it sends them an invite to their catalog and they just get to pick a gift that they like out of that catalog and we did [00:24:00] it last year. In addition to our end of year bonuses, we just said, hey, in addition to the end of year bonus, we wanted to show our appreciation to the team and everybody got to.

Choose their gift. I think depending on how long the person had been there dollar ranges were somewhere between 50 and 150 or $200 or something along those lines. Right? And so they got to choose what they wanted. And somebody who was in the, maybe had the $200 range, might have picked something that was in the 50 to 100 range.

That's great. It worked. That worked well for me because you still get the benefit of offering the $200 gift,

Attorney Will Grafton: Even if they might've picked out.

Conclusion and Next Steps

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Attorney Will Grafton: Thank you all for showing up and for participating so well, look forward to seeing what we do with this. I already have a couple of ideas and if you guys are going to be in Tempe in February, pull me aside and let me know what did you do to implement some of this in your practice?

So see you guys.

Blaine Oelkers: Yeah.

All right. Thank you. Thank you Alex for the tech support today. I appreciate it. All right guys. Have a great week. Take care.

MPS: If you're following along with Will here and you're trying to figure out how to apply all of this to [00:25:00] your law firm, head over to TheLawFirmSecret. com, we'll walk you through the next steps of how to start applying all of this excellent information.