All forms of marketing including marketing your legal services is persuasion. You must persuade individuals or groups to part with one of their most prized possessions: their money.

Marketing is a fancy word that means selling, and selling is a fancy word that means persuasion. You need to persuade to sell or market anything. As a business owner, you need to master the art of persuasion.

Before you say that you are not a good persuader, let me ask you how many times you persuade your kids to eat their vegetables, your friends to do you a favor or your spouse to buy something home. My guess is lots of times. The moral – We are all persuaders at heart.

But if you want to maximize your powers of persuasion, you need two kinds of insight – Insight into their prospects and customers combined with insight into your own legal service.

The starting point is to know who to persuade. Don’t think it trivial or obvious. Certainly you persuade prospective clients to engage you as their lawyer. But knowing who to persuade means more than that. It also means knowing what type of prospective clients they are. Are they single or married, about to be divorced, facing bankruptcy, having issues with the government, being unfairly treated, victimized in some way etc? When you know who to persuade, you are only part of the way home. You must also know what is important to them. Once you know this, then you know the hot buttons that ignite that person.

Now, not every persuasion attempt you make will work out the way you want. The key is to realize why some attempts succeed, to realize why some fail and to realize the difference between the two.

Once you realize that difference, you exponentially increase your power of persuasion. If you become a better persuader, you become a better salesperson. If you become a better salesperson, you become a better marketer. You become a guerrilla marketer – one who achieves conventional goals with unconventional methods.

As a guerrilla marketer, you are constantly learning from every experience. “What was the crucial insight that I used?” or “How did I use it?” Even if you fail you ask: “What insight should I have seen?” and “How did my attempt miss it?” Normally, failures are caused by persuaders failing to understand the person being persuaded. The deeper you walk into the head of your prospective client, the more persuasive you will become because of the scope of your understanding.

Here is what it means to have guerrilla persuasion: Knowing your clients and prospective clients so well that it’s a cinch to connect their goals with yours.

And this all boils down to research time and your own energy. An advertising expert, Claude Hopkins said, “The advertising man (or woman) studies the consumer. He/She tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His/Her success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else.” The keys to persuasion are in shoes and eyes. Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes and see things through his eyes.

In conclusion, guerrilla persuading means connecting with consumers on the level of the mind and heart. The connection begins in your own mind – and it continues until a sale is made. Gentle persuasion can be as powerful as pressured persuasion. And all persuasion begins with connection.