Webinar: Intake Mastery
January 25, 2023Metrics, Software and Tactics to Crush Intake.
Intake is the lifeblood of every consumer facing law firm – fail here and all of your marketing efforts are a complete waste of time. During this session, Mockingbird’s, Robert Williams goes deep on the infrastructure that can massively improve your intake game. Learn about
- Funnel Velocity (and how to measure it).
- The importance of duplicate source attribution fields.
- How to use technology to score the calls of your intake staff – either an in-house front desk, or a third party answering service.
- Review the sophisticated Intake Management Softwares available and hear our picks (and those to avoid.)
- How to Use CallRail as a low cost CRM.
Transcript of the Webinar:
Conrad and Robert Intake
Conrad Saam: [00:00:00] By way of introduction, this is Rob Williams. Rob and I have been working for close to nine years now. Uh, and about three years ago, Rob’s entire focus shifted to intake management software, um, CRM systems, and reporting infrastructure.
And for those of you who are clients of ours, he is kind of the mad genius behind the controls at getting what we really try and get to, which is at the very least consultations, but ideally automating the process from a marketing query all the way into a client and, and ideally revenue. Now we don’t do that for all of our clients.
frankly, some of you do not have the infrastructure to support that, but what we’re going to show is kind of our best practices looking in from the outside, from an intake perspective. Rob, you are almost ready to rock.
Robert Williams: Almost. I got to get it all up here again. Bear with me. All right. There we are. I’m looking [00:01:00] younger.
Conrad Saam: We are, although I still don’t have any air. All right, I’m going to stop talking as much and Rob, I’ll let you take it away. And by the way, as we go through this, everyone, um, please interrupt with questions. Uh, we do really well with answering questions in real-time, so don’t feel, um, like you’re bugging us.
I think these things always work out much better when we are interrupted by questions. And the other part of this is, Rob and I have done this so many times, that is unlikely that there’s a question that you have to ask that we have not already answered. All right, Rob, I’ll let you take it away.
Robert Williams: Cool.
So, this is, uh, intake mastery. Um, what this is not just answering, your phone. Asking a bunch of candid questions to people who call your law firm. So if, if you don’t have a list of questions, uh, today, I recommend that you get those and you work with your intake team on, on capturing that information.
So this is, this is the [00:02:00] mastery, right? This isn’t the 1 0 1. So I just kind of wanted to set the stage on that front. Uh, Conrad already did a couple of nice introductions. Um, I don’t have much to add other than, again, I just want to reiterate, please ask us questions as we go through this. Uh, I want it to be as collaborative and informative as I can make it.
So just to kind of set the stage here for everyone, um, this is a basic law firm funnel, and what you see at the very top is the marketing. And what we’re trying to help you avoid at your firm is kind of fumbling all of the efforts that you make during, uh, your advertising and marketing investments and making sure that you’re converting as many of those PNCs or potential new clients as you possibly can.
And that really starts with your intake team. And the unfortunate reality that we’ve, uh, come to realize over the many years of working with law firms is, you know, we can [00:03:00] do a really stellar job with your marketing and with your advertising, and you still tell us that you’re not getting clients. And so oftentimes when we take, a deeper look into that intake process, there’s a lot to be gained.
And so that’s what we’re going to be focused here on today.
Conrad Saam: Um, I would, I would do a little translation on this funnel here. Um, We, you know, we typically talk about leads as inquiries, and I think many agencies stop at that leads level. Like, Hey, we sent you all these leads. Um, the reality is, and you guys know this because you’ve been complaining about it since I started doing legal marketing, um, a lot of the leads are garbage, right?
We’ve, we’ve run different, um, studies on this. Some are between 70 and 84% of the leads that we generate. My marketing agency generates are not really leads because they don’t turn into the next step, which is the consultation, right? So are those leads turning into consultations? And that for me is a much better, um, [00:04:00] metric, a much better thing for you to work with agencies on, on talking about like, are these actually qualified leads that we want to sit down and talk with, right?
That’s where it becomes really important, and that’s why frankly, Rob has spent three years getting us to a point with most of our clients where we can actually have that conversation.
Robert Williams: And it, you have to have something in place. Some sort of technology and process combined in order to do that, right?
Which is where I think a lot of law firms don’t, because it takes a little bit of groundwork and ultimately if you’ve got that technology, you can go further, right? You can go to the client a PI, which is, which is really what we’re after. Um, you know, leads are cool, uh, qualified leads are cooler consultations, AK consultations, and clients are the coolest, right?
Like, that’s what pays the bills and that’s what keeps you doing, what you do so well. So the client data path, um, this is a typical data or a typical prospect journey, [00:05:00] um, for a PI firm. You know, you, you get injured. You, go to Google to make a personal injury query. You’re met with a variety of different, um, listings within the search engine’s result page.
Um, you click on one of those and you land on a landing page. For the firm, you ideally fill out that contact form. So you, you, you now are a marketing qualified lead because you’ve, you’ve converted your intake specialist, uh, or receptionist fields that, um, and ideally they get back to that prospect or p n c, they schedule a consultation with them.
The consultation is had with the attorney. You send them the agreement and fees and you’ve won that client. And then if you’re, if you’re working in any level of sophistication with technology, that prospect is now entered into your matter management system. Okay. [00:06:00] And this is a phrase that you’ve probably all heard often from your marketing or advertising agencies or consultants that will maximize your ROI.
And the reality is they can’t even calculate the ROI. Without having data as, as, uh, in terms of how, which in terms of revenue and the clients and where they came from. So they’re missing quite a bit of that equation. So jumping into the metrics and the KPIs or key performance indicators that you’ve been ignoring, um, once you start understanding your funnel and you, you put systems in place to measure your funnel and the conversions through them, you get data like this, right?
And this is straight out of our full funnel report and it’s real law firm data. And you start understanding the conversion rates between each of those funnel stages, right? So between leads, uh, this firm happens to have a 16% conversion rate between leads to [00:07:00] consultations, a 19% conversion rate from consultations to attorney-qualified leads, and then.
Miraculously, and we hear this often when we talk to lawyers too, at 100% conversion rates of all the attorney-qualified leads. So, all of the PNCs that the attorneys wanted to sign, actually, excuse me, actually signed. So, this is one of those cases where we’re talking to an attorney and we, we, you know, during the discovery and, and some of the technical tech audits that we do, um, I always hear the attorneys say, oh, you know, all the, all the PNCs that we want, we get, they sign with us.
If we can get them to that point, they sign. Um, the data oftentimes shows something different, but in this case, they weren’t wrong.
Conrad Saam: But I mean, the other thing is to note on it, and by the way, this is real client data, um, look at that massive drop-off between leads and consultations, right? That’s because so many of the leads, which are text, text, sorry, phone, phone call form, fill, text, and chat [00:08:00] are garbage.
And they’re garbage, right? It’s, it’s, you know, the SEO person trying to sell you a new service. It’s opposing counsel. It’s, you know, and marketing agencies often can’t distinguish between the quality of those leads, right? Is, is this someone calling to have lunch with your spouse, at the office, or is it a new potential client?
That’s why there’s this massive drop off and you must have access to this data to understand like, what it really means.
Robert Williams: The days of only looking at your leads, I think, are long and go as they should be. Right? Like if we are working with an agency that’s only reporting on those, you’re missing the entire point, right?
More metrics can come out of intake mastery and, and data that you can use and take action with our understanding of where your consultations are, how your consultations are contacting you, and finding you on the web. Right? So, this is, a simple pie chart, and it’s looking at the different marketing channels and [00:09:00] what, what are driving consultations.
So, this is, again, this is probably familiar to, um, a lot of our audience, but you probably are looking at this from the perspective of a lead, not a consultations perspective. And that’s an important differentiation. Hey Rob, I’m just looking at the people on the webinar, there’s more than half of the people are not our clients, so this could be new to them, right?
Yeah. Well, I think this P graph is new to them, but I think they’re used to seeing p graphs like this. Oh, leads look, you know, only leads, right? Yeah. Like I think we’re all used to that. I, I, I think, um, and if you’re not you, you should be, but the consultations. Uh, the segment is, is what kind of differentiates this slide, and this is something that you probably haven’t seen but you should be thinking about, and you should be trying to get out of your intake.
So, Conrad, you had mentioned this earlier, and then, the data is, the data breaks up, uh, backs up your claim of 84. [00:10:00] 84% of marketing leads doesn’t actually lead, right? They’re just spam. They’re the pizza guy dropping off the pizza. Um, oftentimes they’re an abandoned call, right? Those oftentimes get counted as leads.
Sometimes they’re multiple collars, so there’s don’t get trapped into that top-of-the-funnel metric misleading. Yeah, and I mean, so we’ve, we run this, that metric every quarter that, that, that typically ranges between 70 and 84% for our clients, right? Um, so yeah, the garbage leads, right? Take that stat. And when you’re talking with your agencies that are reporting, throw that out.
So, your conversion rates are in your pipeline. So once a, once a PNC enters into, um, your process, right? You may have an actual pipeline within the software, which I highly recommend, and we’ll get to, um, some software that I recommend later, later in the webinar. Um, but you can start [00:11:00] to understand what are the conversion rates between your pipeline stages, right?
So if, uh, a typical, um, pipeline is, is like we discussed, right? It’s a new potential client. It’s, a consultation that’s been scheduled, you’re entering the agreement and fees, which means you’ve qualified them as an attorney and then ultimately they’ve signed or made a payment depending on what practice area you are in.
Um, but understanding the conversion rates between those stages is really powerful because what you can do with that is you can start looking at where things are dropping off. And then you can start critically thinking about why is that the case, right? If you’re qualifying, if a human being in the firm, one of your intake specialists is qualifying a high number of leads, and you’re getting a low conversion rate out of your attorney qualified stage, there may be some, uh, some improvements you can make with that intake specialist, right?
Like, Hey, I want to get a little bit more strict, uh, about what you [00:12:00] qualify, and here’s how you do that, right? Or conversely, you can be like, listen, we’re not getting enough. Just pass them through. I just want you to make sure they’re a human looking for what we do and I’ll do the qualifying. So it’s really up to you where you kind of make that, um, make that call.
But this is the data that helps you understand where in your funnel things might be falling through, not converting, and where improvements can be.
Ah, another cool metric and, and data that you, and, and insight, I should say, that you can get from the data, um, and your intake process and your, your system, your intake management system is understanding the conversions by your attorneys who are having those consultations, right? A real, um, a real change you can make in your intake process is understanding who is better at converting those attorney-qualified leads [00:13:00] into actual clients.
And so you can make sure that they are doing more of that and the attorneys who aren’t as good of convert converters are doing less of that overall, improving your conversion. Right. So it’s, it’s really insightful, uh, information to, to get out of this system and your intake process. This is, this is a very real problem that we deal with clients all the time.
One of the things I really like to push our clients to do is, is, is be more of a c e o and, and, and we tend to work with clients who are moving from the lawyer seat to the c e o seat. One of the biggest problems in doing that, and I don’t really have a good solution for this, well, I, I do, I have a solution?
Conrad Saam: I don’t know that it’s a, it’s not the best solution. . What comes out of that is that person is frequently the great closer. They’re the founder of the firm. They’re the face, everyone knows them. They’re, um, enigmatic and uh, really good at turning prospects into clients, and that’s why they are growing a firm, right?
And then you’ll take that, [00:14:00] that lawyer and move them into the c e o role and take them out of that role. And, and you, we, and we have had this, this is, this is anecdotal, but like this has happened multiple times. You move them, you move out to that role, and all of a sudden, your business starts to drop because the person who steps in is not half as good as that initial founder.
Right? That named person. And my unsatisfactory answer to that is. Stick that lady back in that closing role because she was great. And this is, this is the last place where you want to fumble. You cannot be bad at this part, but it is a very real problem that fortunately because we have the data, we can actually see it happen.
Um, but it’s not a good answer, right? You really got to think about like, who is the right person to turn that prospect into a client, right? And if you see those numbers drop off when you, when you pull someone out of it, you clearly have that problem. And this same approach you have with your intake team, right?
Robert Williams: Like I know some of you. On this webinar, you may be [00:15:00] the attorney, you may be the intake specialist, you may be the accountant. Like I get that. Um, but as you scale and grow, right, you can start understanding who is performing and, and holding them accountable and giving them, uh, feedback and training on how to get better is important.
I think its counter intake often feels like an afterthought, right? Like, I filled the role, I got the person in the seat, and I can stop thinking about it, right?
Conrad Saam: Yeah. I think a lot of you, so I’m broad brush strokes here on this. I think a lot of you think an intake is easy and simple because it’s answering the phone and going through a bunch of set questions.
It’s actually not, and, and you pay people commensurately, right? Um, if you’re going to overpay anywhere in your organization, this is a linchpin of your growth. It really is, right? And just an average intake person. Is problematic. Whereas an [00:16:00] amazing intake person can really be someone, someone that levered that, that, that is, is, is kind of a function shift for the firm from a growth perspective.
The other thing that I think just happens because you look at this as just answering the phone is, a lot of you don’t think that requires active management, and you, frankly could not be more wrong about that. Our best clients listen to intake regularly. They have someone who listens in on these phone calls on a regular basis and coaches promotes and removes people from the organization because it is such a critical piece to get right.
And if you think of the amount of time that you work on a matter versus the amount of time that you think about intake, like, don’t fumble this ball. Right. And you really do. I think we’ve probably got slides on this. I, I, I kind of got ahead of myself, but, um, you need to proactively manage your intake people.
And it’s not like, hey, we’re going to do three days of training and you’re off and running. That’s not proactive management. It is [00:17:00] every week going over the best call on your worst call. Right? Like, there are things like that that are just so important, and it’s overlooked because it seems easy. Yep.
Robert Williams: Here’s another, here’s actual data out of a, um, an IMS system intake management system. Um, this one specifically leads docket, but you can get this data out of your, your intake process and your tools, and you should use it. Use that data. You have the power.
Conrad Saam: Cameron Kilmer presented yesterday at the national trial of his association.
Yeah. All right. Keep going. Oh, this is, this might be the best slide in the whole deck.
Robert Williams: Yeah. This slide here, it’s your, your phone call answer rate. Right. It’s the distribution of how the percentage of time the phone gets answered. And if you are. Honestly, at this point, I’m confident in saying this. If you’re below a hundred, you need to fix it, right?
Like this. You, there are so many tools out there, there are so many third parties [00:18:00] services that allow that phone to be answered even in your absence or the absence of an intake specialist that you can’t get away with not answering your phone anymore.
Conrad Saam: And there’s two, there are two nuances to this. Number one, ask yourself right now, what is your phone call answer, right?
Most of you do not know the number, that number, right? And if you don’t know that number, you’re not thinking about improving that number, period. Um, the second nuance in this, is this data here includes answered calls because there are technical limitations to this. This includes answered calls and voice.
Right. So the this is, this is done automatically and if you get a voicemail, it looks like that call has been answered. So, if you really want to know what your answer rate is, you need to pull the voicemails out of this as well, which is, is going to be a manual process. There’s no, no technology that can actually do that at this point.
So it’s not, it, it’s not even as good as it looks. The other part of [00:19:00] this is like if you’re at the bottom, if you’re below 80% like just get to average, right? And if you go from the average on here, for us, it fluctuates between 91 and 94% for us. Um, if you’re at 80% and you can get to just average, that’s like increasing your marketing budget by 10% just by answering the phone.
All right, Mario, always a pleasure to have you on our webinars. Um, the question here, uh, is that percentage calculated just during business hours or 24 7? This is 24 7. Um, I don’t distinguish between them. Prospects don’t distinguish between weekends and six and, and 6:00 PM and, and a weekday. This is a 24 7 effort.
Um, and your firm needs to be able to respond, in my opinion, 24 7, right? Um, I, Mario, I know the size of your firm, like you should have a solution for answering the phone twenty-four seven three sixty-five periods. Um, so that’s, that’s my, that’s [00:20:00] my, take,
Robert Williams: A quick note on those third-party answering services to you.
I think there are many bad ones. In a handful of good ones, and even the good ones, just like your intake specialists, you have to support them, right? You must tell them what to do, and when to do it. Right. As you’ve got to have a different script if it’s a salesperson versus if it’s, uh, someone related to someone in the firm versus if it’s a brand-new p n c, um, or current client for that matter.
Right? So, there is a level of effort that you have to put in. You can’t just go and say, Hey, Smith, I’m going to hire you, answer my phone now. Okay, thanks. Right? Like, again, input equals output. Like you got to have a good, a good script, a good, um, work with that third party so that they understand what you expect and how you want it run so that you can get the desired output.
Conrad Saam: And honestly, it’s a really crappy job, right? You’re, you’re thinking about this job, it’s probably not super well paid. You [00:21:00] are answering phone calls on behalf of a variety of businesses. Mm-hmm. of which you have no connection with any of them. And I am very honest like they will do a good job. They will never be as good as your amazing in-house person because they just don’t know you that well.
Um, they will do a good job, but I would really give feedback be the squeaky wheel. Right? Like, let them know that you’re listening in on calls and the great third-party answering services, Rob Manson Smith, posh, virtual receptionist, there’s a lecture reception like those three tend to do fairly well.
Um, but I would continue to like, let them know that you are monitoring for quality and you will get better quality when you do that. We still do it, right? Yeah. I’ll, I’ll give feedback on a call. I’ll be like, Nope, eh, try again. Here’s what we need. Right?
Robert Williams: And that, that improves it each time. Um, the other thing real quick too, the data here, this is pulled out of Call Rail.
You can actually differentiate between a [00:22:00] voicemail and a pickup if you’re using Call Rail for your VoIP, right? So the reality is that a lot of our clients don’t do that. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t make them switch just to get that data. So that’s fair. First-time callers only. Okay, so a real quick note on this.
This is, again, this is out of Call Rail. It’s a setting that you literally turn on with a slider, okay? If you are using Call Rail, or if your agency is using Call Rail, make sure that they’re reporting to you on first-time callers only. Otherwise, that lead and number are extremely inflated.
Conrad Saam: Why is that, Rob? So, let’s just go into the details of that, because this is super, super important.
And most agencies hide this or lie to you about it. How would, how does, and why are they hiding it or lying about it? Or why do, why should our audience care? Or, um, what, what does it, what, how does it work? How do first-time conversations work? Right?
Robert Willliams: Yeah. So if someone calls a tracking number for the first time, that’s going to be counted as a first-time [00:23:00] caller, right?
If they call another tracking number for a second time, that is not new, that’s not at the new one, right? So again, if you’re reporting on only first-time callers and your lead, uh, data, That’s going to, sorry. Conversely, if you’re reporting on all calls, that’s going to inflate your actual leads, right? Because if I’m calling the firm 10 times, I, that’s not 10 leads, that’s one lead that called 10 times.
Yeah. Okay. Um, and why do agencies do that? Because it makes them look good, right? Which is bs This is one of my favorite, um, pieces of data that you can get out of some really sophisticated intake management systems. This species was taken out of HubSpot. Um, but there are others like lead docket you can get this information out of as well.
Um, it’s the sales funnel velocity, and this is how quickly a PNC moves through your funnel [00:24:00] stages, right? So it’s not the conversion rate between them, it’s how fast does that flow? How fast does it go from called the? Put pen to paper and a new client, right? And just like the conversion rates between each stage within your funnel or pipeline, you can use this intel, you can gain a lot of insight into where are things getting stuck, right?
Where can we improve this? Where can we make this a better experience for our prospects? Um, again, this is real data out of a firm. You probably don’t know the velocity within your intake funnel, um, but you should be thinking about it, right? You should, should be wondering how, how long does it take you to inquire?
So, they filled out, a contact form on your website. How long does it take for you to get back to them? Right? That first contact with technology, technology today, that should be an immediate [00:25:00] response. You can automate that response. Someone fills out a form on your website. You’re, you’re canned.
Thanks for contacting us. Here’s what to expect next. Um, if you have immediate questions, call the firm email that can go out immediately. Okay? So you can do things like that to reduce the time it takes to move through this funnel. Again, the sales funnel velocity, it’s one of my favourites, and it’s a hard report to get.
Conrad Saam: It’s a hard report to, it’s really important. And, there are a couple of things. So this, this example here, this is clearly someone whose intake was empowered to determine that we want to turn that person into a client, right? Mm-hmm. And so that’s why it goes from 21 hours to 29 seconds for the next step.
They were empowered to do that. Rob, you’ll, you’ll remember sitting in a, you know what I’m talking about, right? Providence, Rhode Island. I’m I, yeah, keep going. Okay. So, Providence, Rhode Island, um, we had a [00:26:00] client, Providence, Rhode Island, and they were, their front desk was literally bonused on the ability to get, um, the prospect either on their way into the office to sign documents or to agree to have an, a lawyer sent out to that, that prospect’s home in order to sign the documents.
During that first initial call. Right. Now, that guy was bonkers. Um, but that goes to show just how important velocity is. And, and then, the other thing with velocity, if you think about, and I hate to use the used car as, uh, as an example, but car salespeople are, are taught not to let you leave the lot without, without buying something, right?
Because they know the the longer, the more you mull over a decision, the less likely you are to buy a car from them. And it’s the same thing in legal. The more, the more time goes between getting people further down. Their decision cycle, the more likely they’re going to work with someone else. We’re not working with a lawyer at all.
Right? And so what happens is there’s a positive correlation between [00:27:00] accelerating sales velocity and improving overall conversion rates, which makes all of your economics work much better, right? Um, and this, finally, this is another place where we sometimes find things like a form fill that goes responded to for seven days, right?
Mm-hmm. So, so when you look at these things, we’re all right, we’re getting all these, we’re getting all these leads, but no one’s responding to them. Well, you’ve, you’ve screwed up your infrastructure for responding to those things. So that will start to show up here where it just dragged on and on and on.
And by the way, after seven days, after two days, that person is no longer waiting to hear back from you. They have already moved on, someone has already got them further down. A different funnel trick your intake team can take immediately in a start applying is to schedule that person while you have them on the phone.
Robert Williams: That’s cool. Another, another trick is, and I have yet to get an, uh, a law firm to do this, but in that automatic follow-up email, put a, a link to the intake person or the consultation, the [00:28:00] attorney doing the consultation’s calendar and let them schedule it as soon as they get that meeting, that email, right?
Like it’s a scary thing. I don’t want to be that accessible. I don’t want to be that available. But you do, you have to be right. You need to be available and accessible because your prospects want that, right? It’s not what you want, it’s not what you like, it’s what they want, right? And so anything you can do to cut down on that time like again, don’t let me leave the lot.
Don’t let them get off the phone without scheduling that consultation. Right? Send them that call. Let them leave the lot. That makes us sound very Glen Garrick. Glenn Ross. It does, doesn’t it? But it’s true. I mean this, I get it. These are, are real applicable things you can do and take back to your firm that’ll have an immediate impact on this.
So here’s just the same data, a different system, right? Again, this is a lead docket screenshot, but you can get this out of that tool as well. Um, so start thinking about this. Start digging in those reports, um, and looking at the data that you have already at [00:29:00] your fingertips. Uh, velocity by intake or lawyer, right?
So you can start saying, all right, how long does it take Conrad to get back? Versus, you know, Peter and why is Peter so much better, right? Like, what can, what can we learn from Peter and apply to Conrad? So, start thinking like that. Start coaching your intake team that way.
This is really, insightful. Um, and some, some man intake management systems and CRMs have this ability to tell you where your consultations are coming from, by their location, right? So they, a lot of these advanced CRM systems, uh, they’ll actually. Uh, you know, tracking information on where that person, uh, was by their IP address when they contacted the firm.
So you can start literally putting pins on a map to see where are my, uh, PNCs coming from in general. And then you can [00:30:00] kind of dial that down, where are my consultations coming from and where are my clients coming from? And you can start to understand that through the data, and you can get that insight so that you can start targeting, right?
Smarter targeting in your marketing and advertising. Rob, the question for you. Um mm-hmm. , you said putting pins on a map, this is an automated report out of something, right? Uh, yes. I think it’s the lead docket. I think this is a lead docket, but So the more sophisticated systems will actually do this for you, right?
Yeah. This isn’t. Yeah.
Conrad Saam: The other point that I think that has become very relevant for us working with clients who are running multiple offices or opening a new office, right? So it can help you decide where you may want to open a new office because either you’re already getting a ton of business there any way for whatever reason, right?
And maybe a new office will actually bolster that. Or once you do open an office or, or start an advertising campaign or do outdoor display or something along [00:31:00] those lines, you can actually look at the efficacy of making that work. So combine this with a local Falcon, for example, to see how your geographic reach is actually translating into clients or not.
Right? Um, this, this proximity thing is so important that you know, the book I wrote was called Own the Map. It was about, it was literally about making sure that you own where you physically are, and that despite Covid and all these changes has not changed. The preference for proximal, the preference for that hometown lawyer is, is, is very, very real.
Robert Williams: Raise your hand if you thought you were going to come to an Intake Mastery webinar and learn that through Intake Mastery, you can get insight into where you should open your next office. Yeah. Right. That’s awesome. , this is awesome. Yeah. It, it’s, it, it matters. You guys, , it’s a big deal contact type analysis.
So, give them options. Right. And understand what options they’re leveraging. And, what I mean by that is don’t just have a contact form. [00:32:00] Don’t just have your phone number. Don’t just have a chat. Right. Give them whatever they want to communicate with you. Right. And then what you can do is you can start using that, that technology to understand what are my conversion rates with people who fill out a PNCs that fill out a contact form, right?
Versus PNCs that call me. Right. Those are very different. Right. And you’ll find the conversion rate. A phone call is much higher than someone who fills out a form because of spam right? You get a lot of SEO folks selling you high authority, domain authority links. Right?
Conrad Saam: But it’s not just spam. It can also be like you’re really garbage at getting back to people.
Right. And so, you tag pickers. Yeah. Understand that you will convert these things at different rates, and the very general rule of thumb is that phone calls convert it twice. Twice, as well as form fills and form fills convert [00:33:00] twice as well as chat and text. Right. And my belief is the variability that we see within that is because, S frankly, some of our clients are really good at answering the phone and they’re garbage at following up with a text, right?
Um, so understand how people are, are connecting with you, and make sure that this is where velocity comes back, come, comes into play, right? If it takes, if someone to fill, if someone fills out a chat and like face this, Facebook isn’t notorious for this right now. You can set up auto, auto-replies on Facebook, but if you’re not monitoring that stuff, you can automatically reply to a lead and you get back to check that out next week.
They expect to hear back from you within, within the hour, right? And you didn’t even know what happened because you’ve got this autoresponder with a, with, with a form fill. So like, look, the velocity of this will, will, will expose where you’re actually performing poorly here.
Robert Williams: And a, a note on chat [00:34:00] too, and I can, I’ll bring this up again during automation, there is, there are a lot of cool tools out there these days that kind of automated chat.
Right. And I think the big thing in the news right now is to chat, G p t and Conrad, I didn’t even tell you. I was chatting with chat, g p t, and wondering if I can integrate chat G p T into HubSpot chat. did our, uh, anyway, that’s a total aside. But there’s, there are tools that literally help you automate and, and shepherd your PNCs through chat.
Um, close that velocity, reduce that velocity, and speed conversion improves that conversion. Um, and I, you know, if I, if, if I had to put money on, uh, uh, a communication channel that’s going to grow, there’s two that I would say texting and chatting, and that’s just as your, your clients are a younger demographic. Um, I’m still of the old-school approach where I’m going to pick up the phone, but I think I’m, a rare bird in that way.
Um, [00:35:00] but, you know, I don’t think my kids are going to know what a phone is.
Contact type by consultations. Again, the same data is carved up differently, right? So, get beyond the leads. Move beyond the leads. I can’t stress that enough. Your intake system and tools should allow you to do so.
This is just more data. What is your win rate? Meaning how many clients did you get out of these? Right? Look at chat right now. This is real data. Again, no real kinds came out of chat, but I tell you people were using it, right? So again, they convert at different rates. All right, so the actual tactics here, and we’ve been peppering these in, um, the volume, the velocity, and conversion rates.
So again, just a reminder on the funnel here, but replace data entry, okay? Um, One of the things that you can do to make your intake team’s lives better and more efficient and accurate is [00:36:00] actually automating the data that goes into the system. So things like, you know, when someone fills out a form on your website and you’re already getting their name, you’re already getting their phone number and email, at the very least in some cases, you’re getting, um, and you should be doing this, and I’ve got a slide on this.
How did you hear about our firm? Um, and maybe what practice area can we help you with? Right? Try and keep it as simple as possible. Get that intel into your system automatically. You shouldn’t get an email with that information and someone shouldn’t be getting paid for this, replicate that into yours, system.
That should happen automatically. Okay? And secondly, you can reduce, I used to joke, I would find a new I m s or m s system for law firms every day, and if I didn’t, something was wrong, right? There’s so much technology out there, but you can reduce that, uh, that list down to a select few by seeing what systems will actually take that information in automatically.
And, and, and [00:37:00] look at the source information to that source Attribution. If you can pipe in, whether they’ve clicked on an ad, found you organically, whether it was LSAs, whatever it may be, if that information can also get put in automatically, you’re in a much better position. And that l that reduces that technology list for you to, uh, investigate by a lot.
I’d say like 80%. Cause a lot of them don’t do that. I mentioned this, um, just a minute ago, but again, mark, multiple marketing source skills. Um, and a real quick note on the field, did anyone refer you to us? You can ask it this way. This is what we do on our site and this is what we recommend our clients to do.
How did you hear about our firm? Right? If you can couple that data with the automated, I call it the automated source attribution, um, of just tracking on the web and what did they actually click on when before they, they converted. [00:38:00] You get a lot of insight into what other things are driving business to your firm.
And I think it’s, it’s very enlightening. We’ve been doing this for ourselves for, I don’t know, count around about a year or so. And the insights that we’ve gotten out of it is like, it’s not just s e o. Right. And, oftentimes it’s not SEO, is a step that they took, so they clicked on an organic listing.
But my goodness, it’s all the social work that we do, it’s all the word of mouth. It’s that dark social stuff that, you talk about so often in your other webinars.
Conrad Saam: I think this is important to know the importance of this being freeform, how people think they found you because you will get amazing insight, into what’s working for you and not from that, it’ll, it’ll be surprising.
Yeah. It makes it harder to do the analysis because things don’t fall into neat little buckets, but we don’t live in a neat little bucket’s world all the time.
Robert Williams: Yeah. We don’t, I wish [00:39:00] we did. It would be a lot easier, but I, you wish we did. I could automate it all right. Uh, but you can, you, you can, at a certain point, you can automate that.
Once you start identifying patterns, you can start being like, oh, this is the language people use. This is like, and then you can start. Automating some of it, but yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s messy, it’s a messy place to live. This is an example. Again, this is lead docket where, um, you know, a form fill can do a lot of the intake work for you, right?
Same with chat. You can get all this information directly into your system without someone actually putting it all the way down to the case type, right? And lead talk is specifically, you can have, uh, intake forms based on case types to help your intake team based with their questions or the information that they need to capture before they schedule that consultation or wherever that falls in your process.
Um, it just helps them do that job better.
All right. A word on intake recordings. And this is a hot-button issue. I [00:40:00] was just talking to Call Rail, uh, yesterday about recording and law firm specifically, right? Because I think. I don’t think I’ve suggested turning on call recordings to a law firm without them immediately saying no way as their initial response.
Right? So, you have to think about this critically, does this make sense for your firm? Is it, um, you know, can you do it? Should you do it? Um, and in some situations, the answer is no. But in the, uh, you know, like estate planning and elder planning and the intake side of things, obviously, once they’ve, once they’ve retained you, I think you don’t do the call recording anymore.
I think there’s a, there’s a, there’s a time and place for it, but you can get a lot of insight out of the calls. Again, this comes back to coaching and developing your intake team. It’s also helpful for lawyers, right? Like, hey, I’m, I’m, I’ve got this new consultation. I can go literally in the CRM system, listen to the call that they called in on, and I’m going to be, I’m going to walk into that consultation.
Yeah. Not blind, [00:41:00] super informed. Yeah. You can listen to what they talked about during the intake. Right, that sales to service handoff, that intake the legal handoff, that’s an important thing to not fumble. So here are two companies we recommend Smith, AI, and Call Rail. They both offer, uh, voice recordings. Um, a quick note, uh, think critically about your VO system, right?
I think or your phone system in general. They’re not all created equal. Um, if you want recommendations, I’m happy to give you some. Um, just email me. But there, there are a lot of good ones. And again, a lot of ones just check the box. Um, but a lot of void companies do offer, uh, recordings as well. So if you’re using like an air call or eight by eight or Dialpad, whatever it may be, they probably have a call recording option for you.
And chances are, one, the three that I just rattled off, they have a lot of integrations, and they may integrate with your [00:42:00] intake management system so that you can just dump those recordings directly into it. Over full call centers and booking appointments, the third-party answering system. Um, if you’re using that a hundred percent of the time for your intake, absolutely do this.
Take this back and make them do this. Pay the extra $10 a month for this feature, whatever it may be. But give them a meeting link, whether it’s a HubSpot meeting link or a Calendly link that goes directly to your calendar that they can book appointments directly with you on. Okay? Again, lower barriers, lower that velocity that, that funnel or, or pipeline velocity.
Um, and just make it easier for yours, your PNCs to get in touch with you. And if your call service or answering your third-party answering service are not integrating slash using your intake management system, what are they doing? Right? They’re creating more manual data entry for you to do, [00:43:00] get them access, get them using it.
Um, again, the ones we’ve rattled off almost certainly have an integration with a lot of the major intake management systems. So, investigate that. So, Conrad, these are the slides that you were, um, thinking about earlier, but this is, this is a, um, call insight, right? Uh, a product that we had made a while back, but there’s a lot of conversation intelligence programs out there today, um, that essentially listen in on the call.
You must have call recording enabled for this to work, but they listen in for specific things, right? Like what? And you can teach the tool what to listen for, um, to kind of score these calls. So, you, if you’re doing a high volume Yeah. Of intake. These tools are helpful with that. Coaching, mentoring, program management, proactive management.
Conrad had mentioned earlier in the webinar, um, and there’s some cool data and insights you can get out of something like this. Yeah. I mean, if you’re [00:44:00] running five plus intake people having a tool to help manage that and evaluate quality, super helpful. Right. Um, I, this is very cool stuff. Yeah. And, uh, you can, you can even evaluate with your tools like this, you can use them to evaluate your third-party call answering service.
Right. That you otherwise may not have much insight into. Right. Because they’re the third party. Right. So, think about that too. And then, you know, tracking different types of inbound calls matter. Right? So, you, your conversion rates by practice area, right? Understanding what that looks like. The intake, uh, proficiency for an immigration PNC versus a criminal defines versus you may be a multilingual firm.
How well are we doing with Spanish-speaking PNCs, right? Uh, again, a lot of data you can get out of these conversation intelligence tools. And, and another note, [00:45:00] a lot of the big Void players, um, are making huge improvements in strides to including these types of, uh, of tools within your VoIP system.
Okay? You can highlight certain phrases, and swear words, you can measure how quickly that person on the other end is talking, um, to kind of indicate whether or not they’re frustrated or getting angry, right? Um, you can measure for things like empathy, which we have a separate slide on here in a bit. But all the things that you should be doing and be aware of, um, to help improve that intake specialists handling of those calls is helpful.
Dead Air, we, we use this tool for identifying, wow, we got you a bunch of leads from your Google, Google business profile. And most of them looked like this. No one answered the phone, or they answered and put them on hold. They put them on hold for two and a half minutes [00:46:00] and they just dropped. Yeah.
Conrad Saam: That’s this, this bottom graph here, you can see the dark Gray. That’s, that’s when they’re on hold and, the client eventually, like we, I remember re-listening to this call and it was a legit call and lost a client because they were on hold the whole time. Right. Complete failure. Yeah. It was a qualified person looking for, it was literally, it was, I think it was an immigration firm and they were looking for an immigration attorney and they were put on hold for too long until they hung up.
Robert Williams: You’re, you’re right. Yeah. These, again, within these types of tools, you can give immediate feedback like, Hey, they asked for an attorney doing what we do, what happened here? You can give feedback within these tools as well and flag it. Certain calls, share certain calls, you can pull calls down for training, right?
Like here, this is a fantastic intake of someone in a bad PI situation. I want everyone to handle this way, right? So, there’s a lot of [00:47:00] different tools within these types of, um, systems. All right, so let’s talk really quick because we’re getting up on time. about the software and technology of what the intake software should do for you.
Um, it’s not about what it can do because unless you enable it to do so, it doesn’t matter. So, it should be doing these things for you. Um, and real quick, I’ve used some of these two terms already, but CRM, customer relationship management, and legal, it’s actually comprised of a lot of things like your website, uh, any marketing automation systems you may have like a Mail Chimp or HubSpot or Constant Contact your intake management systems, which we’ve touched on a few already.
Matter management systems, which I think you’re all most familiar with. Um, And there’s a whole bunch more that pepper throughout that document management, Call Rail chats, forms, phone calls, all that size. So for today, I’m really been talking about the intake management system and some of the SMS chat forms, phones, and recording stuff that you can get out of them, capture your source, and [00:48:00] your lead status.
But in my absence, I’m very opinionated about what works well and what doesn’t. That said, please include this, how did you hear about our firm component within your form fills? because that’s insightful. It should be a free form like Conrad mentioned, it shouldn’t be a dropdown menu select unless you’ve got a menu of 30 different options to try and cover all your bases.
And in that case, they’re probably not going to look at all of them. So just make it free for them. Qualification status. In Call Rail, you can actually use Call Rail, which is a call tracking and VoIP company. It’s a little bit more than that these days, but you can do a thumbs up or thumbs down within CallRail.
So, if you have Call Rail, use it. Get in there and get your login. There’s a lot of data in there. If you, if you’re a client of ours, log in, look at the data, and see what’s in there. Maybe there’s something cool that you aren’t using that you could leverage. Automated responses. I touched on this, an email that goes out automatically upon a form fill.
Um, think about texting too, right? Should be an email via a text. [00:49:00] Should be a call, call back. Those should happen Quickly. Check your referrals. This is all about networking and, um, fostering, the connections that you have. So, if you know, uh, Peter is, is referring a bunch of, um, business to your firm, track that knows how much that is, reward that.
Right. Thank you. Scotch. Thank you, Scotch for sure. And then customize the workflow for automation. So, this is a screenshot of a workflow that I have made for a client. It essentially cuts down on a lot of the manual effort of their intake team within the actual system so that they can do the one or two things I need the human to do.
And then, the actual software can just shepherd that through the pipeline to the appropriate place and assign it to the appropriate people without any extra work, right? So through engineering, you [00:50:00] can actually simplify the system and the software so that I just did this for us. We just have one field in our CRM where we select whether, like what status is it?
You know, are we, are we scheduling a consultation? Did the consultation happen? Okay, did we send the agreement and fees? Did they sign it? And based on that one field, everything else happens. You don’t have to remember to move the stage. You don’t have to remember to update this and that and that over here.
One thing you can customize your, uh, messaging to your audience, um, in some cases. So if they’ve come to your site, fill out a form on PI or motorcycle accident next time they visit your site, and this is super advanced by the way, and it requires, um, really specific technology to be in place, but you can customize that messaging for the next time they visit to be specific to their, uh, what they’ve looked at and what they’ve contacted you for.
Conrad Saam: And it’s not just the site, it can be the retargeting ads that you’re using. It can be [00:51:00] your follow-up campaign from an email perspective. Um, if you’re doing a large volume, these make a one or 2% difference in the conversion rate. And if you have enough volume, that totally makes sense. Right?
Robert Williams: Absolutely.
Again, more data that you can, that your intake management system should be giving you. And this is something that can feedback from your matter management system, which is often connected to your accounting software, whether it’s QuickBooks or, or whatever it may be. That actual revenue, the money that you were, that you received from that case can go back into your intake management system to automatically update your, your, your, uh, your revenue by channel.
Uh, that is what you need to have in order to actually have a conversation around Roi. That’s just math.
Conrad Saam: And look at this. This is, these are small numbers. This is a small firm. The cool thing about a lot of this stuff is this [00:52:00] technology was not available to small firms five years ago. Mm-hmm. at this point in time, the automat, like automating these reports is available to a small solo.
It’s great. Like the the technology has really gotten that much better.
Robert Williams: And if you’re not having data flow between systems, you can at least directionally get it right by having. You know, within the system, automate what the case value of that type of matter is in general, right? And pi, it’s always a challenge because it’s so variable.
But again, there are ways to get this data to be meaningful to your firm and it’s, and it’s accessible, with the same information, and a different tool. Uh, this is Maddox I believe. Um, but again, you can automate the marketing channel. And then Matic’s is, capable of giving you revenue by marketing source. This is a marginally larger client, a little bit, few, few more, uh, bar graphs in that, in that one.
Um, and then just, I’m sure you’re all wondering, well, what should I be [00:53:00] looking at? What, tools, and what software? Here’s a short list and my, like, if you want to talk to me, we do a technical tech audit, by the way, where I sit down and talk to you for two hours and ask you a bunch of annoying questions that you may or may not know the answer to.
And I look at all the technology you’re using, but. I can make you personalize recommendations if that’s something you’re interested in, but this is a good list to start with, of investigating if you don’t have a tool or if you’re unhappy with the I m s, um, that you are using, think about these. And even some of these have some limitations too, but, um, you got to kind of demo them and, and ask the right questions and see if this is going to fit a word of caution.
Don’t change the way you operate the software. Make sure the software fits how you operate. I, if you, yes, I was going to mention that like many software people like to think that their software is going to fix all your problems. In many cases, you just need to be using what you currently have better. Yeah, yeah.
And , or in the real bad cases, you buy something because [00:54:00] it looked really good during the demo and then you realize that you have to change everything you do. Yeah. Yeah. And the timing of it, how you do it, where you do it. And it’s like, if, if that’s the case, you’re never going to use it. You might as well just stop paying for it.
So again, the real cost is getting on one of these systems, and adopting the systems. It’s expensive, it’s a lot of time commitment. Um, and it’s, it’s not an easy thing to do. And you really want to think about scaling, right? So even if you don’t think you will, if one day you want to and you change your mind, you want to have these systems in place from the beginning.
So, you don’t have to kind of, you don’t want to outgrow them. You want them to stay in place. And again, adoption is, is key. So, get the buy-in of the people who are actually going to use the tool. If you think it does what it needs to do, but you’re not using it daily, you don’t matter. So, get that buy-in from your intake team.
Otherwise, you’re going to have to rip it out and start over again. And that’s really expensive. And then again, [00:55:00] empathy. I can’t stress this enough. Your prospects, and your PNCs are oftentimes in terrible situations. Let them like understand that. Right. Don’t be cold, don’t be quick. It, it’s, it’s so easy to skip over this.
Location: Zoom
Date: January 25, 2023
Time: 10:00 am - 11:00 am PST
Registration for this event is now closed.
We regularly participate in and host events/webinars for the legal community and online marketers.
Check out our upcoming WEBINARS and EVENTS.