Today's session is about recommendations, okay, and the reason, well let's let's start with, let's start with why why we use recommendations or why recommendations might be important to you guys. Have you guys ever received like a like a letter of recommendation or a thank you either from a client or from from like an evangelist or somebody? Okay, how have you used those in the past or have you used those? It's good, well one of the reasons they're important is they make you feel good, right, which is important. No, it's good for you, it's good for you.

Look, the biggest challenge I face with professionals is not lack of sales skills, it's lack of self-esteem. People, people, you know, something goes bad and then you define yourself by what's gone bad. So testimonials, recommendations are important for that purpose, but what are some of the other reasons why those types of things, testimonials or letter of recommendation, why are they important? It helps convince future clients to hire you.

Right. I have definitely had clients come to me and say I'd like to hire you, can you give us the names of some satisfied, you know, some clients you've worked with who can recommend you. Yes.

And I've gone back to them and I've said can I give your name and, you know, would you would you say something and they've definitely communicated. Yeah. I mean almost in, it's about 50-50 with whether or not I land the matter.

I think some of these clients are just persnickety and might not have hired me anyway, they were just shopping around for the price. Sure. But yeah, you have to do it.

Yeah. And for the client, it eliminates a lot of the due diligence they have to do. Sure.

You know, rather than having to really investigate if it's somebody they trust or no. Yeah. If it's a referral from someone who in the past has done good things for them and if you're now in that stream.

Yeah. You give them a good word, they trust you. Yeah.

Absolutely. At the beginning, much more than if they don't know you before. It's a huge credibility builder.

It's phenomenal for your credibility, especially if you have a written letter of recommendation or 20 and you hand them to them or you send them to them in the mail and talk about all different ways to use them. But it's a fantastic credibility builder. You will find that if you give them 20 letters of recommendation, they don't call anybody or they call somebody who's given a letter of recommendation on their own, on their own letterhead.

It's also great for differentiation purposes. So if there's a, you know, consulting, we would call it a beauty contest, right? Where there's 15 lawyers coming in or three lawyers coming in or three firms coming in and they're going to decide who their counsel of record is going to be or who's going to handle this transaction and they get 20 letters of recommendation for you. And none from the other people, you've got a huge advantage.

It's also the best marketing copy you're ever going to have. It's better than anything any marketing expert will write for you because your clients know you. It's what they're saying is true and it's valuable because it's their experience.

So it's literally the best marketing copy that you'll ever have. You can also use them to thwart objections. So if you're the highest price provider or you're higher price than everybody else and you have a letter of recommendation right on the top of the pile that says this is more expensive, but they're worth it because they are the number one firm in New York.

Nobody knows law as well as they do. That addresses the price objection. You can use that for any objection that people are going to have with you.

So those are some of the reasons why we use them. Now, the strategy that I'm going to teach you today to get recommendations is valuable because it will help you recognize people who are your clients as well as people who are your evangelists. Let's talk a little bit about strategy that you are going to use with the recommendations once you get them and why it's important.

So the first thing that I have our clients use recommendations for is to get speaking engagements. I would have the person who's the president of the current president of the bar, the person who's the event planner of the bar, the person who's moderated panels that you've been on. I would have them all writing recommendations for you and talking about how the content you delivered was extraordinary and I'll give you phrases that you're going to use in the recommendations you write for others, but that's how they'll take their cue from you, but I would have all those people writing recommendations for you and you can use that to get other speaking engagements.

And by the way, those recommendations, I would also put them in and send to clients because if clients see that you're an exceptional speaker and people are talking about what an exceptional speaker you are, they're going to think you know your stuff. They're going to think you're an expert. So to me, all recommendations go in the same bucket.

You can also use them to get publishing gigs. If you want to get an article published and you're pitching the article to the editor of a publication with your pitch letter and the article should go 20 recommendations. Why? Because of the credibility.

All these people, some of whose names they're going to recognize, think that you're a qualified expert. Well, we're definitely going to take an article from you. Is that better than past articles? No, you definitely need to include past articles too.

What we do with that pitch packet, what you're sending out, and this is a term you guys will all recognize, you want to include an overwhelming or preponderance of evidence that demonstrates your credibility. So past articles, if you're sending out something for publication, past articles and letters of recommendation are critical. And the letters of recommendation are valuable because they allow people who are mid-level in any organization to defend the hiring of you.

So let's say you're going up against a big firm, Greenberg Trag, for a transaction or something. How are they going to justify hiring you when if they hire Greenberg, even though they're going to pay double on an hourly basis, they know they won't get fired if Greenberg screws it up. Well, if something happens, they're going to reach into their drawer and go, look, this guy had 50 letters of recommendation.

You tell me, you look at this, you wouldn't have hired him. Look at all these. You know, there's something in there from people we recognize.

He's had clients that are high profile. Look, there are all these things in there. So that makes you defensible and it makes the playing field somewhat even in the nobody gets fired for hiring Gibson Dunn or whatever.

After you meet with somebody at a networking event and you think that you have the opportunity to land them as a client or to make them an evangelist for you and you want to follow up with them and you want to connect with them and hopefully do business with them. So you put together a package and it says. And I stuff, I have like 150 letters of recommendation.

I just jam them all in there. I put a cover letter in there and I seal it up and I just mail that out and they open it and it's my cover letter and like, you know, 150 letters saying how great a speaker I am and I get a call and they're like, everybody else sent us a DVD with a video of them speaking. And I'm like, well, you can call any one of those people in there.

I can send you all the video links you want on YouTube, but that's the best marketing that I have. And I'll customize the speech for you. I mean, you guys should be doing the same exact thing.

Client meetings. So a potential client is coming in. You don't know if they're going to engage you or not.

You don't know if they're shopping around, but you have a little bit of time between when they schedule the appointment and when they're actually coming in. I would send a cover letter that says something like, I'm looking forward to meeting with you. Not sure whether we can be of assistance to you or not, but regardless of what happens, we'll sit down and see what we can do on Tuesday.

And here's some information about me and my firm. I would send that out with the same packet with a ton of letters of recommendation. If you don't have time or you forget and you meet with them, that should be your follow-up.

Your follow-up is, great meeting with you on Friday. As we discussed, I think there are some things we can do together to help you with the situation. Here's some additional information about me and my firm.

I will follow-up with you next Tuesday to determine whether or not it makes sense for us to work together. And then you send all that stuff out. And they get all the letters of recommendation right there in that packet.

Finally is media. If you ever wanted to do any media, if you guys ever wanted to get in front of the media and you want people to pitch you, letters of recommendation in there make you an easy target for producers or editors. Because you got 25 letters of recommendation, you must be an expert.

I don't have to explain to someone that you're an expert. I just go, look, he sent me 25 letters of recommendation. This is a person who's an expert.

You might get to this down the road, but what is the critical mass you need? Because if you send like two, people might think, well, you're not that much of an expert. Good question. I wouldn't send less than five unless people ask you for references.

If somebody says, can you give me some references, I would have a reference sheet and then you could send the two letters. Here's a list of 20 people you can call or a list of five people you can call. Also, here are a couple of letters of recommendation from some of my long-time clients.

I wouldn't send less than five. The more, the better. They never go stale, by the way.

You can send them from 20 years ago. If anybody ever says anything to you, I've been sending 10-year-old letters of recommendation forever. If anybody ever says anything to you about these are old, yeah, and that guy still works with me or he still knows me, you can call him.

That's why I keep it in there. He's still alive. You can still call him.

That's another good point that I usually forget to bring up. If people pass away, take the letters out. You don't want them to call or if it's a high-profile person and they know that this person's passed away, you don't want to keep that in there.

I have a question. The letters of recommendation, I missed last. Was this discussed then or did you just bring it up? This is brand new.

I missed the beginning, so how do you ask for them? We didn't get to that yet. We only covered, before you walked in, we only covered why you use them, the reasons why. The idea is to overwhelm them, obviously, with good information about you.

Here are the 10 different areas that you want to have people cover in your letters of recommendation or your testimonials. I'm saving the how you ask for them for the end. There's a minimum of 10 things that you want people to address in these letters of recommendation or testimonials, but that doesn't mean that they can't say other good things about you.

The first is the quality of your work, obviously. That's the first thing that people are going to want to hear about. Nobody wants to make a mistake in hiring a lawyer or any type of professional who doesn't know what they're doing.

You need to get a good number of testimonials that say you do high quality work, exceptional work, top of your profession, top of the field. The second is your character. You want people to say that you're honest, trustworthy, someone they count on, the person they call when they don't know who to call.

The third is the level of service you and your team provide. You're responsive. Number one bar complaint.

I served three years on the Florida Bar Grievance Committee, and the number one complaint we received during that time, and from my understanding, number one complaint about lawyers in general, is that they're not responsive when clients call. That baffles me. I do not understand that.

You've got to spend more time with bad lawyers. Every time a client calls or emails, it's like the first thing I do is get back to them. Good.

That's the minimum requirement of your job. Even if it's just to get back to say, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Just acknowledge their, you know, it's stupidity not to do that.

I completely agree. There are lots of lawyers who are not as responsive or as thorough. I hate to tell you, we have people here who are not responsive.

I was just going to say, I didn't want to say that. Even in internal communications, there are people who you email and they just ignore you. From my perspective, it's the most infuriating thing.

I can imagine if somebody's actually paying you, it just baffles the mind. Well, imagine you've got $25,000 on retainer with this attorney and you've got a question in your mind that's urgent and the person doesn't get back to you, not even with an email, for three or four days. They may be in court and they don't have their assistant or a paralegal checking their email to say, Mr. Jones is in court.

If it's urgent, I'll have him respond to you after hours or he'll get back to you on Friday. It is so easy to fix, but it's the number one thing. One of the things that has to be covered in your testimonials is communication.

Folks, make sure you get something to eat while we're talking. That's under service, the service of you and your team. The fourth one, in most states, people talking about this on your behalf is not a problem.

The fourth one is results. If you got a great result and the client is willing to do it, and again, I'm going to teach you how to ask for this. I'm going to teach you how to get to this point.

You want them to put the result that you got in the testimonial. Now, I need you to check with whoever handles ethics here or whatever the bar rules are about sharing results and about specifically asking clients to discuss results and that sort of thing. That's my way of covering all of us, but putting results in the testimonial is phenomenal.

That type of thing, the reason that people do it is it's convincing. Now, the way you have the client do it, you don't want to be over the top, personal injury. It should just be, they saved my company.

We were facing multi-million dollar judgment because of something that wasn't our fault, and they saved my company. That's a good way to present results. Value is also important.

No, that's the next one. That's number five. Value is communicating that you may be expensive, but worth it.

I don't want you to ever have to worry about defending your price. I want people to understand that they get what they pay for. The way to make them understand that is to have the clients tell them that in these letters of recommendation or testimonials.

Number six, three was service. Number six is responsiveness and attentiveness. I guess I kind of jumped the gun.

Number six is responsiveness and attentiveness. Number seven is, you can say it a number of different ways, leadership or your level of authority or that you fight for them. If you're a litigator, you want your clients to tell people that you're fighting for them.

Clients love to hear that. I personally hate that. I want people to zealously advocate for their clients without being a jerk, but clients apparently like the jerk.

You need to have your testimonials say that you'll fight for them. In the transactional world or in other testimonials, you can say that you're an authority in negotiation and you represent them very well and that you can pull things off that other people couldn't. Leadership, authority, and if you're a litigator, that you fight for them.

If you're a transactional attorney, that you're a phenomenal negotiator and you work to get the best possible deal for your clients. Number eight surprises a lot of people, but it's empathy. These letters of recommendation need to demonstrate empathy.

They need to demonstrate that you're willing to sit and listen to the client. There are some clients that are going to be a pain in the neck about a .1 or a .2 on their bill. You have to be able to judge when you're going to invest that .1 or .2 in listening to the client and not bill them for it so that they understand that you're empathetic.

You need to get letters of recommendation that say, I called him at 7 o'clock at night and he was willing to sit with me and listen to my issues. It doesn't have to say that he didn't bill me, but if you want to get a letter of recommendation that says you're empathetic, you can't send out a .1 or a .2 for the call where they just say, Listen, I'm really having second thoughts about this. I need five minutes of your time.

You need to bill for times when you're adding value, but you also have to be cognizant of the fact that empathy is a big deal with clients. By nature, most competitive attorneys usually are not high in the area of empathy. Most competitive people in general don't have a ton of empathy.

Me, personally, I've become very good at faking empathy over the years because I owe empathy. You could be in pain and bleeding out and I would be like, You okay? I would have to really get myself to see it. It's just the way we're wired.

Keep it in mind and have people recognize the fact that you're going out of your way to be empathetic. Your differentiating factor, what makes you different from everybody else who does what you do is number nine. Your clients will know this and they'll be more in tune with this than you will.

When you're going to talk about letters of recommendation with your clients, you can say to them, if they say, I would love to write a letter of recommendation for you, what should I put in there? I always include, tell them what you think makes me different. Don't tell them what you think makes you different. Let them come up with it on their own.

Why'd you pick me? If they say lowest price, say that's not good enough. You never want that. Nobody's ever going to say that about me.

And then the tenth one is they should highlight your external orientation or your selflessness. Can you imagine a client comparing two attorneys and then reading a letter of recommendation that says that you were selfless? It's fantastic. It's amazing.

Give me an example of how an attorney would be selfless. During Brad's representation of me, my husband tragically passed away. And Brad came to the funeral and he was very attentive to my family's needs during that difficult time.

I'm sure he could have been doing other things that he would get paid for, but that's also empathy. But he was willing to sacrifice that to spend time with my family when we needed it the most. Well, he was willing.

Well, that's the other thing. If they get a bill for that, you're not going to get that recommendation. Just to this point, a client called me up an hour ago and said, Daniel, my project, I forgot to tell the lender we're switching from this program to that program.

And can you give me an opinion on it? They haven't been funding my draws for two months. And I said, oh, yeah, you'll have it tomorrow. They said, really, tomorrow? I said, yeah, I'll make sure I get this for you.

Would this be a good moment to say, can you write me a letter of recommendation? No, so I'm going to show you how to do it. Let me get through some of these other things. Like I said, I saved the best stuff for the end because I want to keep your attention.

I know you guys want to know how to do this and I'm not going to let you down. I promise. So another example of selflessness is the United Way of New York is a very important charity to me.

And we needed some volunteers. Oh, I actually have a client who did Special Olympics. It was very important to me.

We needed some volunteers to come out and hug the kids after a race. And Brad volunteered to do that. Selfless.

He spent an hour and a half just hugging kids who finished the race. And he knew that was important to me. That's why he did it.

Fantastic. There are all different ways to get recommendations. The most common, and the one I like the best, of course, is the hard copy on somebody's letterhead.

You guys are mostly in the business-to-business world. So on their letterhead, signed by them. A recommendation is useless if you don't have a person's actual name on it.

You will see a lot of soul practitioners on their website with Joe M., a client. Useless. Useless.

The one cardinal sin of these, you can never make this up. You can never ever make up a letter of recommendation. Never fake it.

Never get your cousin or your nephew to write a letter of recommendation for you. These types of things are how people get in trouble with ethics issues, bar complaints, that sort of thing. Don't do it.

They're easy enough to get. I promise I'm going to show you how to get them. Written letters of recommendation are my preference.

A close second are videos. I love videos. The problem with a video is if you're sending out a media kit or a brag packet, or sometimes I call it a shock and awe packet, you can't send out a video.

You can send out a video via email. But videos are pretty easy to get, too. And you can get people on video to do a really nice testimonial for you.

And you can get this if you're speaking at an event. You can get testimonials from three or four people at an event. If they come up to you to ask you a question, they ask you the question, and you just turn right around and say, thanks for asking the question.

And they'll say, oh, great presentation. Oh, would you mind? Let me turn on my phone and just tell people in a couple of words why you liked it. 30 seconds.

Very easy. Very easy to do. Especially if you're not getting paid.

If you're not getting paid for the presentation, walk out of there with at least a couple of testimonials. Online. So Avvo, Yelp, Google Reviews, and LinkedIn.

I'm not crazy about these, but candidly, if you don't have at least a couple of them, like with Avvo and stuff, if you don't have at least a couple of reviews on Avvo, it looks a little funny. I would much rather you spend your energy getting regular written recommendations. But when we talk about where you're going to get these from, there's a couple of people that you can ask to just jump on Avvo and write a testimonial for you, and that'll help you out.

If somebody ever, and this could happen, this happens to good professionals all the time. If somebody ever bashes you on Yelp, something happens, and you cut somebody off in traffic and they happen to know who you are and know you're a lawyer, and they're pissed at you and they write you a terrible Yelp review, we have to then go out and get 10 positive Yelp reviews to push that other one down. So you're going to need to get them on there.

Yelp and Avvo and Google are notorious for never taking that stuff down. That's like luggage. It's with you forever.

So you're going to have to get positive reviews to get the negative ones pushed down. Photos are terrific for politicians, celebrities, and dare I even say, judges. So if you wanted to get an endorsement from somebody who is a local politician, you're not going to ask a local politician to write a letter of recommendation.

Unless you give them a max contribution, then you should ask them to write a letter of recommendation. But if you want to get an endorsement from a politician, take a picture with them. Take a selfie with them.

And if it's the kind of politician that is not going to harm you one way or another, influence somebody's opinion negatively, throw the picture in there. Have the picture printed out on good photo paper and throw it in there. Now we'll talk about how to get them.

This is so simple that you're going to kick yourself for not having done it before. But it's work. I'm sorry.

It just is. The easiest way to get testimonials is to, first step one, make a list of everybody that you want to get testimonials from. And let's talk about the people you can ask.

The easiest people to ask are other people in your profession. So you went to law school with a bunch of lawyers who you stay in touch with maybe. Talk to them.

And I'm going to show you how you make this happen. First thing you're going to do is make the list. Second thing you're going to do is you're going to write a letter of recommendation for them, unsolicited.

Now the easiest time to do it is after you've had contact with them. So if you've had a matter with them or you've referred a case to them, let's say, and they did a good job. You're not only going to thank them, but you're going to write a letter of recommendation.

And here's what you're going to do. You're going to send them two copies of the letter of recommendation. And they're going to be on your letterhead.

And you're going to make sure you put them in an envelope that's not bendable. I would do a FedEx envelope or a post office type envelope that has the cardboard on it so it doesn't get all bent and gnarly. And you're going to send it over to them so they can use it.

You're going to tell them it's okay for them to scan it. You'll be happy to send them an electronic version of it if you want. And you're going to write the letter of recommendation exactly the way you want them to write a letter of recommendation for you.

You're going to write it exactly the way you want them to write it for you. You're going to give them the exact examples of the things you want to highlight. And I'm going to give you phrases you can use.

That's why I sent you guys all the notes. I emailed you the notes. The notes contain exact phrases you can use in these letters of recommendation.

Now why do you think I want you to write it for them exactly the way you want them to write it for you? So what's going to happen is most of the time, 60% of the time, they're going to call you. And they're going to go, oh my gosh, Alex, thank you so much. Nobody's ever written a letter of recommendation for me before.

Here is your response, okay? And this is very important. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure to write that letter of recommendation for you because I know you'd do the same for me.

That's your response. Okay? And then they're going to say, of course I would. Would you like me to write one for you? And you're going to say yes.

And then 75% of the people will immediately forget about it and never do it. But the 30% is who we're looking for. Okay? And they're going to use the exact format.

They're going to say, well, what do you want it to say? And you can say, well, just use mine as a guide. I mean, you know, write true stuff. I can't tell you what to write.

But you can use mine as a guide if you want and write about some of the characteristics that I have and just use the format that I use. And, by the way, yours is, like, maybe two paragraphs. The recommendation letter you're writing to them is two paragraphs.

Now, if you want a guaranteed response, if you want to be 100% sure that they will do something for you, maybe write you the letter, like, immediately, here's what I do. I go to, like, Walmart or Target, and I buy cheap certificate frames. And I buy them, like, 10 or 20 at a time.

Okay? And I will send them the two copies. I will frame one and put it in a FedEx envelope and send it over with a cover letter. And then the other one will be just a regular one that they can scan if they want to.

And I send it over. I always get a response. Now, they will promise that they're going to do one for me, and sometimes they forget.

But then I put them on, like, my newsletter list and stuff. And that is almost always—you're almost always going to get something back from them. And here's the thing.

The person has to really know you. Okay? You can't be doing this to people, to random people. You know, you're adverse to somebody who's famous in a case, and you want to write them a letter of recommendation.

They're not going to write you one back. They're going to take that letter and be happy with it, but they're not going to write you one back. It has to be somebody who knows you, who really knows you.

Okay? But that tactic of putting it in a frame and sending it over, if you want to get 10 letters of recommendation in the next month, do that with 10 people who know you really well. So let's go through the list of people. So other lawyers who you know, people you went to law school with are good.

People who you worked with. My preference is not people from the same firm, but if you worked at another firm before you came here, and you got a couple of buddies or friends who were in that firm, then those folks are great. Okay? One that people don't think of, but it's obvious, vendors.

The vendor likes your business, right? You write a letter of recommendation for that vendor, and then I have no problem with you calling up and going, Hey, did you get the letter? Alright, I need you to write one for me. This is a vendor. This is somebody you're paying.

Okay? If you want a letter of recommendation from them, they can write one for you. Now what can a vendor possibly attest to? Well, the quality of your character, right? They can attest to the fact that you work with a lot of lawyers. I'm a vendor.

I work with a lot of lawyers, and very few lawyers, you know, demonstrate the level of empathy that Daniel's clients tell me that he has. It's great. It's a great letter of recommendation, you know? And the person can say they're a vendor or they cannot say they're a vendor.

It's up to them whether they disclose. I just have a quick question. Yeah.

So, when you send people a letter, at some point, these letters start to kind of sound the same. They start to sound the same. If you're controlling what they're giving you, like, you know, use mine as a guide, does that happen or do they start to deviate in a way that… Well, what will happen… Yeah, that's a good point.

So, that's why I gave you these phrases. I gave you 10 different phrases you can use. Okay.

So, every letter that you send out is going to be a little different. It's like if you've ever worked with somebody from, like, Tom James, they don't do custom suits. They do, like, custom style suits.

So, there's a model, right? But they adjust the model. They adjust the template for each person. You're doing the same thing with these letters.

So, you're going to have a model and then you're going to pick and choose the phrases that you put in. Okay. So, you may have five or six different variations of letters of recommendation.

I would recommend at least five variations of letters of recommendation that you send out to people you want to get letters back from. So, you have, you know, you have a whole, you know, a whole assortment. The interesting thing about these is, candidly, all of your letters of recommendation could be identical.

Most people are going to skim them. They're going to look at the letterhead. They're going to look at the signature.

And if they call anybody, they're going to pick it out, read that one, and call the phone number. They're going to read maybe one or two. They're not going to read all 50.

So, you never want, number one, you never want to fake them. Number two, you don't want them to look too similar, but don't get hung up on that. The volume, as long as you're not sending, if you send five, they all have to be different.

But if you send 50, you know, I wouldn't be overly concerned. Okay. The third one is friends, right? So, your kids are on a baseball team or they go to a dance school and you hang out with the other parents at the dance school.

And one of the dads, you know, is a contractor and you've used him to remodel your bathroom. No problem. Write a letter, you know, give it to him and say, hey, listen, you know, it would be great if you could do one for me.

That's easy. Your friends should be able to do them for you in a heartbeat. Okay.

And they can attest to your character. They can attest to what other people say about you. Okay.

Clients. Obviously, clients. The best time to ask for a letter of recommendation is if you're handing the client a check or if the client, whenever the client says thank you.

Oh, listen, you're welcome. You know, one of the things that I really appreciate is if you just took a few moments and jot down, you know, some of the things that you were just saying went really well about your case. Letters of recommendation are really important to me.

That's how, you know, that's how people determine whether or not I get hired. You know, and if you want to model, I'll give you three or four that other people have written about me. Don't make it sound exactly the same, but, you know, use the highlights that you feel about me and you can, you know, use similar language.

What about now that you gave us this great idea and I'm thinking of someone like maybe three or four years ago? Yes, yes, yes. What I would do first is I would take them to lunch first and then two weeks after the lunch, I would call them up and go. You never want to, when you want something from someone and you haven't spoken to them or done work with them in a couple of years, you never want to come right out with an ask.

What you want to do is you want to reconnect, make sure the relationship is good. Maybe there's something you can do for them. Introduce them to somebody and then ask after that.

Definitely, especially if you got a great result. There is, you get paid in two ways, right? The firm gets paid when you finish a case and the client, you know, settles their bill with you and when they write this letter of recommendation for you or give you a referral. Okay? And that's the other point I want to make about this because a lot of professionals, especially lawyers, get hung up and say, I can't ask for that.

My client's never going to go for that. If you can't ask for a testimonial or a letter of recommendation, you can't ask for a referral. And you should be asking for referrals from every single client or from everybody you know who knows someone that can give you business.

Okay? The fourth are evangelists, referral sources. Somebody sends you a case, you do a great job, you follow up with them to tell them about the results of the case or just to tell them that the case is over, if there's a confidentiality issue. They call the other person.

They verify that you did a great job. You're going to take them out to lunch to thank them for referring you the case. At the lunch, you say, hey, listen, I really appreciate you sending me that case.

It was great. You know, you sent them a thank you gift or something. And they say, no, you did a great job.

I wouldn't hesitate to send you another case. You say, thanks very much. Would you mind jotting that down, putting it on your letterhead? I would really appreciate it because recommendations are, you know, they're really important to me because I go up against some big firms and I want to make sure that I have an advantage.

They'll be happy to do it. Or at least they say they'll be happy to do it. They'll forget about it.

This next one, people bristle at, but you'd be amazed. Clergy. Okay.

If you donate to your temple or you volunteer at your church, the people who are members of the clergy, they will write you a letter of recommendation. And there is nothing more impressive than a letter of recommendation from a member of the clergy. People really go nuts for that.

They love that. So, you know, it's, God bless you. It's worth it.

It really is worth it. Charitable organization leaders. If you do work for a charity, okay, especially if you not only donate to the charity, but you invest your time in the charity, those folks will be thrilled to write a letter of recommendation for you.

Event attendees. We talked about the, you know, the quick video. Fantastic.

Somebody says, you're a great speaker. This was a wonderful speech. Hey, thanks so much.

Would you mind if I hopped on the camera and we stand together and take a quick selfie and then you say two or three things you liked? People would be thrilled. I'm going to put it on my website or I'm going to put it on the firm's website or it'll go in an article that I write about the event. Great exposure for them.

Influential people in the industry. Okay. Here's the thing about this.

So let's say that you were, Daniel, was there somebody who was influential that you were on a panel with recently or that you connected with? Yes. Okay. So that person that you're thinking of right now, here's how you get them to do the testimonial.

You offer to do a full interview with them that's going to be recorded and transcribed and you're going to publish on the firm's website. Right? If the interview is on video, they're going to let you use it however you want. So the full video goes on the firm's website.

Right? The transcript can go on the firm's website too. But the one snippet where he says, you know, in that panel discussion, Daniel, you made some really good points and you're clearly an authority on this topic. Boom.

There's your testimonial. You cut that out. That's your testimonial from that.

You can use that. He's going to give you permission to use it however you want. Whenever you want to get a testimonial from somebody who's influential, and this is one of the reasons why I love podcasts or video interviews, people who are big shots will do your podcast.

And if they do any research about you and your background, they're going to say things that are complimentary about you. But just the fact that you got them to sit down with you is a great testimonial for you and who you are. Okay? Celebrities.

There's some local celebrities or if you do work for any celebrities, minimum is a picture with them that you can use however you want. But if you can get them or their agent or manager, just as good to write a letter of recommendation. That's great.

And then I touched on this kind of lukewarm on it. Politicians. If there's like a beloved politician who, you know, these days nobody, like everybody's polarizing.

But if you know somebody who's beloved or you have a specific community that you're catering to, politicians are good. And judges I'm kind of lukewarm on too. I'm not a big fan of pictures with judges, but, you know.

I think most of them like us. Lawyers seem to like pictures with judges. All right.

So how you get them. You write the first strategies. You write a recommendation for them.

Use the exact language you want. You send it to them when they say thank you. You use the phrase and I put it in the notes.

It's my pleasure. I meant every word. I know you do the same for me.

And then they're going to offer. Okay. Now, here's the key.

Okay. If you want to build up an arsenal, if you want to build up a full body of these, my preference for you, as we discussed, is to come up with five different templates for these. You can even have more.

You can have seven if you wanted to. And then you're going to hate this, but it makes a lot of sense. Try to do it like a couple of times a week or even every day if you can.

And the reason is because three, if you're doing a great job, three out of ten people will reciprocate. Right. So if you want 30, you got to send out 100.

Okay. You know, how many is enough? Ten is great. But more is always better.

Preponderance of evidence. Right. You want people to have as many as they can.

And you can use them from one year to the next. So if you do two this week and one next week and one the week after, that's fine. Don't kill yourself.

Like if you can get, like what happens is when I cover this with people, they think it's a great idea. And some people who are really ambitious will be able to get three or four right away. And then they get discouraged because they send out ten letters and nobody ever calls them.

Or five of the people call them, but they promise to write letters and they don't write them. Right. The idea is you get people to write these, you get people to commit to writing these, and then you just stay in front of them.

And every time they see you, they're going to be like, oh my God, I got to see them again. I didn't do the letter. So what will happen is they'll take your letter out at 11 o'clock at night before they meet with you at 9 o'clock the next morning.

And they'll type up a letter of recommendation for you. And when they see you, the burden will be lifted and they'll feel better about it. What happens if the letter's not very good or has typos? That's a good question.

Yeah, but then you waste the letter. Do you at any point say, that's great. Yeah.

I mean, I know you don't want to do that, but what do you do? Yeah. It depends. So first, it depends on your relationship with the person.

Okay. What I would usually do is, what people who are really, people who really care about their relationship with you, will send you in an email a Word document as a draft and say, what do you think of this? Yeah. And then you can go right in and correct the typos.

What I do is I correct the typos and send it back. And if the language is not what I want, I'll say, is it okay? I'll get them on the phone and I'll say, is it okay if I change this to this and this to this? Yeah. Yes, okay, and I send it back.

Okay. And that happens, I want to say about half the time. You have a good relationship with the person, they'll send you a draft.

If the person is, and this happens with friends or if you use a vendor, the vendor is going to give it to you and it's going to be like, well, no, whatever. Here's what I do. I bury that in the middle.

I put it in there and I bury it in the middle. And I don't, if you only have five, that's not the one you want to send out. But if you've got 20, you can put it in the middle.

Because the bottom line is they're not going to read all of them anyway. And the person, most of the time the person is not going to feel like they did a half-assed job. They're going to feel like they did a good job.

So, you know. Is it endearing to include one from your child? Say you have more than five and you put in 10. It shows some sense of humor and a little levity if you were to put what is, my dad's the best.

That's interesting. I wouldn't, look, I wouldn't be opposed to that. If that's my sense of humor, I would totally do it.

So here's something that I did. If you remember and you care and you send me an email, I will send this to you. So I joined, when I moved to Miami, I joined a chamber of commerce type networking group.

And I sent a mailing, and my son was six months old. And I sent a mailing to everyone asking them to go to lunch with me so I could get to know them. But I wrote it in a crayon font.

And I sent, it was from my son. And I sent a box of crayons, a small, like the restaurant box of crayons with it. And I had him close the letter, please write back.

And it was phenomenal. Everybody, that made my mark on that group. So, look, I'm okay with that.

But I think you've got to be, if they know your personality, if the person that you're giving it to knows your personality, I think it's great. If there's somebody who's happy-go-lucky and you think they're a good person and you think it will work, I would do it, sure, why not? Right?