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Like a Buddhist Monk – After the Marketing, the Marketing
by Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD
Some Buddhist monks spend countless hours creating highly detailed mandalas or sand paintings. These intricate, colorful images are "painted" with brightly colored sand laboriously trickled onto a horizontal "canvas" almost one grain at a time. Once the mandala is completed, you might expect the monk to proudly display it or at least savor its beauty. Instead, as soon as the exquisite work of art is complete, he destroys it in recognition of and in celebration of the impermanence of life.
Our CLNC® marketing plans would benefit from such a tradition. Like a monk creating a mandala, we painstakingly and lovingly craft our marketing plans. We pour our creative juices into each strategy, attending to every detail. Surely, we tell ourselves, this is a marketing plan for the ages, a plan that will last a lifetime. Yet the most successful CLNC®s recognize that even the best marketing plan is as impermanent as a mandala. Once we create the perfect plan, it's time to destroy it and start over.
The Marketing Mandala – Everything Now Is New
Everything we do in our business is marketing. No matter how hard we try, we will never master marketing. We can only be good at it temporarily. We can make our marketing program far more compelling by recognizing that marketing is always changing. Our market changes, our method changes, our CLNC® practice changes. We may experience fabulous success at some point, but that success won't last if we rely on the permanence of an impermanent plan. Tomorrow we'll need a new plan.
Once I overheard a competitor say, "Vickie is a marketing genius." How I wish this were true – then I would have made a lot fewer mistakes. If you can believe this, years ago I taught students that I didn't have to market to attorneys anymore because I was so busy! I was fooling myself and misguiding my students. I quickly learned that this limited approach might work in the short term, but not in the long term. By not marketing, I was removing myself from the market, hardly the goal I had in mind.
What best describes me now is "Vickie's marketing plan is like a mandala." Yes, I've learned that you can never stop marketing, but I've also learned that your marketing plan must be fresh, evolving and yours alone – not an imitation of anyone else's. I don't fear others copying my marketing mandala because frankly I'm destroying it before the imitator can find the right sand.
If genius has anything to do with my success, it's because I now enjoy the impermanence of marketing. I love waking up every day thinking of new ways to shake up our marketing efforts. I never abandon what has taken me 24 years to learn, but I don't cling to the old way either. I always try to re-vision my old strategies on a new canvas.
The Zen of Marketing – Everything Is Change
In the Broadway musical, Jekyll and Hyde, one of the characters sings, "The only thing constant is change." Change is the permanence within the impermanence of our lives.
The sweeping changes that have occurred within our lifetimes testify to this fact. Some of you remember black and white television complete with cigarette and alcohol commercials. There was a time when news reports were more than headline sound bites and "tickertapes" crawling across the bottom of the screen.
We also have the Internet, email, our own websites, blogs, Google and one-stop shopping at Amazon.com. Even our cell phones are evolving. Today, you don't just talk on your phone; you download music, take photos, text message, send and receive email, and maintain your contact manager and calendar.
Every one of these changes demands that communication today be instant, and instant communication calls for Buddhist marketing insights. In 2006 how do we recreate our marketing plans, recognize those strategies that don't work, destroy them and celebrate the destruction as we create new and more powerful marketing strategies?
We can't simply offer an array of quality CLNC® services; we have to be available to our attorney-clients, or at least create the perception that we are available, 24/7. Our marketing must communicate that we offer 24/7 service, and indeed, we must offer that kind of service.
We can't just establish a good relationship with an attorney-client, then grow comfortable and forget about marketing. And we can't limit ourselves to marketing just those CLNC® services that the client isn't yet using. We must continually reinvent ourselves and our CLNC® services by offering a new canvas which our attorney-client sees as vital to her success. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves being replaced by someone offering something new or different.
Marketing in the Impermanent Here and Now
Impermanence is an essential element of our impermanent world. We must constantly adapt in order to face and survive tomorrow's changes. The static will fall behind. Don't get comfortable in your marketing success – strive to get better. Become a student of marketing, salute your successes and celebrate your conscious destruction of every strategy that doesn't give you the desired outcome for your CLNC® practice.
Which marketing mandala will you rely on in 2006 – the old or the new? Make it your New Year's resolution to create a new "CLNC® marketing canvas" regularly. This year, I won't be carefully pouring sand into my efforts. I'll be tossing it by the handful! I hope you will too.
Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD is the founder and president of Vickie Milazzo Institute. She is credited by The New York Times with creating the legal nurse consulting profession in 1982. Inc. named her to the 2004 Top 10 Entrepreneur list. She is the recipient of the Nursing Excellence Award for Advancing the Profession and the Stevie Award (business's Oscar®) as Mentor of the Year. Vickie has revolutionized the careers of thousands of RNs. She is the author of Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn't Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now, coming March 2006 from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Preorder this anticipated bestseller now at www.Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Thanks to Tina Little, RN, CLNC, who attended the CLNC® 6-Day Certification Seminar in Philadelphia, for sharing her quick success as a new CLNC®.
Thank you, Vickie, for my new start in life. Three months ago I was sitting in your CLNC® 6-Day Certification Seminar hoping I wasn't wasting my time and money. I had no confidence in myself. Everything you were telling us seemed like an impossible dream.
Today, just three short months after taking your class, I have three attorney-clients and seven cases on my desk.
Since the CLNC® 6-Day Certification Seminar, I've sent out more than 200 information packets and lined up speaking engagements, including an invitation to speak at a bar association meeting.
In early December I exhibited at the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association seminar in Chicago. I left there feeling awesome, overwhelmed and challenged, all at the same time. Hoping to come away with at least one attorney-prospect, I left there with four attorneys interested in using my CLNC® services.
On top of that, the next week I received a call from an attorney who hadn't stopped by my booth, but saw my flyer. He said he came to that seminar especially to find someone with both EMS and ER nursing experience. I told him I had been a paramedic for 27 years. Three days later I drove to Chicago because he was interviewing nurses for his case. Was I shaking in my boots? Yes, but I went in acting very confident as you and your staff instructed us. After 45 minutes I walked out with the case, a huge med-mal suit. He said there was no need to interview anyone else. When I told him my fee was $110/hour, he didn't flinch.
I want to encourage others if they're wondering whether your system works. Attorneys are hungry for us out there. So many of them have told me they had no idea what CLNC®s really do.
My husband, who's an attorney, is so proud of my accomplishments in such a short time. He's very impressed with my eagerness to make my CLNC® practice a success. I told him that Vickie tells us, "We are successful CLNC®s," so we have to live up to that.
Thank you, Vickie, for opening the door. You provided me the opportunity to enhance not only my self-esteem but my entire life. Thank you for what you do and for what you have inspired me to do.
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