The Nexus of Intake and Marketing. Convert Leads Into Clients

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Managing your law practice can be challenging, marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode is to use Bo Royal’s words. I’m going to introduce you to Bo here in a second. It’s about the intake marketing nexus, unraveling the impact of intake on marketing efforts and vice versa. And quite honestly, I just used his, because usually I rewrite that or make it shorter or piter, but it’s really what we’re talking about, the intake marketing nexus. In other words, it’s about acquisition. Many people, many firms, many firm owners, separate acquisition into marketing and sales, and many businesses, law firms and others have and entire marketing departments and sales departments that focus individually on each of these two things they define marketing for the most part, is the machine that kind of goes out in the world and finds or sometimes educates people who may need your services and opens their minds to considering working with you.

Sales then takes over once they have raised their hand and said, I’m thinking about it, and sales takes over and sales is then a service that if it done right, educates them to the point where they can make a decision work with you or not. The goal being to get to the decision, not necessarily to convince anybody to do anything. That’s at least the way I see sales done, right, these two parts of the overall acquisition engine of your business. Thinking of it, if you can think of some businesses out there in the world, there are some that do entirely without marketing and some that do entirely without sales. I usually like to think of Wendy’s or McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A, whatever your favorite is, is one that really does without sales, right? Because of all the marketing out there in the world. You show up and you’re ready to buy.

Nobody needs to sell you anything. The most sales that they do is like, do you want fries with that? And so the sale has taken place by the marketing team. And then a lot of law firms that I work with, at least when I start working with them, think that they can do without marketing and they go out there and do a good job as we were taught in law school. And if you do a really great job, the world will be the pathway to your door. And so they get referrals. Word of mouth is what is often referred to, and so really it’s just no marketing, just sales because the person then comes to you pretty ready to buy, but you have to finish the job and do sales. My take on it is you need both most of the time in order to have a healthy growing business.

And we’re going to be speaking today again with Bo Royal about how intake sits at the Nexus, the joinder of these two parts between marketing and sales of the same machine. Kind of think of it like an elbow, right? The arms, the machine maybe intakes the elbow. A lot of times, and this is truth, this is absolute truth. Firms come to me and tell me they have a marketing problem, or sometimes they’ll come to me and tell me they got a sales problem, but oftentimes the solution is neither. It’s intake, and this is topical right now. I got to tell you, because a lot of my clients are actually struggling with this right now. Good intake is hard to build and hard to keep going unless you think about it the right way. Now, to remind everybody that’s a listener, we do talk about three main things.

The main triangle of what it is that a law firm business must do includes acquiring new clients. We call it acquisition. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. And then of course, producing results that we promised, production, lots of shows about that. And then achieving business and professional results for the owners. We do several shows about that. And of course, you are in the center of it all, driving it all, making it happen. So in today’s episode, we’re going to discuss how you are going to grow your firm to make it easier and more fun for you to run by talking to Beau Royal. Bo is the co-owner of Pato Legal. And if anybody’s listened to me for any amount of time, Pato is a name that I love from the Pato principle on the 80 20 rule that we’ve discussed a lot in the past. Bo is formerly a Fortune 500 advertising executive. He’s now become a law firm marketing expert. Before that, he’s been a leader at eBay. He’s helped build brands like Calvin Klein. In other words, guy knows what he’s talking about, and he’s pivoted into the world of legal marketing for over five years. He’s not looking back today, Bo co-owns and operates Preto Legal, a growth marketing agency position to help small and medium-sized law firms add and other seven figures in cases to their pipeline. That was a long intro, but welcome.

Bo Royal:

Thank you so much for having me, Christopher. It’s great to be here.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Not at all. It’s great to have you. And my intro really just sort of was like a stone skipping over the water about how you came to this. So just talk a little bit more about, if you don’t mind, about how your Fortune 500 experience and your brand building experience has given you the tools that you need to be someone that law firm marketers should be listening to.

Bo Royal:

Sure. Yeah. So I’ve been in the marketing space now for 15 years, my entire career, and as you mentioned, early on in my career, I had a lot of great exposure to, well-known Calvin Klein, Kate Spade, New York doc, Martin’s household names, and I was in charge of their digital advertising budgets. I really enjoyed the time I worked with those brands. I was in charge of large marketing teams of 15 digital advertisers. Pretty quickly though, became disillusioned with that experience, that big agency life because it required a lot of travel. It was 70, 80, 90 hour work weeks. It was just a lot for me at that age to be juggling all of this Fortune 500 client work, managing a team of 15 marketers. And like I said, I just became disillusioned with that experience and did a bit of a 180 when I was 28 years old and ended up becoming a chief marketing officer for a large injury law firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The great thing about that pivot was even though I was moving away from Fortune 500 e-commerce brands, all of that experience translated very nicely into the legal marketing field in that there was a lot of necessity for data tracking and data quality, something that was lacking at the firm and I had a lot of experience with and something that we make sure with our own clients that we’re tracking properly to this day. And then just really understanding the different stages of the marketing funnel and where you need to focus based on the budget that you have. So when I joined the firm, their marketing budget wasn’t very large, so we had to focus on more direct response tactics to help get more leads and cases immediately. But then as the firm grew and I got more buy-in from the leadership team, we were able to take some of that budget and invest in things like brand awareness, tactics, tv, billboard, so on and so forth. So I know that was quite a lot that I covered, but yeah, I guess I kind of accidentally fell into the legal marketing space, but that was now coming up on six years ago. And like you mentioned, I haven’t looked back since.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, no, I mean I think quite honestly, the journey makes sense and I think it’s important for the listeners. I don’t know if you’re about to dole some advice out, you need to have some credibility, and I think you got it. So let’s dive in. So because from that intro, everybody might be getting excited going, well, this is going to be all marketing. No, because the marketing might not be your problem. So today we’re going to talk about intake. Let’s just hit that nail right on the head. How does from your perspective, that intake, and let’s first of all, you know what, before I even ask the question, why don’t you describe what we mean by intake?

Bo Royal:

Intake is all about the handling of inbound leads for your law firm. So leads that are coming from various marketing sources.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So marketing’s out there with paid search with radio, billboards, print, whatever, and prospective clients, again, I think I said in the beginning, who at least have now received enough education to think that they might have a problem, that you might be the solution, and they come to you. And so then intake is like it’s their first impression. Yeah,

Bo Royal:

That’s exactly how I say it. It is the first impression, and you should think of your intake agents as ambassadors for your firm. They are speaking on your behalf. They are the literal embodiment of your marketing and your positioning and your value propositions. They need to know all of those things on that initial call.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool, so we got that definition out of the way, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how intake really begins to influence the overall success of the law firm’s marketing. I think if anybody’s listening, you kind of got the clue right? You’ve spent all this money and all this effort on marketing and here they are showing up at your door. They don’t get to talk to you first as the owner. They might not get to talk to your sales team quite yet. Intake is their first impression the first time that they’re having a two-way conversation. So we’re going to talk about that a afterward from the folks who make this show possible. We are back with Beau Royal co-owner and operator of Pato Legal. So we’re going to get into nitty gritty right now. We just talked about the fact that intake is the initial impression, and as we all know, you don’t get the second chance to make first impression, but so how does this initial intake process, not just the people, but the process, influence how successful the law firm’s marketing efforts are?

Bo Royal:

I would say intake can make or break a firm’s marketing efforts if that first impression isn’t a high quality first impression, if you don’t have an engaged and motivated team answering the phones, again, making that positive first impression with prospective clients, if you aren’t tracking the performance of your agents and coaching them to reach certain standards, if you’re not leveraging technology to support the follow-up process, you’re really just leaving a lot of money on the table. I use the analogy, it’s like having a leaky bucket. You might be pouring all this money into the marketing engine, but if you have holes in that bucket, if you have holes in your intake process, you’re going to miss out on leads and high quality cases. So law firms need to recognize that a strong intake system can give them a significant competitive advantage and enable them to acquire clients more efficiently relative to their competitors.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And I think you also made the point about the leaky bucket, right? Listen, every bucket’s got leaks. There’s no such thing as a leadless marketing funnel or sales funnel, but in my experience, the reaction of most people is, alright, leads, that’s just that bucket’s leaking. Let’s say we keep it topped up by adding more leads. And while that might be true, it’s expensive. I mean, in today’s day and age, law firms are paying hundreds of dollars per qualified lead. And so a leak is expensive and it’s easier to fix that leak than necessarily just pour money at it. What do you see as the primary causes for leaks? Let’s give some examples. What’s happening in intake that is costing law firms money?

Bo Royal:

I think some of the things I had already mentioned in terms of just not having basic tracking in place, if you don’t have a system to monitor your intake agents, if you don’t have a system to track the outcomes of the intakes that they’re doing, I think that’s a huge missed opportunity right there. It’s like the saying, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And if you don’t have a measurement system in place for your intake department, that’s a huge opportunity right there. So I think that’s kind of like square one. I’d say square two is once you start having the data to inform decision making about, oh, maybe this person’s not the right, isn’t the right person for this seat, or maybe I need to work with this person on their delivery. I’d say the second thing is coaching. So are you having regular coaching sessions with your intake agents about deploying empathy on calls, asking certain qualifying questions more upfront so that they’re not on the line for 20 minutes and getting bogged down by unqualified leads, things like that. So I think coaching is another, or lack of coaching rather, is another problem that I see with law firms intakes is that they don’t have someone that’s reviewing the calls and giving feedback to the agents about where they could improve.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, the old, oh, so what you’re saying is your arm was ripped out of its socket and lifted on the side of the road, so what happened next? Right?

Bo Royal:

No empathy, they’re not connecting with the prospect, things of that nature. So you really need to make sure that you have someone that’s periodically checking in on how those calls are happening, listening to call recordings and having regular coaching sessions. And then I would say the third problem or area of opportunity is not leveraging technology to handle a lot of the minutiae of intake. And a lot of that minutia ends up being on the follow-up process. So things like SMS and email that shouldn’t be done manually, that should be done using your intake system or your CRM if they’re one in the same thing. So yeah, just to kind of recap that, it’s the tracking, making sure that you have the tracking in place, making sure that you’re regularly coaching your intake agents based on the data from your tracking system. And then the third is leveraging technology to make sure all of that minutia, that follow-up work is being handled by a computer and not a human agent.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And you just mentioned something interesting. You said your CRM or your intake system, if they’re not the same thing, what are some intake systems that are not CRM that may be news to a lot of listeners? Are there intake systems that are separate from the CRM?

Bo Royal:

So we do have clients that are using separate intake systems versus their case management systems. I know we have a client that is using Lawmatics for their client intake system, but then they’re using needles for their case management system. This isn’t an ideal scenario. It’s best if you can be using the same platform for both. But there are fringe cases where we have clients that for some reason they’re on this tool for whatever reason and they don’t want to change tools

Christopher T. Anderson:

That explains that, alright, we’re using technology to track. A lot of that was to track things as you said, what we talk about here very often is that data is essential and you have to have hypotheses for what the results are going to be unless you track ’em, you don’t know what the results are going to be. Is this, what would you describe as the key touch points where intake and marketing start to intersect with the law firm’s operations? Or are there other areas where the law firm’s operations need to support this activity?

Bo Royal:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I honestly don’t think of intake and marketing as intersecting per se. I see them as just part of the same continuum. I think, like I mentioned before, intake agents are essentially marketing ambassadors for your firm. They need to embody your firm’s values, they need to be knowledgeable about your firm’s practice areas, your value propositions, and make sure that they’re incorporating all of that information in their calls with prospective clients. Treat it like an actual sales call, and much like your website, your blog posts, your social media posts, ads, et cetera, your intake team needs to convey and educate why prospective clients should pick your firm over the alternatives.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And they need to be primed to explain those key differentiators and not use the things that all the other law firms talk about that are all the same. Got it. Okay. So what we’re going to do here is what our sponsors, they just want to be heard from one more time. So we’re going to listen to ’em and then we’re going to come back and when we do, we’re going to talk about the few times. Now we’ve mentioned you need to measure, you need to measure, you need to measure, I want to talk about what we should be measuring and how we distinguish our marketing metrics from our intake metrics so that we’re measuring the right stuff. And after that we’ll talk about using that data and how to leverage it. But first a word from our sponsors and we’ll be right back. And we’re back with Beau Royal, we’ve been having a conversation. He’s the co-owner and operator of Pato Legal. And we’ve been talking about intake and we’ve been talking about intake and marketing. And several times in our conversation already, we’ve mentioned you need to measure, you need to measure, but we haven’t talked about what we need to measure specifically. So let’s go there. How can a law firm measure the effectiveness of their intake process in relation to marketing so that they understand whether their intake is being effective?

Bo Royal:

So firms need to be tracking leads by marketing source, and they need to have a system set up that enables them to track the journey of that lead all the way from initial contact to sign up all the way to settlement. And that involves setting up, like I mentioned before, a robust reporting system that enables your firm to track the marketing source that is driving the inbound calls, the live chats and the web form submissions. And the way that we help our clients with this is we use what’s called a UTM parameter, a Google Analytics UTM parameter that will essentially push into the intake and case management system so that once a case settles maybe 18, 24, 36 months down the line and that check comes in, you have a way to attribute that revenue back to the originating marketing source. And that is really what helps you figure out your marketing ROI, your intake ROI.

Again, having this data, having the intake data by marketing source will enable you to determine which lead sources are the most valuable and consequently should be prioritized by your intake agent. So for example, Google Ads, these are people that are solution aware. They are typing in certain keywords that indicate that they know that they need an attorney. Typically, these are the highest quality lead sources, someone that’s finding your firm through a Google search. If you can validate that with data, maybe you set up your intake system so that when a Google Ads lead comes in, it goes to your best intake agent, something like that. Or maybe you know that certain lead sources are lower quality lead sources like Martindale, Nolo, if you have the data that’s telling you that maybe that goes to or is deprioritized by your intake team if they’re all on the lines already. So I would say one of the most important segmentations of data that you need for marketing and intake is the leads by marketing source and then tracking the life cycle of that lead from, like I said, initial contact all the way to sign up.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. Now in that answer, and I think that’s super important, being able to track it all the way through. And you mentioned a Google UTM tag, if you have a good CRM, and we’ve mentioned a couple of them, there are dozens and there are good ones. There’s HubSpot, there’s contextually, there’s Constant Contact, there’s Zoho, CRM, there is Lawmatics, there’s Clio Grow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a bunch. And please, I didn’t like just a little knock off the top five, I knocked off the ones that just came to my mind. I’m not making any comment as to which is better. So that’s really essential and I appreciate that. But you also in that discussion, in that description you mentioned, so you could send them to your best intake agent. And I want to kind of hit there because we are talking about measuring intake. How do we know who our best intake agent is? What should we be monitoring, measuring to determine how effective our intake agents are being?

Bo Royal:

I think the primary metric is conversion rate, and to be more precise, it’s the conversion rate on qualified leads. I’d say there are four key things that you need to be tracking for intake, and then you can use this data to measure how effective your intake agents are. The first would be unqualified leads. These are leads that don’t fit your firm’s specific criteria, or maybe they’re unqualified for everyone. If it’s someone that got injured 10 years ago, they’re beyond the statute of limitations, you can’t help them anyway. So having data on, alright, of all of my leads, what proportion of them are unqualified is really important because you might have a certain month where your overall case volume comes down. You need to know, is that because my unqualified leads are increasing or is there something wrong with intake where we’re not signing up the leads as effectively as we should be?

So unqualified leads is a really important thing to be tracking. And then on the flip side, you need to be tracking qualified leads. So these are leads that meet your specific criteria. A qualified lead is basically based on the information you have so far, you’re pretty confident there’s a case there. And the only thing that really needs to happen is you need to get them signed up with your firm. So unqualified leads, qualified leads. The third thing is cases signed. That is just a, that’s the ultimate acquisition metric, right? That’s a metric that’s going to be shared between the intake team, the marketing team. At the end of the day, everything that they are doing is geared towards getting more cases. And then the fourth thing, as I mentioned before, you need all three of these things tracked by marketing source. You need to know your unqualified leads by marketing channel. You need to know your qualified leads by marketing channel. You need to know your cases signed by marketing channel. Going back to the original question, if you know for example that John A is the highest converting intake agent, meaning he of the qualified leads that he gets, he converts those at the highest rate of any other intake agent. I would say that’s a pretty good marker of him being the best intake agent on your team.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. You mentioned client personas and market segmentation and their role in intake and marketing approaches for law firms. And for me, these things are super important. And I was hoping that you might be able to share a little bit with our listeners about, first of all, what client personas and market segmentation, what are those two concepts? That’s question one. And then two, how do they have a role in successful intake in marketing?

Bo Royal:

So client personas, let’s start with client personas. They really will help you build a model of your target audiences, unique preferences, their values, their interests, their lifestyles, their goals, their behaviors. It really helps you build, again, a model of who they are. And that will enable you in your marketing and your intake efforts to craft your messaging, your tone, just overall approach to dealing with that audience in a way that resonates with them. So that’s really client personas and all of that information should be shared ultimately with your intake team so that they have a better understanding of who they’re speaking with from a demographic, psychographic and behavioral perspective. I think that’s really, really important. And then market segmentation is really kind of marketing’s role in taking all of that information and putting it into action. So for example, on the marketing side, you might realize that your firm appeals to two very different clients. Maybe you’re a workers’ compensation law firm and a good chunk of your clients are men aged 25 to 34. And then another good chunk are men aged, let’s say 50 to 64. So it would be building out separate campaigns, separate messaging, separate user experiences to speak to those distinct audiences in a way that resonates with them. So that’s really how client personas and market segmentation plays a role in both marketing and intake.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. Fantastic. So now I think this will be a great way to end the show and to thank you for being here, but developing client personas and understanding market segmentation is not something people are going to like, oh, thank you for explaining that. I’ve got it right. So for me, it maybe I’m slower than most, but for it took a while to really understand how to build a client persona and to use those personas to really represent my market segments, right? I might have several personas representing each one representing a different segment of the market. What’s a good way for a law firm to figure out how to get started doing that and develop these personas and the segmentation in a way that’s useful for them?

Bo Royal:

I would start with your first party data, which is just all of the data that you have on your current and former clients. So you should be tracking things like date of birth, you should be tracking things like zip code, things of that nature. The demographic stuff is easy to get from your first party data out of the gates. And then I would also be using tools like Google Analytics for that’ll give you a lot of information on your website traffic. What websites are they also looking at before they come to your website or after they go to your website? What are their interests? What other things are they searching for other than the keywords that you’re targeting in a Google Ads campaign? I would say those are the best two areas to start. Look at your website traffic and look at your CRM and your first party data to start building out some rough models of who it is that your firm is actually appealing to and who your firm is ultimately converting into clients.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Alright, Beau, thank you.

Bo Royal:

Thank you, Christopher.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Not at all because unfortunately here we are. We’re out of time and we are going to wrap up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour. So thank you to our listeners for hanging out here with us. Our guest today, one more time has been Bo Royal. He’s a co-owner of Pato Legal Beau. We touched on a lot of topics, we didn’t have the time to go really deep into any of them, so if someone wants to follow up with you to ask some questions about some of the stuff we’ve been talking about, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Bo Royal:

I would just go to legal do pareto ppc.com and if you’d like to book time to discuss any of the things we discussed today, you can just do that right there on the website.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Bo, once again, thank you very much.

Bo Royal:

Thank you, Christopher.

Christopher T. Anderson:

You bet. And of course, this is Christopher, T Anderson, and I look forward to being with all of you listeners next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. Don’t forget that you can be part of the show. Come to the community table on the third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. The way to do that is here in the show notes, and you can look for [email protected] or on iTunes, and we will be glad to answer any questions you have about anything that has to do with making your law firm business work for you. Remember, you can subscribe to all the additions of this [email protected] or on iTunes. Thanks for joining us. We will speak again soon.

Speaker 1:

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, it’s officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer. Thanks for listening to the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. Join us again for the next edition right here with Legal Talk Network.