Convert leads to customers for Legal Services

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[Music] managing your law practice can be challenging marketing time management attracting clients and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren't billable welcome to this edition of the un-- billable hour the law practice advisory podcast this is where you'll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on legal talk Network welcome to the unbuildable our the law practice advisory podcast helping attorneys achieve more success we're glad you can listen today on the legal talk Network I am your host Christopher Anderson and I'm an attorney with a singular passion for helping other lawyers to be more successful with their law firm businesses my team and how to manage a small law firm and I work directly with lawyers across the country to help them achieve success as they define it in the unbuildable hour each month we explore an area important to growing revenues giving you back more of your time and or improving your professional satisfaction and one of the key areas of your business I start with a fundamental premise that a law firm business exists primarily to provide for the financial personal and professional needs of you its owner in this program I have a chance to speak to you as I do in presentations across the country about what it takes to build and operate your law firm like the business that it is I have a chance to introduce you to a new guest each month to talk about how to make that business work for you instead of the other way around but before we get started today I do want to say a thank you to our sponsors answer one solo practice University and scorpion answer one is a leading virtual receptionist and answering services provider for lawyers you can find out more by giving them a call at 801 or online at WWE and circum that's WWE answer and then the number one com solo practice University is a great resource for solos no matter how long you have been practicing make sure you check out solo practice university comm and learn how to run your practice better scorpion crushes the standard for law from online marketing with proven campaign strategies to get attorneys better cases from the internet partner with scorpion to get an award-winning website and ROI positive marketing programs today visit scorpion legal.com slash podcast today's episode of the unavailable hour is mining your clients one of the topics I cover is marketing and marketing is the lifeblood of any business and particularly of law firms that lawyers have many misconceptions about marketing and very many misuses of the very valuable things that they get out of marketing which are of course leads and today's guest is Michael Jason Michael is the president CEO of lexicon a firm that helps law firms to manage their leads from beginning all the way to becoming clients and let me let Michael tell you a little bit more about that so let's get started with mining your clients welcome Michael all right thanks for having me Christopher first of all I'm really bad with introductions that made it really brief so if you don't mind if you run a business called lexicon uh I think some of my listeners know about it some of them don't would you just tell a little bit about what lexicon it does yeah so essentially what we are is the leader in the space when it comes to tracking your leads and managing your professional relationships so a lot of people like to think about us is kind of like a pre case management software so those guys typically handle the time after a case is signed right actually managing the matter Mexicana basically handles the part leading up to that case so from the time you're first introduced to a client to the time that you actually retain them so that entire process that can sometimes be years sometimes be hours sometimes weeks or days we basically manage that process and help them streamline their intake process right now we're recording this at the Clio cloud conference I've seen you at maybe a tech show I've seen you at lots of different conferences and one thing we all we both see is where we go to these things there are a lot of people selling marketing right selling pay-per-click selling social media selling SEO doing things to help people get more leads and lawyers are all excited about always getting more leads but when we were talking about what we're gonna talk talked about today we were discussing how really they're missing the point right and that they're they're wasting these valuable resources that they get so I wanted to start our conversation today about about their pipeline about about what lawyers really should be doing with these incoming leads that they're that most of them aren't doing today yeah I think your hundred percent accurate you know most people really spend their time trying to bring in more clients but the fact of the matter is for most firms based on referrals marketing word of mouth whoever maybe personal connections most people really do have enough leads in their funnel and we can talk about a little bit more what a funnel is most people have enough leads and their funnel to build and grow a successful practice the problem is most people do not have any kind of significant processing pace to manage these leads so what ends up happening is they come in the door they talk to the attorney and then the attorney basically says okay if you want to hire me come back as pretty not sophisticated process to do that right if you were in any other industry there's no way that you would survive as a business relying on that is your sales process so one of the things that we really stress at lexicon and just generally from a consultative point of view for our attorneys is whatever it may be using technology using paper using Excel whatever system you want to use create some sort of internal process for you your employees in your practice to basically understand what is happening once a lead comes in what's gonna happen right is your process different if it's a client who does a consult versus doesn't do a consult in person versus out of office most people just kind of fly by the seam of the pants so I think having a process in place is the number one thing that most people do not have yeah and I think that you mentioned one thing I I haven't heard earlier today that one of the reasons one of the biggest reasons that that clients don't hire lawyers is they don't call them back ever and that was just the out just unbelievable to me but so and then what you're talking about is they may call them back they may speak to them once but they have no procedure for follow-up how does have as a lawyer really correct for those two separate things so I think honestly what they have to do is do two things one they have to stop looking themselves as solely as a lawyer and start thinking about themselves a little bit of salespeople right whether you're providing professional services to a client or not you still have to sell the professional services so a lot of people miss that part and they don't really understand that they have to look at things as salespeople and then I think it's also just following up that that follow up procedure understanding you know I had someone come by our booth a couple minutes ago they said I've been doing this for four years I'm just starting to hit my growth phase I and they said I need more leads or else your software isn't that valuable to me I said how many leads you getting on a weekly basis she said literally twenty five leads a week and I said you have literally probably five times more leads than you'll ever need with you as like a couple lawyer firm you need to figure out what you do and I asked her what she does and she literally exactly what you just said she basically does a consultation and says if they want to hire me great if not they come back on their own you mentioned you know the Clio cloud conference and really interesting study that I would encourage every single person to go look at if you just Google a be a study on client intake it's really interesting about a year ago they did a really in-depth study where they basically did like intakes for you know hundreds of firms around the country and they found out that the average response time on an email or on a message through a website or a voicemail the firm was three days Wow three days it took someone imagine if you walked in an Apple Store and said I want to buy a computer today and they said I'll call you back in three days what would you do you'd go to Microsoft and buy a computer that day cuz it's just not worth it right so I think people really need to understand that the bar is set very low pun intended the bar is very low in the industry when it comes to sales all you have to do is not suck and you'll be in good shape it's like it's like yeah you don't have to be the fastest deer in the herd you just have to be faster than the slowest deer right to not get eaten and your analogies actually it's worse than your analogy because in your Apple Store they said we'll call you back in three days in this case the client doesn't know if they're gonna get a callback at all there's no promise there's no guarantee they're just not getting the call so we go here we had the leads the pipeline the NOC ad that calls back obviously the solution there is to have a system to return calls whether it's you the lawyer or someone else but someone needs to be returning it what's more troublesome though is what you were saying about the lawyer who was meeting with people and if they hired him great and if they didn't they didn't and maybe they'd come back maybe they wouldn't what can a lawyer like what is the system that a lawyer should follow when a client doesn't hire so I think it kind of largely depends on practice area right if you're a transactional firm then you can do it can be a longer sales cycle like fur let me give you like two examples example number one would be like a criminal defense attorney right if you're let's say do your in a DUI case and they for most states you have to file some sort of you know you know injunction within the first 10 days to basically allow the the person to keep their license and if they don't do that in the first 10 days the DMV automatically suspends their license so there's very much of a quick like oh crud I need to get this done immediately right so for a law firm that's doing DUI firm if someone does in comes in on day three that timeframe they better you know attack hard over those next seven days and once they pass the seven days maybe they don't need a follow-up so much right now if you're doing a state planning firm most people are like a six to twelve month sales process for that right it takes a long time and the person who came by the booth was actually an estate planning attorney okay and so for those types of people what I recommend doing is first off you know acknowledging and knowing like what kind of practice area you're dealing with what your typical sales cycle looks like is it a longer short sell cycle if it's a long sales cycle you have to also kind of consider like what are your clients want right do that you know with the legal trends report they were talking about like Millennials and people under 35 like 60% of them want to be contacted via email or text whereas if you're over 50 like 80% unwanted phone so I think having understanding how you should be attacking the leads and in what manner so I think the frequency of follow-up I think is is a big thing that people should focus on maybe send an email once every three months or something right you don't want to be too salesy perhaps if it's an estate planning they're just not there yet but I think really it comes down to them like I said at the beginning coming up with a procedure that works for themselves sometimes people are really busy and they don't really want to grow their practice that hard so maybe you don't attack the sale too much you basically only take the clients who want to come to you but I think the biggest thing to focus on is building a workflow in place so your employees if you have them understand what to do and what the process looks like right and then but I think it's really interesting like you made it very clear that this is there is no single solution for this it's dependent on your practice areas probably depending on the age and sophistication of your clients it's dependent on your geographical area some Geo's might some people in San Francisco might expect a different approach than somebody in Des Moines you know who again you have to the lawyer will know that and then so they should work to build procedures that match what what they're talking about well thing I wanted to follow up on with that was you were talking about the follow-up for let's say estate planning would be it would be long but followed for criminal would be short because the the shelf life go goes down but what happens when the client just make makes a decision like you shouldn't keep following up as if they say I'm not hiring you what did what did what can people do about that what's a procedure that can recapture some of those leads so I think um I think a lot of lawyers struggle with utilizing this and like most SAS company is like a software company like lexicon o or Clio or something like that do a really good job of his content marketing I think a lot of lawyers you know when I when I talk about you know okay when you build out your lexicon account you can build in some email marketing and I get a very frequent response which is oh I don't want to do marketing I don't want to sound salesy but there are ways to market still provide value to the client enhance your brand and bring them back without being salesy right so for instance someone comes to LexA kata they're not ready to use intake just because maybe they have zero volume they literally just started their practice so what do we do we're not gonna try to sell them on something that they're not going to need right now because it's just a waste of time and we're gonna lose they're gonna lose the relationship because they're gonna you know look at us as just sales people so what we'll do instead is throw them into like a drip marketing campaign solely cater to content three mistakes that you're making in the intake process five ways to grow your practice without spending more money two things you should be doing an intake that you're not doing right now those types of things because then when they look at it they look at us and more as consultants that really understand what their needs are and not only that but they look like we have their back and so for you as a lawyer as like an estate planning attorney for example you can send them something two months in that says like you know what the downfalls is of waiting too long to get your will right it's a little salesy but it's more content or you might say like the note you know like a case study of a client who waited too long or something like that so there are a million ways to estate planning then you could go for criminal offense like what happens if you don't fight or hired a lawyer in the first ten days after a DUI it's no longer saying hire me it's just saying hire a lawyer and I just happen to be the one that you're talking to so again you can do a lot of content strategies um and you know I think that the the key to this and like a really shocked we were saying about the one lawyer who said well you would say one example is somebody who might not need as many cases they're not trying to grow fast they know but leads cost money right lead each one of these leads you should if you don't as much many new clients get fewer leads but maximize the ones you've got right and choose choose to keep keep the best ones and but but if you don't have a system I think is what I'm hearing you say then you don't know what's happening to them at all yeah and I think a lot of people look at like a lot of people might be listening and saying this oh well I don't buy leads online so this isn't relevant to me but your professional relationships and your personal relationships whoever send you leads if you do not give a 100 percent amazing experience those people even the ones that don't hire you that affects your clout with those people and you know what like if I say if I if I send a lead to us someone like you know for instance I this happened to me about six months ago I sent a a business lead to someone who want to start a business to an attorney friend of mine and basically I asked him two months later I said hey whatever happened that person be like I don't know I'm like what do you mean you don't know it be like did they not hire you it's like well I sent him an email and ever heard back and I just never followed up and I'm thinking in my head okay fine maybe he wasn't that interested but - you clearly didn't that didn't reflect that well on me because I basically sent someone who didn't really care about them in the first place and was just looking for a quick buck so I think it's understanding that even if you're not buying leads online everything affects your clout in the industry and your relationships and your friendships whatever maybe and having a process not only hurts yourself but it hurts the people who are referring things to you as well I got it so we're gonna take a break here when we come back we're gonna talk to Michael Jason about what to do what to do to mine the contacts and the leads than the people that you already have and we'll be back in just a moment ready to create and build your own solo or small firm practice need a nuts-and-bolts education on the 360 degree experience of starting a business there's only one online destination dedicated to helping you achieve your goals solo practice University the only online educational professional networking community dedicated to lawyers and law students who want to go into practice for themselves more than 1,000 classes 58 faculty and mentors what are you waiting for check out solo practice University calm today is your firm experiencing missed calls empty voicemail boxes and Patek to clients you'll never hear from again enter answer one virtual receptionists they're more than just an answering service answer one is available 24/7 they can even schedule appointments respond to emails integrate with Clio and much more answer one helps make sure your clients have the experience they deserve give them a call at eight hundred and seven or visit them at answer one.com forward slash podcast for a special offer so we're back with Michael Jason Alexa cotta we've been talking about how to maximize leads by having procedures and systems in place to make sure you're following up with them make sure that you're capturing them make sure you're maximizing the leads that come through the funnel that you've created we'll talk about a funnel in a minute but what I wanted to do now is shift our conversation a little bit and talk to Michael about the leads you already have in other words the people who know you like you and trust you already who you have in your list who you have as former clients you have as current clients or you have as people that just know about your business Michael what are lawyers not doing about them I think lawyers are not categorizing their leads not only their leads but their professional relationships as well I think a lot of people when they're coming in the door to LexA cotta for the first time and they want to import their list of contacts right they usually have one of two things either have just like that word document with a ton of names in it which is about as worthless as it can get or they have a spreadsheet that they've been keeping track of which is the most common thing I think that APA study said something like 50% of people are not tracking leads at all 25% are using Excel and the other 25 are using some other you know you know you know hodgepodge of different things so for the people who are using Excel or just putting it down on paper like rolodex type of thing business cards they have know they're doing they're not doing two things one they're not tracking their relationship from the perspective of how do you know them what if your interactions been and what it's happened in the past and - they're not tagging them in any kind of data-driven way right so you know legal trends report is all about data and how important that is and I even wrote an article for the APA about a year ago on how on the number one thing that lawyers are not focused which is data and how it can impact their their practice so what I mean by data is not necessarily like what percentage of leads are hiring me even though those types of things are important I'm talking about being able to tell a computer filter my results right if you want to tell Google like filter my results based on or like you go to Amazon you're like I want to find shelves you can filter based on price you can filter based on reviews all that type of thing why because they've been categorizing every single like category so what we allow you to do in our in lexicon a and you can even do this in a spreadsheet doesn't matter you'll have to be using our software but what you can do is you can basically tag people and what a tag is is basically a label that you can apply to someone almost like a characteristics so for instance I might say you know Christopher Anderson he is a legal tech might be a tag or I might tag him as coach or consultant or something like that or I might take a lawyer and tag them with their practice areas because what can I do with that then I can filter based on practice areas are type of person so when someone comes to my practice and says hey I want to be referred to a criminal defense attorney I don't have to try to think off the top my head well who do I know that's a criminal offense attorney and then I look kind of like you know befuddled like oh wait you don't know a criminal I can search and I can look for the people who sent me leads and all that type of thing same thing with clients right when you're talking about leads you can categorize people right so if like that person let's go back to that example that 25 a week lead person they've got over the course of the year they're getting like a thousand leads let's say they have a really slow month in the month of August because a lot of people don't do wills during the summer or whatever I think is what it is now what do they do with that two weeks of kind of busy of time that they have well they can basically just throw a dart at the wall on their list of contacts and decide who to go after or they can if they've been categorizing and tagging correctly they can go after for instance if you tag people as hot lead or high-value or VIP you'll be able to filter down your list and say show me all the people who are currently leads who are hot leads who have been in the system for less than three months so having that data is really important to be able to filter down and understand who the most important people are in yes because otherwise your choices are basically all none or random right but this gives you ability to reach out and build an audience of people you actually want to reach and then the second part is like I was saying earlier is really like tracking the relationship from a tent-like note-taking right and again you can do this in a spreadsheet if you really want I don't condone it because most people leave spreadsheets to come to something like lexicon o or Clio but you got to be keeping track of what you talked about right if you met a client this happens to us all the time someone comes to LexA kata says hey I want to purchase your software I'm a criminal defense attorney in Michigan with four employees and this that and the other they're not ready to buy today nine months later they call me back oh hey this is you know max Schwartz Oh max what's up I don't know who this person is I don't remember them I've had a hundred leads between our but I pull it up in my CRM and I see Oh max like how's everything in Michigan has been crazy humidity summer oh you remember no I don't remember but they don't have to know that right so having that tracking of relationship oh hey how's your kid they're probably what three now oh yeah great memory my kid just turned three last week you know it kind of makes that relationship really fresh and makes those cold leads warmer leads after yeah and what and one thing I mean I've tried to believe me I've tried this in a spreadsheet and what goes wrong for me and a spreadsheet is the spreadsheets got one line per customer now if I've talked to them five times I can't keep five dates and five notes right and or I can but it gets really really messy and that's how we're I think you know as good trm tool where you get that database instead of a flat spreadsheet format and think about it from a collaborative standpoint to write like a spreadsheet works if you're working as a solo by yourself but if you're working a solo by yourself you probably have aspirations to hire a receptionist or an assistant once that happens you might grow and now you need a second lawyer and then what happens after that then you're like okay now I have eight people using a spreadsheet that can only be edited one at a time and then it's like how are they gonna know it you know it's just and then all it just it just gets a mess and most people come in with this crazy spreadsheet they're like can I import this you're like yeah but you're gonna lose some data because you just haven't been doing it right from the start all right well so we're gonna take another quick break here when we come back I want to talk with Michael about sequences about how to use sequences to reach out to these target groups of clients that we just talked about how you built you grab a segment of the people you know and then what do you do with them it'll come back and we'll talk about that feel like your marketing efforts aren't getting you the high value cases your firm deserves for over 15 years scorpion has helped thousands of law firms just like yours attract new cases and grow their practices as a Google premier partner and winner of Google's platform innovator award scorpion has the right resources and technology to aggressively market your law firm and generate better cases from the internet for more information visit scorpion legal.com forward slash podcast today all right we're back with michael Chasen of lexicon we've been talking about how to maximize leads both new leads coming in and the leads that already exist in your business and when now I wanted to sort of wrap it up I talked with Michael about all right we've segmented them we've marked them we've tagged them we have them in a database now what do we do with them and we were talking I was suggesting that we talk about you know what what is a sequence and how do you manage a funnel with your sequences yeah so I think I'm so sequencing or like creating workflows or checklists for yourself a lot of firms have like checklists on a piece of paper at least in their head I think before you talk about that you have to talk about like establishing what a funnel is right so in most traditional industries they call it like a marketing fun or a sales funnel right basically obviously most people know what a funnel looks like right large right large cylinder at the top that kind of you know funnels down into one single point right so depending on what kind of practice you have you want a really big funnel at the top or a smaller funnel right if you're an employment firm there's a lot of crappy cases at the top of the funnel that you don't want entering so maybe you siphon them off quickly versus criminal-defense you'll pretty much take most cases right so setting up this like what I call like the the workflows or what your processes is there's almost like the plastic casing around the funnel right where do you want it to look do you want it to you know push down and what happens at each stage as they move down the funnel so stage number one is typically going to be something like just gathering the very basic information right I just need to collect contact information and make sure I have something to follow up with right that's the first thing that anyone should do hi what's your name max Schwartz okay max what can I help you with I need help with this okay let me take down your email on your phone number just in case we get too disconnected or you know whatever and so now you have their contact information now they've entered the funnel now at that point you can do a couple things right you can schedule a consultation you can send them an intake form depending on what how many people you want in the funnel but I think the it goes back to that how extensive your funnel is really depends on that practice area driven right so the estate planning firm should have a really extensive funnel and then also keeping in mind that there can be deviations from this funnel like this decision tree right do they hire do they not if yes then this if no than that right you're almost doing your own like version of like coding right so figuring out that part now I think but so basically what you say is like the funnel has some exit points which might enter a different funnel depending which is exactly right so especially like in LexA kata you can build like mini workflows like at stage one and two of the funnel this is what my workflow looks like and if they go to 2ei then I go three A through five a versus three B through five B if they go to a versus B on the funnel so creating like those sequences and most firms don't really think that through like what happens if they fall out at this part like what happens most staff members don't know those things so I think one of the big things that a lot of law firms can do to really maximize their conversion rate as people move through that funnel is email automation kind of talking about sending them content and just keeping it a loop and this could be something really simple that you can set up with a click in like ceccato or if you want to do like a mass email or even if you want to do a manual follow-up you can but just having that constant touch point throughout the process I think is really important to keeping that relationship fresh and making them trust you I don't want to hire you long term Michael I feel like we could go on for hours but we can't because we're at the end of our time and this wraps up this edition of the unbuildable our Vallois business advisory podcast my guest today has been michael Jason now Michael people are gonna want to know more so can they can you give out some contact information how they could reach out to you learn more about this topic yes so you can just go you know obviously if you're interested in lexicon you can just go to lexicon calm I'd strongly encourage again content driven right I strongly encourage everyone to go to blog lexico dot-com we have really awesome content on there written by lawyers like very curated content that'll be really helpful to not only give you the basics but you can get like more advanced this time goes on if they have any questions specifically for me at my email just Michael at Mexico dot-com pretty simple I'm always sorry on Twitter as well I'm on Twitter like stuck at Lex Takata or Michael e chasin fantastic and this is Christopher Anderson I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build a law firm business that works for you the views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor they endorsed by legal talk network its officers directors employees agents representatives shareholders and subsidiaries none of the contents should be considered legal advice as always consult a lawyer thanks for listening to the unbuildable our the law practice advisory podcast join us again for the next edition right here with legal talk network [Music] you [Music]