If your Google budget doesn't buy what it used to, and more of your calls open with “just tell me the price,” you're not imagining it — and it isn't a targeting problem. It's the predictable output of an auction whose supply stopped growing a decade ago.

In this Smith.ai Masters session, Jan Roos, founder of CaseFuel and a bestselling author on legal client acquisition, laid out the economics behind rising legal cost per lead and the four-step process his team has used with more than 500 firms to reach prospects who have a legal problem but aren't searching about it yet. Hosted by Maddy Martin, GM of Legal at Smith.ai.

A note on credibility that Jan raised himself: his team still runs multiple seven figures of Google Ads a year, including white-label work for large legal agencies. “Anything I say about Google is a damaging admission.”

Key takeaways

• US search volume capped out around 2016. Advertiser demand kept climbing against flat supply — that's an auction with only one direction.
• Three structural changes tightened it further: search-term data was taken away (2020), manual bidding became functionally unusable (2022), and Google began losing search market share, which shrinks supply again.
• Commoditization drives price shopping. When every firm looks the same in a 30-character headline, a savvy consumer collects quotes — the same way they'd shop for a plumber.
• Only 3% of a market is buying now. Another 6–7% are open to buying and 30% aren't actively thinking about it — a pool roughly 22x larger than the one every firm competes for.
• The mechanism is problem-first advertising into an educational webinar, not a direct-to-consultation ad. Attendees watched ~77% of a 40-minute presentation.
• Speed beats automation on follow-up. Calling within five minutes of the presentation produced a 38.8% qualify-and-book rate versus 5–15% for calendar links and email sequences.

The boiling frog: why cost per lead can't come back down

Jan opened with a number from a personal injury account he ran in Manhattan in 2015: $29.39 per click. Shocking today not because it's high, but because it's low — comparable clicks now run well north of that.

The mechanism is Econ 101. Google is an auction. Demand is the number of advertisers bidding; supply is the number of people searching. US search volume capped out in 2016, while advertiser demand kept climbing. Prices went one way.

Three subsequent changes compounded it:

• 2020 — search terms hidden. Advertisers lost the ability to see exactly what people searched. Jan's example: an adoption attorney campaign where search-term data revealed a chunk of traffic was people looking for lawyers for dog adoptions. And niche high-value terms — a workers' comp firm built an entire campaign on spine injuries — became unfindable.
• 2022 — controls removed. Manual bidding wasn't banned so much as starved of impressions. Functionally, every advertiser delegated strategy to Google, which means Google bidding against itself.
• Recently — Google losing market share. Search volume down means supply down, which raises cost per click again.

He was careful to note this applies downstream too: Local Services Ads, SEO, and purchased leads all inherit the same pressure, because they're downstream of paid traffic and search.

Why prospects treat your firm like dish detergent

The second half of the problem is what rising cost per lead does when you also can't close at a good rate. Jan traced price shopping to the rise of comparison shopping generally — and to a simple question: how do you buy something you know nothing about?

If the options look interchangeable, you pick on price, or on review volume. He ran a search in his home market of Austin and counted two LSA slots, three sponsored results, three map results, organic listings, and — one click into a Super Lawyers page — another 215 firms.

Does this seem more like dish detergent as a commodity, or does it look like any of these are head and shoulders above? We've got 30 characters in the headline and 90 characters in the ad to differentiate ourselves.

The stream and the lake

Jan's central metaphor: search traffic is a stream, and it's where every attorney knows how to fish. You can buy a better rod, but you're still standing shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.

The lake is the rest of the market — and the framing comes from research by Chet Holmes International, corroborated by academic work including the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. In any given market:

• 3% are buying now
• 6–7% are open to buying
• 30% aren't actively thinking about it
• 30% don't think they're interested
• 30% know they're not interested

Every referral and every “divorce attorney near me” search comes from that top 3%. Which leaves roughly 66% addressable — and unaddressed.

Two categories fill that pool, in Jan's experience: decisions people avoid (divorce, bankruptcy, immigration status) and decisions stalled by a serious information gap (employment, insurance claims, mass tort, medical malpractice, wrongful death, estate planning). He cited an average divorce being considered for 6 to 24 months before anyone moves. He also conceded the obvious exception: for a motor vehicle accident, no presentation creates a case.

Step 1 — Meet them where they are

The lake is social: Facebook and YouTube primarily, with TikTok and Instagram in the mix. The distinction Jan drew explains why direct-to-consult ads fail there:

Google is where people go to make decisions, and Facebook is where people go to avoid making a decision.

He showed a real firm's ad pulled from the Facebook ad library — “50 years of trial experience, call today for a free consultation” — and made the point that it's a perfectly good search headline deployed in the wrong place. It speaks to someone already looking.

The alternative, borrowing an old direct-response maxim, is to enter the conversation already happening in the prospect's mind. His live example was an insurance claim campaign: “Not sure what to do after an insurance claim denial? Start here. Denied, delayed, or underpaid — the step-by-step guide to winning your property claim.” No attorney, no consultation. It markets the problem, not the solution.

The click leads to a webinar signup page. At that point you have an email and a phone number — the hook is set.

Step 2 — Reel them in with an educational webinar

CaseFuel uses pre-recorded webinars, and the reason is consumption. Jan's numbers across thousands of attendees: roughly 77% completion of a 40-minute presentation live, and close to 50% on replays. That's 20 to 30 minutes of attention before anyone picks up a phone.

What that time buys is the sequence of small decisions a prospect normally makes over years. Someone finishing year two of considering a divorce has already answered every one of those questions alone. A well-structured presentation answers them in half an hour.

Think of every question as an invisible sale to be made before the ultimate sale, which is to sign with you.

The structure matters more than the content. From the ten estate planning firms CaseFuel first ran this for, seven worked and three didn't — and the difference was ordering. The failures opened with definitions: this is what a will does, this is what a power of attorney does. The successes opened with a story — the client who couldn't access their late father's account and put the funeral on a credit card — then covered what goes wrong, and only then explained the instruments.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Step 3 — Bring them to the surface (call in five minutes)

This is where Jan says most firms lose the whole thing. Having spent money and 30 minutes of attention bringing someone up, they hand off to a calendar link and an email sequence.

His comparison: passive outreach converts at roughly 5–15%. A call center dialing attendees five minutes after the presentation produced a 38.8% qualify-and-book rate in a recent week — that's of everyone who picked up, gave a real number, and qualified.

He still recommends putting a call to action and a booking link in the presentation — framed as something specific and valuable rather than a generic consult — but not assuming anyone will use it. And on why waiting doesn't work:

Time is not what people need to make a decision. Information is what people need to make a decision.

He added a sharp psychological observation: people who watch the webinar and then do nothing often feel like they've made progress. They talked to someone, they learned something, they can walk away satisfied — having changed nothing.

Step 4 — Haul them in

The resulting consultation behaves less like a Google lead and more like a referral. Jan's explanation of why referrals convert is that they aren't interchangeable — someone the prospect trusts has vouched for you. The webinar manufactures a version of that through accumulated time and familiarity.

Which means differentiation, which means leverage on price. But he was explicit that the advantage is squandered by getting lazy: treat it as a real sales process, hold the timeline, and ask for the money on the consultation.

His internal benchmarks: about 25% of attendees book a consultation (40–50% in some markets), and strong closers convert 50–80% of those. Firms that expect prospects to volunteer a retainer convert approximately none.

The kinds of cases this surfaces, in his words, largely don't exist on Google — seven-figure mesothelioma claims, $25,000 estate planning engagements, emergency Medicaid matters, deportation defense clients who didn't know they had options. The prospect doesn't search because it hasn't occurred to them that they have a case.

Q&A: retargeting, practice-area selection, and short-form

Maddy asked whether retargeting belongs in the strategy. Jan's answer: it's largely built into the ad platforms now. The stream is directional — the people searching this week aren't the people searching next week — but the lake is the same population repeatedly, so attendees get retargeted by default. Most Meta advertisers he knows, including his own team, don't run separate retargeting budgets.

On choosing a practice area when you run several: pick the one with the shortest sales cycle. His example contrasted estate planning (both decision-makers in the room, closeable on one call) against emergency Medicaid planning (a multi-stage close involving a spouse or adult child). The reasoning is as much psychological as financial — fast feedback keeps you invested in the channel.

On webinar topics by practice area, his reliable frame is “How to X” with a best-interest angle rather than a hire-me angle: how to know whether it's the right time to move forward with a divorce; how to prevent a wrongful accusation; how to lawfully enter the United States after overstaying a visa.

On short-form platforms: the ad's job isn't to be watched to completion, it's to get a signup. Thirty seconds of TikTok or YouTube is a small fraction of the eventual experience — the webinar is the homogenizing function in the funnel.

Where Smith.ai fits

The single biggest failure point Jan identified is follow-up speed: the difference between calling a webinar attendee in five minutes and letting an email sequence do the work is roughly 5–15% versus 38.8%. Smith.ai's outbound calling and 24/7 intake handle exactly that window — qualifying and booking while attention is still warm.

This session is part of the Smith.ai Masters series, our ongoing webinar program hosted by Maddy Martin, GM of Legal at Smith.ai, where industry experts share practical playbooks on marketing, intake, operations, and practice growth. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates on future sessions.

Full webinar transcript

This transcript was auto-generated from the webinar recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels mark the main turns in the conversation.

Maddy Martin: Anything you need to be comfortable for the next I'm going to see an hour All right, we'll let everyone trickle in. In the meantime, I'm going to kick us off. So welcome everyone. I am Maddy Martin. I'm the GM of Legal here at Smith.ai, one of the many hats that I have worn over the years and happy to be wearing this one Now, I also run the Smith.ai Masters series, and you're joining us today for the latest installment with Jan Rus, who is the founder of Case Fuel and a bestselling author. And today we're going to be talking with Jan about how law firms win clients their competitors Don't even know exist.

So what you'll learn today, just a few of the things among many are why Google's cost per lead has increased two to five times in the last 10 years and the structural reasons it will never reverse How to identify and reach the 22 times larger pool of prospects who have a legal problem but aren't searching about it yet. And the educational webinar framework that can turn your cold social media traffic into pre-qualified consultations without competing on price And how law firms across every consumer-facing practice area are using the system to close at premium rates and build a client pipeline Google can't touch. So pretty exciting stuff here today.

I think Everyone needs to know this topic. Jan, I will let you take it away.

Jan Roos: All right, awesome. Thank you so much for the intro, Maddy, and let me go ahead and get my desktop shared And we'll get rocking and rolling. So Guys, can everybody see that here?

Maddy Martin: Yep, looks good.

Jan Roos: Alright, fantastic. All right, guys, yeah, so welcome to How Law Firms Win Clients, their competitors Don't Know Exist. We're going to get really familiar with this diagram here over the next 45 minutes or so And yeah, in addition to what Maddy said, I'm gonna show you guys how you can lower your cost per lead, raise your prices, and in my opinion, future-proof the firm by focusing on where the puck is going As opposed to where the puck has been for the last 10-15 years. And, you guys are gonna see what that means in a little bit Just as far as big picture agenda for this, we're gonna start off with who this is for.

Before we get into the substance of this, I need to kind of show what's going on today, what's been going on, and then we're going to get to my favorite part, which is going to be the meat and potatoes, the process And finally, we're going to wrap up with how you guys can get started. And the other thing is we got a free gift for everyone who makes it to the end. I'm going to try to make this content as scintillating as possible. If that isn't enough motivation for you, you guys can do it for your own self addressed One last thing, as far as if you guys want to drop...

oh yeah, perfect, Matt, that was gonna be my next question. So, practice area, as we kind of talked about in the intro here, this is going to be for almost any kind of law firm that's B2C. I mean, I haven't figured out a way to do this for White Shoe yet, but We'll go into some specific examples I'd love to dig into your specific examples if you want to share that. So starting off with who this is for get a lot of stuff from prospects, people who've been in the space for a while. It just kind of feels like marketing has been harder than it's ever been, and in my opinion, that's because it has been.

And I'm going to get into some numbers shortly. But the big point is that the sky isn't falling, and this is just the outcome of competitive dynamics Which have fed into the cost of doing business. So, here's how to tell if this is something that you've been affected by. And I'm going to kind of go by a couple of symptoms So the first one, shrinkflation is not just at the grocery store. And the question is if it feels like your Google budget isn't producing what it used to, and we're gonna go into a couple different versions of this. Just to be clear, I am talking about pay-per-click Local service as SEO, even lead vendors are gonna be affected by this.

But basically, if your budget's not producing what it used to, if you need to spend more money to get the same volume, if your ROI seems like it's shrinking year over year, and this is basically the same math equation that's looked at from different angles. So basically we've Cost per lead going up as a function of the cost per click, which we're going to get into, which is going to naturally decrease all those numbers in a way that we do not like. The next thing is price shopping. And it used to be that you could just throw up a website and people would behave pretty much the same as if they were a referral.

And then, you know, the bar kind of ended up moving. It used to be then, you know, getting to SEO, then it was paperclip, click, and then it was paperclip LSAs. But basically, what we kind of ended up seeing, this was really towards the end of the teens, so to speak, is that people seemed to be more rude now. You get a lot of price shoppers, you know, even if you want to enroll in a sales course and get everybody on your team using a script Sometimes people will be like, I don't care, just tell me the price from hanging up the phone. If you guys have heard that, then this is also a function of the same problem, and the real question is, what gives, right?

So This is by Morpheus mode. What if you could set the clock back to running Google Ads in 2010 or being the only attorney with a website in 2005 or The only person on the Yellow Pages in 1990. What we're getting now for this is we're paying oftentimes less per lead than most people are paying per click on Google. We're able to get higher ticket clients, and even clients that you can't find on Google, and we actually have them having more adherence to process, how you want to get done Things, timelines, all these different things from a compliance perspective that are fantastic. And I'm not just talking about a bunch of theory here.

So this methods that we're going to go over in this presentation have been done for over 500 law firms since we discovered this process. Almost every practice area, family, criminal, immigration, mass tort, estate, of course. We've had solos add north of $240,000 in their first year. We've had seven-figure firms add additional millions with this process. We've had attorneys raise their rates. We've had attorneys take their first vacation in decades. We've had attorneys that became real and estate investors based on some of the stuff we're talking about here. But before we get into how it works, I want to show you why the window for this is open right now, and why it might not end up staying there forever.

So let's talk about what's changed. I went ahead and pulled these numbers from an account that I was running back in the day, and this isn't, like, you know, middle of nowhere. This was from Manhattan in 2015. Personal injury. I don't know if we have... let me just check the chat real quick to see if we got any PI attorneys in here. I do not believe we do, but I'm sure you guys all have met API attorney at some point Along your, your travels in the legal world. But if they were, you know, you'd probably be spitting your coffee, obviously, $29, $39.39 cost per click.

The reason why that's shocking is because those clicks are going to go from anywhere from $1 to $200 these days. Oh, here we go, Javier, my man. Okay, so you probably know what those clicks look like right now A little bit higher than that. And again, this is just a PI example because it's one of the most ridiculous ones, but is the same for pretty much every practice area. You know, you guys might be asking yourself, who the heck is this guy, you know, some... until I have a baby face from now, but I actually have been doing this since before most of the people running paper late agencies were, you know, in their diapers or whatever, right?

The most important thing I want to point out here is that I'm not the guy who says the thing sucks because I have another thing We still do Google Ads. We run white label for some of the biggest agencies in this space. I can't disclose those relationships because of the nature of them, but chances are if, you know, if anybody here has bought a bankruptcy lead that converted in the last 10 years, chances are you've already worked with my team And we still run multiple seven figures of AdWords a year, so anything I say about Google is a damaging admission of sort. I'm not just saying this to say this.

But just I want to appreciate that some people might have been entering the market more recently. They thought this was always like this, or they haven't been around to see the changes. And so this is providing some of the context of 11 years plus of being on the Google Ads platform You guys probably know about the metaphor of the boiling frog, and if you guys haven't, so basically, if you take a frog and you put it into boiling water, it's gonna jump out. But, if you put a frog in room temperature water and slowly raise it, it's not gonna notice. And that's basically where I see a lot of attorneys today, and, you know, the heat is basically the cost per click on Google.

A lot of people have just been slowly putting up to this because It's hard to tell when you're looking at these things day over day, week over week, month over month, even year over year, but a lot of people don't end up knowing why this is the case. So I want to take it back to econ 101, supply and demand, right? So when we're talking about Google, it's an auction, right? The demand is going to be the total amount of advertisers that are bidding on the network. Or you can go more specifically legal or even the specific search term if you want to get more granular.

We're going to get back to this later The supply is the total amount of people searching, your prospects. And unfortunately for everybody who's located in the US, and I'm going to assume that's everybody on this call. That number that supply capped out in 2016. That's what we got highlighted right there. So, internet search was baked into consumer behavior well before this. I was, you know, I don't know if you guys... I remember the moment that I switched to Google. I re... like, I was... when I was a kid, I would So I was, like, searching for, I looked at, like, ways to, like, hack my Nerf guns and stuff.

I was a weird kid. But anyways, I remember I used to use Dogpile.com, and then, you know, we eventually switched over to Google when it just became the best. But, you know, again, that was Probably 2001, 2002 for me. And again, you know, we're talking about the supply side, and guess what happened to the cost, because more advertisers were getting those $500 vouchers, I'm sure, are happening. So, fantastically, Google, stunning display of grit. They managed to make more money when they were doing this. Good for them, right? And again, it continued from there, right? So this was something that happened, a lot of headlines in this back in 2020.

We're talking 6 years ago. If you guys are more on the nerdy side of things, you might remember this, but you used to be able to see exactly what people were searching for, right? So there was a couple really cool applications for this. If you guys are familiar with negative keywords, this would allow you to eliminate stuff. Example I have in my first book, we were running an adoption attorney campaign, and we actually found out from the search terms that a lot of people were looking out for lawyers for dog adoptions Obviously, not a great billable. So that... the ability to do that kind of thing was taken away.

We also found some cool niche terms as well, right? So, we had a... I mean, this is still a long-running campaign, but a workers' comp firm, the whole crux of their campaign was running spine injuries, because those are the highest value cases for them. But you couldn't find these anymore after this got taken out. So this is kind of the beginning of the end. Again, there's no secret pocket to keywords. People are getting funneled into the big ones, and guess what? Google found a way to make more money. Oh So plucky. And then, okay, so continuing on to 2022, Google started taking controls away from advertisers, right?

So, functionally speaking, this isn't stuff that came in the headlines. I actually took a lot of this stuff from private groups. This is mostly Reddit stuff over the years We started noticing this with our media buyers, but it wasn't that you couldn't use manual bidding anymore, but it's just that you really wouldn't get any impressions if you didn't. So functionally, everyone's delegating their strategy on the platform to Google So now Google's bidding against itself, right? And guess who that does to cost per click? It keeps going up, right? And then finally, we started to see effects on this starting in last year. For the first time in close to 10 years, Google's actually been losing market share.

So search volume's down Now, we're talking more about the supply side, and guess what? That actually can also increase cost per click. So Are you guys starting to get the picture? Google makes more money every single time something becomes worse from advertisers, and that is just the nature of an auction, right? Google is the auctioneer. You guys are participating in the auction. I'm participating in the auction. Anyone advertising at Google's participating in the auction And it's arguably better if the supply is lower for them, but it's not so much for the end users. Now, by the way, I've been talking about pay per click as in search network traffic for the most part, because that's where I have most data, but this applies for everything that's downstream of search If you guys signed up for LSAs back when they launched 2020-ish, you know that those are way more expensive on probably a similar timeline.

If you guys are paying for SEO, you know it costs a lot more to get that started or maintained than it did back in the day. If you guys are buying leads and those costs are going up, it's because those are downstream of paid traffic and SEO. I can tell you we sell pay per click leads to lead vendors But that is why it has ended up going high. And I'm just talking about the cost per lead here, right? Because at the end of the day. There's some room to absorb the cost for most law firms, right? If you can close people for good money, you can absorb that, even if the ROI goes down.

But what happens if you can't close them for a good rate? Because of the price shopping thing? What if it happens if you can't close them at all And again, we started noticing this through the end of the teens. I don't really know if that's a good word. It's a weird name for a decade, but especially for transactional firms and firms that took retainer, not so much of a problem for contingency stuff, just FYI. We wanted to say, why the heck is this happening, right? And I kind of want to go to what happened to consumer behavior during that time period, right? And there's this huge rise of comparison shopping, specifically with Amazon.

You know, I could post graphs on how big that ended up happening in that same time period, 2015-ish, to right now, right So basically, you got to ask yourself, how do you buy something that you don't know the first thing about? If it all seems like it's the same stuff, you're probably going to choose one that's the best price. Some people will pay more for something that's got an abundance of reviews or better reviews. But again, this is the caveat that the items are perceived as exchangeable if it's a commodity, right? I use dish detergent as an example I'm not gonna not wash my dishes if I can't get Cascade.

I'm just gonna buy the next one. And, you know, we kind of have to think about this right? What would you do if you were in the consumer perspective of this, right? Does the average consumer feel like there is a shortage of attorneys? I just ran this search in, you know, Austin, Texas, where I'm based here, right? You know, we got 2 people in the LSA section. We happen to have one in sponsor results. That can go 3 to 5. We've got 3. I had to zoom this down because the map is through 3 in the maps, then the organic selections. If you happen to click on the Super Lawyers page You get another 215 results, right?

The question is, what does the average law firm have to differentiate itself? Does this seem more like dish detergent as a commodity, or does it look like any of these are head and shoulders above? You know, ultimately, we've got 30 characters in the headline and 90 characters in the ad to differentiate ourselves. And the question I asked for you is, you know, if you're being a savvy consumer, would you call a few people? Or, like, you know, think about what you would have to do if you needed to call a plumber, and you don't know the first thing about plumbing. I gotta get some quotes, right?

That's just what a savvy consumer does in this day and age. So again, it absolutely sucks to deal with, but that's just a function of being on downstream of the search market in 2026, right? Okay, so the way out. Let's talk about my favorite part of the presentation is which... so it's what to actually do about this So we're going to use this phishing metaphor. I started fly fishing a couple years ago. I think it's a really, really good analogy for marketing as a whole. So let's talk about supply and demand situations. Phishing has its own supply and demand. Your supply is the fish Your demand is the amount of people who are trying to get the fish.

Everything we've talked about so far is about one specific way to get clients, and that is fishing on the stream of search traffic on Google. And that's represented by the bottom here And again, you can fish on the stream if you want to, right? You could try to get a better rod, but you're still going to be competing against a lot of people because that is the only place most attorneys know how to fish. So this is one of my favorite diagrams. I put this in both of my books because it's just so powerful. And for context, this is the result of research by Chet Holmes International.

One of the best sales consultancies in the last 25 years. They used to work with Charlie Munger, if you're familiar with them for Berkshire Hathaway over 200,000 businesses helped. And then, basically, they generated this from their internal research, but it's actually been corroborated by academic studies. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, others. But anyways, I want to break this down So in any given market, you've got 3% of your prospects that are buying now. 6 to 7% of your prospects are going to be open to buying, 30% are not actively thinking about it, 30% don't think they're interested, and 30% know they're not interested. Now, the key thing to note is that you don't want the bottom 30%, but if you can expand beyond the 30, the 3%, there is 66% total in the other three, 6% plus 30% plus Another 30%, right?

So this is another diagram from beyond intake. But this is mapped onto the channel. So any single time you've got somebody who's typing in, I think I saw a lot of family attorneys on here, anyone who's typing in divorce attorney near me is buying now Every single time you guys have gotten a referral at any point in your career, they don't go to the situation of asking their friend, Hey, do you need a divorce attorney? Do you know a divorce attorney until they are buying now. So the entire market, most of the marketing that's going on The stream, so to speak, is the 3% of people that are buying now.

So, how do we get the rest of them, right? And some people will say, but Jan, it's different for legal. And until recently, I used to agree. We developed a lot of the methods for these stuff with estate planning, but when we branched out and started doing other stuff a couple years ago, we found a ton of stuff, right? So Let's get into some stats. We've got a lot of buckets here, and I'm happy that we have a lot of family law attorneys, because one of the stats we found out is that your average divorce is considered for 6 to 24 months before somebody moves forward.

That's where those 66% of people The big types of People that are going to be in this bucket are one decisions that people are not moving forward on because of bad information, which I'm going to get to later, or avoidance of something that they probably need to do. So divorce, great example here. Filing for bankruptcy, another one. People who are overstaying their visas, immigration stuff is third, right Second is decisions where there's a serious information gap. I think there's a lot of contingency stuff here, employment law, insurance claims, mass tort, even some types of personal injury. I'm looking at stuff like medical malpractice and wrongful death, not necessarily your MBA stuff And then, of course, you've got the classics like estate planning, which you could even put into the people that are halted by bad info.

And again, I want to concede that there are certain cases where the cycle is really immediate, right? If we're talking about an MVA, and there's nothing you can say in a presentation that's going to get somebody to have a case. But for a lot of these other things, there's tons of options here. We'll leave that out for now, right? But before we get into where to find these people, I want to address people who may have tried this stuff out and not had it work out. And it's not because there weren't fish in the lake, period, or it wasn't because the fish in the lake weren't able to get caught.

It's because people were using the wrong approach. Like, those guys on the stream here who got this tiny little hook, and this guy was really, really happy with this other one So, here's where most firms get this wrong, and I pulled this from Facebook ads library. Huge apologies if this happens to your firm, no hard feelings. This is literally the first one I saw. But, little interactive moment. We'll give this for a minute or two. Does anyone can anyone tell based on what we just said what's wrong with this ad? I'll give it a minute Anyone? All right, maybe. All right. We'll, we'll move on.

So basically, the whole issue with this right This is a fantastic tool for somebody. Oh, here we go. We got an answer. We got answers. All right. Too much stuff on there that's very true. Also, it's kind of like a this is a this is a different thing. I also agree with that, and maybe I should have had a more linearly broken ad. But I always used to make this joke like there's this restaurant by where I went to school in Montreal, and it was like they had like Thai food and sushi and like Chinese food and like Indian food. And I was like You think they're great at any of those?

Like, you know, probably not. Anyway, so same... and again, I know it's different with Eagle, but anyway, now this is the headline that would play... this is a headline that would play very, very well, potentially, maybe if it was more specific, on search, right? Hey, we've got 50 years of trial experience, call us today for a free consultation. You search any practice area on Google, you'll see some variation of that headline. That being said, we're not on Google, right? It's the wrong tool for the job. This is not for somebody who's thinking about it, not for somebody who's not actively looking or think they aren't interested.

And so using our metaphor, these people are using that are on the surface, and I'll get to what that means, but the tools and methods are basically going over all the really these people know how to do is to get fish that are already there, right? So what we need to do is We need to go deeper. Now, you can actually get you can absolutely get a fish into your net if it doesn't start there. Just because it doesn't start on the surface doesn't mean it will end on the surface. But you have to get them up from the bottom first And you can't lose them while you're reeling them up, or maybe they're going to be on the surface next to somebody else that's fishing right there, right?

But if you can meet the fish where it's at, you can hook it, and you can bring it to the surface, it's gonna be a deal you can close, and there's people that do this all the time. And again, you might be asking yourself, this sounds like a lot. Oh, we got to do some new process, some new skills, new platforms, even got to that. Is the juice worth the squeeze? So what I want you guys to consider is that we're not just talking about a different source of the same clients that you're already getting. The people who come through this method are fundamentally different.

They're not price shopping. They haven't called four other attorneys this morning. They've spent 20 to 30 minutes with you before you even pick up the phone And by the time they get to a consultation, in most cases, you're the only attorney that they're going to be considering. But the other thing, and this is the part that doesn't get talked about enough, is some of the most valuable cases in any practice area simply don't exist on Google. The prospect doesn't know they have a case. They don't know there's an attorney who can help. They're not searching because it hasn't occurred to them to search yet, right?

These are all real cases on the slide here from the last few months if you use this method. This sounds crazy. We've got seven figure mesothelioma cases, week two of running this for a big mass tort firm We got $25,000 estate planning engagement. This is a vanilla estate planning engagement. I have to be somebody with a bajillion properties. We've got people who are getting emergency Medicaid matters, $20,000 plus. We've got people who are coming in for petitioners with divorce who come in with money And no interest in comparing prices because they're the wife that's taking all the money out of the checking account to pay the attorney and not the unfortunate husband who's got $20 to go price shop.

We've got people who are getting deportation defense matters who didn't know they had options until they saw the content, and none of these came from Google. All of these came from the lake. So overview the process. We've got to meet them where they're at. We got to reel them in. We got to haul them to the surface and we've got to get them to the surface and haul them in. Just to be clear, I could probably do an entire hour on Any one of these steps, and we're gonna have some resources to get them through, so just if you guys are wondering for more clarifying detail, I'm gonna do my best with the time we have.

But let's start with meeting them where they're at, right? Now, I might have mentioned this in passing, right? But where is this lake, right? And by and large, we're going to be talking about social media channels So right now, Facebook and YouTube are the big ones. We use TikTok as well to an extent. But I had a mentor who once told me Google is where people go to make decisions And Facebook is where people go to avoid making a decision. And again, this kind of confirms a whole direct-to-consult thing not working, right? And again, this doesn't mean that these people can't make a decision ever, it's just that's not the headspace that they're in when they're on these platforms.

Now, what are people doing when they're on Facebook or YouTube? And I could put Instagram here, it all is kind of under the Facebook umbrella, but They're consuming content, right? I don't know if you guys do Reels or TikTok or whatever, I'm unfortunately the victim of these, but you know what the experience is like, right? You're not looking for anything in particular, you might be scrolling through, see what your friends are happening, they're gonna put some in the feed, could be some stand-up comedy, could be some crazy time lapse cooking thing, or a car blowing up, or something, who knows, right? You're passively consuming. And it's gonna serve you a bunch of stuff, and it's gonna shape the next stuff it serves you based on your interest, right?

And it's gonna know what your interest is like, because you're engaging with it. And, you know, not that anybody's listening here, but, you know, it's also listening to everything that's happening, depending on what your settings are at, right? So There's a weird chance you're going to see a Toyota ad if you start talking about whether you want to get a CR-V or a 4Runner, right? It's just, it's how these things are going to work. Now. With that in mind, this is one of my favorite quotes, and we're gonna see how this works as a real example. Always enter the conversation that's already taking place in the customer's mind, which is very different than you need an attorney hired today, right?

Especially if they're not in the headspace. Live example from a project that we worked on last year, right? Now, if you guys can... I know it's a little bit small, but I'm gonna read it, so the headline to this is not sure what to do after insurance claim denial start here, denied, delayed or underpaid the step by step guide to winning your property claim. So this is an example, right? The first thing to note, we're not saying talk to an attorney now, right? We are entering the conversation that's in the prospect's mind if they happen to have gone through one of these situations. We are addressing people who don't know what to do.

Now, a quick aside here, can you see why these people wouldn't make it to Google? Like, they don't know what to do, let alone what kind of attorney they would hire. We're marketing, in this case, the problem here. We're not marketing the solution, which is the book of conversation. That comes later. So when they click on that ad, they go to a webinar sign-up page, and then they sign up to an upcoming webinar. And you can see that stuff on the right there. And these are all pre-recorded, by the way. So at this point, we've got their email, we've got their phone number, and in following the phishing metaphor, the hook is set at this point.

We can reach out to them now. And the reason that this works is that it's low pressure. Somebody in this mind state doesn't want to talk to an attorney, but they have a case that's just as real as somebody who is actively looking for an attorney. But we're meeting them where they're at. So We've officially set the hook, we've got somebody who's raised their hand because they resonated with a problem. How do we take them to the surface? At the end of the day, it's going to be a function of how much time and attention they're going to be spending with you. The more time that you have their attention, the more you can get into their mind and start rearranging things in a way that's helpful for you.

And there's many ways to do this But what my company really likes is webinars, and on the next slide, you're going to see why. So this is what good looks like from a webinar perspective. And this is one from, you know, there's literally thousands of attendees over the years, right? So when we talk about reeling them in, if you want to take a look at that event completion rate And the replay completion rate. People who are attending live or watching 77% of a 40-minute presentation, close to 50% for replays. So that is 20 to 30 minutes of being educated on why your firm is different Allowing you to build trust and allowing them to move forward on the issues that are preventing them from moving forward.

Now, the thing to keep in mind is that information can accelerate the process. Anybody on the surface, right, slash they're in market has come to these conclusions already. This represents people who got to the end of their five years of deliberating over their bankruptcy or, you know, year two of considering the divorce, etc They had to answer all these questions before they could get to this point. But I want you to think of every invisible... every question as an invisible sale to be made before the ultimate sale, which is to sign with you, right? But in a well-written presentation, we can show them or get them to show themselves all of the answers that they need to move forward.

And we can compress years of mulling over something into a 20-30 minute presentation or make substantial progress in that time. So if we're going to go through that insurance claims example, right? We're going to select for people who have the problem, we're going to show them examples of how we've helped We're going to explain the legal process to doing this. We showed them what a case worth pursuing looks like. We tell them what makes a good attorney, and hint it's going to probably be based on how you guys happen to do things. Then we show them how much it costs and how much they stand to gain or lose depending on the practice area, and that puts them in a position to move forward, right?

After you've answered all these questions, you are finally now in a position where you say, huh, looks like an attorney can help. I wonder where I could find an attorney, just where they are getting onto the surface, right? We've educated them, and they're at the point where they're open to a consultation, but the critical point is to make sure we follow through on that. If we bring them to the surface and we don't do anything with it. Now they're in a position where they're going to be unfortunately searching, right? So The big thing that I kind of like to sit here is outreach versus automation.

The issue here, and I think this is kind of a follow on from people being used to referrals and those in-market traffic, is people assume they're going to take the next step. And I've even seen people who say, well, they would take the next step if they don't take the next step, they're a bad prospect. Not true. They're there, right? But we got to strike while the iron is hot, right? So what we typically used to see with clients is they would do something. And again, I can tell you this because this is how we started when we started developing this process back in the COVID days.

But you do something like you'd throw a calendar link on the end of the presentation, you'd get some email follow ups or some chat bots or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing, right? Kind of this, you know, the dude and the hacker. It sounds great, but it doesn't work. At least it doesn't work well, right? So we see those outreach methods probably getting 5% to 15%, and on the right is a kind of results that you can get from a call center, right? If you notice there, the key thing to look at here is 38.83%. This is an honest to goodness slide I took from the other week when I was putting this deck together This is what happens when you're calling people after 5 minutes after the presentation, and we have an opportunity to qualify and book, right?

And again, not everyone's going to pick up, not everyone put in a real number, not everyone's going to qualify this 38.3%, which it happened to be this week, is what happened For everyone that qualified after all of those things, right? Now, important thing to keep in mind, you have to have a call to action in your presentation, and this is where we give them the opportunity to book. You know, by the way, I talk smack about the calendar thing. We do have a link. We just don't assume people are going to use it. But typically, the way that we like to do this in a presentation is, you know, you cook up something for your practicer and say, hey, look, you know, this is going to be our winning divorce game plan session with a board-certified attorney, we normally charge $7.50 for this, but since you watch this educational presentation and you're so educated, we can offer it free of charge for the first 5 people to hook up.

And then again, when we pull up the conversation to book, we say, hey, look, you got a couple of spots left, and et cetera, et cetera. If you guys want some more details on this, there's gonna be some resources at that at the end Now, the last part is going to be hauling them in, right? They're on your calendar. You've officially gone into the lake. You've taken somebody who's merely aware of a problem or not even aware of that problem. We've gone to the point where they are ready to hire. But It's just a matter of getting them to sign. So the reason that our clients love these consultations is because there's a huge advantage at this point compared to a Google lead, right?

I consider them closer referrals. In my opinion, the reason that referrals work so well is because they're not exchangeable, right? That's why a referral performs different than a Googly is because They have proof positive from their friend that you can do a good job, right? Everybody else on Google doesn't, right? So, and it's closer to this because you have all this time that they've had, right? Even if they did want to shop out attorneys, they're not going to have nearly the amount of understanding and the trust and the familiarity that you've Built up over this 20 to 30 minute plus process of interacting with this person.

Not to mention the ads, seeing them in multiple locations, talking with an agent, getting booked on your calendar, whatever you want to do from that point, right? Because you're going to be putting that against trying to sell with 120 characters in a Google ad, like we were talking about earlier, right? And differentiation means leverage at the end of the day. When you are not trying to sell the 99th bottle of dish detergent on Amazon, you can have a situation where you can charge more, right? you know, if you have a situation where your service is a Rolls-Royce and everyone else is a Toyota, it doesn't mean every single person's going to want to buy the Rolls-Royce, but it's at least a dilemma, right?

And that's not the situation where you're coming in when everybody looks the same. That being said, you know, the fish isn't gonna jump into your cooler. You have to take it seriously. Like, for the most part, where we see people messing up on this is getting lazy with the sales process or treating it like a referral that truly has zero other options, or more importantly for this kind of situation, not holding the timelines I think asking for the money on the consultation is always a good call, is more of an important call here, because you can kind of assume that they are in the position to move forward, and we need to make that real by asking them for a commitment.

But that's really kind of like the biggest, is to get the money, get the signature, depending on if you're contingency And again, I could do an entire process, like, presentation of this process, but I'll get some resources coming in at the end of the presentations. All right, so to recap, right, four steps. Meet them where they're at, reel them in, get them to the surface. Hallman, right? If you can follow each one of these steps in sequence, you can go away from the stream of competition onto the Lake of Plenty. This will allow you to adapt to where people are at and give you the skill set to do that.

So the question is, what is your next move I don't have a crystal ball. I can't tell where the future is going. That being said Based on the treads, I have never seen Google costs go down, right? You're welcome to make your own conclusions, but I'm gonna be operating personally under the assumption they are continuing to go up. And again, just to be clear, Google isn't dead. It's still a great channel. And to this day, we have attorneys all the time that come to my team and say, I've got only $1,000 to spend on advertising. I'll say, do some LSAs, right? But again, if you want to scale, you need to spend more.

Going back to those days, 2015, I remember the first PI attorney I ever asked For a budget was $2,000, right? It's probably $20,000 now if you want to be operating a real way. Most people I see if you guys are running Google ads, you know this isn't news to you. You're really hard to get started for three to $5,000 and that's before even talking about the agency fees. That's just a Google budget And again, it's not realistic for many. Google's gonna keep making money, but it's going towards channels like billboards and advertising and radio, and just the sense that it is a harder field to get into.

And again, to be fair, the lake's not going to be easy forever either, right? I had a mentor that told me once that everybody talks about the good old days, but nobody realizes that today is going to be the good old days in the future And what I'm talking about now, it's rare and it's hard to figure out, which is why there's less competition there. And it's going to be easier to get a return on investment until that becomes common and easy to figure out. That's just competitive dynamics. Those are the exact same dynamics that led Google to be in the position where it's at right now in terms of the cost But I will say that even if this isn't the way, the future of paid is more likely to look like the lake than the stream.

Again, I don't have a crystal ball. Nobody knows what's going to be next. We just had ChatGPT ads come on last week, right? And, you know, maybe Elon Musk's going to be serving ads on Neuralink or Maybe the company from Blade Runner got their initial funding from ads. Who knows, right? And new inventory is coming online, but it's all top of funnel. It's not going to be like Google. That is shrinking. Reason example, TikTok, one of the biggest channels that came on the last few years billions of views available, a shocking amount of user levels. And who ended up getting the first mover advantage for this is people who are already advertising on Meta, people who are already advertising on YouTube with video content.

They were able to take an advantage. It wasn't people who were writing text ads for people who were just already looking for the thing. And not to mention the process for closing these people is going to be more likely to look like this stuff, you know, we're not going to just be waiting for people to jump into our laps. We need to build up a process to do that. Speaking of process, go ahead.

Maddy Martin: Yon, I have a question for you. So sorry to interrupt your next slide, but when we think about retargeting, right, which might be a cost-effective method for scaling to some of these other channels once you have This core anchor in place, you know, is that part of the strategy that you recommend when you have this, like, core program? And of those who don't immediately convert, are you using retargeting to, you know, keep them engaged and, you know, build in reminders and reinforcement on that message you first conveyed

Jan Roos: So it's kind of interesting. Retargeting has gotten built into a lot of these ad platforms in the last couple of years. So people try to talk about, it's kind of one of these things like I remember back in the day when I got started, everyone was talking about like, oh, what's like Matt Cuts, the director of search going to be doing and like all this stuff And everyone's trying to, like, look into the mind of Google or look into the mind of Meta. So what we've seen in the last couple of years is retargeting is built into it. The thing that's kind of and this is sort of I could have gone more nerdy into this, but the analogy of the lake versus the stream is appropriate in more ways than one, because the stream is, you know, directional, right?

The people who are searching for a divorce attorney, Austin, Texas, today are not likely to be the same people who are going to be searching next week or the week after, right? Versus when we're targeting the lake, we're targeting the same group of people over and over So a lot of the times, there's gonna be a group of new people, but there's people who are gonna be seeing ads for the next Waze. And the way that, you know, Meta in particular is speculated to do this is that they might see, okay, cool, if we show an ad for this webinar that somebody opted into Three weeks and 2 days afterwards, you've got a 90% chance of person.

And guess what? Your people are gonna be automatically retargeted. Most meta advertisers that I know, including us, do not have separate retargeting budgets if they're using Meta as a first process Like, marketing channel Yep. And the other thing, too, is that, like, you know, they they're trying to push that, but I will also say this too, because, I mean, it is interesting to kind of think about this it depends on where you're at, right? Because if you have somebody that's at that situation where they're ready to make the decision, and then they back off You might want to retarget on search. There's custom audience lists that you can do there, but also there's, you know, there's situations where people might, like, you know, I love the divorce example, but also I feel like everyone's been in a crappy relationship at some point, so it resonates, but it's like, you know, let's say you got the...

I'll make it... I'll flip the traditional general. Let's say she came back late, right? And then you're like, oh, I got a divorce my wife. And then, you know, you guys have a great dinner, and happy times, blah, blah, blah, and then you back off. And then, you know, whatever. You want to catch them on the week that they keep breaking the promise, or whatever, right? So that's where it can get useful, but Long story short, the retargeting stuff is less something that I see targeted directly these days.

Maddy Martin: So just to sort of tie it back to your metaphor, because you mentioned again, like the lake versus the stream. So, you know, thinking about it almost like a lifespan of the fish It's fairly short, right? So As long as the fish is still alive in the lake, then you're retargeting by default to your point, because you're still fishing in the same lake and Facebook knows that that fish hooked earlier and they're likely to hook again, right? And they haven't bought yet because Yeah. Your exclusion list doesn't include them, something like that, right? But at some point The fish dies off because they have a fairly predetermined lifespan, and new fish come in to replace them, right?

So it's probably a mix, but overall, not heavy retargeting.

Jan Roos: Yeah, yeah, and like the other thing too is like, I always try to consider, I think people, well If I'm being cynical, I think people who sell really, really long email sequences like to believe... like to have people believe that this is the kind of situation that can last indefinitely, but, like, I kind of like to use the front burner, backburner approach when it comes to our database marketing Look, when you get somebody hot and bothered and they understand their issue, like that is the time to book that person, and that consultation is the time to close that person. There's something that happens psychologically when people move forward towards a goal, because a lot of the times it's like that same stuff that people talk about with sharing your goals with people.

You get psychologically satisfied, like, oh man, I was telling everybody I was gonna grow my law firm, I was gonna get a six-pack this summer, and you feel good about it. You feel like you did something. Meanwhile, you haven't done anything except for talk to people about it. The same thing happens to prospects In particular, like, the problem that people can walk away from, like, I love the state... I mean, I love estate planning for this reason, right? Because it's like, you know, they can get the feeling that they... they talk to an attorney, they watch the webinar, and they can walk away feeling they did something, but they actually didn't, and their kids are going to be destined to go to probate court.

So I always push for the close as soon as possible. And again, we have backup email sequences for people. I'm not going to lean on them, though. That is the back burner, and it's gonna be a percentage. And then you can also do stuff like reactivation campaigns now and then a little beyond the purview of this. But yeah, those are absolutely options that you can have.

Maddy Martin: Thanks. Okay.

Jan Roos: I guess this kind of works it. Okay, speaking of process, right? Now, we talked a lot about, kind of, the more specific examples are around the ad size and, like, the webinar side of things. You have to make sure that you get the lead to commit to get the marketing to work So back in the day, I think I wrote this book a couple years ago. It took me like six months to write this. And it illustrates the entire process that we use internally to get people from attendee, and again, this is just attendees at ThinkDude. This works for anything that's not a search lead, right It's the exact same way.

We have scripts, we have process, we have the hiring factors we look for, we have how to promote people, all kinds of stuff. 211 pages, this was handwritten, it was before AI got good. And funny story, I know of at least two competitors that created products Based on a process that we taught here. So I can tell you it was good enough for them. And again, it's totally free for the next week if you want to get it, go to beyondtakebook.com, coupon code SMITH, that will get you the book for free. There is some funnel stuff you can get if you want I don't care.

We don't have any stuff to consult with on this. It's really bad lead gen. So for case fuel, got a cobbler's boy has no shoes situation here. But basically, that's going to be free until next Tuesday at midnight. Write it down Okay, so that's kind of if you want to do it yourself or sort of take some of these principles and rip with it. And again, if you watch all this and thought, Hey, Jan, this all sounds great, but this is complicated, then just go to casehold.com, fill out the form. My team will get to you, or Google my name on LinkedIn. There's a couple of Jan's actually a surprisingly common name in the Netherlands I'm the only one that looks like me, though.

Looks that should narrow things down. Okay So that's pretty much it, guys. That concludes the presentation and we'll open the floor for some questions. Are there any?

Maddy Martin: Okay, let's see. There are some questions. Okay, so Debang says, once a fish prospect has gone through the education funnel and is ready to reach out What do you see as the biggest drop off point before they actually become a client?

Jan Roos: Okay, so I want to answer that question, but I also want to answer the question that you didn't ask. So the assumption that the fish is ready to reach out is a challenging one. We like to assume that they're ready to reach out So there's a there's a quote that I love in sales, which is time is not what people need to make a decision. Information is what people need to make a decision. And when you take somebody that's in a problem state that just watched a presentation, that is the absolute best time to reach out with them There is very little likelihood that they are going to get a better picture on their own.

And if they do get different information, it's not going to be information that supports them hiring you over other people. Your education and what's what's going to be moving forward, right? The biggest drop-off point Is there's it's gonna be typically so our KPI internally is about 25% for contact, right? I mean, that's going to be as high as 40, 50% for some people in some areas. But for that, every one person who attends A presentation, and we're going to get about one in four of them to book a consultation. So that's 3 out of 4 fish that are going to die in the spawn if we want to extend the metaphor.

Our best closers on these systems are going to be closing probably between 50 and 80% of these. So when things are tuned up, we should only be losing one out of two or one out of 5 for that. That being said, when people are not following process or just kind of expecting people to walk up and throw them a retainer or a signed credit card That can be 0%, right? So that could be a potential area where people are doing it, but that's a huge reason why we've, tried to get as much education as possible for how to make sure that we're closing this type of consultation specifically.

Maddy Martin: Great. We have a couple more questions. So first question is, can you give example webinar topics for different disciplines, meaning practice areas, please?

Jan Roos: Let's see. So I'm trying to think. So we have stuff that's around. So a really good frame to take for any practice area is how to X. And there's a really interesting psychological reason for this, how people are generally looking to solve a problem, why people are generally kind of shaking their fist at God and wondering what would happen, which, again, I know you guys have probably had clients like that. They're not the best. But, you know, we kind of had that one for the insurance defense stuff. You know, a lot of the stuff that we have in the family law stuff is how to protect yourself We've got how to know whether it's the right time to move forward with a divorce.

Another big thing that we kind of like to keep in mind is you want to have a best interest frame in a lot of this stuff. You don't want to be looking at the person who's saying, hire me, right? So you want to talk about this You know, how to prevent a wrongful accusation for insert criminal issue here. You know, how to lawfully enter the United States, even if you've overstayed your visa, that kind of thing, right? So think how That's kind of a good example for this

Maddy Martin: Great. I love that. Yeah, and maybe go back to some of your past educational content. If you've undertaken any of that in the past. So one more question. Do these educational funnels work on short span social media platforms like TikTok and Facebook? And are we including lives in this funnel, or is it only, you know, pre-recorded webinars and presentations?

Jan Roos: Okay, super good question. In my opinion And I'm saying, okay, I use webinars because that's what we like, right? Technically, if you go to the old school, like, you know, technically any information source works here. If you go back to the strategy where you'd have, Hey, click here for this PDF or sign up to our mailing list and we're going to send you one nugget of information every, every day or something like that, that works too. So, it's kind of agnostic with content. The reason that we like webinars is just because that's the highest consumption pattern that we've ever seen we just, like, you know, even if you get...

and there's special things, too, like, we do like to use the kind of, like, always-on webinars as well, too. If you look at stuff, I'm just gonna use, like, the live, for example, because you mentioned it, but, like, you know, I've, you know, we've got YouTube channels where you watch that, right? And you guys remember what the graph looked like for the actual presentation pretty consistently high. Whenever we've done Watch Anytime, do it on your own kind of situation, you know, it usually looks like a backwards hockey stick, right? If you have a YouTube channel, you guys are gonna know exactly the shape that I'm talking about.

So, I like to think about consumption as the main thing to prioritize, because you can have the best presentation in the world But if nobody's consum... or you have the best handout you could get insert the most compelling author. You can get James Patterson to write your PDF, but if they're not going to open it up, then it's it's for naught, right? So outside of that, right, so that's... that kind of answers the webinar question. Again, I'm not saying it's the only way, it's the way that we've been doing it, it's the way that's working right now. I'm not saying it's the way that's going to work forever, but just, again, other places work, you just need to look at that consumption thing.

And I'll say this to As far as the structure for the webinar, there's certain ways to do it, right? Generally speaking, I'm gonna give you guys a 50,000-foot overview of what to do, and for a little bit of a background story on how this happened, we ended up having the first client we ever did this for was a firm out of Fort Worth, right during COVID, and they shut down the state, and we did it We kind of lucked into that because they happen to have a presentation that did fabulously well online, and fabulously well in person. And then we went and said, oh my god, this is great, let's go help out some more estate planning firms that can't do seminars and more.

And we ended up signing another 10 7 of them did well. Three of them did poorly. And the difference between the seven that did well and the 3 that did poorly was the structure of the information. What we saw from those ones, and this is something I do see in a lot of content, and I'm just going to use estate planning because it's a great example How to lose every single person on your presentation. Alright guys, welcome to the presentation. This is what a power of attorney does. This is what a will does. This is what a revocable trust does, etc, etc, etc. providing information before we provide a context, right?

Good presentation. Hey, let me tell you about a situation where I had a client that ended up coming in, and they were really, really upset because they went to go get the money out of their father's bank account because he was named in the will, and they said, hey, you have to take this through probate. And he had to put the entire funeral on a credit card, he racked up a bajillion points, and that's the situation I want you to avoid. Let's talk about all the things that can go wrong if you don't have stuff set up. And then, you actually wind up in the third section This is what a field does.

This is what a power of attorney does. This is what a revocable trust does. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, right? Basically. Sorry, I just but anyways, that's kind of just something to keep in mind. Again, like I said, this is one of those things I could do an entire presentation on is chances are you still have stuff on the site on how to do that. But now to kind of go into the short form stuff, right? We use short-form ads all the time. The goal of the ad isn't to get someone to watch the entire ad.

The goal of the ad is to get somebody to sign up for the webinar, right? So the ad only has to be long enough to get somebody's attention There's more in common with. And if you kind of like, you know, if you kind of visualize the entire client journey from tip to tail, right? Whether they watch a 30 second ad on YouTube or a 30 second ad on TikTok, or a 32nd ad on meta, or if any of those things were organic, or if any of those were static images, or you name it, right? It's going to be a small percentage of the experience compared to the 20, 30 minutes that they're going to spend on the webinar, right?

So that webinar is kind of a big homogenizing function within your overall marketing funnel. I hope that answers it.

Maddy Martin: Yes, absolutely. Okay, last question from someone. How do we get to the last step of getting

Jan Roos: Okay, one second. I can't check my funnel. Guys, if you, I'll tell you what, if you guys don't have... I'm gonna put my email, or actually, I'm gonna put this email here. If you guys have any issues with getting the book that's not delivered, send an email to that Email, and then we'll get it to you ASAP. I will tell the customer service team that we're having these issues. You guys, and if it check your spam filters for the book. Okay. Yeah, the funnel looks okay when I checked it out, but I didn't check out. So for anyone who is listening or on their phone, it's C as in cat, S as in Sally, M as in Maddy at casefuel.com Yeah, and That's the email that Jan put in the chat.

Just contact You guys should already have it, by the way. I mean, I think it's the language on those subsequent funnel pages are meant to make you look like you're not going to get the book, but that's not true. If you guys made it past that first page, you guys should get it. If you don't, then Yeah. Email that email, you'll get it Yeah. Yeah, no special tricks.

Maddy Martin: Perfect. Well, thank you so much. I don't see any additional questions, but I'm sure when people read the book and when they rewatch the webinar, there will be other questions that arise on how best to get started for their specific practice area, and for many who are in the chat, how to choose one practice area. You know, maybe I will actually ask you that as the last question. You know, if you are practicing across multiple areas, how do you help people make the decision on which To choose.

Jan Roos: Yeah, that's interesting. I would say this, and this is kind of, okay, I have a huge bias of this because I got started out in pay-per-click stuff when SEO is the case. My preference is to stuff that in your experience has the shortest sales cycle. I'll give an example. We have, you know, I had a client that was coming on recently and I'll kind of stick to the estate planning world. So basically he had estate planning, he had Elder planning, and then he had emergency Medicaid stuff. And if you kind of think about those two things, I said, look, I would always recommend estate planning out of those three.

And this is going to be specific to that practice area, but I think you can use it as a model because estate planning is a deal you can close on one call. Right? You get the husband and the wife there, or whatever the combination happens to be. You have all the decision makers there, that is an easy close. Compared to emergency Medicaid planning, it's normally not going to be the person who just broke their hip. It's going to be a child or a spouse or something like that, and they might need Talk to other people, and it just becomes a multi-stage close, and you guys know what are the fast closes and what are the hardest...

or what are the slow closes within your practice area. So, I tend to recommend that reason why. I think feedback is Super important when you are investing into something, regardless whether it's marketing or something else, you need to trick your brain that this is worth it for you, and the sooner that you can get a check that's deposited into your bank account, the more you're going to be paying attention, putting money back into that situation, whatever happens to be. So I always default to shortest one

Maddy Martin: Great. That's a great answer. Well, Jan, thank you so much. It was great having you back here, and I hope everyone got a lot out of our session today. The recording will be emailed to you. It will also be posted on YouTube on the Smith.ai channel and as always, thanks so much for joining us for another session from the Smith.ai Masters series. Have a great day.

Jan Roos: Thank you so much, guys.