A Tale of Two Dashboards

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam (00:00)

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and I am right-handed, although I play hockey left-handed, which is really weird. I just always have. Today we’re going to talk about a client that Mockingbird lost. And I think there are systemic reasons to that in the way, there’s a lesson in here in the way that law firms

 

and agencies are working off of two different scorecards when it comes to the reporting of their marketing success or failures. We’re get deep into that with me and Gyi later on in the segment.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (00:37)

music.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:13)

We lost a client this week.

 

Conrad Saam (01:18)

very sorry.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:19)

And I’m not sure I’m very sorry. This may have been a good departure. Having said that, we made a mistake on this account and the client also made a mistake on this account. And I would like, I’m going to read a back and forth of emails from you and socratically, as if you’re an attorney, I would like you to figure out the mistakes that I made and the mistakes that the client made.

 

Conrad Saam (01:48)

Okay. All right.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:50)

So this is Monday email I get ⁓ from, ⁓ more in, we work with this with a fractional CMO in this, in this instance. So we have a fractional CMO, we have a client, we have the agency content. And the reason I’m sharing this with everyone is I want you to think about how you manage your agencies and how your agencies are managing their clients, you, the client, because this is a, this is a relationship gone poorly very quickly. And

 

Conrad Saam (02:17)

And

 

that’s I was about to ask you. How was your relationship with this fractional CMO? The frac- Okay, great.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (02:22)

Actual CMO is great.

 

And so, so I think one of the issues that you have with fractional CMOs, especially as the agency, it is incumbent upon us, we’re brought into a lot of law firms through a fractional CMO. It is incumbent upon us to work primarily with the fractional CMO. This is a, this is basic relationship stuff. I don’t want to go over her head. I don’t want to go around. I don’t want to talk directly to the client without them involved. Like that is, that is bad relationship management.

 

⁓ which, but, the, but the flip side of this is you have less direct contact with the primary stakeholder, right? My primary stakeholder is a fractional CMO and our job is to make him or her look amazing. and

 

Conrad Saam (03:09)

And without any relationship with the law firm client, you’re at risk of the relationship with the fractional CMO and the client. So that’s always the challenge.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (03:21)

Yeah, it is difficult. you know, we tend to have a ha I’ll give you another, and I will not name the other fractional CMO. ⁓ we, it is, it is always difficult when you have three people in a relationship. Right. That’s yeah. So, ⁓ anyway, I’m going to, is good relationship with fractional CMO, but, but I will tell you this. The other thing is lots of

 

It is easy for the fractional CMO in order to try to demonstrate a level of value to bad mouth vendors. So that is also a pit you can find yourself in. This is not the case here, although we certainly had that last week as well. ⁓ but let me, so let me get, let me get down to it. Hey guys, I just wanted to put something on your radar. Bill, not his real name called me this morning and he’s concerned about paid performance.

 

He’s at the point of considering options. Give me a ring when you can and I can brief you.

 

Conrad Saam (04:24)

Okay, pause.

 

What, how is Bill measuring the effectiveness of his paid media management? Is he, managing to cost per clients, cost per consultation, number of clients, number of consultations?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (04:41)

That is a great question. I’m gonna answer your question for you. He is measuring it in terms of new clients, not cost per consultation. He wants new clients out of this.

 

Conrad Saam (04:55)

regardless of cost.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (05:01)

Probably there’s probably a cost per client associated with this. Yeah. Yeah. There’s probably a cost. Okay. So our response, we go back and look at the reporting and this was, this, this felt very out of the blue because when I got my pay-per-click lead to look at this, he’s like, this is one of our best accounts. I don’t understand this. This is one.

 

Conrad Saam (05:24)

Pause again. How is your best PPC lead defining success?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (05:30)

That is, is great question. So.

 

What we have, and you’re getting down to where the mistakes are, what we have is a cost per lead. Okay? We do not have a cost per consultation. We do not have a cost per client. We have a cost per lead.

 

Conrad Saam (05:54)

Has that subject been broached with them in the past?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (05:58)

I don’t know because again, CMO to like, don’t know where that this, this kind of breaks down, right? But you’re right in, in identifying the missing piece, which is alignment between client wants cost per client. We have data on cost per lead, right? Those two things are missing each other.

 

Conrad Saam (06:18)

Yep. Keep going with the more emails and more emails to read.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (06:22)

I’ll give you some more in-off. But I’m going to give you the monthly performance and why we were very surprised that my pay-per-click people were like, this should be working amazingly well.

 

Conrad Saam (06:39)

I’ll short circuit it. You hit cost per lead goals, but those leads weren’t turning for one reason or another didn’t turn into clients.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (06:48)

That is a great guess and not necessarily accurate.

 

Conrad Saam (06:53)

Okay.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (06:54)

Okay, so I’ll give you the numbers. We spent $11,500. Okay, we generated 64 leads, a cost per lead of $181. 40 % of the lead and this is non branded. This is not branded queries. is not paper click search ads only right?

 

Conrad Saam (07:11)

ads only

 

Those are very good numbers if you were, well, they’re very good numbers if they’re qualified leads.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (07:20)

That’s right. Very good. and, and, and 40 % lead rate. if we, if we got to collect 40 % of the time, which is very over the top, like all of these numbers would trend at the extreme end of our performance for these numbers.

 

so we were, we were a little flabbergasted. We had already a meeting. So this is Monday. We had a meeting set up for yesterday, Wednesday.

 

to go over this, this information. Okay. So, ⁓ we send all the data that I just shared with you back to the fractional CMO. I give him a call. We go over the data. This looks really good. Blah, blah. ⁓ that is, that was, that email came in at 10 22. We probably got back to him by one.

 

Conrad Saam (08:47)

Can I pause you there? You might have already answered this, but I’m curious.

 

What was the fractional CMO’s position on the reporting? Like did the fractional CMO know like, hey, for whatever reasons we’re looking at cost per client and clients over here and you guys are reporting on leads. Did that come up in that, at that point or not really? ⁓

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (09:11)

I don’t think no,

 

because we had a call on Wednesday to review all of this. Like, and that was a pre-scheduled call. It wasn’t a, it wasn’t a reactive.

 

Conrad Saam (09:20)

Okay.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (09:22)

Uh, so that was around one o’clock two 31 we get from bill. Did I call him bill before, uh, a termination notice that we’re terminating. And because I don’t believe in long-term contracts, uh, we, that’s fine. We’re going to terminate. We’re going to leave this, this client with, we call it the white glove treatment. want people leaving feeling like they have made a mistake. Um, and

 

This is the first time we’ve kind of had this direct client contact with a client. Okay. Uh, where we’re, actually going around our, our, CMOs, although he’s copied on this. Uh, I want to make sure you have all the data to make an informed decision. We’re happy to discuss the early performance of the campaign and would like to preserve our relationship. Early results for the March ad campaign show a cost per lead of $181 for non-branded search.

 

The call rail phone call showing first time callers associated with Google ads campaign is attached. If you’re open to a conversation, please let us know what time works for you over the next couple of days. Reply is, I don’t wish to discuss further. Cost per lead is pointless to your point, Gyi. We have not signed a single case that can be attributed to your services since you took over. No one seems to care.

 

Okay, let me finish to be clear. This is not an attribution problem. I know where every case I have signed since two one came from and none of them were from digital marketing efforts. Moreover, nothing we bring to your attention gets addressed in a timely manner. If at all this has been an all around disastrous experience. Can you figure out what my mistake and what the clients mistake?

 

Conrad Saam (11:14)

Well, I don’t know if I don’t know if it’s your mistake, because this is where I was going earlier when I keep picking at the defining success and advanced conversation. That to me is the root of this mistake. Now why that mistake happened. That’s a question. And where I was going is because this is what we see a lot. We’ll have that conversation. We’ll be like, you know, look, we’d love to manage media to wanted leads usually, I think is the best one some people want to do to clients.

 

⁓ My view is, that especially in a PIA, if it’s a there’s a PIA client, I’m guessing the PIA client, yeah. PIA client like if I’m sending you if if marketing is generating leads, we’re managing media to leads that are wanted. And that implies that it’s you know, there’s a consultation there because someone at the firm had determined it’s Yep. Then I think you’re in good shape. Now, frankly, we get a lot of pushback.

 

clients for a variety of reasons, lack of data infrastructure, lack of process, lack of intake, sophistication. And we try to work with them. And they’re like, look, in order for us to manage this media, you need to send signal back to us that this was a wanted lead. And there’s a variety of ways we can do that, but you have to do that. And so that’s the first place that I go. again, and you can give me the backstory here, but it sounded like…

 

Either that conversation wasn’t had or was had and we never got on the same page with what you, with client thinks is success and what you think is success. Now, the other thing, you know, getting deeper into the weeds here for that last part and you, he claims that it’s not an attribution ⁓ issue, but it seems to me that there’s maybe something, some things missed between, ⁓

 

If your signals are all positive on the lead front and his signals are zero cases and I know where everything’s coming from, that sounds like, you maybe from his perspective, it’s not an attribution problem, but there’s something going on with attribution likely. To go 04, whatever number you had put out there, think is extremely unlikely.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (13:31)

Right.

 

Conrad Saam (13:32)

So hold on one more thing, one more thing it could be. One more thing it could be. He could be lying to you. He could be, they could be really bad at intake and missing calls, but you said they gave him first time callers. So their intake process could be broken.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (13:45)

Yep. Yep. So here for me, I looked at this, I was like, nothing came from digital marketing. There wasn’t a single person who knew about your firm and looked at, looked them up on Google business profile and that trickled into your, your, mean, this is all digital marketing, right? Well, we were talking about pay per click specifically, nothing’s happening from digital. Does not ring true. And so I think you are correct. The key here is

 

the wanted leads. And I always talk about this as consultations. there are different ways to kind of look at this, but the key here is the wanted leads and, and, and us not being on the same page. The other thing, Gyi, that I think was the client’s mistake. This is a very hasty response. this was a campaign that had been on for six weeks.

 

⁓ we have, we had a call scheduled two days later. and this was a hasty, I don’t want to talk to you response. These things do take time and you do need actually time to look at them. And if we had taken the time, I think if the client had taken the time, ⁓ we would have learned something on our meeting that didn’t happen on Wednesday. ⁓ but you are correct. So what, what, what our response was, Gyi,

 

And, and, and, and our mistake, this is our mistake here is the client was looking at his numbers, his dashboard, what he believed to be the source of truth. And we were looking at our dashboard and I, I am convinced that this is going to be a fundamental shift in the agency world over the next 12 months, if not faster. The, the adage goes, the man who has to watch never knows what time it is.

 

And this is exactly what happened here. He’s looking at his dashboard, seeing garbage. We’re looking at our dashboard, seeing gold and there’s no, and the miss is there’s no communication between the two. This is exacerbated by having a third party CMO involved in the mix. Right. ⁓ I think that becomes problematic,

 

so the, and the reason I am certain this is our mistake is

 

We actually listened to those 64 calls is a miserable. will tell you this. If any of you thinks taking intake calls for personal injury firms is an easy job, you are sorely mistaken. is depressing to listen to those calls. And then the reason I say this is because I listened to many of them. Of those calls, we had 27 that we believed to be

 

good qualified leads and the likelihood that you go over 27 is just not the case. And so that’s, but like we never had that time to have that conversation, right? And that that’s the.

 

Conrad Saam (17:29)

question for you. So you, you heard the ⁓ intake, how was the intake on those?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (17:36)

It is good. Yeah. And the poor. Was not an intake problem.

 

Conrad Saam (17:38)

That wasn’t it wasn’t an intake problem.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (17:44)

running into and they were both good. Right. Like, and, and it’s painful to listen to these intake calls, right? Shouldn’t the CMO be bridging the gap? Nick worker. Great question. I believe the answer to that question is yes. Right. And I believe that we should be working closer, whether you’re working through a CMO who’s fractional or otherwise.

 

but the gap that a really good CMO who should have access to, and I don’t want to throw the CMOs under the bus, but like who should have access and who should be reading off both of the watches, right? A really good CMO should be reading off both of the watches and understanding. I’ve said this before. I think a really good CMO operations person, whatever that might be, needs to be listening in on those calls on the regular and finding where we have problems and finding where we’re doing.

 

And, and this should not have been a surprise. Right. And so I do think Nick, to your point, that’s part of it. And it gets, it gets difficult, right? You’ve got the agency, you’ve got a client who’s, know, clearly short fused. but it is, it is the importance of, of sitting and reading off that same watch. And I think that’s what I think what you’re going to see. My meta point here is

 

I would encourage law firms listening to this and any agencies who hear this to as much as you possibly can work off of the same watch. And it is, it really is the client’s watch as opposed to the agency’s watch because agencies are notorious for up into the right grass that look happy.

 

Conrad Saam (19:26)

Yeah, no way, bro. It’s all about visibility index in AI. AI prompt tracking.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (19:34)

Well, so, but so hold on here. mean, ⁓ let me talk about the two uses of AI that we had in, in, this, that I would love to actually get a little bit more visibility. ⁓ the first is the, ⁓

 

CallRail has a score, a scoring mechanism, right? It’s a lead scoring mechanism. ⁓ And that’s an easy way.

 

Conrad Saam (20:01)

It’s only as good as you ⁓ shape it. You gotta teach it what you want.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (20:08)

have to teach it what you want, et cetera. like there’s, there’s, and, so in this case, because it was six weeks,

 

Conrad Saam (20:15)

point?

 

Well, to your point that you the watch if you if is the firm track in that watch? Are they saying are they feeding back like, hey, these are these are the wanted leads?

 

That to me is the biggest issue, right? Because you never, you really never got to, my definition of wanted lead is the firm saying this is a case we want.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (20:45)

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And if you know that and know where that came from and where that came from as a direct response channel like pay per click, you don’t have these conversations, right? ⁓ That’s a failure on the firm as well as us.

 

Conrad Saam (20:56)

Now here’s a toy for you.

 

100%. I mean, I’ll play the you know, and this is we not surprisingly, we live this with our clients and former clients a lot and

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:11)

This

 

is not a new story, right?

 

Conrad Saam (21:13)

We’ve invested a lot of resources in trying to be as platform agnostic as we possibly can and provide as much insight from an attribution and business metrics standpoint as we possibly can. So we built this whole thing. We built a whole thing that helps facilitate that so that no matter what CRM you’re on and no matter what, however your, even if it’s spreadsheets, can figure out a way to stitch it all together. So we’ve done that and it’s a lot of work.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:42)

And that does not work when you have a firm that does not want to share that information.

 

Conrad Saam (21:47)

That’s right. so any more leads? Right. So this is where I’m going with all this is we spent all this. We spent all this time and money building this thing to solve this issue, because we’re right there with your same watch. And it’s got to be collaborative. And really, it has to ultimately, if you’re going to optimize and manage media, do whatever to wanted leads.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:49)

Dude, just give me more leads.

 

Conrad Saam (22:12)

that record that want needs to be defined by the firm, not by the agency. And that requires participation. And so, to your point, so so we’ll have that conversation at the get go. Issue one is, like what you said, they’ll be like, I’m not why would I share that with you? And so that so then we’re so so when we get that when we get that issue, we’re kind of put into we’re forced into a corner. Here’s our choices. You tell me what you think is the right choice. Option one is is that okay, let’s fall back on some other leading metrics.

 

Now we’re not on the same watch anymore.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (22:44)

Like cost per lead.

 

Conrad Saam (22:46)

cost per lead or God forbid traffic or visibility dude, first time call. Yeah, God forbid visibility. So, or we can say, no, we’re not going to work with you because we know where this is going to go. You’re going to measure about this by something that we’re, you know, you’re, you’re hiding the ball. So we don’t even know what the metric is. We’re going to do the best we can with our, you know, our proxy things that we can for wanted leads. And we’re going to report on those leading indicators for you. And we know that over some period of time,

 

because we’re not gonna be able to directly tell you that these wanted leads came from these activities, you’re gonna shop around. Grass, even if you’re happy with this, even if you the service is good, you’re gonna be like, I just feel like the grass is greener somewhere else. You’re never gonna get out of that quagmire. And so what do we see? When we go to conferences and we talk to our worthy rivals and our friends, it’s the same musical chairs. The merry-go-round of these firms where they’re like, I’m not sharing the data.

 

I want a thing I go out and I spend money with the agency doesn’t work after X amount of time. Try the next one. Right. Second one. Here’s the second one though. So anyway, well, I didn’t give you a chance to respond where you mean, you take those clients, right? If they won’t share, do you take them or now?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (23:57)

Yeah, we do take them because and I’ll tell you why.

 

Conrad Saam (24:01)

That’s what the market wants.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (24:04)

Well, there’s two good reasons for this. Number one, we have best practices across our other clients for whom we do share that. Like we know we can do a good job, right? Like it’s not like we’re walking completely blind. And that this is one of the assets that you get with working with a firm that works only with legal, right? They know they were 85 % of the way to having a really successful MBA campaign just because we’ve done this forever. So I know we can deliver something fairly good.

 

Conrad Saam (24:32)

Unless,

 

unless the clients like were of those MVA leads, we only want X, and Z that we never told you.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (24:41)

So yeah, I mean, then you have, yes. So it’s not perfect, but like we will take them. The other thing, and this is maybe me being defensive, but like most people, most business owners would have that call. Like, hey, things aren’t going great. Let’s have that conversation. And then you can have this conversation. I think nine times out of 10,

 

We really try and sit on the same side of the desk and find people that we sit on the same side of the desk with. And if we’re sitting on the same side of the desk, that’s fine. This is a clearly an example of where we were not on the same side of the desk. ⁓

 

Conrad Saam (25:22)

I’ll tell you the I’ll tell you the more common one that we see, because I think a lot of lot of the lawyers we talked to, especially if they’re sophisticated, and they’re up market, you know, the multi office and doing a while. They’re like, Yeah, totally. Like, we want to be on the same page with what the the KPIs are. We want to hold you accountable. We want to be accountable. You want to hold us accountable for those. We understand that requires the partnership, the sharing and blah, where we run into a real challenge is

 

where they philosophically agree, but they don’t have the processes or the training or the team bandwidth, the roles, or there’s a data infrastructure issue that they have that they just, they conceptually agree, but they’re like, hey, you haven’t been updating the lead records, what’s going on?

 

so and so was out yesterday. Okay, so now you’ve got a week of unupdated lead records. And so and you know, or you’ve got approvals that are held up, or you’ve got someone, they got tinkerers that like to go in there and do stuff to their site and do stuff to their ad campaigns. And those are the ones that are a trick because, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re saboteur, you know,

 

It’s like going to the doctor and being like, hey, I want this medicine. The doctor’s trying to tell you, need this other medicine. And you’re like, no, give me this medicine. you’re like, cognitively, they know it, but they just can’t stop getting in their own way. And so we see that a ton.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (27:02)

I’m

 

seeing that less and less. I think there’s less excuses for that.

 

Conrad Saam (27:07)

I

 

agree. I agree. don’t don’t I’m not big on the excuses. My thing is the same question though is like, what do you do? Right? So you’ve got a wicked easy one. You got this client, they’re with you on all this stuff. And they’re like, we got an 80 % or 20 % missed call rate.

 

And so you’re like, you need to fix that. And they’re like, we know. Then a year goes by and they’re at 20 % missed call rate. they’re, you so again, you still take them as a client, they’re already your client. But they’re driving so much waste up that, you know, if you’re measuring the cost per wanted lead, it’s gonna be higher because they’re missing.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (27:47)

100%. So, but this is where like I, I view our role does not stop until the contract has been signed. And so if we have the miss, the miss call rate is actually one of the few things that is the easiest to solve because you go show a business owner that they spend $143 on this click and no one answered the goddamn phone. Right? Like that starts to get solved fairly quickly. You, I, the other thing that we did and I, did, this is the,

 

the whole genesis of my fascination and obsession with benchmarking. We showed, this is a while ago. We showed all of our clients, we’ve just plotted everything out. This is, this is where you fall on our missed call rate continuum. And the ones that were in the bottom 20%, we fixed that very quickly. like you see the money just like burning and you hate being below average. And I,

 

If you go back to some of the stuff that you and I used to talk about before, if you think, if you know what your phone call answer rate is, it’ll piss you off and you will be above average. If you don’t know what it is, you think you will, you, you will think that you’re doing a great job and you won’t do anything about it. Like that is, that is a, I’ve just watched this play out over and over and over again.

 

Conrad Saam (29:07)

Do you have an issue with the consistency in lead working, nurturing, like updating records, moving through pipeline? Like do you that with really.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (29:26)

I will say yes. I don’t, I couldn’t, but I couldn’t plot those out on across my clients. Right. And I think I’m going to go back to this as an old Harlan Schilling or point. Most of what we report on and talk and talk about is the things that we get. You got this many clients, you got, you, you’re, talking about the things that we won. And the real important piece of this is the flip on that, which is to

 

look at the things that you didn’t win. So I will give two examples of what, of what that should look like. Number one, we, think we’ve talked about speed AI here, but like speed AI was put out by the Haskins brothers. And it’s essentially a tool that’ll be like in, in, in, kind of real time, Hey, it looks like this was a good lead that has just walked out the door. You should do something about it. So it’s an escalation and it’s immediate escalation and it’s an evaluation lead scoring, which I think is super, super valuable.

 

And I

 

Conrad Saam (30:26)

Totally unrelated to this, I just heard another story about a lead being saved by Speed AI.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (30:33)

Yeah. So I check them out. Like don’t hire the Haskins brother for your marketing, for God’s sakes. But boy, the concept of the speed AI is great. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but the other part of that, Gyi is the firms that I see, again, this goes back to my phone call, knowing, knowing the phone call number will piss you off. The firms that I see doing the best.

 

are the ones that have someone in charge of understanding all the stuff that came in and all the stuff that’s so from where’s the gap between what came into intake management software that is qualified and what turned into matters. And that person is obsessed with all the stuff that falls out. That is the magic of a great CMO that or CO and it doesn’t matter what the title is, but somebody

 

Conrad Saam (31:30)

Somebody do something.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (31:31)

Somebody

 

if somebody is focused on that, your firm is winning, right? Your firm is going to identify where the leaks are.

 

Conrad Saam (31:41)

Absolutely. And then again, that’s primarily that’s the piece that we have tried to connect so that we don’t get all the way to practice management, but we get to CRM for sure. And you should be managing, in my opinion, you should be managing to signed retainers in your CRM.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (31:59)

Yeah, and I, by the way, I don’t think we should be in practice management. do, except for signed retainer, right? Which really should live in your intake management software, right? ⁓

 

Conrad Saam (32:10)

The

 

only thing that some that we agree with you, we’re not in we’re not in practice management, but I guess the only but you could you can handle this. You could do this in CRM too. But sometimes the ways that the systems are set up, there’s some data you might want to extract at the end of a matter to push back to marketing. So like, if you only capture billings, like say you’re a billable firm, and you only capture billings in your practice management tool, not in your CRM.

 

You want to pipe that back so you can do things like, won’t say it, but I think measuring lifetime value of clients versus acquisition costs is a positive thing.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (32:40)

Don’t say R.O.I. Don’t say it.

 

And, and, and the, the other one that I would pull out would be customer satisfaction, right? Maybe that’s coming to have a home or something like that. But like, I think it is actually very important to get some signal around happiness of a given client to determine whether or not you’re going to go out of your way to stay in front of them for the rest of their lives. Or if you want to just move on and pretend this never happened.

 

Conrad Saam (33:20)

I mean, you know, that’s another thing that if you’ve got it implemented for on the service side of the house, something like call rail or, you know, other call analytics software, like they can give you they can notify you when there’s negative sentiment going on in service delivery as you know, as well as intake.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (33:38)

Yeah. Hona, K-Status, do a good job of that. They’ve talked about doing that promoter score in different phases of a matter, et cetera. So there’s lots of places that I would like some of that data to come back, but the ROI one, it’s a hard one for me.

 

Conrad Saam (33:55)

Well, I think it’s my issue with the ROI, especially in the PI context. And we talked about all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s it can still depend on your practice. You know, look, there I think there are practices that it lends itself to. But again, the point that you always make is it’s one thing to be optimizing to ROI. I think that’s a mistake. Then I agree with you on that. I mean, ROI is, you know, it’s going to be a function of the volume that you’re trying to do market share, you’re trying to capture. And so

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (34:01)

PIs are

 

Conrad Saam (34:25)

know, as a point you’ve made many, many times, there are reasons to especially if you’re, you know, in a dominate the market phase, not to optimize to ROI, because you’re not going to be able to fill the volume needs that you want. And so I think there’s I think there’s good reasons not that it’s not it’s not the right metric for everybody. But I think it’s a good thing to have a finger on if you’re you might you might be intentionally being like, yeah, we’re not trying to optimize ROI. But here’s where we’re at.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (34:54)

Here’s my, my, sorry, this is completely tangent. It will be interesting to see, and I do not believe this to be the case with one exception that fundamentally different channels are really material, materially having a different ROI. The one exception that I have to that, because I feel that these calls for as part of my job for like a long, far too long is the directories.

 

Conrad Saam (34:58)

But it’s great.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (35:23)

And that’s a user behavior thing. You get rejected by three law firms when you want, when you think you have a case. And so what do you do? You go and contact, find a place where you can find 10 lawyers who do whatever it is you might want to do, might, might need. And that is a directory and you contact all 10 of them and plead your case. and so the directories tend to have a higher propensity of garbage in from a prospect perspective.

 

But other than that, like the variability in ROI across different marketing channels, pay per click versus LSAs, especially in the digital world, I think is.

 

tough. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s I mean, it probably exists to some extent, but like

 

It’s a bit tough.

 

Conrad Saam (36:14)

There it is.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (36:14)

I

 

should maybe time out lifetime value and shit like that like and and or or PI where the term You know the turnaround is so far like just just this

 

Over for F. We have a question.

 

Conrad Saam (36:26)

Sorry, referrals

 

have the greatest we do not have any questions kind of running out of time here. That’s great. I was going to remind everybody to join us in Baltimore.

 

for

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (36:44)

A Seat at the Table.

 

Conrad Saam (36:47)

we can talk about how it’s going to be that much more difficult to hit target cost per clients because of the investments that private equity making in the PIs.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (37:00)

Wow. That’s a great, that’s a great endorsement, dude. ⁓ Yeah. No, come join us in Baltimore. That is, ⁓ may six and seven, ⁓ at Camden yards, which is the baseball field. So we, we did this the other day. It is the baseball field in Baltimore. ⁓

 

Conrad Saam (37:18)

We’ll also be at the Pilma Super Summit.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (37:23)

Yeah, stop by PILMA. If you’re going to be at PILMA, find us. and I would love to answer your questions. You can be part of the pod, so find us at PILMA. And yeah, those are the next two biggies that we’re going to be at, correct?

 

Conrad Saam (37:36)

That’s right. Well, there’s one more biggie. Who is speaking at lunch our legal marketing summit? Do we have any announcements to make? I thought maybe we did.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (37:46)

Well, we can talk about John Henson because he reached out to us this morning and, ⁓ John Henson. I will tell you guys this, and I’m sure there are people who are not named John Henson who really understand this stuff, but I don’t know who they are. John Henson is the person who knows more about the regulatory environment of marketing on the web than anybody else. And I’m probably wrong about that, we are lucky to have him speaking at the lunch hour legal marketing summit. So be there, ⁓ get tickets. is.

 

mid August in Nashville, lunch, our little marketing.com. We’ll see you there.

 

Conrad Saam (38:21)

even do one more plug for this talk. Because the reason we talked about this on the pod, don’t know if this episode is published or not. So I apologize for scooping ourselves. people think compliance is hard and it’s boring and all this stuff. Right now, there are law firms out there right now that are doubling down on this best law firm listicle thing.

 

basically paying their agency, whether they know it or not, to create all of these, this is the number one law firm, blah, blah, blah. They’re not disclosing that it’s paid for, they’re not disclosing that it’s made up by the agency. They’re doing it at scale because someone in the GEO world told them that these listicles will help them rank. And sadly right now they do seem to play an outsized role. But as John will tell you, there’s a lot of problems with that. So you gotta come to the summit to learn why.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (39:20)

Maybe we should serve popsicles and call them listicles at the summit

 

Conrad Saam (39:23)

That’s great idea. That’s a great John Henson swag.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (39:27)

I’d like

 

to sponsor lunch at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit popsicles and call them listicles.

 

Conrad Saam (39:32)

Popsicles.

 

That’s amazing. Genius. And fits right into the food motif. Great marketing there, Conrad. All right, Conrad. Well, great to see you. and I will talk to you next week.

 

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