Streamline Your Legal Services with lead management systems for Legal Services

How to create outlook signature

So, do you feel like you're spending too much of your day tracking and responding to leads coming into your law firm? It can be extremely time-consuming to make sure you're getting back to prospective clients quickly and getting them all the information you need. Here are three tips on how you can keep your time down when responding to leads and still do it effectively. Welcome to the Josh Gerben Show, because law school didn't teach business. Hi, everybody, this is Josh Gerben. And welcome to Episode 17 of the Josh Gerben Show. This is the show where we talk about the business of law for those of us running a law firm or just running a law practice where you have clients and you have demands on your time. These are things I've learned from owning and operating a law firm since 2008. So, today's show, I want to talk about leads, because one of the things that we have started to have a problem with, it's a good problem to have, is that we get a lot of leads every day in our law firm, people that need assistance with a trademark, patent, or copyright. And we could get on a good day, a dozen, maybe even 20 people that are contacting our firm asking about our services. So when you have that many people contacting you, or even if you have a handful of people contacting you about more complex matters, it could literally take half, if not your entire day, to respond to them and get them all the information they need to make a decision about whether to hire you as their attorney. And as we all know, as attorneys, we're already pressed for time. So the idea of taking hours every day to respond to leads can be pretty daunting. And sometimes it just goes by the wayside, right? You might just try to hurry the advice to somebody or maybe you don't get back to everybody that day, and you call a couple of days later, and that person's already found other attorney. So getting back to people and getting them information is critical to keeping the pipeline of work flowing for your firm, but you have to also get the work done, so there's all these, you know, competing factors on your time. So I want to go over three things today that I do that really helps cut down the amount of time I have to spend handling leads for our law firm. The first is that we have a very good trained paralegal that can take the initial call and actually provide very good information to a client that answers many frequently asked questions. The second is that we don't try to sell the unsellable of our services . If we know somebody's not a good fit, we quickly move on. And the third is we start our sales process before somebody even contacts our firm by putting out a tremendous amount of good content. Once folks contact us, we know they pretty much want to hire us. And that is a great place to be. So let me go over these in detail and show you what I mean. The first is an extraordinarily difficult thing to put in place, but if you can do it, it's going to save you a ton of time. So we have trained a paralegal who has worked with us for over a decade, that when we get an inquiry, this individual can call or email the inquiry back within an hour or two, right? Very quickly, it's during business hours, and if the lead comes in after business hours first thing the next day, and instead of just being a, "Hey, we got your message, and here's some general information, this paralegal is knowledgeable enough to be able to answer a lot of the frequently asked questions we get. So questions can range from what happens if a trademark search finds a problem, with my trademark, you know, how does that affect my fee? How do your fees work? Can I trademark this? You know, all these different things that people ask us on a day-to-day basis, our paralegal that takes these calls can pretty much answer. And this is a lot different, keep in mind, you know ... in today's world, I know a lot of people think of things like Ruby Receptionist, right? Where you can have an outside company basically answer your phone. So they get a live person, but if someone's calling your law firm, and they get a live person, and all that person can do is take a message, you're still not moving that lead along the sales funnel at all. You're just basically taking a message and punting it to an attorney. You have not stopped that person's search for an attorney at this point. What a good paralegal can do, that can take a call and answer legitimate questions a client has, is you can stop that person search. So if somebody calls your firm and they get somebody that can answer questions immediately and not have to be passed around and leave messages and wait for phone calls to be made to them, they can get initial questions answered, see if the firm is extremely competent. And then when they have something very specific that the paralegal may not be able to answer or is uncomfortable answering, would be willing to wait for the attorney to give them a call. Again, this is such a different thing than just talking to a receptionist and letting the receptionist take a message. By providing good information for people, you can stop their search, buy you a little time and then once you get on the phone with them, as the attorney, you're only answering questions that are highly specific to that case, and not dealing with the same general question you hear 100 times a day, which admittedly can get a little difficult to answer. And you may mail it in a little too much sometimes, right? You may not give someone your best answer. Whereas, with a paralegal, this is what they're doing, this is what their job is. They're going to be more enthusiastic, hopefully, with the person in answering these more frequently asked questions. But again, once you get on the phone with them, now all of a sudden, you can focus on a very specific question. And maybe you only have to spend 10 or 15 minutes, as opposed to 20, 30 minutes or more on the consult yourself. So you may be saying, "Oh, Josh, that's a great idea in theory, but I mean, how do I even train somebody to do that?" This is where it comes into, you have to hire somebody that's good at customer service, someone that understands how to talk to people and just be a real person. And then you can let them listen in to all your sales calls that you do, you know, the calls you're taking with leads, and you come up with all the answers you want them to give to the various different questions you get on a daily basis, and over time, you basically train this person into being able to answer these questions and handle the calls as you want them handled. It takes a lot of hard work, don't get me wrong, this is not something you're going to hire someone, and a week later, they're going to be able to do it. But if you spend several months training somebody, at the end of that time, all of a sudden, the time savings are going to be huge for you, and you're really going to have something in place that, you might even save ... Like, I think, once we started doing this, I think I probably saved an hour and a half to two hours a day in the amount of time I was spending on the phone with prospective clients. That's huge, because now that's time I can go out and do other marketing activities to grow the firm. So the second point and rule that I have when we're responding to leads is we don't try to sell the unsellable. You know, if we have people call up and start complaining about how much it costs to hire a lawyer or that they think they can do it on their own or they ... major red flags, right? And so, and you know this, you've gotten leads where you talked to them and you're like, "Oh, man." You know, they're so far away from where they need to be to hire you, and you just know, like, what they're talking about, they'd have to kind of come around full circle, you've got to convince them of the value you're going to provide, you got to convince them of this, convince them of that, and then they're going to have a hard time with the fees you want to charge. You're just wasting your time, because maybe you close 5% or 10% of those leads, but you spend an enormous amount of time trying to do so, and most of them will walk out the door. There's a really good episode of Seinfeld, for any of you that are Seinfeld fans, you know, and it was the Soup Nazi episode, right? And they come into the soup store and if you don't know your order, and you can't place it right away, and you can't ... "No soup for you," right? And it's one of my favorite episodes of all time, and I will be on the phone with people, and they will be, you know, and it'll just be an extraordinarily difficult call, and I'm thinking, "No," you know, "Next," like, "my store is not for you," right? And because I'm not there to ... I'm only here to help people that really want a high level and appreciate what an attorney can bring to a trademark application, to a trademark search. I don't need to hear, "Why should I hire you over ?" If you haven't figured that out yet, we should not be talking, right? So don't try to sell the unsellable. If somebody comes to you, and you know that it's not a great lead, you have to have a polite decline, you can say, "I'm so sorry, this is not a good case, a good match for our firm. It's not something we typically handle." If it's not, you'll be honest. Or just say, "You know, I don't feel like this is a good match for our firm." This is not, you know, it's not a case that appears to be a good match for us." And you can explain to them, just, "Please contact a few other law firms and maybe you'll find someone that's able to handle this kind of case better than I could." And I find that nobody's really upset with that. You know, some people get a little bit agitated. "Well, why can't you do this?" And then you're like, "Well, now I know why, because you're agitated with me the minute that we have a small hiccup, right?" And that's another huge red flag for a client. But just politely declining people and letting them move on and focus on the leads that are ready for you. And you will be surprised how much time that will save you. Now the final point I have here is that your leads should be contacting you essentially ready to hire you, because they've read about you and you've provided enough information for them to understand why they need to hire you. So, in our case, we have a lot of content about trademarks circulating around the internet. Typically, if somebody finds us, they can very easily see a lot of the content we've produced, they can see a lot of information about our fees. So we will get leads that call us and say, "Hey, I saw your fee is this. I really like what I've seen, I just want to confirm a few things." You're talking about a 5 or 10-minute conversation and not a 40-minute conversation to explain fees, to explain why they should hire you, and all these other things. People see that we are really, really good at handling trademarks and handling trademark searches and trademark filings and all the things associated with it. So they have no doubt in their mind that we're the firm they'd like to hire. So long as we are responsive from a customer service perspective, so long as we do sound competent once we get on the phone, and so long as our fees match up what they're seeing online. But a lot of law firms, you know, you don't put a lot of information up, you're like, "Oh, we're great, right?" and everybody says that they're the best. I mean, whatever. You know, there's good lawyers out there, a lot of good lawyers out there. But somebody's only really going to want to hire you if they feel they connect with you, or you connect with them on their particular issue. And you're only really going to do that by putting out a lot of content. This is an investment. This can take years to get to, I mean, I'm talking we probably spent five years to get to a place where we were getting leads like this, just to get enough content out there so that people would see it in various different searches and things that they're looking for. So you just have to invest the time, the energy on a daily if not weekly basis, to just go through and make content, and this can be video content like I'm doing here. This could be written content, like blogs , LinkedIn articles, things like that. This could be just getting into the press and getting your name mentioned by media as in providing analysis on stories in your particular area of law. It could be about getting on Facebook and develop, like, if you're a wills and you know, family attorney, you know, you should be on Facebook, and everybody in your community should know about you and what you do. But you should also provide other useful content about things that can happen in good times, things like wills and planning for, you know, planning your estate and things like that. And then when things might go wrong, if there's a divorce or there's a custody battle, knowing that you're a trusted person that somebody can come to. But being all over social media and things like that, very easy to do in today's world, if you know what you're doing, or you can hire people to help you. But putting out that content and being top of the line in your area of law, when somebody needs you, they're going to come to you, and it's not going to be a huge sales process. It's just going to be, "Hey, as long as your fees match up, as long as you can take this case, as long as you seem like a nice guy when I talk to you, the deal is done. And, again, you can get to that place, but you've got to produce a lot of content. And you've got to get people engaged with that content before they come to you, before they come to you. Now, if that's not as possible for your firm initially, the next thing you can do just to kind of triage this issue is once people contact, you have all the content you can give them, right? So if somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, I have this problem." "Well, here's some videos I've done," or "here's a book" or "here's a couple of articles you can read before we meet up, before we have our consultation," right? So they can see that you've written on it, they can see your videos on it, they know that you know your stuff before they even come in for their initial consult or you have the consult over the phone. So, again, maybe you don't have all the ability to push all that information out initially, but if you have really good content internally that you can then provide your leads, that's another way to try to cut down on the sales time that you're going to have to spend. Again, maybe you're answering some questions with the content, you're not going to have to answer in person in detail. But more importantly, you're basically helping the consumer make up their mind that you're the one they want to hire. So I hope you found today's talk helpful. As you can see, when you're thinking about leads, it's not just how many can I get? And what are the quality? It's how do I handle the leads in an amount of time that makes sense for my day-to-day so I can actually do the legal work I have to do, do the management work I have to do for my firm or my practice. We all just can't sit around answering phones all day long to keep the pipeline of work moving, we have to do it in an organized fashion, And we have to do it in a time-sensitive fashion. And you can apply these techniques to help you save time. And I hope you do, and I hope you find it really helpful. So if you've got another technique that you use to help keep your time down and managing your leads and closing, turning leads into clients, I would love to hear about it in the comments. Please, please leave a comment, shoot me an email. Let me know what your experience has been, and we continue the discussion online. Thanks so much, and I'll talk to you next time. ♪ [music] ♪