← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
413. Scam or Strategy? The Truth About Third-Party Lead Generation w/ Anthony Bux
00:24:41
Inside the math of bought leads, the danger of aggregators, and why your intake team might be dropping the ball.
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, Chris Dreyer here. If you want to sign better cases and move them faster, join me April 16th for a free live session with Even Up. We'll show you how top personal injury firms are using AI to increase case velocity and profitability without adding headcount. Save your spot@ Rankings IO Webinars
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B
There are a lot of marketing agencies that probably oversell what they can deliver on. And same with law firms. There's a lot of law firms that oversell what their intake and processes can deliver on it.
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A
Third party lead generation can feel like an absolute minefield. You've got agencies promise in the moon and law firms burning capital to try to figure out what actually works.
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B
One of the issues they've had a really poor experience with lead generation five years ago, six years ago. Those are groups that are fossils in the space who don't do lead gen the way it's done today.
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A
The landscape is confusing and the rules are constantly changing. If you're relying on outdated strategies or buying from aggregators who sell the same lead, the five different firms, you're going to lose. But if you navigate it right, it could become an engine for new case acquisition.
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B
The firms that have recognized that they're the firms that are grabbing a lot of the cases out there.
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A
Today we're talking about the wild west of third party lead generation. We're cutting through the noise, talking real numbers and showing you how to vet providers so you don't get burned. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO Matt, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Rankings get you cases. Today I'm speaking with Anthony Bucks from Sanguine about how third party lead generation might fit into your business model. Sanguine isn't a lead vendor. They act as a strategic advisor that tests and vets providers so you don't get burned by the bad actors in the space. We talk about the confusing landscape of buying leads, the current cost per acquisition, benchmarks you need to know, and why a cold lead requires a completely different intake strategy than a warm referral.
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C
Let's get into it. Before we get into specifics, talk to me more about Sanguine. Sanguine isn't a lead generation company, guys.
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A
Sanguine is like a strategic curator, so to speak. But talk to me about what Sanguine is.
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B
Yeah, my wife often gets asked what her husband does and I see her sometimes struggle with the messaging. So the best way to put it I've been in the legal space for 20 years. I'm not an attorney, my partner is an attorney. You know, we started the first legal lead gen marketing agency in the early 2000s. So we were literally pioneers in the space. As a young 20 something year old, I started reaching out to law firms to talk to them about form fills that my website was generating. So I got very intimately involved with lawyers, their dynamic, their infrastructure and it is a two way street.
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A
Right.
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B
There are a lot of marketing agencies that probably oversell what they can deliver on. And same with law firms. There's a lot of law firms that oversell at times what their intake and processes can deliver on. And what sanguine comes into play is to really help matchmake, you know, really understand a law firm's infrastructure and what they will have success with. Sometimes they're not ready for lead gen and I'm very open about that. Hey, let's build a foundation first before we start burning money on leads. You guys are very good at taking inbound calls from your LSA at, but handling an outbound call from a third party lead provider is a completely different sort of dynamic for your group and one we should look at before spending cash.
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C
Let me ask you a question on that. You know, a lot of times the wanted case conversion percentage on an inbound like a branded inbound is like 92 to 95% and you got some of those unicorns hitting the 96%. What do you see from Legion? It's cold, right. They're using a variety of tactics like what's a benchmark that you should for cold?
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B
70 to 80. 70, 80 converted off of wanted. Yeah, that's, that's where I like to be. That's where the firms typically like to be. I will say this, you know, it's not apples to apples when you look at your branded marketing versus your non branded. You need to get comfortable with a little bit of a higher cost of acquisition. It's okay. You know the idea of jumping into a third party campaign is to get, you know, another piece of the pie. Right. It's to tap into some of these national campaigns, these groups with massive buying power, spending millions of dollars, things you cann do as a law firm by yourself. You know the firms that have recognized that they're the firms that are grabbing a lot of the cases out there.
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C
I'd like to touch on that more. You know I'm a search marketing guy. Of course you know that SEO, AI, search. No, that that takes time. Especially you're entering a big metro and I just heard we just had Richard Harris on a podcast and he was talking about a go to market strategy, how he went into a new market and he used Legion and how I've talked to other firms, their go to market strategy. You go in with broadcast television like
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A
it's, it's going to work eventually. I hope you got the dry powder.
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C
You know, so talk to me about like a go to market strategy, either
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A
for a new market or maybe you're like a young firm that doesn't have a brand.
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B
Totally. I mean, I look at third party lead generation as something that can help out on both ends. If you're a new firm without a lot of capital to support like a branded SEO or PPC campaign, you and I both know those SEO campaigns can take some time. Tapping into third party lead gen is an immediate turn on to start getting cases in the door. You know, with some of these larger firms, they're smart enough to know they need to diversify their portfolio. Obviously Richard Harris, he's got a great brand, he's billboards, he's got plenty of capital. But he's also smart enough to probably recognize I'm not just going to put all my eggs into the billboard and traditional basket. I'm going to spread out my capital and see what gets me the best return when I get into market. And as a business owner, you know, he just starts to pull levers. So I would look at third party lead gen as another bucket that law firms really need to consider. I don't think it's talked about enough. Me and you have, you know, we've been to dozens of conferences. You don't really hear a lot of conversation about like the third party lead gen category. It's kind of talked about, but it's like taboo. Yeah, it's taboo. People hold it close to their chest. I totally understand why. But the reality is it's a growing market and you know, with, with more and more money coming into the space, these guys are gaining traction quickly by, by tapping into these groups. And let me tell you, you know, from experience, this is what I do every day. There are some groups who have gotten really, really good at it. You know, one of the issues. And I'll talk to law firms that get introduced to me all the time. They've had a really poor experience with lead generation five years ago, six years ago. I won't, you know, talk about the specific sources, but when you really dive in, those are groups that are fossils in the space who don't do lead gen the way it's done today. They're not using video, they're not selling their leads to multiple people at once. So it's really trying to get through that bureau of law firm to say, hey, I understand what happened in the past. Let's talk about what's happening today. And some of these groups that can really deliver a quality lead. Right. And that's again where sanguine comes into play. When I test a lead provider, I'm looking at all the KPIs that a law firm would look at. Your conversion rate, your cost of acquisition, your drop rate after 90 days. Right. How many of the leads that you signed up are still cases that are going to be viable at 90 days. And then the metric that I find most interesting and important, does the campaign have the ability to generate a higher tier case? Fractures, broken bones, catastrophic commercial. At the end of the day, those are the types of cases that 10 to 15% that are really going to make the campaign worthwhile over the course of the year. The smaller stuff keeps the lights on, keeps the flow in. You start to get referral business from that. It's those larger cases that make those campaigns worthwhile.
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C
I know this is on the spot, but you probably top of the dome have some of these like what are just some general benchmarks. What's a cost per lead in Legion? What's a cost per case? What's a fall off rate percentage that's acceptable? You know and I know it's. It depends because you know if you get that big commercial case and you
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A
hold it, even though the falloff rate might be higher, you're going to still do it.
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B
Yeah, it's interesting to see the market shift. I probably am in front of this more than like your average law firm because I live and breathe it. So I see the shifts in the market happen. When we talk about third party lead generation, there's kind of three buckets a lead can get delivered today. A web form lead, you know, very straightforward, API'd into your CRM law firm reaches out, nurtures it and calls a live call transfer lead. So that's where the marketer generates the lead. Also has an intake group that's going to do a pre qual with some basic questions over the phone and then live transfer into the office and then the third tier. And something that started to gain a lot of traction over the last 6 to 12 months is assigned retainer model where your marketers now delivering soup to nut intake, marketing intake and signing retainers passing them over to the law firm. So each of those come with a price Tag, every tier is going to be more expensive. I'd say a web form lead, on average you're going to be around 300 to $400 depending on your market. California, Texas, Georgia, your big boys, Florida, you know, those can be more expensive. Live call transfers, you know, depending on the group, anywhere from 450 to 650. Again more expensive for those states. And then assigned retainer, you know, it used to be acceptable at $2,400, $2,500, that number's jumped to 3,000. You know, you talk about California, I mean 3,500 plus. So the numbers are moving. And law firms need to understand the cost to generate these leads has gone up. Right. The margins for the marketer have shrunk. Right. To invest in an intake and the services and all the technology to nurture and control the process, it's more expensive.
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A
Even up is a specialized proactive AI built for personal injury law firms. Personal injury is in their DNA. Visit evenuplaw.com to learn more. Let's just stop for a second and
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C
take a look at the math.
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A
A web form lead for 400 assigned retainer pushing $3,500. With costs like that, you cannot dabble in third party Legion without the intake infrastructure to back it up. A third party lead is completely cold. If your team treats them the same way they treat a warm organic referral, you aren't just losing cases, you're throwing away thousands of dollars.
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C
But you know, I want to talk about the stinkers, the some of the bad stuff, right. Do you think the attrition in the falloff rate is so high because you know, the affiliates that these legions are paying or selling the lead multiple times. Why is it so much higher?
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B
Yeah, it's a question I get asked often. I work with some groups, some law firms give me a lot of detail into their analytics. So I'm able to see kind of that drop off rate. And it is really interesting when you start to look source by source. Some of these groups have just a much higher attrition rate than others. I think one thing to be conscious of when you're talking to a third party lead generation group and the question you should always be asking, how are you generating your leads? Are you an aggregator? So are you somebody that is going out and buying other people's traffic, polishing it up and then reselling it to a law firm? That's where you run into some issues on the attrition side. Or are you a lead provider who's got homegrown traffic and Generating your own business. I tend to see a higher stick rate with the latter. And those are things that I keep an eye on. Right. One of the benefits of having sanguine, kind of, I guess sanguine in your catalog. I'm able to look at trends with lead providers on a more macro level.
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A
Right.
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B
My team usually has anywhere from thirty to a hundred law firms with a lead source. So I can get ahead of these trends and really help guide my law firms if I see some trends going sideways.
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C
The other one I see and you touched on it, right. Is the cherry picking. Do they sell them for a higher price? And that's pre negotiated. Is that happening under the table? You know, it's like, oh, there's I
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A
pre qualified the commercial.
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C
That's not going to Bob, that's going
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A
to John, you know, like. Or we're keeping it.
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B
Yeah, it's tough, it's tough. I mean, I hear the same stories, right. There are implications around the space of groups that do that and there's law firms that negotiate that. Again, those are things I try to really caution against when I work with the lead provider. I tend to leverage the fact that, hey, if I find out that this is happening, you're going to cannibalize the entire book of business that you have with sanguine. And that's quite a bit of revenue. So, you know, they do run that risk, but you have to stay on them. Chris, you know as well as I do, lead providers get hot for a year, a year and a half, and then you see the traffic go down. And a lot of times what happens is you have these lead providers that deliver a premium product. The law firms recognize it's a premium product. They go back to the lead provider and say, hey, I love what you're doing. I want more traffic. How can I get more traffic? And all of a sudden you have this marketer with law firm saying, I want to give you an extra $300,000, 400. They struggle to figure out how to do that. And that's where they kind of sign a deal with the devil and they go out and buy traffic. Or they start to do all the things that we tell them not to do, right? Because they want to go to the bottom line with the revenue. And at the end of the day they see their attrition numbers go way up. One of the things that I've found is yes, I advise and my team advises on lead gen to the law firms. We also are an advisor to the lead gen group. Right. I am constantly Talking to the lead gen groups about the mistakes that I made as a marketer. The mistakes, you know, after we did our marketing agencies, we sold our interest in that business. After a decade we ran a national law firm ourselves, right. I was purchasing 50,000 leads a month for a 70 person intake department. Crazy. But I've used those experiences, right and wrong, to really help guide some of these markets. They don't, don't make that mistake. Stay the course, right? Stay the course and keep your attrition low. Figure out how to maximize the quality. Don't figure out how to double your revenue month over month immediately. Cause it'll bite you.
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C
That's super interesting. I guess. You know they have one good source that's probably getting a good cac and then they're like, oh, let me talk to my friend who has the affiliate program and I can get some volume, right?
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B
I need more leads. I have firms that want to pay me for more leads. If they don't give me the money, they're going to go give it to somebody else. So I'm going to do what I need to do to get that money in. And the quality, you just see the quality dip.
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C
Talk to me. Let's just say hypothetically a firm listing comes to you, comes to saying when you're like here's three good providers, they spin out, do a 20, $30,000 test on each, right? Can they do it with their third party intake? Have you seen any success there?
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A
Or is it you gotta have the control like the really robust intake with
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C
the good chase sequence.
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A
Like obviously there's the different levels you
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C
said, hey, one of them signed retainer. So I guess if you don't have a good intake, I guess that's a method.
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B
It's a method. I definitely have some third party personal injury specific intake groups in my catalog and I've recommended a ton of business to them and they do right by clients. I like the idea of always having some people in house with your team. I like the idea of having overflow after hours and weekends with the group you trust who can talk competently and sign people on a retainer. When I talk to a personal injury firm and they are aligned with like an answering service versus an intake department for their after hour. That's not helping. Right? You and I both know you can't take a message for someone who's got into a car accident or sometimes even make a transfer. You've got to be able to talk to them right then and there and get them signed and over to the Firm.
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C
So can I, can I jump in there?
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B
Yeah.
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C
On that point, one thing that I've seen with our clients is when they sign on say a Friday evening or a weekend and they don't get connected to the attorney immediately. Right. They don't get connected until Monday. Well then that's. I've seen the fall offs increase there.
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B
Person's gone.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Person's gone and probably hired somebody else.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And you just wasted the market. There has to be immediate connection, one way, shape or form. So there are groups that do a really good job out there of helping carry through the message of the law firm. They understand the law firm. They can talk competently on behalf of the firm, talk about the next steps in the process. They're not giving legal advice or anything like that, but they are presenting the law firm correctly and the same. Even with those signed retainer models. You know, the thought that, oh well, the case is signed, they're already a client. I tell my firms, you treat that signed case just like a lead. They still need to talk to you guys. You guys still need to discuss the next steps.
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C
They don't.
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B
The consumer doesn't care if they signed a case or walked through a retainer. They will move on. And you will have to drop that case and send out a drop letter in two weeks because you can't get them on the phone. Or again, you didn't carry over that message. Right. And they feel like it's a bait and switch, so they drop the law firm and move to somebody else.
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A
This is very important. So I want to stop for a moment and underline it. When you drop three grand on a signed retainer, it's easy to assume the hard work is done once you get that signature. But that third party lead has zero brand affinity with your firm. If your intake team treats it like a warm referral and waits until Monday to establish a real connection, that client will ghost you with bought leads. The deal isn't closed when the ink dries yet. To make sure you resell the firm to your new client constantly.
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C
How much capital? How much time do you give? You know, a provider? Do you say, hey, you got to spend X amount and then I've got enough data. Like, how do you make a decision? Like, when is it time to pull the rug? When is it time to scale? Like what's just some general tips there?
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B
Yeah. You know, when I make a recommendation, the law firm to a lead provider, I've already got the data and the intel on thousands of 1000s of leads. So I'M able to tell the law firm this is a lead provider with quality, with product, and the numbers back that up. So I really try to focus on the law firm to make sure that they're set up to do what it takes to get the numbers to achieve. And that goes to what you said earlier, the lead nurturing, sequencing the immediate follow up. When a web form lead comes in, you have to get a call out within two to three minutes, preferably sooner, but I mean immediate. There needs to be three to four phone calls a day for the first 72 hours, preferably longer if you can, if you've got the bandwidth to do it right. So when I quote to a law firm, you know, this lead provider's converting 18 to 22% on average with my firms. What that law firm needs to understand, it's, it's because those law firms are doing longer lead nurturing sequences. They're calling leads for 14, 21, 30, 60 days now. How are they doing that?
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C
I'm just trying to guide the audience. You know, what's a minimum you come in to test lead gen. Is it a 5? Is it a 10? Is it a. I'd say the lowest
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B
amount I would do with a law firm on a lead by would be $10,000. And that's even pretty minimal.
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C
Like a three month, four month trial.
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B
10,000amonth would be like a minimum. And obviously if they can give it three months, they'll see the campaign improve. So mentally, $30,000 right on the low end.
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C
Perfect.
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B
And if they flinch at that, it's okay. They're just not. What I say is it's okay to react. Lead gen is not for everybody. And if that's making you feel uncomfortable, then let's hold off on lead gen because you're going to have those reactions when the conversions aren't where you want them to be. So let's talk about some other solutions to get some things in the door. Right. And help build that out.
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C
Anthony, this is the softball question. Like, what did I miss? Like what did we not?
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A
What did we not hammer?
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B
The other point I'll make, Chris, and I know I sound like a broken record because this is talked about. Invest in your intake department. Invest in people, right? The. An intake person. When I look at some of my best firms, their top intake people are not, you know, the person with the most personal injury competency. It is the person with charisma who can talk, who can make someone feel love on a phone call. When someone says they broke their arm, they empathize with that situation. They tie it back to a scenario. That's how you're gonna get a stick rate, right? It's those people on the front lines talking to your clients. So invest in your intake department and understand the difference between traffic from a third party group and then an incoming phone call from somebody who saw your billboard up. They are completely different journeys for the consumer and they need to be handled differently. So intake can be fun. I ran a large intake department for several years. I gamified the intake process. I ran monthly contests. I shed a spotlight on people that I thought were doing really good work making other people around them want to aspire to do that. You have to recognize that it is a grind and you are on the phone all day trying to do right by this law firm and representing your business the way you want to be represented. So treat them kindly and, you know, praise them with their successes.
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C
Anthony, this has been amazing. You covered the gambit on lead gen what Sanguine does. I'm sure this is going to be really helpful so people can avoid those pitfalls. And you know, for those that want
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A
to reach out to you to get
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C
assistance here or have questions about the podcast, what's the best way to get in touch?
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B
Best way to get in touch with me is through email. It's Anthony Sanguine sa.com or my direct line 708289 1111. I like to tell my wife I stopped working around 6 or 7 o' clock, but I, I tend to be 24, 7 these days and, and frankly I just really like helping lawyers and talking to them. So it's fun for me. I think you'll find with me and anybody on my team, we try to do right by everyone and I think that's why our business has grown. We're not a sales group trying to make a quick sale. We are in this to help you guys build and that helps us build when we do right by. So yes, please, anybody who wants to reach out, even if just educational, I could help hopefully guide you guys in the right space.
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C
Fantastic. Anthony, thanks for coming on the show.
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B
Chris, thank you for having me. I will see you soon.
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A
A huge thanks to Anthony Bucks for peeling back the curtain. Third party lead gen can be a fantastic way to turn the faucet on and get immediate traction and it's clearly an essential piece of the puzzle for a lot of growing firms. As you're looking at your whole marketing mix, it's always interesting to to see how fast action channels pair with long term brand building. That's the side of the house we focus on at Rankings. We're the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. If you're ready to build an asset you own, brand equity, crush, search and dominate your market, head to Rankings IO. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. I'll catch you next time.