Managing Leads Through an Effective Intake Process

Growing your law firm isn’t as simple as generating leads. You need a strategy to convert those leads into paying clients because potential business doesn’t keep the lights on. Many attorneys make the mistake of adopting a quantity approach, absorbing as many leads as possible with the hopes that some of them convert successfully, all the while neglecting an intake strategy that could optimize their lead volume. Today, we’d like to help you understand how to develop an effective intake strategy in order to better grow your business.

We’ve identified four critical components of an effective intake process, which include a trained intake staff, specific tactics to maximize conversion, robust intake software, and meticulous tracking of key metrics. Let’s get started.

Managing Leads with an Intake Staff

Your intake staff is your first point of contact with a potential client. A dedicated and trained intake specialist is the most important tool in your conversion arsenal because every other system that you’ve prepared to secure a potential client’s business will be irrelevant without the right person answering your phone calls. It makes little sense to have a receptionist who simply passes calls from one line to another handling a process so vital to your marketing conversion rate.

With all of that said, here are some key considerations for your intake staff to focus on when initiating that critical first point of contact with a lead:

1. Speed to Contact: Time is of the essence. Train your intake staff to quickly call on a lead the second it hits your inbox or CRM. Have your staff quickly ascertain whether or not a lead can be represented. A list of qualifiers during this vetting process can help your staff weed out any unqualified leads. For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, for instance, and the lead’s injury occurred outside of your state’s statute of limitations, then your intake staff should understand that the lead is invalid and that they should move on.

1. Knowledge About Your Firm: Assuming that a potential client is qualified for representation, be sure that your intake staff is familiar with your firm. An individual seeking legal representation has likely experienced a life-changing event, perhaps an accident or a divorce, and will certainly have a myriad of questions about documentation, legal fees, and more. Your intake staff should be able to confidently answer each of these questions in order to reassure the caller.

1. Seizing the Moment: Most firms seem to treat that initial point of contact with a potential client as separate from a consultation. If your intake staff is trained to treat that first call as an opportunity to convert into a consultation, then you can more efficiently convert that lead into a client. Keep in mind that the client is likely sitting in front of his or her computer at the moment that they call your firm. They are considering your competition just as much as they are considering you. If you have the time, then don’t wait for another time to schedule a consultation. Once your intake staff has acquired all of the necessary information from the caller, use that opportunity to turn the lead’s inquiry into a consultation.

Conversion Tactics for Leads

Dr. James Oldroyd and David Elkington, a research fellow at MIT and the CEO of InsideSales.com, respectively, published the results of a three-year study of lead data to uncover the most optimal conversion strategies. In those three years, they studied over 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts. What they discovered has illuminated truths about lead conversion that every attorney will want to know:

1. Response Times: How long can an attorney wait to call back a lead? Maybe a few hours? A day or two shouldn’t hurt, right? The truth is that the strongest predictor of lead conversion is response time, which means that sooner is always better. Dr. Oldroid and Mr. Elkington’s research showed that the difference between a five-minute response time and a ten-minute response time is a 400% drop in conversion rate; can you imagine how low the likelihood of conversion is once an hour passes? 

1. Persistence is Key: Let’s assume that an attorney has effectively reduced his or her response time to five minutes. Wonderful! What if the lead doesn’t answer? Obviously, your first instinct should be to call the lead again, but how many calls are too many? How many are too little? According to the study, the sweet spot, which is somewhere between six to ten call attempts, might seem excessive at a glance, but the facts suggest the opposite. Don’t be shy, call again.

1. Leaving Better Voicemails: Having a voicemail script for calling leads is not a mistake in and of itself. The issue is that every other firm in the country is likely using a similar script, which makes it impossible for an interested client to differentiate you from every other firm that is vying for his or her business. Having a better voicemail script is not enough, you have to train your staff to utilize several unique scripts to create the illusion of variety. If a lead has two voicemails from your firm and they both sound distinct from one another, while offering critical information to help the client reach you, then you will have an advantage over every other firm that is still relying on the script that they wrote when they founded their business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

As a law firm grows, there will be a temptation to increase its lead intake, but without the proper infrastructure in place to effectively receive those leads, then the firm will regress to square one:

Loads of volume without any means to convert it into business.

At this point, your firm will need to adopt a customer relationship management system, or CRM. This software can be built to enable your intake staff to more effectively manage the growing number of leads that your firm is receiving per month, ensuring that no lead is lost.

A CRM system can help your firm determine the status of the growing number of leads flowing through your firm’s intake process, allowing you to strategically approach each lead based on its specifications. At a glance, a CRM will allow you to review a lead’s basic information, determine whether or not they have been called back, how many times they have been called back, and so on. 

Clio is a CRM used by law firms around the country and is a vital tool used in their intake processes.

The list of benefits is extensive, so here are a few:

1. Website Integration: The most effective firms are well aware of the importance of utilizing tools like live chat on their firm’s website to create a convenient avenue for interested leads to become integrated into the firm’s intake process. These leads will be viewable via your management software, allowing you to take immediate action to convert the lead as soon as it appears in your CRM.

1. Lead Tracking: A lost lead means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lost dollars per year, especially for a small firm. Oftentimes, leads slip through the cracks because of miscommunication, poor management, and other avoidable mishaps. Your management software can eliminate the possibility of those costly human mistakes by allowing you to track the status of each lead.

1. Analyzing Key Metrics: A law firm needs to know, down to the most minute detail, what is working for the business and what isn’t. Rather than scanning handwritten notes or obtuse spreadsheets, your CRM can provide a visual tool to better track the performance of your firm, your conversion rates, and so on.

Tracking Your Performance

There’s an old saying, which reads, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” At a law firm, the opposite is true. What you don’t know might be the difference between a flourishing business and a floundering one.

Law firms that take the time to examine their internal metrics will perform better than law firms that don’t. Here are the metrics that you will want to measure on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis:

1. Daily Lead Intake: A law firm must be acutely aware of the volume of leads that it is receiving daily, but knowing the quantity of leads is not enough. It is critical to compartmentalize those leads by source, allowing you to gain deeper insight into the cost or benefit of each individual lead.

1. Consultation and Conversion Rates: By measuring the conversion rates of leads by practice area, your firm will be able to determine which area of law is resulting in the most consultations and conversions. If any area is underperforming, then that knowledge will be useful to determine whether or not resources should be expended to bolster that practice area, or if it would be wiser to divest from it altogether.

1. Costs Per Source: Ultimately, the bottom line means everything for a law firm, let alone any business. You’d be surprised to discover that many firms are operating while being completely ignorant of exactly how much is being spent on their lead volume. By tracking that information daily, a firm can determine which sources are resulting in the most business, as well as which sources are potentially costing the firm money.

What You’ve Learned About Managing Leads

Contrary to popular belief, when it comes to lead intake, more isn’t necessarily merrier. A law firm might be willing to take on thirty to fifty leads per month, but without a strategy in place to optimize lead conversion, that firm is leaving thousands of dollars on the table. 

Now that you’ve read this article, however, you can avoid becoming that law firm. By utilizing the strategies listed above, you can set yourself and your firm up for success, ensuring growth for years to come.

At Legal Brand Marketing, we specialize in helping law firms that are looking to grow by providing quality leads in real time to our clients. Join our network and see what twenty years of experience in legal lead generation can do for your business.