Empower your Legal Services with Customer Service and Relationship Management

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[Music] welcome to the lex factor a lawfully good podcast where we'll brief you on the business of law so you can build a better practice and capture more billable hours hello everyone and welcome back to the lex factor this is randy shorefighting and my co-host this week welcome back brad poble hi nice to be here wonderful it's good excited it's wonderful to have you back everyone who uh if you're returning or if you're new uh if you're new my voice is new but for those who are returning normally you would hear the dulcet tones of lauren hoffman i like the way you say that yeah very good i could definitely put that together people were probably going is this the right is this the right podcast who is this guy exactly lauren your voice has become very masculine that's exactly right yeah but uh lauren is not able to be with us today so i am pinchating again so welcome everyone and so today we are going to be talking about crm and brad what is crm i don't know i was thinking uh dave is going to be our guest today and i wanted to come up with a couple thoughts for what crm could mean and uh the only thing i could think of was curmudgeons randomly meandering around but i just don't think i have it yet i don't think i have it right now and so whenever brad and i were talking about before we before we came on the air he asked me what it stood for and i said can't remember much so um but anyway we want to welcome dave whiteside dave is director of client growth and success at clients first in jacksonville florida dave thank you for joining us today a pleasure guys great to be with you dave it's so good to see you we can actually see dave in the studio here with us today so it's i actually mean it when i say it's glad to see you that's right exactly the the the wonders of technology and zoom that is not a paid endorsement but as brad said it is nice to see dave and as well as our all of our other guests so there's a little more of an engaging back and forth so dave is here today to talk to us about customer relationship management yes exactly that is what crm stands for so now that we know what the correct acronym for crm is let's just kick it off and ask dave dave what is crm well thanks guys and it's great to be with you here today um well by definition uh crm is a software system that enables an organization to collect store analyze and leverage information about the organization or in the case of a law firm the firm's most important asset and that would be the relationships that lawyers have with clients and prospects crm is one component of what we refer to as the marketing stack you probably heard that term before there's actually a series of tools if you will that that enable a marketing team and oftentimes the firm to uh to really do all the functions that they want to do and just to kind of quickly go through the whole stack and then we'll today we're really going to focus mostly on crm is uh there's a second component called erm which instead of customer relationship management it stands for enterprise relationship management and it's a little bit different type of tool that uh really is designed to capture uh information for signature scraping but then what they do is they actually measure the relationship score who knows who and how well do they know them it's very uh it's a nice addition to uh to the marketing stack and it they tend to work in tandem with the crm system also firms usually utilize what's called an e-marketing tool and there's a whole number of them out there and we can talk about those at some point but that's really if you think of keeping your contacts in your crm system the e-marketing is how you actually get the communication out the door and uh so when you you know somebody you receive something that's probably where it came from also experience management is something that's a little bit unique i think to uh to law firms and how they use experience management and that's the process of really capturing what work is the firm done um i i view relationships and experience as the two most important things that a firm has because without relationships and without experience which is the work they've done it's kind of the product of the firm if you will the firm wouldn't be there would cease to exist and use oftentimes the last one firms often like to have what we would call a pitch and proposal system something where they can put together uh you know a packet of information to get out the door might be an rfp or a proposal or send the attorneys off to a meeting with it but uh but that is is really the components that make up the marketing stack so crm just in general i mean it sounds you're speaking very passionate about it i want to know you know what drives you about crm why why are you passionate about it you know it's uh it's something that i know i personally use one i i rely on the one that we use in our organization every single day and i find it extremely valuable and i i think that when done uh done well they bring a lot of value to a to a law firm or any organization that uses it and uh in fact it's you know in the in the big picture of things if you think of the walmarts of the world and places like that uh all their inventory all those things are run by by a type of crm system it really runs the gambit it's it's such a large variety of different systems that you're talking about there it is and it works across all industries i've been doing this in law firms for a lot of years and law firms are interesting in how they use crm they probably quite different than a lot of industries because typically you don't think of a sales you know crm is often equated with sales people and we don't think of law firms as having sales people in fact what makes law firms somewhat unique and i guess a lot of professional services is the sales person and the product the service are the same right so that it's a little bit different dynamic and so how they use crm and the types of functionality that they look for in using crm tends to vary a little bit uh more with with a law firm right i could definitely see that you know i think of the different law firms out there and them working to adapt the crm into their practice you know sometimes i think that they might be able to struggle with that um do you have any advice for them or any thoughts you know it's one of those projects that uh it can be difficult if it's not well done and a big reason for that is because crm is usually a tool that from a lawyer's standpoint it's very handy for the marketing department marketing departments use it all the time but they like to have the lawyers use it but it's hard to get lawyers to use a crm system and it's because they don't always see you know why why do i need this you know they have to have a time and billing system in order to get invoices out the door and log their time but they may not see the need for it they've probably got other ways that they go about uh using they're getting work done where the firm says you know you could use this crm system and they say you know what i use excel and i use outlook so there's a lot of a lot that has to go on but then it's kind of all over the place you need that central repository you know to keep that information in you're absolutely right when done correctly it is a huge benefit to a firm a lot of crm systems they'll say that you know anywhere from 50 to 70 of crm deployments the word they use is it fails to meet expectations and what that often tracks back to is well what exactly were the expectations and how were those expectations set and how realistic were they i see this all the time where firms wanna you know they see it in fact oftentimes they have the fomo right they got the fear of missing out we need a crm system because everybody else has right but at the same time they're completely afraid the project's going to fail and they're going to face the music if that project fails so there's this fear of failure and risk and and so anytime any you get that combination of fomo followed by the fear of failure um it can really create this hair on fire experience that i say is somewhere between a bungee jump and drag race don't combine the two it's a bad it's bad but they get this real life anxiety about it so really proper planning and expectation setting is the key to this let's measure twice and cut once as the carpenters say that's a great segue um working with brad brad is the chief information officer at lexicon and i'm in the the pr department at lexicon so our paths cross and in a number of of ways and instances you know throughout a day or a week or a month culture is i think a guiding principle i think that's fair to say for brad not just with regard to you know managing and designing the it infrastructure for lexicon and any of our clients but culture is very is one of his guiding principles and i've heard him talk about that a lot in meeting expectations how does culture come into play with the crm system or platform in law firms it is probably far more important than most law firms give it credit and some of the reason for that is when you work inside the law firm you're part of that culture and so you you can't always objectively look at the culture for what it is i often quote i think it was peter drucker that said this he said culture eats strategy for lunch every day yes yes and and that is no nowhere more is that true than in a law firm um you've got a partnership here of people that are very single-minded at times they are sometimes can have this my client my mindset you know they're very individual in how they go about their things at times and they can be very collegial but the question becomes are they collaborative and that's really where the culture question comes in and the other part is and i i sometimes just make fun of law firms because if you can just picture each of them carrying around a little sack and that sack has their contacts in it and their information and who they know and they don't share it with anybody else then this process goes on inside a firmware if someone knows someone in another company they send out this all points email everybody gets it hey does anybody know anybody at this company and it's just a very ineffective way of of communicating right and we see that so much in in law firms and the other part that oftentimes doesn't get taken into account uh you know what a firm will buy a crm system they go to deploy it and if you're not taking culture into into an effect you know are they are they collegial or collaborative but the other part oftentimes is compensation you know what compensation drives behavior and compensation system does not incent people to work together there's no way you can get a crm system to overcome that so you have to figure out how do we get the crm system to work within the the limitations and the confines of what we have here as a culture as opposed to trying to fight the culture every step of the way because that's a good way to have it go bad right i could definitely see that you know you talk a little bit about uh sales uh kind of building that brand the sales side of the business from an attorney perspective and then you kind of switch gears and talk about the importance from a crm to have that information in a system for you know making sure that it stays updated making sure that the firm collectively has that information instead of that that bag picture you painted for us as them walking around i pictured cavemen but um i'm not sure why my mind went there not that it's a correlation but uh i could see both sides are we asking too much by that by them implementing the crm is that too much out of the wheelhouse or what are do you have suggestions on how that can get closer to their wheelhouse to kind of change the culture at the same time you're implementing a crm what i always use is kind of an example here is kind of a an analogy to implementing a crm system is like a tax and so the question becomes are you putting a tax on your lawyers are you taxing their time and their ability to to do more productive things and when that happens um nobody likes to be taxed i guess is the bottom line to the whole thing right and so they're they're going to fight back because at the end of the day i it's what i call the with them what's in it for me right right anytime anybody is asked to do something they tend to look at it through their personal lens of okay well what's in this for me i can see where this might benefit the greater organization but what's in it for me because this is affecting my time and my ability to get work done and what's important to me and so when i when i talk about this this idea of the tax um let me start out you know just share a couple of things here what i call my little tax factoids sure if you think about this any tax tends to depress the activity being taxed you know so if we've got uh income taxes and payroll taxes affect how many people you can hire right and they're they're also used to drive behavior and affect behavior so you got sin taxes right we're gonna put extra tax on the cigarettes and the booze and all that stuff and and then you got tax breaks and credits you know we're gonna give give money back over here for a particular behavior but usually people look at that and they say well that that hurts me but helps them that's not fair so you get all of that going on so oftentimes when i'll ask firms to let's take a look at this through a tax lens are you taxing your firm rather than benefiting them and so if we if we think about that there's some correlations here you know it's and what it really stems from is the concept that nobody really likes to pay taxes right i mean nobody likes to do it it's your money nobody likes to do it although we do it every day whether it's payroll your gas tank we're paying taxes but the reason for the dislike is pretty simple rarely does anyone feel they get the same amount of benefit back from the tax they paid in to what they get back it just doesn't work that way everybody feels like they paid in more than they receive right and if that's how a crm system feels you're always going to struggle to get adoption and so i mean if a tax is viewed as a burden if your crm is viewed as a burden it's going to struggle if it's you know taxes are viewed as good for uncle sam well maybe if your crm is viewed as it's good for the firm or good for the marketing department but not for me as an individual lawyer i'm going to struggle with that and i'm always going to look at it as if i'm paying my unfair share i feel like i'm paying more than i'm getting back out of it and and so because of that just like a tax i'd like to legally minimize what i have to pay well i'm going to legally minimize what i have to do in this crm system i'm going to do the absolute minimum to get by if i do anything at all and and so there's there's really this this whole concept that the benefit just isn't there for the amount that i have to i have to contribute right so so how do you change that around how do you how do you you know change that philosophy or that thought process well we go through a process with with clients where you know we really have to get them to understand this is your culture accept it this is what it is we have to to really see the strengths and the weaknesses and figure out how do we work within it and we have to define the requirements that the business driving requirements so that we can figure out what will benefit these people what will they look at as helpful and beneficial and will get them to use the service it's the you know it's the other side of the the what's in it for me well here's what's in it for you and and if we identify those correctly and we train them and we configure the system and we and we communicate this properly you can have success but it's a lot of work and and it doesn't take too many missteps in that process to to have this thing have the thing kind of come apart and and once once they start to turn on the system it's really hard to get them back you know you kind of get one chance to make a good impression and once that's gone it's it's really hard to get another get a second try at it you know if if a law firm or any business for that matter doesn't have a crm they may have heard of it don't know what it's all about it's something new for some change isn't good they have to learn they have to step outside of their you know their normal comfort zone and just like you said yeah crm could be viewed you know as a burden or as a tax and no one wants to go through that and i was just wondering if you could just maybe expand on some of the compelling reasons why lawyers or law firms should adopt crm in their practices really the the biggest thing for a lawyer is the ability to understand who do we know how well do we know them and what do we know about them if we can get that consolidated into an easy single view simple to look up lawyers will go use it it's it's not uh not easy to get all that information in there but at the end of the day the lawyer needs to be a consumer of the information and not the editor and not the not the input person for the information it's very difficult to get them to put information in but if we can collect from a multitude of systems that information all exists somewhere in the firm we have to identify where does that information exist today how do we bring it into a crm system in an easy to way easy to use system and one of the best ways is today a lot of the crm systems they actually work right inside of outlook so you can be sitting in your outlook window which is where attorneys spend a great deal of their day and you can pull that information right in while you're in outlook and that's a great way to get them to to use it it's really how can we fit this into their workflow without having another login to another system and that's what really what makes it more difficult is anytime it looks like something that sits outside of the normal workflow so we have to figure out how do we get this to fit into the workflow and get it into the view another way that a lot of firms uh are getting some success is through mobile applications if a an attorney i know today nobody's going to conferences but in the days when we go to conferences and meet people you know the some of these uh mobile applications for the crm systems they have card scanners so rather than having to enter the person's information you just take a photo of the of the business card and it not only puts it into the attorney's phone it actually can put it right straight into the crm system oh that would be nice yeah so you you start figuring out what are some of the little things that they will value um some of the other things that uh that they like it makes it easier to get people on lists and to communicate with their clients and and things like that so it's you know they can go into a crm system go to that contact they can see all the lists that the firm has available and say yes add my add my contact to this list in this list so there's different uh different ways to you know provide benefit to them that they see as useful because otherwise it might be a lot more work for them to get those i could see that so really what you're saying is you know i look at it from both angles and really from an attorney perspective what you're suggesting is through automation and through proper requirements gathering and understanding you're going to make their lives easier with the crm because they can get to their information faster they can do all of those things so that's really what's in it for them it allows them to do their job more efficiently easier and that's where they're going to find the success whereas on the firm side you're really going to see a collection of that information that you have exactly and but yes if you if you want to get participation and this is just you know human nature right we're going to do things that benefit us and we're going to we're going to stay away from things that don't benefit us and absolutely so it's really the process of figuring out what makes it unique and one of the things that we see i have uh you know if you if you go on and google like uh the uh the swiss army knives there's one out there that has like 82 different gadgets on it 140 functions and it weighs about two pounds and way more than anybody could ever use yet somebody buys that puts it in their toolbox or something a crm system is a little bit like that in that it has hundreds thousands of functions that it can do nobody needs all of those functions so one of the keys to this is figuring out in fact we tell most firms find the top three once you find the top three go with them now those top three can differ for different parts of the firm different departments uh different practices different people even but once you can identify the three things that that person finds important now you've got something to work with forget about all trying to sell them on all the hundreds of other things that the crm system can do that's what we want to do is focus on these two or three things that actually make their life better and then when you train them you actually have we recommend train them right at their desk one on one desk side don't send them a video don't send them to a class train them right at their desk with their data on those two or three things that are important to them and that's when you've got a chance to get them how long has crm been a tool within the league you know for law firms was there a time where it really took off or was it a gradual build or was there like an aha moment i i think a lot of firms are still waiting for that aha moment but uh but yes i you know the first crm system was built by siebel back in maybe the early 90s and i think the first law firm crm system was actually the i believe it was interaction from lexus nexus and it probably came out 25 years ago something like that right and uh and it's still out there today it's a growing area the products you know there's a number of them that serve the legal industry now and the products are getting better and better you know cloud and new technology used to be that you know like all programs were 15 20 years ago they ran so slow nobody wanted to use them and so it's you know it was just just that was just technical functionality right but uh but today it really comes down to the the key user functionality and how simple how few of keystrokes can we get something done how easily can we can can we render information for the lawyer and make it available so those are the types of things today that that really drive firms although i think it's probably safe to say that today in fact some of the recent studies i've seen over the last year or two um about 75 percent of law firms that have crm systems say very few of their lawyers actually use it on any regular basis um it's it is a tool that is widely used in marketing departments and oftentimes the work that they wish the lawyer would do is actually done by the business development team or the marketing team they actually enter the data but uh but it but it seems to be but it's coming it's growing each year uh the statistics around attorney usage improves some of that i think is younger generations coming that are more technical savvy and uh they they seem to gravitate to it much more quickly than uh say an attorney who started many years ago and had a paper rolodex and has just really never gravitated to the technology i used to have a paper roll of dex just i did too you're right yeah a year ago randy one or two years ago yeah randy dave please tell us yours yours was not still around a year ago did you did you move no it's been gone at least two okay all right i'm i'm a slow adapter to a lot of technology but that's just the way that's that's just the way i'm wired i hate to say it i i've never had a rolodex i just never have no it could be because i i don't know anybody or don't have oh no i i would say that's false mr paul but anyway um we've talked about the adoption of crm and how to uh inject culture into into the adoption of crm and overcoming the tax perception talking about the why and for whom of crm for a law firm so what's that definition of why and whom for of crm for law firms but then also how crm can deliver the who and why benefits yeah the the who and why are really critical um and what i talk about is when i see a lot of charters and business cases where you know maybe a firm is trying to get the crm system approved by the executive committee type thing i see all these uh lists of benefits so better client relationships and less client attrition and better cross-selling and improve team collaboration and staff you know savings and all these all very good you know what these are very very noble and great ideas but what they don't have is they don't have a who like who benefits from that and they don't have a why do they benefit and how do they benefit and so there really needs that needs to be taken a little bit deeper um we need to define very tightly who's the recipient of these benefits why and how does it benefit them and how do we go sell them that this is going to work for them right and and so that's really what a successful rollout of crm is all about it's that communication factor in fact we we think that one of the areas that most firms probably underestimate is the importance of a complete communication plan to roll out a crm system starting with right from the day you acquire it and then it lives forever you're always communicating with them this is what it does here's how we do this here's a success story here's and you just have to keep on communicating with them and because nobody ever likes to be surprised right you don't want to be you know putting your crm system together here in the background and then one day you just bring it out to him and say ta-da yeah here about this and uh it just doesn't work that way you know they have to be involved the whole way they have to know what's coming you're pre-selling these benefits uh you're talking to them you're getting them ready it's in in you know any good software rollout would work that way and crm is absolutely no different yeah because of that i really think you're talking about you know changing the culture along with the tool to get them ready for it getting them understanding the the what's in it for them the why the who all of those things so important in any software implementation near to my heart exactly right brad [Laughter] and that is what it's about and you know so it's and one of the other things too that we uh we see is you can't you can never be over sponsored in something like this from your leadership the more engaged your leadership is with supporting sponsoring messaging using the system the better off the the whole project is going to go and and the life of the crm is going to go i kick myself for calling it a project because we don't ever look at crm as a project it's because it goes on forever it's a it's a fundamental change in how you operate your business if you treat it as a project that means it dies when the project when the rollout ends and in so many so many firms that actually happens to them it's not a project it's a way of life exactly absolutely right well i think you know i really learned a lot today about crm clearly i was way off on the definition of what that was but uh i think we could dive into it a little bit more in another episode absolutely and what we normally do here dave at the end of every lex factor podcast episode we we like to review three things or three takeaways and from from my perspective and brad provided a great segue for that um because there's there's so much to learn and discover about crm one thing um that we talked about at least that i highlighted was culture making sure that the culture within your law firm is prepared to not only accept but to implement a crm program because if you don't have that culture then it's not gonna be accepted the second thing that i uh wrote down was communication dave just like you said you know if your communication plan uh for roll out of that crm is hey here it is we got a crm let's go to work jumps right out of the case that's right yeah exactly right pull the rabbit right out of the hat so there's the culture there's the communication but then defining the why and for whom basically the benefits better better client relationships less client attrition the ability to cross-sell not just you know let's say you have a you know a medium-sized law firm and your law firm you know specializes in more than just one area within law real estate tort family law whatever gives you you know an opportunity to cross-sell you know but that crm can also help you increase team collaboration revenue profitability and one very important just as important if not more than more important than any of those is greater client and staff satisfaction anything you want to say with regard to client and staff satisfaction before we close out i think it's important that particularly with the marketing teams they end up using these tools a lot they spend a lot of time in them so making sure that they are effectively set up to meet the daily demands and that they're not constantly trying to work around the system and have workarounds and things i think is really important i think it makes their job much more rewarding and uh and you know keeps them from frustration and burning cycles on things they shouldn't have to and it's it's kind of one of those things that you know once it's in there they just kind of accept it as it is but uh but i think it's important to have it working as optimally as possible for uh for the marketing team and the what we'll call the power users sure absolutely that's right the power users are in marketing mark that down is that you randy uh that that's that's stored up in my mental rolodex yes that you're a power user oh i wouldn't go that far but but anyway so that that brings us to the end of this uh episode of the lux factor with dave whiteside and just as brad mentioned earlier dave is going to come back for a second episode on crm we want you to tune in for that but before you tune in for that listen remember to listen like and rate and subscribe to the lux factor you can find us on itunes spotify or you can go to our website at .lexiconservices.com under the knowledge base tab and then you can filter through podcasts we have a number of podcasts uh approaching 30 now oh yeah quite a few out there we are growing exactly so listen like and subscribe to us and uh for this episode i'm randy schorrified and i'm brad poble it was such a pleasure dave to have you thank you guys it was great being with you here thank you thank you everyone for tuning in and uh we expect to have you join us again for the next episode of the lex factor thanks for tuning in to the lex factor lexicon takes care of business so you can take care of law learn how to build a better practice at lexiconservices.com