My CRM is Bigger Than Yours || Quarter 1, Done

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:
You made it.

Conrad Saam:
I made it. I apologize for completely blowing up our schedule. This is kind of first world problems, the growth of the agency. I’ve got a new executive assistant, I’m in Vegas right now, and with the automation and the executive assistant, we can’t cancel our recording time, but everyone is super cool. I think this is one of those growing pain problems that I hope law firms are experiencing. Right? Exactly. Not everything goes smoothly, but as you’re growing, putting in those processes to not cancel, the very important LHLM recording sessions needs to go into my list of things to make sure we don’t do again.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, I am grateful for your willingness to be vulnerable and to talk about not everything’s perfect all the time, but I think that’s what’s valid about this for listeners is Conrad and I, we talk about automation. Great experience. You got to make sure that you’re working through these and there’s going to be bumps no matter how hard you try to plan this stuff, right? Anyway. So maybe a moment of empathy and sympathy for those who have botched their scheduling in the past, but enough piling on. Conrad, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:
So, Gyi, we always like to start with the news and we’ve got a very short news segment, but after that we previewed this concept last pod is my CRM bigger than yours, the CRM measuring contest. And then because it is the end of Q1, we’re going to talk about, go back to our business planning and talk about what you should be thinking about or should you be thinking about anything at your Q1 review

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Music.

Announcer:
Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make Fat Stack for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:
Alright man, Gyi. I’m going to break script a little bit. Who was the voice that we had for money Makes the World go round. Do we know? Was there amazing voice talent? Because it’s not you, it’s not Jared. Correia was this,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
It’s paid voice.

Conrad Saam:
It it’s you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Was it really you? No, I think it was paid voice talent. I believe we’ll have Lockwood chime in on that. I would

Conrad Saam:
Love that to be my next career. Paid voice talent, Mr. Lockwood doesn’t know either. So moving on,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Hopefully LTN has the appropriate licensing for this voice average word.

Conrad Saam:
Wow. Alright. That’s one of those beautiful things that we don’t have to think about because LTN takes care of, I was just talking to someone sitting at Mass Torts. Someone was telling me how he’s getting ready to get his podcast going. He’s been working on it for five months and he’s going to set June as the deadline to publish. And I’m like, dude, if it’s taken you five months and we’re looking at June, this is going to happen for you. But I do appreciate all the stuff that LTN does on our behalf to make it easy to just show up regardless of where we are and what we’ve forgotten or which calendar we have botched and be the talent. I love being called the talent. Okay? When we come back the news, that’s an old timey news segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I like that. I love the new news music, although you did put a fake break in there. I don’t know if we’re going to have to rerecord that or not.

Conrad Saam:
No. Adam will magically take my oh crap out of that and you’ll just have to hear it right now. Okay, so I am at the Mass Torts Made Perfect, hardly news. I did a session with two agency owners this morning on what to Expect from Google in the next 12 months.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
What should we expect? What’s the teaser there? What should we expect from Google the next 12 months as a news clipping headline,

Conrad Saam:
Pay-per-click rates and LSA rates. You’ll spend more on pay-per-click and LSAs and get less from that because of the ongoing deliberate conflation of your branded queries, especially in LSAs and pay-per-click. That was one of the many ironic takeaways.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Mine is just more ads.

Conrad Saam:
More ads. Here’s the other thing, and I was wrong on this, so it’s important for us to note when we were wrong, I was all excited about SGE. Now we’ve heard the dodo bird that there’s been a sighting of SGE in the wild on occasion. I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not sure it’s going to hit legal and boy oh boy, it does not look like, I mean they were talking about a early year. In fact, Gyi, if you go back and listen to our pods from just December, you were like, we may be seeing this as early as January 1st. Right now it looks like a doto bird. So all that excitement, shiny object was sad trombone.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I kind of agree. I still think this is where they’re, I think they’re out there. I haven’t seen them and it seems like a natural, I think Google’s going to try to pull an apple here and make Google io their big light switch moment, even though they said they weren’t going to have a light switch moment. But I’m still long on SGE. I agree with you with shiny objects and the hype cycle just like everything else, but this is where they’re going. This is the ultimate closing of the ranks in the AI wars.

Conrad Saam:
So SGE and Sasquatch very similar in characteristics.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Sasquatch is not nearly making the revenue that Google’s making, but

Conrad Saam:
Fair enough. That’s fair. That’s fair. Okay. Gyi, did you receive any emails from Google about UA? You want to share that for our listeners who if you’re a loyal listener, this will be boring. If you’re a new listener, you should panic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
So this is an email from April 2nd thanks to Adam because I lost mine and I don’t know what happened to it, but here’s his April 2nd, 2020, just for the premise on July 1st, 2024, Google Analytics four properties will have fully replaced universal analytics properties as previously announced. So if you’ve been listening to this, we have failed you. If you have not migrated over to GA four prior to this date, but sounds like this is the real date, they’re going to turn off Universal Analytics. And so if you’re still running Universal Analytics, get some help because your analytics data is about to vanish.

Conrad Saam:
My read is if you are still running Universal Analytics, you’re probably not reading your random emails from Google support to tell you to change Universal

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Analytics. No. But maybe your agency that you trust to run all this stuff has really been asleep at the Wheel Hill.

Conrad Saam:
Would you like to name anyone? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Nope.

Conrad Saam:
Okay. Alright. Put differently. Let me rephrase that for Gyi, because he’s being polite and I’ll say what he’s really trying to say. If your agency hasn’t done this, fire your fucking agency

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Probably we had this conversation a year ago and at that time I think you said the same thing. And I was like, well, you got to give him a little time. Now I agree with you.

Conrad Saam:
Okay, no more

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Time

Conrad Saam:
You can find Gyi new [email protected]. No, no, seriously, this is fire worthy for an agency. And finally, Gyi, you are doing an event in Detroit with one of our very, very good friends. If you are in the Detroit area, people I will encourage, Gyi to pump this up, it local you in Detroit, tell us about it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
So super grateful. I wouldn’t say I won a contest. They asked for community people to be like, Hey, would you like to host Local U? Local U? It’s a sterling Sky property, I believe. Joy Hawkins,

Conrad Saam:
Joy Anne Hawkins. Yep.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yep. And super grateful that I will be helping bring local U to Detroit. We’ll put the link in the notes and if you just search for Local U, I’m sure you’ll see it. But this is to me one of the premier places to learn from really, really outstanding local SEOs. And it’s a great community. It doesn’t stop just at Local U. It’s a great community to get involved in if you’re not there, Sterling Sky, all the stuff that Joy’s doing, big fan of. And I would love to see you in Detroit in the summer. I think the Tigers are in town, so maybe we’ll catch a ball game or something too. But local U, come.

Conrad Saam:
We told you it was a boring news cycle. There was one news item about Conrad at a conference. We ended this news cycles sandwich with Gyi at a conference and there was a non-news item of Google closing down UA. Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Lockwood, maybe you just cut this whole thing. Who knows? We’ll see. Geez, this is tough news day. Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:
So loyal listeners will remember last episode we had a quick quip about my CRM is bigger than yours and I promise that we would revisit that and we’re revisiting it as promised right now. Gyi, you are really big on the CRM and tactics to grow your database, and this ties in a little bit to Google and the sun setting of ua, more and more privacy, less and less information, less and less cookies. Why do you think CRM is so important and why have you made that kind of pillar might be overstating, but really important for your clients.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, it really comes from most of the time when we start a conversation with a lawyer, I’ll ask something like, what are you doing to stay in touch with former clients? What are you doing to stay in touch with referral sources? What are you doing to stay in touch with other people who might be wanting to consume some kind of information from your firm or have engagement with your firm? And largely the answer is not much. Maybe they send a card once in a while, maybe they reach out. But to me this is one of these really untapped areas of opportunity for law firms especially. So let’s talk macroeconomics here. Cost of ads going up or down Conrad,

Conrad Saam:
I believe it is going up

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Easier or harder to rank for non-brand organic queries in Google, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:
I believe it is getting harder.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Are the platforms giving us more or fewer targeting options for advertising?

Conrad Saam:
I believe the level of opacity brought to you by the platforms is increasing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Thank you. So all of these factors to me make your CRM, that’s your call it owned data. That first party opted in, former clients, referral sources, people in your community, in your network. Staying in touch with them is so, so important because they forget who you are, they forget what you do. I was just having this conversation with Brian Glass the other day. He told a great story about it, but it was another story on the pile of how many times you just think that people are just thinking about you all the time. And look, there’s other ways to keep top of mind awareness, and we’ve talked about affinity a lot, but to me, growing the number of engaged people that want to receive stuff from you should be a priority for your firm. Agree. That’s why I think it’s so important. Agree. Okay,

Conrad Saam:
So the CRM systems, I’m curious how you break this out. Are you looking at their intake management software or their matter management software? When you’re talking about growing my CRM is bigger than yours?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I love that question. And the answer is sadly, ideally it would be in a true CRM product.

Conrad Saam:
What

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I don’t know, what do you like for CRM these days?

Conrad Saam:
Well, there are lots of different vendors who

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Are, you’re HubSpot? You’re a HubSpot person?

Conrad Saam:
Listen, I’m a very big HubSpot person because of the depth that it gives you. But for the audience, I think the reason I asked the question is this is not your matter management software because there’s a very, very small percentage of people from your intake management software. And even if you go down to HubSpot, what you’re actually tracking, the reason I love HubSpot is it will track people’s performance on our site for five months before they actually call us. So I have five months worth of data. That kind of stuff is magic. What you’re talking about being able to do, I do think requires some level of sophistication. But in legal, because we have these two different systems is IMS and MMS, you need to move up into the intake management software because that’s where all of the volume that doesn’t turn into clients happens. If you’re just leveraging your MMS, honestly, you’re getting such a small sliver of what should be your overall CRM system.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s right. And ideally they’re integrated, right? They’re seamlessly integrated. So that matter management business data is getting pushed back, is communicating with the front end marketing and intake data so that you can say things like go buy media for contact records. That became this fee for us.

Conrad Saam:
Right? So I want to ask you this question. So now that we’ve established,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And I would be remiss, I would be remiss,

Conrad Saam:
Do not be remiss on this show

Gyi Tsakalakis:
If I didn’t mention our sponsor as well as my investment

Conrad Saam:
Full Disclosure

Gyi Tsakalakis:
In Lawmatics. And I think this is what Matt is working on, doing a great job moving the conversation forward in legal about CRM because again, the Lawmatics isn’t brand new anymore, but when he was back when he started, it was like, yeah, this was, my answer was probably matter management or MailChimp.

Conrad Saam:
Right, right,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Right.

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. So a little foreshadowing there. Gyi, talking about his investment in Lawmatics, we may come back to this. Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Right.

Conrad Saam:
Okay. You believe that we should be working on building our CRMs? I don’t disagree. You’ve also had tactical advice on how to actually make that happen. So it’s great for you and me to sit here and talk about grow your CRM system, grow your database. How do you do that? Help me out here get tactical.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
So the heavy lift, especially if you already have a bunch of contact records, is that first pass of segmentation, maybe tagging, but getting your list organized. That’s the first step. And people get overwhelmed by this and it’s valid because especially if you’ve got 10,000 contact records that you think are people who are opted in to receive messages from you or you’re a high volume shop with a lot of former clients or referral sources and chunk it out, take small bites. That’s a great thing to outsource too. I think if you can not, because a lot of these contact records, they might have limited information and you’re the only one who knows why they’re in the contact system. But get those tagged and segmented and then I would start prioritizing. I’d start making lists of former clients. And again, some of this can should be specific content designed for that particular segment. Some of it can be a little bit more high touch. You send out a happy labor day or happy new year check-in type of email to them, but that’s more of the existing. So how do you

Conrad Saam:
Grow it? How do we grow it? Where’s the fertilizer?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, the growing is that you got to get out and meet people and you got to, so one of the lists that hopefully you have some, it’s maybe partial is let’s use a real life example. You’re at MTMP, you be making a list or tagging the people that you’re meeting and talking to at MTMP and saying, Hey, remember back at MTMP when we talked about when I was talking about the future of Google, here’s a new video I did on the future of Google. That’s the way to stay, to grow and stay in touch is as you meet people, as you get, and again, maybe some of it is you have a content offering that is multifaceted. It might be like a regular, you could get a regular email on a specific subject that you’re passionate about. Maybe you like to do book reviews. And when you’re networking with professionals, great way to get professionals to opt in to be like, oh yeah, hey, I’d love getting your book reviews, blah, blah, blah. Now that all being said, those are more like on the referral side of the house. If you want to grow getting people to opt into email, you got to give them something of value. So that’s not going to be like sign up to get my tips after a car accident. That lead magnet serves a different purpose. It might be though some kind of local community thing that you’re involved in and you might talk about your affinities in the local community, the kind of stuff that people actually want to get message from you about.

Conrad Saam:
So I want to tie CRM into social. Yeah, because I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:
CRM is social.

Conrad Saam:
It is, yes. And I think is most of the legal industry looks at CRM as some technical database somewhere. And by the way, it’s not that hard to tie it to LinkedIn. It’s not that hard to tie it to Twitter or it’s not that hard to tie it to Instagram or Facebook. And so part of this is making sure, and this is a tedious, awful job, but as you build out your CRM, you’re also including those relationships on social. And that makes it so easier to stay in touch with people. Not just that email, the staying in touch with people. It’s a multimedia, multimedia, sorry, more accurately multimedia strategy. And it takes time and discipline to say, all right, I just picked up someone’s business card or they were in the Turkey trot that I sponsored and now I’m going to go out and find them on these different platforms.
That takes time. It’s outsourceable time, it’s easily outsourceable time. But this is something that I really, really think should be happening. And I would look at, so I’ve got my database that I’m going to populate with social profiles. I would also look at those engaged social profiles as an extension of your CRM. They may not be sitting in your database with an email address, but it’s the same concept. Your contacts through LinkedIn, it’s a database. It’s just not one that you control. It’s not in your CRM, but there’s no reason you can’t make that happen as well. So I really look at these things as being really tied together.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I totally agree with that. And in fact, I was going to just put a softball pitch out there for you, but does HubSpot have integrations with social platforms?

Conrad Saam:
Why? Yes, it does. I feel like,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And there’s a reason for that because of this, because the relationships that you’re managing in your CRM, you’re having those conversations and nurturing those relationships in other places. The other thing that I always think about with with the growing the list and the opt-ins, there is though, and you mentioned this before and I think that talking about maybe you can share, maybe go deeper on this. You alluded to it, and this is part of the reason why I think it’s a priority too, but you’re advertising options when you have the email opt-in, tell us what we mean by that. When you’re nodding and agreeing with me, what do you like about, why do you light up when I say that?

Conrad Saam:
So the problem with just branded display advertising is it’s fundamentally untargeted and it’s usually a, let’s boil the ocean problem. When you have a CRM system, you can have highly targeted display advertising, which means that you can put for the same dollars, you can put that brand in front of using round numbers, a thousand people, 20 times instead of 20,000 people one time. And the 20,000 people one time doesn’t work, but the thousand people 20 times does. And it also means that you can, I’ll pull this out. We use the Turkey trot example all the time. Let’s say you sponsor the Turkey trot, you get the list of all the people who ran in the Turkey trott. Your advertising doesn’t have to be what to do when you’re hit by a tractor trailer. It can be around people who are into running or supporting charities or whatever that might look like. And so it enables you to avoid this, boil the ocean problem, and really target people that you are into and that have engaged with you and that you’re involved in the community.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes. Super powerful. And it also allows you to personalize your messaging to where they are in their journey, which is so, so important. Right? Yep. Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff that you can do. So you can go look, you don’t have to take our word for it. Go look up first party data. That’s what you’re trying to do there. And with that, we’re already out of time. Conrad’s got to go. I got to go.

Conrad Saam:
Hey. Except for the fact that we have another segment, but good thinking. I love what you to take an A break

Gyi Tsakalakis:
To take an

Conrad Saam:
Oh to take an A break. Yes. We got to go take an ad break. I thought we’re going to take an break. We’re out of time for this segment, but after the ad we’ll be coming back.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Dear friend, are you enjoying this ranty edition of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing? If you’ve gotten something valuable out of this, please share it with somebody. Post it on social media or send them an email. Great way to stay in touch, by the way,

Conrad Saam:
In your CRM system, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Exactly. And from your CRM system. So hopefully you listened to our segment about 30 days in. So the idea was we’re 30 days into the year or you’re 30 days into a marketing campaign, or you’re 30 days in with a new agency or you’re 30 days in with a new marketing director. So go listen to that episode now. We want to take that theme as a continuation. What do you do now that we’re 90 days in? What are we looking at? And I’m a big EOS person, so we run EOS and we do be called quarterly pulses. There’s a lot of different ways to talk about this quarterly business review, but it’s essentially looking at the business one quarter in or looking at your marketing one quarter in and Conrad. What types of things do you like to start talking about? 30 days in?

Conrad Saam:
Definitely nothing. 30 days in. And our point,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m sorry, I meant 90 days in.

Conrad Saam:
No, no, no, no, you’re good. You’re good. You’re all good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Conrad, what do you like to review 90 days in?

Conrad Saam:
So the reason I said nothing with 30 days in is you don’t know anything yet. It’s too fast. You’re looking at stuff too quickly. There’s been no trends, it’s just too fast. So slow down. What we told you when we did our 30 days in is don’t do anything. Stop panicking 30 days in, but 90 days in, you’re 25% of the way through the year. And I think the key here, and I think this is missed, we always kick agencies around, but it’s missed by agencies, is if you are doing a quarterly review with your agency, which you should be, and I’m just making the blanket assumption that your agency is meeting either you in detail every quarter. If they’re not, you have an agency that’s not really thinking about you. But the law firm need to take the reins on this conversation and make sure that that conversation is around your business objectives.
And if you have done a good job with annual planning in 2023, we sat down in Q4 to talk about what we wanted 2024 to look like. And we have some smart goals, which means that they are quantitative and we are going to look at those smart goals 90 days in and see where we are. So it all is built around your annual business goals and your progress towards reaching them. What it’s not is tactical data about an individual marketing campaign. It’s not, not talking about marketing tactics. We’re talking about achieving a business goal. And agencies like to control this narrative because they want to show you graphs that look like they’re going up into the right. If the add up into the right is getting to your business goals, celebrate Merry Christmas, buy yourself a bottle of scotch and be happy with your agency. But if they’re not, even if it’s not your agency’s fault, might not be our fault, but it’s still our problem. We need to get back on track,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Right? So totally agree, but it begs the question, right? So first you got to be aligned on what those business goals are. And so hopefully if you did that at the start,

Conrad Saam:
Well we’re presupposing that you’ve talked with your agency and they know where you’re trying to go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Or even if you’re doing this yourself presupposes that you have business goals that are something like give me an example of an annual planning business goal that you might think about. Gross and growth revenue. Profitability,

Conrad Saam:
Target revenue is a great one. Number of cases, number of consultations delivered, number of new clients, new lawyers that we’ve hired, these are all business growth goals, but none of them are. We’re going to trim our H one tags or we’re going to drop down our CPC rates or any of that stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Because what happens here is, okay, we have those goals and part of the EOS quarterly review process is are we on track or off track through the quarter? And you can say things like, well, look, depends on stuff, but you should have an idea of whatever, even if it’s a leading indicator of success, are we moving in the direction in those first 90 days that we are starting to see that? And if it’s an ads campaign, if it’s a high volume ads campaign, you probably are collecting pretty significant data through even open case 90 days in, right?

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. I mean we’re presupposing at this point in time that your ad spend is large enough for you to have a validation of whether or not from a cost per case. And by the way, let me be clear on this. When we say ads, this sounds like a direct response conversation. It is a pay-per-click. I’m bidding on motorcycle accident lawyer Tallahassee. So that is a direct response, which means someone is looking for it, someone’s clicking on the ad and someone is hiring you, or at least having that consultation. So it’s a direct response thing. You should be able to, after three months, have a feel for what your cost per consultation. At the very least your cost per consultation is with enough data to decide whether or not this continues to make sense. Now, if your ad spend is a thousand dollars, you don’t do not have enough data to look at, you won’t have enough data in three years to look

Gyi Tsakalakis:
At. Maybe not depending on it comes down to cost per click, how many clicks can you get, how well those clicks are converting into calls, and then how well those calls are converting. But looking at that, that I think is a very important thing to do in those first 90 days, especially too, because you’re going to identify bottlenecks. You might find, oh yeah, intake’s broken here, or we’re not answering the phone properly there. 90 days in, you have enough data. I think, again, assuming you’re doing any kind of significant volume, but big picture all in calls, you can start identifying some of those problems, those leaks in your funnel so to speak.

Conrad Saam:
So the way I would look at this, and this is a very, very rough way to think of, you said you have enough data and we’ve been kind of talking about is there enough information for us to make a good decision? The question that I would ask is, if you look at the number of cases that you’ve generated in three months from a marketing channel, direct marketing channel, and you give that plus three or minus three, right? Plus three or minus three, we’ve got three more cases. It looks amazing. We’ve got minus three more cases. It looks terrible. You don’t have enough data to make that assessment, but if it doesn’t change your outcome, if you go plus or minus three now you probably, and again, very rough, this is probably my stats professor from University of Michigan is rolling over in his podium, but that’s the way to think about this, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s right. And I was really more talking about like, oh, we noticed that we’re missing 25% of our calls.

Conrad Saam:
Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
That one’s more like you don’t need that much data to recognize you’re missing. There’s a big hole somewhere. But you’re right on actual making tactical decisions and campaign decisions like yeah, you got to have a lot of days. The other thing, bringing it back to this quarterly pulse, so I’m just reading from the meeting pulse agenda, some things that you might look at in your marketing strategy more generally, and they would talk about things like the three uniques. Are you reevaluating if the things that you think make you stand out, really make you stand out? Or are there different ones or did we get that wrong? The positioning stuff, your target audience is your list, right? Do you need to adjust who you’re targeting? Do you want to go a little more specific? If you’ve been doing divorce, maybe you want to go, we want to help moms who are contemplating divorce or something like that. That one’s come up a lot in examples. I don’t know why. Yeah, no Freudian slip I guess. I dunno.

Conrad Saam:
Go backwards.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, so reviewing your target audience, your list, refining that, that quarterly pulse is a great time to do that. And here’s another one. Review previous quarters, rocks and EOS terminology. That’s just priorities. So did you set the smart goals that Conrad was talking about? Or if there are initiatives or marketing priorities that you would set from the prior, how did you do on those? Did you complete ’em or did your agency execute on ’em? Or were there holdups? Were you a delay in that process? So whatever the priorities that are supposed to be executed, whether if you’ve your marketing director, are you setting those priorities? Are you hitting those priorities? Are your partners hitting those priorities? It might not just be a strictly measurable metric. This was a priority that we agreed to. Did we hit it or did we not hit it? Then the other thing, you do establish the next quarter’s priorities and then that naturally, so now you’ve now got an EOS language.
You’ve taken it from the scorecard. Are we on track to hit our one year plan from a business metric standpoint? Yes or no? Why? That might tease out some issues for you. Then you look at your priorities. Did your priorities get completed? Is your list right? You got your unique selling propositions. Those conversations though, help you tease out issues that you can discuss and solve so that when you go into the next quarter, you’re changing the narrative. Because the other thing that’s so frustrating to see over and over again is you have the meeting, but nothing comes out of the meeting that you’re going to do differently to improve. And so now you’re doing the same thing. Another quarter.

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. Okay. I think you’re onto something here. This is really important, and I think, again, I kick agencies all the time. The report at the end of the quarter or the end of the month or whatever it might be, and the quarter is the right time to do. This is not the end of quarter report as to what happened last three months.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Only

Conrad Saam:
That

Gyi Tsakalakis:
The blue,

Conrad Saam:
Not only that, it’s not only that. Most of the time agencies make it that because they want to show you the up and to the right and tell you that they’re doing a fucking great job. They may or may not be, but it’s the blueprint for what you’re going to do tomorrow. And that is a completely different thing. And I don’t for the life of me understand why most relationships are built where the report that it’s a review of what happened instead of a blueprint for tomorrow.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I call it reporting the news. I use that all the time. Like, oh, you’re just reporting the news. I don’t need you to report the news. I can read the news. I can throw the news into chat GPT,

Conrad Saam:
Right? And some agencies do, right? And you can see that this is a problem if your in-House person or your third party vendor is reading you their PowerPoints of what happened. You can all read. So you don’t need that. We have this thing where data without insight is just a number. You want the insight, right? And the context.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah. Insight analysis. The thing that I always tell people to ask is, okay, look where we’ve been. That is the starting point. What did we do? That gives context for the conversation. But that’s one third of the conversation. The second, third is what did we learn? What did we learn from what we did? And then the third part of the conversation is, what are we going to do differently now based on what we learned? That’s the key to distilling insight and analysis, not just traffic’s up 10% from last month

Conrad Saam:
Because it’s all from China. Great. Is that

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Good? Is that bad? Right? Is it bad? I don’t know if that, what is that? What are you telling me? What’s the insight here? What did we learn? Well,

Conrad Saam:
It’s really good if your agency has convinced you that traffic from SEO is the number one thing that you should be looking at. Okay, I’m going to give one more KPI that I think is important.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Okay.

Conrad Saam:
We have talked about how direct response is part of the marketing puzzle, but it’s not the entire marketing puzzle. It’s getting increasingly difficult to draw a pretty pie graph as to where your business is coming from, or your consultations are coming from multi-touch attribution, dark social brand, billboards, radio, all these things working together. So I do think you have to create what I will call the big average. All of your stuff, all the good things, whether it’s consultations or new clients or revenue, whatever that number you’re looking at is divided by all of your marketing money, right? It’s your big average. And what we’re finding is the firms that are growing are investing in multichannel strategies. And you don’t have perfect insight into that one channel that how that one individual channel’s performing, because it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. And so you need to look at the big average. What does that big average tell you? Is that okay with you from a cost per consultation basis? Is it getting worse? Is it getting better? As we’ve spent more money, has that big average gotten that ratio? Has that gotten better or worse? So that number, while very, very much not a good MBA answer is your reality.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, and you talk about all this all the time, and I gave you a shout on LinkedIn about this. You have to have the dual source attribution. You have to, however you’re doing it, however you’re asking, who can we thank for you sending us to you? And even if we did get it wrong sometimes, or how did you hear about us? However, you’re going to do that. You have to do that. I mean, again, I’m seeing more and more in that qualitative attribution field. Things like private Facebook group that we’re in, yes, LinkedIn, other types of content vehicles. And again, I always use the example for attorney sync on LinkedIn, but I looked at the last six of my sources, lawyer, Facebook group, Google Tech Show, LinkedIn, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, Lawmatics webinar. You need that at your law firm.

Conrad Saam:
A hundred percent. And as you review this, you need to get dirty in it. You need to roll up your sleeves and get intimate with the data. Sorry. Gyi, if you’d like to rephrase what I just said, please go ahead and do so.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Roll up your sleeves to get intimate with your data. That’s an image. I’m typing that I’m, that’s my next prompt. I’m creating my next social post.

Conrad Saam:
No, we now have a title for the episode. Alright, so do that. Do all of these things because otherwise you’re going to repeat what you did last quarter.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Exactly. Don’t do the same thing and expect something different to happen with that. We are now really out of time, not just segment time, but we really have to go. Conrad, thanks so much for making it. I really appreciate you showing up.

Conrad Saam:
You’re welcome. I apologize for the snafu. I hope some of the conversation that happened just four feet to my right did not make it into the audio pickup.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I didn’t hear it, but you will look forward to hear about it in the news on the next episode. Thank you Dear listeners, for showing up and subscribing. If you’re new here, please do subscribe. We’re really pushing the YouTube thing because we love YouTube and it shows up in search. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi saying farewell.

Announcer:
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Conrad Saam:
You did what I usually do where you tried to end the pod without doing the second segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I did.

Conrad Saam:
It was great. I’m glad that happened to you. Usually my fault.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m very disappointed in myself.

Conrad Saam:
We were too.

 

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