Loading summary
Transcript19 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey, it's Sam Alaia here, founder of my legal academy, where we help lawyers scale and automate their law firms so they could send up more clients and reclaim their precious time. If you're looking to grow your practice while working less, click the link in the show notes to book a free call to discover a radically different way to grow your law firm. Enjoy the episode Mastering Law Firm Intake. Today we have a super, super valuable video and podcast for you with an amazing guest. The topic as Good as It Gets, Mastering Law Firm Intake, how we currently sign up a thousand clients per month. Eamon, you want to introduce yourself?
- [00:40]
B
Hey, thanks for that, Sam. My name is Eamon Graziano. I've been working with Sam probably like a year and a half or something like that at this point. And we've signed up a ton of clients. I run a couple different law firms with Sam and yeah, it's definitely been a fun experience growing and scaling these law firms.
- [01:02]
A
Amazing. And Eamon, when you joined us, we're at probably a couple hundred clients per month now to over a thousand clients per month. And we in the past year and a half, because we have a couple of law firms that we work together, we have a lot of experience that will be sharing with you a lot of different issues that we dealt with. A lot of stuff with our team intake team, a lot of stuff with intake. And that'll be our talking points. And so let me just review what we'll be talking about today. We'll be discussing, number one, our tech stack. What is it? What kind of tech tools you need to be able to sign up more clients? Number two, the ideal intake team structure, which is crucial. Looking to scale up your intake team. Number three, measuring performance and quality assurance. What does it take to be able to improve your conversion rates and be able to send up more clients? Number four, the cadence. How often should you contact your leads? And how to increase your chance of you getting contact with leads. And number four, the pitch, how to improve your pitch to be able to offer your legal services and sign up clients. So we have a lot to discuss, but let's start off with the tech stack. Pretty much the backbone of the automation of sending out more clients is the tech stack. So Eamon, what do you see as the ideal tech stack for sending out more clients?
- [02:29]
B
Yeah, so there's really kind of four to five things that go into like the most streamlined, sleek tech stack. The first key piece is what CRM you're using, and that is probably dependent on how many intakers you have to Start off and then how much you're going to use that CRM throughout the rest of your firm. You're going to have, you know, less than five integers. Something like Legal funnel is perfect, something simple that someone can implement for you. But once you start growing past that, it's better to look at something that's a more, more of a fully functioning CRM. I know a lot of law firms use like the Clio Grow and the Clio Manage. We use HubSpot, which is more of like a broader CRM with a lot more capability and flexibility. I've worked at firms that use Salesforce, which is like probably another tier and you know, expensive, you know, in expense, but also in capability above HubSpot. But the key to a good CRM is one, how many automations you can put into it and then how much data you can extract from it. Sam and I, we look at our data from our CRM, you know, and make decisions based on that. You know, Sam, what like on a daily basis basically for all the different firms. So yeah, I would say HubSpot is perfect for that. It's like the perfect middle of the road. Not too expensive like Salesforce, but pretty robust in its capability. And then the next thing I would say is you need something to connect your marketing to your CRM. So for that, you know, Zapier is perfect. A lead comes in, we populate it directly into the CRM and you know, the intakers start calling it and what phone system they used to call it is the third piece that we discussed. You need to have a good soft phone system that is capable of completely integrating with your CRM. You want to have not only be able to outbound and inbound call, to handle the outbound and inbound calling. You want to be able to have your text messages showing up directly. You want to be able to see if there's missed calls in your CRM. Can you hear the voicemails? Can you re listen to calls on the actual lead in your CRM? That's all key. And then you want to be able to have, you know, a dashboard or a wallboard that shows what all your intakers are doing. Are they on calls? Are they on break? How long have they been on calls? What are their, how many calls do they make a day, what their average talk time is. So that's all super important because at the end of the day, if you're paying an intaker to do intake, you want them either on the phone or like signing up either on the phone or looking for the next person to be on the phone with is really the only two things you want them to be doing. Internal communication, that'd be the fourth thing. I think that's huge. I've seen, I've seen soft phone systems like Ringcentral do it. I've seen, you know, you can do it on Microsoft Teams, but for Sam and I, we use Slack and Slack's just awesome. You can have a bunch of different channels for categories of things to discuss. Everything's archived. You can have a quick call or video chat with somebody, a team member directly on Slack you can do automations from your CRM into Slack. Just an example of what that would look like. If a new lead comes in, you could get that posted into a certain channel. Or if somebody has a meeting coming up in five minutes with a potential client that could get posted into a channel and then everybody's aware. If somebody didn't completely fill out the CRM or missed putting in a field, you could get that posted into Slack. So just a lot of cool things you can do with that. And then the last piece of the puzzle to really get to the a thousand plus mark where we're at is how are you leveraging AI to enhance what the intakers are doing? We use AI to, in a simple way just to set appointments, which I mean it's amazing. We get you know, a 90 contact rate or we've gotten, you know, a little bit higher than that on some months. So a typical contact rate without an appointment set is closer to like in that 5 to 10% range. With an appointment set that the AI is doing, an intaker wakes up in the morning, logs into work, oh, I've got 10 appointments today. He knows he's probably going to talk to nine of those for sure. So that's another way to do it. If you want to go really advanced, you can have the AI actually filtering, having conversations, doing light disqualification. And that to a whole other level increases the productive time of the intakers. An intaker, you know, one of the firms that Sam and I work on has pre qualified warm leads that are already talked to you by AI. An integrator gets on the phone with them and it's a layup to close them. So, so that's great. And it also, you know, they work 247 so that's also an added benefit.
- [07:46]
A
So to recap, just to take all of Eamon's takeaways, CRM is the backbone. There's no questions about it. You know, if you're looking to sign up even three clients per month, you still need a CRM number two Zapier for all your integrations, AKA how do you connect your lead sources, wherever your leads are coming from to automatically come into your CRM? Well, Zapier is the best tool for that. Third is you need a phone system. Just to clarify, if you need a phone system these days it probably just comes down to 2 if you have probably 5 or more integers, alaware is the best option. Or if you have less than five integrators, then the best and cheapest option is open phone, not RingCentral and not any of these dial pads or a bunch of other ones. We've tested out a bunch between me and Eamin and then for back for internal communication which is key and just to round it out, essentially Intake AI that qualifies and gets at the very minimum books appointments for your team or the place that we're right now we're working on right now. Amin is actually getting client signups using intake AI. That's where we want to essentially be in 2025. But those are the five kind of necessary Tech Stack I forgot to mention Emin upfront by the way. We are doing a full on training on law firm Intake mastery and that will be on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 1:00pm Eastern. You'll find the link to that right below. Wherever you see this video or if you listen on the podcast, it will be in the show Notes. Again, we try to get this episode out to get this out before so you guys could register definitely. If you listen to this podcast or you're watching this right now, go take a moment to register for it. Everything we'll be discussing and a lot more details and a lot of behind the scenes kind of stuff that we can't really share publicly, we'll be revealing there will be an open book and we'll share that with you. So if you're looking, if you're a law firm owner, there's no reason for you to miss it. Go register for that and join us there. So Tech Stack, we got that covered. Eamon, what is an ideal intake team structure? Yeah, what is that for you?
- [09:53]
B
So it totally depends obviously on the size and I'm talking about probably like on the larger size like 30, 40 intakers but you can do this at a lower level, just slightly tweaked. We'll probably talk about that on February 5th. But you really want like the first thing that you want to do is you want to evaluate your intakers based on skill and Then have them in a tiered system, the best leads, either the newest leads or the highest qualified or the highest prequalified leads should be going to the best intakers. What that does for you is your best closers are getting on the phone with the potential best clients. So having a tiered system where you have it could be like 1, 2 and 3, A, B and C. Something where you have a delineation between the best intakers, you know, the pretty good intakers, and then maybe the newer intakers that are just going to do a lot of the heavy follow up. That's how you want the intakers to be set up. And you can do it in a couple different ways. You can do it based on time, like how long did the lead come in? You could base it on lead score, you could base it on channel. Like if your Google leads are way better than your Facebook leads, for example, you could have the best closers talking to Google leads. But in some form or fashion, you want the best leads to go to the best intakers and then down the line and then your low tier doesn't necessarily mean they have to be bad intakers. They could just be new. They could just be, you know, learning what they're doing and they're going to go call, you know, try to call 500 people in a day and try to get them on the phone and, you know, see what they can do. The next part about a team structure is what kind of leadership is overseeing it. Because you can have an intake or come in, you can train them and you can let them loose and in a week later, you know, they could be doing something completely different from what you want. So you have to have leaders that are making sure the team is doing what they're supposed to be doing. And that's everything from, you know, calling the right leads or clocking in on time, or not just doing nothing for an extended period of time, to making sure they're following all the processes. Are they collecting documents when they need to collect documents? Are they filling out the CRM when they're supposed to fill out the CRM? And the best way to do this is to have, depending on size, either a supervisor or a group of supervisors and a manager. And when you get to a bigger team and you're looking at either, you know, a lot, a bigger time zone span, like maybe you're nationwide and you have to cover from 8am Eastern to 9pm Pacific, or you just have a huge team of intakers and you want to make sure you have weekend Coverage and everything. You want to have a couple supervisors that are bracketed in time. So like one Supervisor's in at 8am and then another one is staying until 9pm and then one of them is in on the weekend on Saturday, the other one's in on Sunday. And then you have a manager looking at all that. So I know a lot of people like to put a supervisor on a team. I much prefer the method where it's bracketed on time. All the supervisors are the same, but they're just in at different times, you know, commanding the ship at different times. And maybe there's some overlap at like really heavy, really heavy call times.
- [13:15]
A
What are the supervisors filling up their time? I mean, you know, enough. What do the hours look like? What are they doing during the whole time?
- [13:22]
B
Yeah, great question. So a lot of their time is deep into the phone system and to the CRM. So they're looking at leads, running reports, making sure leads are called appropriately. So maybe there's a lead that's three days old. Has it been called enough? You know, when is it being called again? Does everything have a task? Are people following their tasks? Are people doing what they're supposed to be doing? Do, does all the team have enough work right now? You might get into a situation if you have a big team. You know, some people have plenty of leads to call and other people's don't. Other people don't, other intakers don't. So you need to make sure it's a balance. Everybody is productive in calling. So that's number one, two, training and shadowing. If there's an intaker that you know needs to improve or something that needs to, you know, somebody who needs feedback, the supervisors can get on a call or a zoom with them, or if you're in person, just go sit with them, see what they're doing, give them basic, you know, ways to improve, little steps to improve, to just overall raise the performance. I also tell the supervisors 70% of their time should be focused on day to day operations. But another 30% of the time needs to be focusing on how you can improve the entire system. For managers, I put it like 50, 50. So depending on the level, like a manager would be 50, 50 focusing on improvements. 50, 50 on day to day supervisor. 70, 30. So that other 30% is, can we implement some workflows that will help us sort the leads faster? Can we come up with a protocol that will solve this issue with the intake team? And then they're also managing the intake or schedule. They're Making, you know, they're dealing with any issues and all the sorts of fun things that come with leadership.
- [15:12]
A
Nice. And I know there's a lot more to explore there and also there's a lot of stuff to explore. What levels do you need? A manager and a supervisor? You know, there's a lot of nuances. We'll try to save that for a deeper, detailed discussion again on February 5th. Let's do one more. How do you measure quality aiming and what are the main KPIs you look for?
- [15:36]
B
Yeah, so that is a great question. In addition to a supervisor, we like to have, we use a role called quality analyst. And this is more of like a performance management type role. Their main focus is actually listening to calls and they listen to a lot of calls. I prefer to have them listening to 20 calls and doing five feedback sessions a day. How we set it up is we give them five areas, like five criteria points. So we have tone and sympathy, we have persuasion and we have like the CRM score and a couple other ones that we'll probably talk about in the live session. But we have the qas grade each call within that rubric and then what that does is gives each intaker an overall quality score. And that quality score over time is used to help improve the individual intaker in those feedback sessions and whatnot. If there's an integral that's not, you know, meeting the on call performance targets, it's a lot easier to put them on a PIP when you can say, hey, your quality score has dropped over the last two months down to a below average level. We need you to bring it up. Here are three or four things that you can work on, like your tone of voice, your sympathy, your knowledge of the area of law. Those are the things that the QA can easily then say to help them improve. So, yeah, the quality piece is huge. If you just look at people based on how many calls they're making and how many signups they're getting, you're missing like a whole other piece of the puzzle that you could potentially elevate or, you know, potentially lower. Somebody on the team.
- [17:21]
A
Is that like a difference between like leading indicators versus kind of post result indicators where potentially unless if you're looking at the lead indicators that won't give you a good grasp of how that's affecting the actual numbers on the back end?
- [17:36]
B
I think the quality score is a little bit more of a post indicator, but you can use it to kind of project where somebody's going based on a certain amount of time and it's also super important for like new hot new intakers too, I guess. Does that answer your question, Sam?
- [17:53]
A
Yeah. And then. And we'll probably to go. Go a little bit deeper into that because there's probably different metrics that I want to break each one, each of them down and exactly what are we looking? What are we looking at? Amen. How many different law firms are you currently managing? And actually it's so funny, we have so many things going on. Amen. That I sometimes have to look at my Google sheet to even look at to see how many law firms do we have today versus last week versus next week? As a joke, just last night we went to. Haven't even shared this with Eamon. We went to dinner last night with a couple of the partners and we came back with a new law firm. Now some people leave with desserts, some people leave with a new law firm. So Ayman, I haven't even shared that news with you.
- [18:34]
B
Five or six now? Something like that.
- [18:37]
A
Yeah. So we have, from what I see, we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then as of last night, 6. Yeah, they're working on together. So a lot of the reason why we share this is because it gives us a lot of experience all at the same time. You know, each firm has their own teams, has their own issues, has their own tools, has their own little nuances that we all learn from each of those and we're able to take that data and apply it across all the law firms. So that's why we get so much experience even though it not look like it or you know, Eamon is just sharing his insights. But I don't think there's anybody who knows intake honestly better than Eamon because he has, you know, on the ground experience all across multiple law firms all at once. There's a lot more to explore, but Eamon. I'm gonna hold off the rest of the conversation for our actual in depth training again on Wednesday, February 5, which is in two or three weeks by the time we're recording this, the link will be posted right below this. Wherever you see in this video or if you're listening on our podcast, you'll find the show notes. Definitely. If you're looking to send up more clients, 2025, this is literally the best training. This is one of those unmissable trainings. Register to join. We have a lot more to discuss about the cadence, you know, how often should you contact leads? It's just something that me and Eamon have found a lot of law firms are way off on this. There's a science to this. So we want to share that kind of our secrets with you and then how to also how to pitch. And there's a lot of also there's a lot of limiting beliefs is like how do you have non lawyers signing up clients for you think I'm going to add that as actually something for us to discuss. Non lawyers setting up clients. And then the other thing that I want to add to this is other AI tools that we're currently using to be able to evaluate and increase sales, conversion rates and sign up conversion rates and a lot of like other tech things and also tech implementers that are I think crucial to make this happen. So we'll save that. Eamon, any last words for our listeners?
- [20:45]
B
I mean it's, there's a ton of stuff to go into and dive deeper in. So I won't, I won't say anything right now other than I'll, I'll see everybody on February 5th and excited to do it.
- [20:55]
A
All right. Also we'll see you. Definitely register and we'll see you then. Thank you so much.
- [20:59]
B
Thank you.
- [21:02]
C
Thanks for listening to the Law Entrepreneur. If you found value in the show, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you're listening. And don't forget to share the episode with a friend. It could help transform their life. To get access to a treasure trove of exclusive free resources for lawyers, go to join lawyerclub.com again, that's joinlawyerclub.com we'll see you on the next episode.