New Rules of Lead Nurturing for Law Firms (Full Transcript)

[00:00:08] Speaker 1: All right, welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. We'll get started here in just a few minutes. But as we do get started, we would love to know your name and where you're where you're from, and then today I think with summer, it would be great to know if you have any vacations planned and which one you're looking forward to the most over the summer. Chris, you guys have any vacations coming up this this summer.

[00:00:37] Speaker 2: We do actually, and we're going to Washington DC in July, and then doing it and going to do it out West road trip sometime end of September.

[00:00:47] Speaker 1: Very cool. Very cool. And then also everyone just make sure on your chat to put change the to section to everyone just so we can all see how everything's going and for those of you who just joined. We'd love to know your name where you're coming in from and what is the most exciting vacation you're looking forward to this summer, or if you're not going on vacation hopefully this webinar will help you get to a point where you can take vacation. But yeah, we'd love that. Welcome everyone. We're going to get started here in just a few minutes on the webinar. And, like I said, if you're just coming in, we've got a few people coming in pretty quickly here. We'd love to know your name and where you're coming from and what is the most exciting vacation you're looking forward to this summer. Welcome everyone. We're going to get started here in just a few minutes on the webinar. And, like I said, if you're just coming in, we've got a few people coming in pretty quickly here. We'd love to know your name where you're from and what vacation you're looking forward to most this summer. We've got a lot of vacations. Some haven't scheduled them yet. There's still plenty of time. Ruth, I see you there. We've got plenty of time to get that vacation scheduled. Disney World. Fun. Have you gone to Disney World lately? Have you been?

[00:02:23] Speaker 2: I have not been lately. Actually, I've never been to Disney World. I've been to Disneyland many, many, many times because I grew up just north of San Francisco, but never to Disney World.

[00:02:32] Speaker 1: Nice. We've got a few Disney Worlds here. I haven't been since I was a kid, but my kids are near the age where they know what it is. So they're starting to ask about it. All right, we're going to get started here in just about one minute. Once again, if you haven't taken a chance to go through into the chat and put your name and where you're from, we'd love to know it. And then also, if you have a vacation, we'd love to know what your dream vacation is this summer that you're looking forward to.

[00:03:00] Speaker 2: What about you, Blake? Going anywhere?

[00:03:04] Speaker 1: It's funny, I've been asking everybody and telling them there's still plenty of time. No, we haven't scheduled anything. I'm supposed to go on a golf trip in August, so I guess that still technically counts as summer. But yeah, nothing yet planned with the family, but I'm sure we'll do something. Three kids, it's hard to get everybody moving around.

[00:03:26] Speaker 2: I hear you on that. Originally, the trip we're talking about in September was for my brother-in-law's wedding, and we were going to fly. And then I realized with three kids, it was a whole lot cheaper to just go ahead and drive.

[00:03:40] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard. Cheaper immediately, but for your therapist bills later, it's much more difficult. All right, well, we'll go ahead and get started here. Thanks for joining everyone today for the webinar. Today's topic is the new rules of lead nurturing for law firms. So we've got a lot of information to cover. And before we do, I just want to make sure everyone has all of this started. So we've already started this. We asked number one thing, holding you back for your law firm's growth. We changed that today to have fun. We'd love to know, as you continue coming in, where your top vacation choice is this summer. And so, yeah, so first name city. And then once again, make sure in the chat, you change the two to everyone. If you have any questions, feel free to put them in either the question section or into the chat. We will be checking both, but we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to ask questions. We will stop and answer some questions if they come through the chat and go through that. But we will have a Q&A session at the end where we'll try to get to all of the questions that come through. A few people say there's speaking issues, there's sound issues. Sorry, we'll try to get that adjusted. But we will be sending out a recording of this webinar at the end as well to everyone. It'll be posted on our website. So without further ado, my name is Blake Roberts. I'm the director of business development here at Lawmatics. I've been here for just over two years and I've been in the legal industry for about 10. So I work with most of many of our partners like CallRail and love the legal industry, love working with marketing and have a sales background as well. So this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart. And then I'll pass it over to Chris.

[00:05:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks, Blake. Thank you for having me. My name is Chris Nelson. I'm the senior manager of vertical marketing here at CallRail. We are a software lead engagement software platform. My legal industry background, I graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law, practiced five years in Louisville, Kentucky, primarily business law, but also some administrative regulatory law. And then transitioned in-house to a client of mine, moved from the legal side to more business management roles, and then transitioned over to CallRail where I do our vertical marketing for both legal and home services.

[00:06:14] Speaker 1: Awesome. So we'll go through the agenda. We're excited to have Chris here today. So the agenda we're going to go, like I said, we're going to cover a lot. So we're going to go through the importance of lead nurturing, kind of an overview. Chris is going to kick it. We're going to kick it over to Chris. He's going to go through kind of the current state of the legal industry and some trends that we have there. We're going to cover understanding your client personas, timing and personalization, multi-channel communication, lots of things. So we're going to go through this fairly quickly because we do have a lot to cover. But yeah, like I said, questions, we want to be interactive on this. So please feel free as we're going through to drop them in the chat. Well, so the importance of lead nurturing, you know, a lot of times we focus a lot on getting that first call, answering that call, making sure the form that came in through the website is taken care of. But what do you do if, you know, they're not responsive? Chris will go through some trends and things like that that will help. But lead nurturing is such an important part of the sales cycle for any business, especially a law firm, right? You've seen the trends. The mindset of the consumer has changed where they're expecting, you know, to be communicated with. They're expecting prompt replies. They're expecting these things. The expectations from the consumer standpoint has never been higher. And so it's important, especially whether you're a large law firm or a small law firm, that you're making sure that you have the tools in place to stay top of mind with clients through communication. It's not just a, hey, thanks for reaching out. We'd love to schedule a consultation. It's making sure that you're constantly talking to them until you get them across that finish line. Fostering that relationship from the moment they come through to the moment everything is resolved at the end, right? You know, the relationship and the trust building does not start once they sign the EA. It starts once they've contacted your law firm, really once they've Googled your law firm, right? So making sure that you're building value throughout the entire process. And then that leads to delivering valuable information, right? So even if they haven't hired you yet, you're still trying to get them to. So you want to make sure your communication is not just, hey, we'd love to talk to you. Hey, we'd love to talk to you. Hey, we'd love to get a consultation scheduled. But you're providing value for them. And that goes to the building the relationship. And the most important thing, someone that told me this years and years and years ago, a quiet lead is not a lost lead. If someone's not responding to you, it doesn't mean that you just give up on them, right? It doesn't mean that they've hired someone else necessarily. You know, you still need to be in contact with them. You never know. It could be that they're busy or things like that. But that's the important of nurturing that lead is that maybe they do get busy. A lot of times if someone's hiring an attorney, they've got a lot of stuff going on, right? And so maybe they went through and they Googled you. They filled out a request. They're talking, you know, reaching out to a few people. But just because they've gone quiet does not mean it's over. So you want to make sure that you're still staying in contact with them, even if it's referrals. We've had people tell us that they never closed the deal. But because they've been sending out emails, you know, that person that came in as a lead originally that didn't hire them still referred business to them later. So it's important to understand that. Common pitfalls and mistakes. So it's tough, right? Especially if you're a law firm that most of your process is manual. You're trying to go through and email everybody, reach out, phone calls, schedule all these things the right way. It's hard. And so common pitfalls that we see, especially in this industry, is personalizing your follow up. You know, we talked about adding that value, making sure that it's the right kind of communication. And we'll talk about that more when we go through client personas. But making sure that you personalize your follow up, make it friendly, make it inviting. You are trying to sell them on your services and on you overall. Manual process is burning time. That's probably the biggest one. If you have even decent volume in terms of incoming leads, being able to, like, efficiently follow up with all of them on a timely basis and not have anything fall through the cracks, you're probably a marketing and sales superhero. You talk to the best salespeople in the world. And it's still really difficult to do a lot of this stuff without any sort of automation. And disorganization. That kind of goes to the manual process. But even if you have automation, if things are disorganized, you're going to have things slide through the cracks. If you don't have workflows in place and checkpoints in place to make sure that all of the touch points are hitting, things are going to ultimately fall through. And it's going to create headaches because you're going to miss out on potential paying leads. And then the biggest one, and this is, you know, we all get busy. The leads, like I said, are busy sometimes. But waiting too long or even not replying at all. So we see that all too often as a lead comes in. We forget about it. We didn't mark the email as important. We didn't have a task reminder set to email them back. And then sure enough, it's been a week. You go back to your inbox because you finally have some time to breathe and you realize you never emailed that person back or you never called that person back. And at that point, that is loss. They're not the quiet lead. You're the quiet business. And so it's hard to get that back. But these are the four things. And hopefully as we go through the presentation, we'll give you some tools and tactics to make sure these things aren't an issue.

[00:12:07] Speaker 2: Yeah, Blake, I think that Amazon has really, I don't know if it's necessarily done a disservice to everybody, but it has absolutely changed the expectations that customers have for their experience and when you're going to have different kinds of realities. Just in our lifetime, overnight FedEx packages would have been considered something that was like real prompt response. And now it's to basically same day, yeah, you can have it within the next couple hours. It just has totally changed customer expectations that you have to operate with.

[00:12:47] Speaker 1: And it's not demographic either. My grandmother turned 94 this past week. She was complaining that her Amazon package was running late and that it was supposed to be there by 10. She ordered it the night before. And it's crazy, but it has that kind of thing. And it's not just Amazon. It's everything in our lives, right? It's this instant gratification. It's this instant sense of connectivity. And that goes into this. Lead nurturing and sales cycle has been a long time study, right? And so it's constantly evolving, but it's definitely, and it'll go into the personas that we talk about. But yeah, totally agree. And so I'll let you talk about some of the legal trends and the current state of everything.

[00:13:31] Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. I think it's a, I would call it a unique time to be practicing law. Definitely an interesting time. Don't know if it's exciting so much as it is interesting, but it definitely presents opportunities. And one of the things that I think is really just unique about law and the legal sector is 90% of prospective clients are still reaching out via phone. And that's something where the trends towards more online contacts, different things like that, they haven't permeated it as much within the legal space. So you have a little bit of a different type of lead experience. And when you have, when you then combine that with the fact that you have many, many, three out of every four clients are going with whoever responds first. That puts a heavy emphasis on your intake team and being able to handle those calls as soon as you possibly get them. And what we found, we did our call insights. We looked at all of the calls that were coming in through the different customers that we have. And we looked at law firms in particular. And what we found is that 28% of calls are going unanswered, which if you are looking at it and saying, hey, clients are going with this first responder. If you are not answering the phone, you've lost that opportunity. So I think that really puts pressure on you as a lawyer, as a firm, that if you really want to continue to bring those cases in, you've got to respond. Only 50% of the law firms are responding to prospects within an hour. 42% are taking four or more hours to respond to a prospective client. If you are looking at that in the same context as, look, 78% of clients are going with the first responder, you're losing out on many, many clients. And I think, you know, combined with what you were saying about the different kinds of processes that people are running, when you look at it as a situation where your processes are manual, all of those different things, that kind of disorganization allows these leads to slip through the cracks. And the other thing that I think is unique about legal, it's not like you're going to the grocery store every week to get eggs. You know, when a client or a prospective client is looking for legal services, it may be that they don't have any kind of need for months and months and years and years on end. And then all of a sudden that need pops up right then and there. If you have them within your pipeline already, within that kind of marketing funnel, where you've been nurturing them and nurturing them and nurturing them, you have a much more likely ability to get them, once they actually have that need, to jump on the phone and give you a call. What you don't want to do, though, when they give you that call, is throw out the lead by not answering it.

[00:16:33] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the two stats that jump out at the end of this page is, you know, 78% of clients go with the first responder. And only 50% of law firms respond to prospects within an hour. That means 50% are, there's just, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage pretty quickly. And I know it's hard, right? You could be in court. You could be, you know, anywhere. But you're putting yourself behind the eight ball by not having some tools in place or processes in place or having staff. And there's plenty of different reasons. It's not just laziness that is why the 50%. It's much more than that. It's all of the circumstances. But those two, it just seems like there's such an opportunity for firms who can start to put tools and processes in place to really gain more momentum with adding clients.

[00:17:25] Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no doubt that, I mean, it underlines the importance of all of that.

[00:17:29] Speaker 1: For sure.

[00:17:32] Speaker 2: As we said, when we're talking about this being an interesting time, for us, we've had year-to-date calls per legal customer. They're up 16%. So we know that people are calling. We know that clients are out there. Prospective clients are out there. Minutes are up almost 14%. So you've got a situation where the legal market and the need for legal services is expanding. And I think it's expanding primarily within the consumer-oriented practice areas of personal injury, criminal defense, immigration, bankruptcy, family law, all of those, which are really driving these trends. I think are something that we're going to find, you know, it has been going on within Q4 of last year, Q1 of this year, and then all the way through the end of this year. And when you look at it, I mean, we're seeing 55% of law firms believe it's more difficult to acquire a customer. I think part of that is that you have lawyers like me. When I started out practicing, I did a lot of business, a lot of real estate law, and it was going great guns in the go-go years in 05, 06, 07. And then the bottom fell out of the market and there weren't nearly as many transactions that were out there. And so there were people, I had to find other places of business. And that means that there are more and more people moving into the areas that they might not necessarily be their specialty. And I think that goes into that kind of more competition, more difficulty to acquire those customers as we go into the rest of the year.

[00:19:06] Speaker 1: For sure. And I'm curious, just your perspective on some of these, you know, legal service softwares that are, you know, a lot of the younger generations are looking at in terms of like, well, if I just need a document, I can go do this. Or if I just need, you know, if it's a non-contested divorce or something like that, I can go through one of these services and do it all myself. Like, are we seeing more of those that contributing to this 50% or this harder ability to get clients coming through?

[00:19:36] Speaker 2: I definitely think that's part of it. You have, what I've seen is statistics in the neighborhood of 70 to 80% of client needs are going unrepresented as is. So in some respects, there's an additional market that could be served. But at the same time, I do think there's competition that's coming in from these, your like legal zooms and different things like that. Hey, we could just get your articles of organization and everything you need to start your business. Hey, we can do your trademark application. Hey, we got a one-stop shop. All of those kinds of things I do think are in play, especially for practices like estate planning, where people have a hard time understanding whether or not they should. Even though, you know, everybody should have a will. Everybody needs that kind of stuff in place, right? But getting people to overcome that and understand that they have that need. These services that are coming in there that can say, I won't do it for a hundred bucks. That's something that is definitely going into the competition.

[00:20:44] Speaker 1: Right. Well, and I think, you know, I asked that because I think it ties into kind of a segue of what we're going to be talking about with personalizing and all that stuff. A lot of these services can't do that, right? And so, a key value as you're continuing to brand your business, your law firm, and work towards getting more clients on board as you nurture them is you have an advantage in the fact that you can be personable, right? You're not just a service. You are a human. You're an attorney. You're a firm of attorneys that is working with these people. So, understanding them and communicating to the demographic and the persona that you need to is an advantage for you. Not everybody wants the one-stop shop. I can get it done. A lot of people want, even if they try that, they're going to go through and say, you know what? I need someone who can actually answer my questions. I don't have all of this. So, yeah. So, we'll switch over to that. So, client personas.

[00:21:40] Speaker 2: The hard part with that, though, Blake, is you get into a situation where you don't know if something's wrong until something has gone wrong.

[00:21:49] Speaker 1: For sure. For sure, yeah. On our last webinar, we were talking about this with someone from U.S. legal marketing, and it's this pay me now, pay me later, or cost me now, cost me later, right? If you save money now, save time now as a client of a law firm by taking the easy route or going the self-serve route, it may seem right now, but if there's any questions or things aren't done correctly and you're putting all that on you, you could end up paying for it later, both financially and resource-wise, by having something done incorrectly. So, you know, another part of the importance of adding, you know, content and education to every piece of communication they have, and an advantage to you as an attorney to be able to talk to them.

[00:22:39] Speaker 2: There's no doubt ChatGPT could spew out a great contract for you. You just don't really know whether the contract terms are right.

[00:22:47] Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly. Well, cool. So, moving on to client personas. So, this is a really important tool. If you haven't gone through an exercise, there's plenty of them out there. You can reach out to me, and I can send you some resources on how to create your client personas. You may have a few. You may have different client personas based on different practice areas. If you are a family law firm, yours is going to be much different probably than, you know, estate planning or elder law. So, but really, when you're creating these personas, they're very, very important. It's a really key first step to building out your nurturing and your just overall lead communication to make sure that you're hitting those. So, once again, we talked about practice area, but you want to make sure you understand what is the demographic of your clients? Where are you located? Are you metro? Are you rural? Are you east coast, west coast? That goes into timing. Are you global? Like the time zones is a huge part. So, just understanding, you know, what groups of people you're working with, things like that. What are their goals for looking for a firm, right? So, understanding, you know, you may have even in a single practice area, three or four client personas. You have a client persona for your, you know, divorced moms, right? Moms going through divorce or dads. You have custody hearings, things like that. So, going through, like, what are the goals of their, why are they reaching out to you, right? If it's something urgent, then you want to make sure your communication is very straightforward and urgent. If it's something more laid back or things like that, then maybe you have the ability to be a little bit more laid back in your communication. The psychographics, too. So, understanding, what are they thinking? What are they dealing with? What are they currently going through in that exact moment? If you're going through, if you're a personal injury attorney, you know, they're probably dealing with some really high stress situation, right? So, you don't want to send them a cute e-mail saying with a joke or a gif or something in there. If it's, you know, family law, maybe, right? You want to lighten the mood a little bit. But understanding, what are they going through in that moment? And then their behaviors and preferences. So, I think that kind of goes along with a lot of the other things, the demographics, the psychographics. Understanding that, you know, and it's not going to be one size fits all, right? But this will give you a good understanding of how to communicate, when to communicate, how often, how frequent. You know, understanding their preferences is big, right? And just making sure that you're catering to everything that that person needs, right? Because ultimately, they're coming to you with legal help or with the need for legal help. And so, being able to understand and not only be able to offer that, but be able to meet them where they're at is huge. So, once again, this is a tool or this is just an overview, but there's tools out there for creating this. Every business with a sales team in any industry has client personas as one of their sales training tactics. And understanding how to talk to that person, how to market to that person. Because it is crucial, as we'll talk about a little bit more in the timing and personalization, if you're sending the wrong kind of information to someone who does not respond to that, it's not necessarily going to kill the deal, but it's going to make it a lot harder to get them across the finish line, when you could make it a little bit more efficient.

[00:26:16] Speaker 2: I don't think this is any different than when you're building your case and you're laying out your case. You understand who the judge is. You understand who the jury is. You have an understanding of everything, their thought process, who they are, what they might be thinking, how it might flow, when you present that. And then putting those together and tailoring your case to whatever that is with the judge and the jury. It's the same way when you've got clients. You're trying to persuade the client to become your client. You're just using that same mentality.

[00:26:52] Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. It's the aspect of taking stuff that you already do, but just moving it a little bit earlier in the process. And it's one of those things that, once again, it's not going to be a deal breaker, but it's going to make the process way more efficient. And it's going to create that client value because you've taken the time to understand what matters to them, what they can react to the right way as you're communicating them. And it becomes like, you know, we all get emails all the time, right? So from different sales groups or things like that, you probably, you all on this attendee, you probably get plenty of emails from Lomatics and CallRail. But understanding, you know, if you're doing it in the right way, hopefully it's not annoying them. Right. Hopefully you're providing value. You're adding content because you've taken the time to understand what your client base reacts to. But, yeah, another great segue into the timing and personalization of your follow up. So it's really easy, you know, if you get a lead that comes through to just call them, call them, call them, email them, spam them, trying to get them on board, that may not work with everybody. It may work with some. Once again, knowing your persona is huge. Maybe they just need that constant barrage of communication. But once again, once you understand that persona or those personas that you're working with, connecting with them the way they expect. Right. So we talked to Amazon and how everyone has the expectations now. So unfortunately, as a law firm, we're probably not setting a lot of the industry expectations for how people want to be communicated with. So it's understanding. And this is going to take experiments. Right. You're going to you're going to not you're not going to have the correct formula and flow right away. And it's once again, none of this is one size fits all. But it's it's tinkering, experimenting, trying things here and there, but understanding how things work. And there's at the end, we'll talk about kind of tracking this and making that experimenting a lot easier so that you're not just blindly throwing darts out there. But timing is everything. Right. Chris talked about the initial follow up and making sure that it's quick. Right. The first first responders, typically the one that they're going to go with based on stats. So making sure you're in there immediately, but then also having that cadence. Right. If it's something depending on the case type or practice area, if it's time sensitive, you're going to want that second follow up pretty quick. But looking at and mapping out kind of your communication flow where it goes from first contact. And then if I haven't heard from them, when is that next email going out? And then there are a variety of things. Right. So making sure that you have that timed out, using a tool that helps you schedule these things soon as that lead comes in. Right. So you're having things automatically get sent out. You're having tasks automatically sent say, hey, it's been two days. You need to call this person. Those are part of the things that kind of go through the fall through the cracks. But timing is everything because you don't. And it's it's a science because it's it's you're either going to annoy them or you're going to not be there enough. Right. It's typically how we look at it. So there really is this perfect middle ground that you can get to. It's just understanding how to get there. So once again, just kind of building that out and experimenting with it a little bit. Building trust through communication. You're going to hear us talk about this a lot. We've already talked about this quite a bit in a few of the other slides, but that relationship aspect, building the trust with them. And then, you know, your emails should be. Hey, here's something. Here's a case study we did. Right. If you're looking into divorce cases, here's our success rates, your stats, things like that. I think some value in there where it's not necessarily you're not, you know, showboating or anything like that, but just building trust and saying, hey, I'm here. If it's if you give out your cell number, I don't know how you do that or whatever phone number. Just let them know you're available. Start building that trust. However, makes sense for you and your firm. But make sure the communication is effective and it's not just, hey, haven't heard from you just want to touch base. Right. You know, really put some thought into what that content comes out, that that email copy comes out and then deliver value every time. Right. So even if it's just a hey, by the way, we can do this. Hey, by the way, you're looking for a personal injury attorney. You know, where are you located? We can make sure we can at least get you connected with somebody. You know, I've had some firms that I've heard, you know, if we can't help you, we'd love to refer you to someone who can. Right. So it's it's it's kind of this risky thing. I know back in my sales days, it was always kind of like sell to the no. Right. So you try to sell the person to get you to say to get them to say no. And then they realize this actually works. So it's it's not like you don't want to do it in a scammy way. But part of that is delivering value. Right. Like you're going to be talking to these people and sending communication quite a bit. So if they're getting emails from you, you're going to want to at least put in some sort of knowledge, probably not the first two or three touch points. Right. You're not going to send them articles or case studies, you know, right away. But maybe if you haven't heard from them, send them your newsletter, invite them to a webinar. One thing I forgot to mention is all of these touch points, these these follow ups, they don't have to be related to getting them on the phone. Right. Or getting them to hire you. It could just be keeping top of mind. If you're having a webinar, you're going to be an event or you're doing something, you know, let them know about those things. It's just it's trying to stay relevant is the big thing. And so making sure that you're mixing it up a little bit on average. And this is not a legal specific number. This is just a business specific number. Typically, any lead that comes through is you're going to have seven to 12 touch points before they cross the line or you you deem them as as as lost. Right. And so that means from the time that they come in through the first initial phone call or form on your website, you're probably going to have seven to 12 pieces of email, phone calls, things like that, that you're going to need to to create to make sure that, you know, you get them across. And so that seven to 12 emails or phone calls were just like, hey, I wanted to know if you're still interested. An attorney is not going to cut it. You know, you're going to want to mix it up. You're going to get bored at that point. So adding some things in there that we already talked about, you know, sharing relevant information, helpful content, resources, if it's depending on the practice area, resources for them locally, things like that, just making sure that you're, you know, to to the comfort that you're. To the comfort of your firm offering as much legal advice or help as you can before, you know, they've actually hired you, it's just building that trust.

[00:34:10] Speaker 2: I mean, in my previous role, when I had the HR hat on, I used to get emails pretty consistently, probably every month where they would be from firms that would talk about whatever updates were in the employment law space. And I found that to be very, very beneficial. You know, it allowed me to it allowed them to keep themselves top of mind with me at the same time as I could really look at it and say, OK, I do think that you've got a lot of expertise here. And, you know, when it comes time for me to go outside for somebody, this is a firm that I would absolutely consider because I think, you know, they've done a great job just keeping me in the headspace and also just keeping me able to understand what's going on, especially in areas of the law that are just constantly changing.

[00:34:57] Speaker 1: For sure. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's it's once again, practice there is specific kind of, but most practice areas, there's so many things changing in the space. Think about immigration law. Right? So the daily the forms are changing. The the rulings are changing things like that. So just throwing those simple things out, it doesn't have to be complicated, but it's all it is is is a nudge back up the inbox or a nudge in the voicemail or missed calls, you know, just making sure that you're staying top of mind because the chances are most other firms aren't right. Like, they're probably doing the same thing where they're just calling them, assuming if they don't hear back the other firm that answered first. Got it. Right. But that's not necessarily the case. So, but yeah, so the other thing to think of as we're going through this follow up is it's not just phone and email. Right? Those are the two major ones. Those are the two that you're going to make sure you, you push on and likely it's still the two that you're going to use the most. But the industry or the the consumer base is changing. We've talked about it. Everyone's texting. I feel like I can't remember the last time I left someone a voicemail. Actually, you know, it's it's text. It's Slack. It's Microsoft Teams. You know, these are important, right? Social media is another big factor. Once again, this goes back to understanding your persona. If you're working in elder law, you're not, you're probably not going to message people on tick tock or send out and hope that that's going to be a channel. You could, I don't know, but maybe not text. It's pretty common practice. Now, most people have adopted text, but I still think, you know, adding variety, right? As you put your workflow together for your touch points, your follow up, having those stages set and having understanding what that process looks like, you know, it's important if you've got three phone calls in a row, right? You know, maybe add a text message in there or, you know, make sure you have, you know, on your contact form. How would you like to be contacted? That's a great way immediately to just understand an aspect about your persona. Maybe they hate emails. Maybe they never check their inbox, but they check their phone messages or their text messages way faster. You know, that's something that's a really easy first step on that first phone call or contact form is just how would you like to be followed up with? So that's a big one. And then two, we talked about, you know, social media is one where it's like, you're probably not going to DM them. You're probably not going to follow. They may not be following you. But posting stuff and the relevant content, there's a chance they're looking, right? I know, I'm sure if I asked for a raise of hands of if you're looking for a restaurant to go to, or you're looking for, we talked about vacation spots, probably most, if not all of you have searched on the website, what the restaurant looks like. You've looked at their social media. You've looked at the resort. If you're going on vacation, you know, all the social media about it. So it's part of that. Maybe they're, maybe they've already contacted you. Maybe they're getting your emails, have your handles, your icons for your Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever in your email signature, because they're probably going to be looking at it. The younger demographic, they live on there. You know, it's part of my generation down. It's Instagram, the death scroll. But being relevant on there is still part of the touch points. And then lastly, just webinars and events, right? If you're not doing webinars, or you're not hosting events, I highly encourage you to start trying. It doesn't have to be complicated. Once again, it doesn't have to be a big production, but having relevant material, if you have the time to do it, and having just quick 20 minute webinars of one specific thing, right? Invite them to that. If there's other stuff going on that you're going to be attending, or your colleagues are putting on, you know, invite them to those things. But anything you can do in a variety of ways to add value, add touch points, keep you top of mind is really, really crucial. And this is one thing a lot of people, it's not the most important aspect of this conversation, but it's one that could really help is just, you don't have to just flood them with phone calls and emails. I mean, they probably don't want it. There's other ways to kind of help keep top of mind.

[00:39:32] Speaker 2: So I think it ties back to the understanding of your client persona. There's no doubt that part of how you understand your client persona should be what type of communication do they prefer? How do you reach them? What are the ways that you get there?

[00:39:48] Speaker 1: For sure. Yeah. And I mean, not that any of you care about my preference, but I am, I'm a big texter, right? Like, that's just kind of the generation I grew up in. And to me with, you know, three kids and full time job and all this stuff, it's like, I don't have time for a phone call. I checked my email during the work hours, but if it's a text, I'm probably going to see it and respond to it pretty quickly. It's for whatever reason, it's just, it's such an easier thing. And that doesn't mean that it's going to be a full conversation, not through text, but it could lead to a phone call. But just staying in touch through that, I think SMS is a really underutilized tool in the legal industry, just because it's hard to have that boundaries and things like that. But there's tools and stuff like that that we'll talk about.

[00:40:35] Speaker 2: Yeah, no doubt. So you were talking about creating the workflow for us. Yeah. So let's talk about, you know, we've, we've understood the setup. And now you really have to look at it from your firm and what your goals are for your firm. Not any, no one size fits all. My firm and your firm could be very different. Our needs are very different. Our goals might be very different. So how are you going to put that firm specific workflow together? I mean, you want to get down to the details here. This is not an area where you can sketch out the broad basis of whatever the processes are going to be. This is where you've got to look at it and understand what are the granular aspects of your process. Take away anything that is repetitive. Always look at it as, okay, how is this getting me to whatever the goal is that I'm trying to achieve? You know, understand where there might be issues, where things could go wrong. Look at it from the client's perspective. Understand as you look through your process, how is the client going to look at it? How do they view each of these steps in your process? Are they looking at it as a positive? Are they looking at it as negative? Do they see friction with what you're trying to put in place? You're requiring a phone call for this. You're requiring a form submission, right? Does that add to friction between somebody who is a prospective client actually becoming a client? And then when you look at all of this stuff, not only should you look at it from the perspective of a hypothetical client, you've also got to look at how your actual prospective clients are going through, learn from them, understand where things might be breaking down, where things are breaking down, and just work to improve it. It's something that should not be set in stone. It just needs to be continuously improved. And stick with the process. Understand that you've got a workflow. Don't throw everything out. Just stick with the process and work through each and every part of it so that you can have a workflow that fits your firm. It ties into not only that kind of understanding what clients you're working with and what their needs are, what your goals are as a firm, and then also what you can do as a firm. What kinds of tools do you have available to you? What kind of budget do you work with? All of those fit into how you create that kind of firm-specific workflow.

[00:43:17] Speaker 1: For sure. Yeah, I would just add to it, the sticking with it is huge. This is experiment. You're going to have to figure it out. Sales teams at massive companies have spent years trying to figure out the right cadence, and it's going to change. But don't throw everything away. Don't throw it out, all that stuff. And then I love the bullet point. The more granular, the better. You don't want to just have a stage for, he's a lead, and he's made contact, and we're following up with him. You want to have a stage for each follow-up. You want to see, at what email did he finally respond to? At what text did they finally respond to us? You want to see not only where things go wrong, but you want to be able to track, okay, at what point did I get that? We talked about these seven to 12 touchpoints. By no means does that mean that every single lead is going to take seven to 12 touchpoints. It could be two or three. But understanding where that is happening is huge. All right, and lead scoring. So, Chris, this is a big one that I think will be very new to a lot of people as well. So, I would love your thoughts on this.

[00:44:27] Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think this is another one where, you know, the legal industry is probably behind the rest of the business world. This is something that we do all the time with everybody who comes in the door for CallRail. I'm sure you all do the same thing with Lawmatics. Just understanding what is a qualified lead. You know, do you have a lead? Do you have a qualified lead? What constitutes that kind of qualified lead? Is it somebody who has reached out to you? Is it somebody who has reached out to you? Is it somebody who actually had a phone call? Is it somebody who touched your website five times? Just different kinds of ways that you understand, all right, this is a qualified lead and somebody that we want to continue to nurture. And then look at it and say, all right, is it, you know, what type of score are you going to put on there? Are you going to sit there and say, this is somebody who has touched our touch points, our firm kind of branding, our firm experience, our firm website so many times that we think that they are ready for us to really move them to a middle of funnel or bottom of funnel kind of situation where they are sales ready. You know, somebody who is ready to become a prospective client or is ready to become an actual client. Maybe this is somebody who is just like I was in my HR role where we didn't have any kind of actual case that might involve, but I was interested in knowing more about different things and you were providing me information as a firm. You know, I'd be much less of a, I wouldn't necessarily be sales ready at that point, but if I had a case and I suddenly was looking for these particular different things that might be really specific, you know, maybe my score moves up much more to where you say, hey, it's time to reach out to this. He's a client that's got a case and he's ready to go. I think it's really important because this is something that you just are wasting time without an understanding of what the quality is that you have of your leads.

[00:46:30] Speaker 1: For sure. Yeah. And, you know, I come from a SaaS technology background. So, but the best way to think about it and kind of relating this to the legal industry is this is a score that's going to be ongoing, right? They're going to come in with an initial score that you're going to set. This is going to be very firm specific, right? So, you're going to come through with this process of scoring these inbound leads or outbound leads if you have a team out doing outreach. But the best way I like to think about it as an example is, you know, let's say we're comparing two leads. One of them was you met them at a conference or a happy hour and they gave you a business card, right? Because they were interested in talking to you, but they didn't necessarily have a specific need. Versus a lead who they went through your website, they said, I need legal help, and then they filled out a form. The one who goes to the website and says, I need something, they're obviously going to start with a higher score. As they progress through the process, that person that gave you the business card, maybe they interact more, maybe they are interested, maybe something comes up, that score is going to change. But to Chris's point, it's just a measurement of getting that lead to the right point where you know they're ready for heavy communication. They're ready to potentially get that engagement letter and things like that. So, it's just another helpful tool for being able to do that. Each stage that they go through, you're probably going to give them, the score is going to update, right? Either down or up based on how they interacted, how they didn't interact.

[00:48:02] Speaker 2: You have limited time and resources. You need to maximize that limited time and resources on the things that are going to provide the most value to you as a lawyer and as a firm.

[00:48:14] Speaker 1: Right. This is totally random, but I'll go quick. But one of the best things I was ever told in sales training way, way back was, don't spill your candy in the lobby. If you're going into a conversation with someone that is not ready for it, or they're not really interested yet, they're just kind of maybe looking, you don't want to throw out all your tricks right there. You don't want to throw out all the information. You want to build that trust, nurture that lead, and build that relationship so that when they are ready, it's going to be way more effective. You don't want to just go in there and say, hey, would you like to sign this? So, yeah, don't spill your candy on the floor or in the lobby. Cool. And then leveraging technology. So, we'll go through this, but I want to have Chris talk a little bit about tracking and analytics. We've talked about all these things and these pieces of lead nurturing, but really it comes down to how you're doing it and how you're managing it. So, Chris, go take it away.

[00:49:13] Speaker 2: These go back to what we were talking about with lead scoring. These are taking things that are just standard practice within the business world and moving them into a legal setting. You know, looking at your emails, are they opening? What is the rate that they're opening at? What is the rate that they're getting replies at? Is there a drop off? Are people saying unsubscribe when you sit there and send out emails? Different things like that. These are things that are standard, certainly standard within the SaaS space, standard within other spaces that I've been in that really allow you to understand how successful you're getting as a firm with your marketing activities. Conversion rates is another one. How many people who you sat there and had outreach to have actually converted to clients? If you sit there and you're spending all of this money and you're getting 100 leads, but those leads are only converting to two clients, well, if there are two clients with traumatic brain injuries, maybe that is all you were looking for. But if it's two clients for slip and falls, that may be something that is a very different conversion rate. That's something that should be analyzed from the perspective of your firm and your needs, but it's still something that you absolutely need to know in order to understand whether you're successful with your marketing outreach.

[00:50:35] Speaker 1: For sure. I mean, it goes back to identifying what is going well and what is not working and where they're falling out in the process, for sure. And then from a CRM and automation side, so there's a lot of stuff in this that basically, as we're going through this, it sounds like I'm telling you to basically work another 40 hours a week or hire someone who can just be responsible for this. But thankfully, there's tools out there, right? CRM. Lomatics does it. There's CRMs out there that can help, but it's really crucial that you use a product that you can not only integrate with products that can track these things and help with the phone calls and help with the intake, but have the ability to automate these workflows, right? So being able to set up, someone comes in and automate that process of they're going to automatically get these emails sent. After a phone call happens, they're going to move to another stage where it's then going to send them an email if they don't respond within a certain time. So being able to set up all these very intricate things sounds like a lot to do, but once you get it set up, it's working, right? And you can easily adjust it and tweak it. And it's going to automatically tell you in tracking and reporting where things are falling off, right? With the suite of products that you're using in conjunction. So it's really important to use some sort of technology to be able to help you with that. Because once again, if you do all of this, even if you're doing it right, it goes back to that one of the first common pitfalls and mistakes is the manual process and things falling through the cracks. So don't, I hate using double negative, but don't not use technology, don't miss out on it to leverage it to automate, make your life a lot easier. Sure, there's going to be setup time, you're going to still need to figure out your firm's workflows, your personas, but putting that in there and leveraging that is going to make things a lot easier and save time in the long run. And potentially, you know, get that client growth up as you're doing everything correctly.

[00:52:43] Speaker 2: Now once you've taken yourself out of your spreadsheets and your legal pads and put it all into something that is a system that works easily for you.

[00:52:54] Speaker 1: For sure, for sure. Yeah.

[00:52:58] Speaker 2: Use the legal pads for case strategy, not necessarily track whatever leads are coming in the door.

[00:53:04] Speaker 1: Right, for sure. So using, leveraging the technology and you know, with that CRM and tracking analysis, plenty of marketing, marketing tools, reporting, everything like that, you know, Chris, you can maybe touch on the tracking of leads and the conversation intelligence from CallRail.

[00:53:22] Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, what we do at CallRail is we take all of the leads that you have, and we can either track them coming in on a phone call or coming in from a form submission or coming in from a text message. So, you know, it's really lead tracking, it allows you to understand everything that's going on with your leads. Then on top of that, you can sit there and gather all of the conversations that are happening with those calls. You can sit there, you have the ability to transcribe those calls, to record them, to move through and take them, summarize them, understand the sentiments of those calls, just completely understand what is the sum and substance of every call that's coming into your firm. Be able to analyze that and be able to organize that. All of those things that you might be doing on a legal pad can be done just within a system. And you can pull that up so that you can get reports that are, you know, what calls were coming in by your source? What were the costs for each of those leads? Are there insights that are coming from multiple conversations that a particular lead has had with your firm? All of those things become at the tip of your fingertips, instead of like I used to do going back and looking through like five different legal pads to try to understand what this client told me five weeks ago.

[00:54:46] Speaker 1: For sure, for sure. I mean, the tools out there, there's plenty of them. And once again, if you hear nothing else from any of this, it's make sure when you're doing this, like leverage automation and leverage tracking. And really, regardless of whether it's a spreadsheet or CRM or anything like that, track what you do, because it really is an experiment, right? You're creating a science that's not fully perfect and making sure that you understand all of these things is crucial for the success of that. So, yeah, well, thanks, Chris. We have time for questions. We have a few that we'll get started. But if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the Q&A or in the chat. First one we have is, I use CallRail, the Lawmatics integration. Yes, call recordings are transferred as part of the CallRail integration into Lawmatics. So any of the calls that come through will automatically be associated with that call, and the call record will be pushed into Lawmatics as well as the recording. Grace asked, are you with stages in Lawmatics for each touchpoint? So trying to figure that out. So once again, it's in terms of she's asking, how many stages do you need? Do you need a stage for each touchpoint? I always like to say start off as granular as possible and then whittle back from there, right? Maybe you have kind of, eventually you have, instead of seven to 12 stages of touchpoints, you'll have three where it's like initial touchpoints, hasn't responded, things like that. It really works out best for your firm to figure out how many you want. It's hard to say, you know, whether you have it where it's like new lead, but definitely don't just have new lead status contacted. You're going to want at least three or four to make sure that you're understanding what point of the process did they go dark? What point of the process did they sign on? Things like that. Christy asked, is there any way to track outbound calls with the same transcription? Chris, can you take that?

[00:56:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say, unfortunately, with CallRail, there is not. We only have the ability to do inbound calls right now. That's definitely something, though, that has been presented to our product team. And I, myself, am hot to trot to see that ability be added to where we can have both inbound and outbound calls.

[00:57:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, I haven't seen too many that are tracking the outbound calls or recording those. But, yeah, and keep your questions coming in if you have any. We also, if you want to learn more about either CallRail or Lomatics, feel free to scan these QR codes. They're going to take you to more information where you can reach out to Chris or myself as well. If you have any questions following up from here, we'd love to answer these. And, yeah, so let's see. We have, if you have leads designated as sales-ready or high-value leads in Lomatics, can you text all of them simultaneously, provided we have previously gotten opt-in via Lomatics platform? Yeah, so you can set a parameter where it's going to text everyone in a certain stage, right? So, based on a lead score, you could have a stage set up where, as soon as they get to this point, it's going to send them a text, right? Once again, granted, they've opted into the texting on the platform, but the same goes with emails and texts. You can trigger any of that by stage, right? So, as long as you have it set up where, as soon as it hits a certain point, it's going to be put into the stage, you can have it set up where it'll trigger an automatic message to that person. Does Lomatics functionally allow for lead qualification? Lomatics functionally allow for lead qualification. Not yet, where it's actually doing the lead scoring. That's going to be parameters that you set up, but you can set up things where it's like, you know, put them in this stage if they respond to this email or if they click this link. So, you can have it pretty granular where it's going to move them. Once again, going back to the stages and having as many stages as you think is necessary, you can have the system track didn't respond, right? If you're building out an automation, if you're familiar with Lomatics, you can build it out where it's like, there's an automation, send an email, and then put in a buffer time where it's like, then wait three days. And then after three days, send this email. But if it's set to where it's like, if they do respond to that, it's going to move them into their stage. So, then that is the point. So, there's lots of different things that you can do within Lomatics to help do that. And we have one more minute. So, let's see. We have, can you embed a link to make a payment into auto emails to collect? Yes. I mean, if you're using LNPay, that's going to be mostly for the consultations unless you have the time and billing add-on. But if you have a payment link that you use, you can put it into your email templates. And we do integrate with Filevine. We don't integrate with the docket, but we have an integration into Filevine. For sure. And, yeah. So, with that being said, once again, I'll leave these QR codes up. And then just want to thank everyone for joining us today. Chris, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure talking with you. We're excited to have you here. And we're excited to send this recording out to everyone. Our contact information is on our website. So, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. My email is just blake.roberts at lomatics.com. So, if you want to learn more about the client personas or anything like that, feel free to email me. And then just want to let everyone know, until next time, next month we will be hosting a webinar that's focusing on CRM and case management. So, using it together, reduce busy work, improve outcomes, and build a stronger foundation for growth. So, we'll be sending out more details soon on that. But, yeah. Chris, always a pleasure. Thanks so much. Thank you, everyone. And we'll talk soon. Thank you, Blake. Thank you all. Have a good one.