Why Initial Responsiveness is Critical for Law Firms with Maddy Martin

Resource Links:

• See what process can do for your firm with 28 FREE days of SweetProcess
• Use code: LFGPOD for $100 off your first month of Smith.ai
• Learn how to set – and meet – internal sales goals with Double Your Case Files Masterclass
• Estate planning attorney? Get online leads and sales coaching with Seminar 2.0

A whopping two-thirds of people base their buying decision on how fast a business initially responds.

That’s nothing to sneeze at. But between call inquiries, chats, texts, emails, and Facebook messages, it’s tough to always be on the ball.

This rings true for law firms: over half of firms never respond to initial client outreach! It’s safe to say that’s a whole lotta missed opportunity.

And oftentimes, responsiveness boils down to capacity. If you’re running a small firm, you’ve likely struggled to juggle everything… And you’ve likely watched parts of your business suffer because of it.

But upping your responsiveness can transform your business. You can take on more clients, or just be choosier when the clients you work with.

If you’re thinking, But how can I find the time? this episode is a must-listen.

Maddy Martin of Smith.ai knows what it takes to help a business grow. In today’s episode, she takes a deep dive into responsiveness and explains how it will give you a competitive edge.

She shares how automation and delegation can help you improve your intake — and free up your capacity at the same time.

There’s much more to learn in this episode about growing your firm, so tune in now!

About Maddy Martin:
Maddy Martin is the head of growth and education at Smith.ai, which provides integrated communication services for small businesses, including their virtual receptionist & intake service, live website chat, and text answering. She has spent the last decade growing tech startups from New York to California and has expertise in digital marketing, lead conversion, email marketing, social media, SEO, affiliates, and event marketing (in-person and virtual).

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let’s get started.

This episode is brought to you by Sweet Process. If you’re looking to grow your law practice, who’s going to be taking care of what you’re doing today? There’s a reason that the fastest growing law firms that we’ve interviewed on this podcast all swear by SOPs and that’s because that enables them to focus on new things without stuff falling apart once they leave the room. Sweet Process was designed from the ground up to help teams ranging from solos plus freelancers, to enterprise scale law firms create and manage the SOP that allow your team to execute correctly every single time. And at the end of the day, that allows you the owner to work on your business, create new process, or even kick back and relax every once in a while.

And for a limited time listeners of the Law Firm Growth Podcast will be able to upgrade to a 28-day free trial by going to sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. Again, that’s sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. See what process can do for your firm by signing up today.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Podcast.

I’m your host as always Jan Roos. And I am here with Maddy Martin. You may have heard of her. You may have known her as the Head of Education at Smith.ai, but we were having her on the podcast for the first time. Thank you for coming here.

Thanks for having me, great to be here.

I wanted to start something out, which I found out that was really interesting, which we kind of spoke about on the pre-call, which was your background, which I don’t think a lot of people know about.

Certainly I didn’t but I know prior to Smith.ai, you had some really cool, interesting startup marketing stuff. So I was just kind of curious, what ended up attracting you to going into the intake space after your background in the startup world?

Yeah, well, that’s right. It’s sort of a long story. We don’t even have enough time for me to tell you all the things I’ve navigated throughout my career, but basically econ major, went to culinary school after graduating early and having some fun time to kill before your career really gets heated up and that’s way harder.

And actually that’s how I got my feet wet with the first startup, which was Food52. They have done incredibly well over the last decade or so. I connected with them. I was an early recipe tester. Then I was an editor. Then I ran their content syndication and audience development at a time when you could have a relationship with an editor at Yahoo and get your chocolate brownie recipe on the homepage carousel next to Kobe Bryant, and you got, you know, a hundred thousand page views in one go.

So that was an exciting time. And then I, you know, developed a lot of partnerships through that and moved to California. A relationship brought me out there. And then I realized I’m too type A to be three hours behind the New York City office that housed Food52. So, I encourage anyone listening to know thyself, right.

And for me, that didn’t work for me. I can’t be three hours behind the rest of the team. I want to be ahead. Right. So they ended up getting connected through AngelList, if anyone knows AngelList. Cold sort of interview process with Art Agrawal who was running Your Mechanic. And they were, you know, they had proven their concept.

They were a startup that had customers. They had a network across the country of mechanics who would come to your home or office to fix your car. And it was at a time when Uber was just growing like wildfire and we were the Uber for car repair. I came on as their first Head of Marketing. I basically did everything from outfitting the mechanics to standing up all of the social, all the ads, postcard, flyers, radio commercials, emails, drips, you name it.

Like it was everything under the sun marketing and everything that I didn’t learn at Food52, I learned there. And under great leadership. We went through series A, series B. It was, you know, pretty sophisticated startup by the time that I moved on from there. And what we did that was actually really interesting is, not only do we have all these ads, extremely long-tail for any folks who are listening, you can only imagine what the ad words account looked like when it was “Honda Civic 2012 timing belt replacement San Jose” right? Like, we’ll get how many variables are in there. And we realized that that was actually going to be part of our content strategy.

So we built the biggest car repair advice site, basically online. Twenty-five thousand articles answered Q and A of the most common questions for the 2,200 makes and models over about 18 months. And that took a really large team. I really had to step up to the plate and manage everything myself, brought on editors and illustrators and things I had never done before.

And you know, at the end of the day that brought in a ton of traffic. It complimented our ad strategy. It really introduced people to Your Mechanic. If you think about like who your competitors are in any market that you’re in, you have to identify what are the gaps and the opportunities.

And for us, we were competing with the car repair shops that you would drive past on your way to work, from work. It feels funny saying that now, because we’re just going through the coronavirus pandemic, but we all remember what that was like. You pass by the pizza shop, you pass by the Jiffy lube. Right.

And we realized like we need to be more discovered than just when someone needs that timing belt replacement, that brake pad replacement, that oil change, because they’re going to go to that corner place because they’ve been driving past it and they think, well, it must be reputable. You know, turns out they weren’t such good service providers. And many people are afraid of bringing their car in.

Anyway, the whole point is that we really had to identify how do we get exposure to an audience that has a very familiar, but subpar, competitor of ours presented to them just by driving down the street, right? In lieu of billboard ads, you know, which we could have done, we really took a deep look at an approach into content and that worked very well for us. So a lot of partnerships there, there was a B2B arm and that was a really exciting time through there. I actually met Aaron Lee and Justin Maxwell who are the co-founders of Smith.ai and I had, you know, been thrown into the deep end so many times that my confidence level at this point in my career was really high.

And I was like, look, I pretty much feel like I can do anything that you throw at me. I’ve I went from food and recipes to car repair. You’ve got receptionists? Cool. I get it. Small business owners, just like those mechanics who were posting on Craigslist to get jobs before we started booking them through the engine that was Your Mechanic, small business owners that we serve as Smith.ai, they are similarly in need of strategic partners and vendors and solution providers who can help fuel and build consistency in their growth engine. So to me, I saw an education gap. I saw incredibly smart and high performing professionals who have a gap in the business side of their education and experience.

And those were things that married perfectly with a flexible month to month plan with affordable services, with plug and play solutions that you don’t have to become an expert and you probably didn’t go to business school for a reason. Right? You went to law school, you went to, whatever it is. We have a number of clients in different verticals, but that’s what really spoke to me.

Like this is something that’s not your core competency, isn’t likely to be your core competency. Outsourcing and automation make a lot of sense here at the affordable price, it’s a no brainer. Yeah, I want to go work for a no-brainer company. It’s as simple as that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff I find interesting about this. And one of the things is that, you know, you have such a deep marketing background. I think a lot of the things that when people, especially attorneys are thinking about revenue, a lot of the times they’re trying to market their way out of a problem. But like, you know, with the absolute insane depths that went as far as the content strategy that we were working on at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good the marketing is until you’re closing that gap to getting them from a full lead that just filled out a form to a consultation that’s booked in your calendar, right. And it’s interesting that that’s kind of where you ended up winding up, because it’s in a similar trajectory that we ended up finding as well. Cause it was like, you know, we used to focus a ton on the marketing stuff too, but at the end of the day, you know, we couldn’t make somebody be a success if they weren’t calling the damn leads that were coming in, right.

Absolutely. It is the single most important thing to do is to answer the phone and also thoughtfully screen and schedule those leads. But what we know from the Cleo report, it’s very simple: two-thirds of potential clients base their decision to hire on your initial responsiveness. And during COVID we’ve seen, you know, that omni-channel sort of communication open up a lot. It’s not just calls, right? It’s not just emails. It’s really, and we don’t answer emails to be clear, but it’s chats, it’s texts, it’s Facebook messages. Look at what’s happened on Facebook. For example, they now have a plugin for any posts you make that’s asking for recommendations where they ask you to tag a business.

Right? So if your business, if your law firm is, if your dry cleaner, it doesn’t matter what it is, dry cleaning shop is tagged people are going to not go to Google search and see, oh, can I find this business? They’re going to click on your Facebook page. They’re going to send you a message. That’s the way that it works.

They send messages to their friends. It’s back, you know, a few years ago, when people started realizing someone’s texting their business number, they better figure out where those texts are going to. It’s the same thing with Facebook. It’s the same thing with other platforms that are getting more popular.

Websites remain extremely popular places to not just gather information that you need as a lead, but also to reach out and start that conversation. If you’re not there to answer when someone reaches out on, they go to the next business and that’s the power of Facebook. It’s the power of the network.

You’re going to get not one recommendation, but many. So back in the time, when you would call up your friend or ask your family at dinner, who do I use for my estate planning lawyer? How do I get a divorce? Who’s the best firm to go with? That’s really, if that’s happening on Facebook, even in private groups, in group messages, they’re going to mention multiple companies now.

And the speed of the response then becomes even more important. It’s not just one referral and you get to leave them sitting in your voicemail, which was always a bad practice, but a little more tolerated. That’s completely intolerable. Now you really need to be fast to respond and then you need to deliver information that helps them make the right decision for them, whether it’s your firm or it’s a referral you’re going to make to another firm.

Yeah. It’s kind of interesting too. Like I find this as a super consistent pattern with the people that we’re running into for running marketing stuff. It’s like, I think there’s a lot of bad habits. That ended up getting instilled as far as intake practices, just because people are used to referrals and like, you got to think about it.

I was actually, you know, taking a training for our team internally. I was like, this is the situation you graduate law school. You go to the big firm at some point. You want us to decide the gigs up and everyone’s starting on day one with referrals. So you know, that’s usually the situation, but unfortunately, that’s the thing. You don’t have competition with a referral. It’s not you versus the next person on the, you know, in the Google search results page, it’s you, who they know that, you know, their brother, friend, cousin, whatever can recommend you or they can roll the dice. So I think the thing that a lot of people have to realize is that like getting the stuff down is absolutely key.

If you don’t want to be at the mercy of other people having to be happening to bring your name up when you’re in the class, when you’re in a conversation that you’re not in the room. So it’s like the, you know, the key to having these firms that can, can predict anything, whether it’s, you know, NOLA, whether it’s webinars, whether it’s SEO, whether it’s, you know, pay-per-click, it’s like you have to figure out a way to close that gap.

Master close the gap. And let me tell you, actually, it’s really a big green space for you because 39% of lawyers are letting calls from potential clients go to voicemail. 64% never responded to the potential clients outreach. Like what does that tell you to me? It says, wow, there’s a lot of people who are not doing this. So if I do it like the world’s my oyster, I’m going to get so many clients just by being responsive.

And then my marketing costs and the return on investment goes up. I see a lower cost per lead, a new client. I’ve got, you know, a better, bigger book of business and I can be more choosy because the more leads that come through doesn’t mean I’m going to sleep less. I’m going to have too much work. I don’t even want that Maddy don’t tell me I can have more work, you know, thank you.

It means you can be pickier because we all know that there are clients who we would have liked to say no to if we could have, and there are clients that maybe we didn’t get back to soon enough, who probably would have been like a really great. So it just gives you more control at the end of the day.

And that’s what it’s about. If you’re running a small firm, even if you’re running a VR firm, you know, you want the right clients and you want to control your destiny.

Yeah. The, actually the you’re, you’re bringing something up that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is basically this phenomenon of the door lawyer.

Right. A lot of the times, you know, especially when things aren’t super tight and I can imagine there’s a lot of people, maybe people listening to this podcast have been going through this situation with COVID and maybe. You know, when you’re your best self, you only want to be tight practicing X type of law, or you want to be working with X client avatar.

And then you got the person that says, “Hey, I know this, isn’t your thing, but can you do this?” And if you don’t have, and again, people think if I don’t have the leads, then I don’t have to take that person. But it’s really, if you don’t have the people. You know, on your zoom officer, your consultation of the habit, but ultimately it’s also taking the right kind of people.

And I think there’s also a path to join charging what you’re worth. And like, if it’s people who don’t want to work more in the short term, then I don’t really have too much to say as advice. But, you know, if you get to the situation where you have more people, then that’s the path to hiring out people that, to help you with this kind of stuff, hiring out an associate. I mean, maybe taking a vacation every once in a while, right?

Law clerks. I mean, are your friends, freelance lawyers? There’s a ton of these networks out there, you know, Locklear.Legal, Lawyer exchange. There’s so many opportunities to sort of like hand off that work to paralegals. Like if you can’t find a great one, hire up your legal agency and they’ll assign people to you and you don’t have to manage that person. Brilliant.

Right? Like there are all these solutions to help you get more work done and more that revenue on your bottom line, actually greater profit margins. But, the thing that’s exhausting you after being in this industry for a while, and you know, I had been in car repair now, here I am answering an intake, scheduling receptionist service industry, which the vast majority of the clients that I talk to are attorneys.

If you are feeling overwhelmed and like it’s too much work and you can’t possibly fathom, you know, taking on more cases, you don’t want to think about bringing on a partner or more staff, et cetera. My prediction is that is really all the other things outside of the legal work that are exhausting you.

So are you trying to do your own marketing? Are you trying to get to every call? Are you answering every email or have you outsourced some of that frontline to gate keepers? Do you have someone who’s a paralegal who’s helping you? Do you have a great marketing agency who is an expert that costs far less than the opportunity cost of your time?

There’s an econ major and you have to calculate where the exhaustion is coming from, and you may be fatigued as a lawyer, not because of legal work. Right? So that is something that’s really important to get to the root of. And you may actually really enjoy building a business or the practice, or you may really enjoy practicing law or being, you know, in court at trial, whatever the case may be, whatever it is.

Write down, what’s blocking you from doing more of that during your day. Then all the other things that you’re doing, and you really have to confront the assumptions that you end up making around what you’re necessary for. And that Eisenhower decision matrix comes to mind, right? Like what’s critical to do now to delegate.

Right. And I think that a lot of people think more is on their plate that only they can do then is really the case. And if you start handing it off, first of all, your processes and systems are far better documented because you can’t delegate it unless you’ve documented it to some extent. But it’s critical for the long-term growth of your firm and mental health and just happiness that you’ll experience when there’s not so much on your shoulders, because you think, you know, the onus is on me for everything I’m pinching pennies, and I’m going to be responsible for A through Z at my firm.

Nobody, if you look at your most ideal from that you could become, do you see the principal doing everything? The answer is never, the answer is never. So like think if that really highly successful person has managed to delegate. And I bet they’re not just citing things, willy nilly, blindly. So can you, right? So can you delegate things? That’s the way that like the happiest business owners operate.

And also not to mention too, like, even if it is something that you asked, I mean, I don’t know, I’ve never met someone who’s like, man, there’s nothing, I like more than answering a shot that goes to the site. But even if that happens the case, it’s just like, you have the switching costs too.

And like, you know what, we’ve kind of talked about it. I mean, I think we’ve kind of hinted towards it, but like, you know, the time to response is such a critical factor to be able to satisfy that in a way that’s going to maximize your opportunities with leads that are coming your way. You really have to have kind of continuous availability to just drop everything that the, you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the way to court or if you’re in the middle of a consultation with us, like a client or something like that.

If you’re not getting back to that person in five minutes, they’re calling the next person on the, on the Google list. Right.

I’ll tell you sort of like the customer service secret. If you’ve ever worked at a big company with a big customer support department, the most important thing to do is to respond.

You don’t have to solve it. You don’t have to have the sales consultation right there. So, so two things come to mind. One is you have 82% of potential clients say that, like they expect an instantaneous response to a service or a sales inquiry. Right. But the problem is like, you’re demanded to deliver an instant response, but leads are not always a good fit.

So you’re like great. I have to hop to, but only, you know, 40% are gonna, maybe 60% are gonna schedule a consultation with me. And then another half of that are gonna move forward. If I’ve got my marketing campaign pretty dialed in, well, why did I have all those calls? And, oh, when it comes to screening, by the way, I sort of know it when I see it.

That is actually the biggest problem where we see a lot of ownership still from the firm owner saying, I really need to talk to this person. I need to answer my own calls because I have my secret method recipe of asking them the questions. And it’s like, okay. Do write those questions down and give it to someone and just see, like, how did they do if they ask those same questions, sometimes it can be extremely effective to A.) Build more professionalism because you’re not answering your own phones and you want to look like, you know, more professional well-established from where the attorney doesn’t answer their own phones.

And secondly, like, you actually have something that’s scalable because if you were to get, for example, COVID, or you have to go to trial or someone’s out on maternity leave and the person you assigned to that, has their own special sauce. Maybe you have someone who’s doing that and they haven’t written it down.

What in God’s name are you going to do? Right. Like you have to have things documented so that other people, besides you, maybe you share in it, you don’t do all of it, can screen those people and then they schedule the consultation, but here’s the secret thing I’m getting back to with customer support in, in providing the instant response, you buy yourself time and you actually stop the search.

So if I am looking for a divorce and I contact family law attorney. And I have been divorced and I have contacted a family law attorney. So I know exactly what this process is. Basically, you know, you are going to stop looking as soon as you get in touch with affirm and they say, you know, either you’ve got a warm transfer and you talk to someone, right there. .

Fantastic. Or yeah, you have a scheduled consultation you’ve asked those questions. I’ve answered them as a lead. And you say, look, you know, are you, already separated? Do you have kids? Blah, blah, blah. How serious are you? Like you could even ask them like, Hey, how did you hear about us? And then B) How ready do you feel to hire an attorney?

Boom. Right? Like how great is that to ask, to say like, why, why should they not have to answer that question? They might say I’m a one out of 10 and you’re like, okay. You know, you’ll talk to the intake specialist or you’re a nine out of 10 and you’re like, I am on my way out. I have everything already filled out in all my forms. Can you help me look them over? And I need to get a divorce, blah, blah, blah. We need to separate our assets.

Boom, your intake that right. So uncontested say that, say the magic word, whatever it is, then you schedule the appointment and you’re like, having a great conversation. You have the same information every time because they’re using that system, that intake form that asks the same questions and gets sort of expected answers.

And in the meantime, between that first call and the scheduled consult, that person is just having such peace of mind and relief, a sense of relief and the Cleo report, Clear Legal Trends report talks about this too. When you are in contact with an attorney that there’s already this sort of like wall that comes down, the stress that, that comes down and you think, all right, I don’t have to keep hunting.

I got a guy, right. And that conversation will happen and it will proceed as it will proceed, but just answering and doing nothing else other than, steering that conversation right or wrong? Yes. You’re the lead. No, you’re not. We’re going to refer you or no, we’re not going to refer you to anyone because you’ve been through four lawyers.

Like that’s the decision point. It’s the response point and that’s where everything else can flow from there. And that’s in your control.

Yeah, this is actually really interesting to you. Just remind me of something. I’ve never shared this on the podcast before, but basically we have a couple it’s it’s interesting, cause you know, when we’re talking to clients and trying to help them out with their intake process, we have people that are like a pretty wide variety. So we had a situation where, and this can range from people that are paralegals or people that haven’t passed the bar, but we had a recent situation where we had a recent law grad who had been promoted to associate, and this was the person who was responsible for answering these calls. And we actually had huge problems because she was so excited to leverage her degree on these intake calls that she was completely messing up the sales process.

And like one of the pieces of feedback we get, sometimes it’s like, Oh, what’s going to happen if somebody asks a legal question, I’m going to get disbarred and all that stuff too, it’s like, you shouldn’t be answering any questions of that nature if you can avoid it on intro call too, because that’s just going to lead you in a position you should never, you shouldn’t tell anyone legal advice until you have them in a position where they can write a check for you.

Let me tell you something else. So I completely agree with that. I’m so glad that you brought it up and it brings back home the point that like you are in complete control of that conversation. And if that person is asking questions that are outside of that intake process, It is the job of the person who’s on the phone to steer them back to that process and say, you know, I really ask these questions for a reason.

We need to get this information. I can’t answer these things for you now. That’s what I’m trying to evaluate. If I can get you on the phone with the attorney and that’s the same thing, they also say, if you charge for consultation. Oh, why can’t you just help me figure out if I wanted to merge or, or if I want to pay for the consult, maybe it’s $300 or whatever it is. Can you tell me a little bit more before I put my money down? It’s like, you know, from your answers, it seems like you could be a good fit for the firm. We take cases like yours. We’ve had 20 years of experience, whatever it is. But we do an evaluation because our firm is selective and, you’ll be scheduled for a consult. We’ll review the information and you’ll get a confirmation the morning of it, that it will continue and we’ll charge your card at that time, whatever.

It’s really important that you maintain control. And so often. This happens actually at other times during the lawyer client conversation, right? So that’s lawyer client, but even posts or during work line conversations, think about billing. They’re pulling on your heartstrings. Again. They say, I can’t pay my bill. Can I pay 75% of my bill? You know, they have outstanding balances and you keep working for them and you let them take advantage. The point being, if you lay down the ground rules and you stick to them – I’m thinking about my new puppy and how I’m training this little guy – like if you laid on the ground rules early, I’ve got a 10 week puppy, but this applies to leads to you’re much happier later on that client or puppy behaves much better, later because they know the ground rules and you can refer back to them. And you said, look, I told you, you know, the, the payments due. I told you, we have a process when you work with our firm, you follow our process and you, you seem to agree to that you did in writing.

The biggest problem is if you let that client run the show in the beginning, then they’re going to think they were on the show as is understandable, the rest of the time.

Yeah, there’s also the other thing too. It’s like, if, if you’re taking that kind of a position from the jump, the absolute worst case scenario is you say no, or they say no, and then you’ve, you’ve lost yourself, a nightmare clients down the line.

So, you know, in theory, if you have these, these hurdles set up and, you know, you can obviously have a range of what those are gonna look like, but then you can think about a point where the people, you know, you might not get everyone, but a hundred percent of the people you are working with are going to be on board.

And that’s one of those things too. It’s like just strictly from, I guess a skills and talent acquisition perspective. Even if you were able to do this every single time with the level of accuracy, you’re not going to be answering calls all the time, right? It’s like, you know, you’re splitting your time with lawyering and running the business.

And like in a lot of the cases, too, even if the person isn’t the lawyer that you are, they’re a much better intake person than you are at the end of the day. That’s, that’s their job. It’s not yours.

Absolutely. And you should be, you know, sort of not siloed, but, specialized in your practice so that you can practice at the highest level of your law degree basically.

Right? So like, you don’t want to be spending your time doing admin work or messing around on Canva with social media graphics or whatever it is like. Sure. Maybe it’s fun, but is that actually what you should be doing to bring the most value to your firm? You’re a business owner now. Right. And, and, you know, I would also say with clients, make sure that, you know, the questions to ask too.

Bring in the best clients and then avoid those sort of troublemaker clients. If you get that gut feeling, right my feeling has always run, right? Like you’re getting that feeling for a reason, but also do exit interviews. So it’s critical that you are evaluating at the end of it, like was that client is happy as we expected to make them?

Are we happy with the fact that we accepted them as a client? Are they going to bring in other clients like, what’s the referral opportunity there? And what do we change about our marketing mix? Did we learn anything that we’re getting clients from a certain channels, certain referral partner, whatever advertising campaign, and we want to scale it up or roll it back because the clients who are coming through there are either a really good or not as good match for our firm. So if you’re not doing that, I think it’s important.

And the last thing I’ll say. Is, you know, around process for intake, there should also be sort of one line for someone to write in after that consultation. Like, do you get that sort of red flag feeling? Does this person sound to mandate? Are they complaining like crazy about every lawyer they’ve tried to work with in the past? You know, as Maya Angelo said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Right? Not, not like, believe them all later on when you’ve been trying, struggling to work with them. Believe them the first time and make a decision and move on. Yeah.

And I got a question too, as far as this kind of feedback loop. And then one of the things I definitely want to get into is just like, you know, you guys have such a wealth of data available as far as when somebody is dealing with, you know, maybe one channel, maybe a couple of channels, at what point do you guys recommend the clients you’re working with to determine whether to change things, whether it’s a script, whether it’s a channel, whether it’s an approach?

Well, I think that we’re very engineering heavy here, and we’re all about testing. So you never know what you’re missing unless you open up that opportunity, and a great example of that is chat. So there’s sort of two parts to your question and I’ll try and address both of them.

So one is the channels that you’re opening up for people to get in touch with you. Okay. And the other is how much are you iterating on the conversation flows that happen during those conversations? Right? The calls, chats, texts, whatever.

What all start out with saying is that if you have a website, you should absolutely be. Putting website chat on there and seeing what are those conversations? Are they a value don’t assume that your high net worth estate planning clients don’t want to chat in because you know, there are tons of people who are using this technology.

And do prefer it. And you’ll only know if you put it up there and see, does anyone engage? Right? What we see typically is that there’s one chat for every four calls. So, you know, how many calls you got today? You know, how many calls you probably got this week that are not spam or sales calls that are decent and relevant?

That is something that immediately can give you data that’s actionable. It also is great for content, by the way, because all the questions they ask are going to be the questions they put into Google to find your site or explore their problem. And you want to be writing on those. So that’s a pro tip there, but you also want to make sure that certain systems are set up to be open.

If you don’t even know that they are so commonly, we see your phone is ringing too many times before you hear it ring. And there’s wait and see, or you have business texting enabled on your voice phone system. And you know, you’ve never seen a business text. Where are they? You better go find out, right? Because someone’s texting you and they might write a review on Google that says, one-star, couldn’t get in touch with them texted and never heard back. Well shoot. Avoidable, right?

Now that second part of it is how much are you iterating? One of the things that we created last year, if I can keep track of time, don’t hold me to that. I think it was last year that we rolled out the chat funnel with AB testing. Basically the different steps of the questions you’ll ask a lead, or we will ask a lead through the chat sequence. So you start a website chat, you say, yes, I’m interested in estate planning and you know, yes, it’s me and my spouse are going to make this decision.

Do you have, you know, X, Y, or Z net worth, whatever it is, whatever questions you want, where do you live? Zip codes, state, doesn’t matter, whatever screening you’ve got to make sure this is interesting to you as a client. What’s the order of those questions. Are you asking hard questions first or, or hard questions later?

A lot of that actually. Is really interesting to see the conversion rates through the funnel and you can test and move and switch all these things and see what is the drop-off at each stage? And are you getting sort of premature drop-off early by asking a really hard question? We’re constantly looking at that with our clients and saying like, how do we understand and implement the sequence of the conversation to best align with your goal?

If you want to really, to come through, not going to be that many hard hitting questions. If you’ve got leads out the wazoo and everyone’s chatting with you, it’s going to be really hard to book a consultation. You need to jump through some hoops. Right. So it should be iterative and listen, it’s not going to be perfect from day one, but it will absolutely be better than letting them go to voicemail or hear dead air or get in touch with someone who takes a message and there’s a, post-it floating around in someone’s home office.

Yeah. So never too. I didn’t even get the chance to kind of talk about this, but like, you know, so many of these situations where it’s like new we’ve set up, there absolutely needs to be, you need to be available on any channel where clients want to contact you, but like, it’s really tough to get these things all centralized and that’ll be it up to a point for another episode.

Right? The last point is sort of like you need systems that work with your other systems. I know we were going to talk about this. Like does Smith connect to your CRM system, Slack, phone, your website host? Yes. All of the above. And like the whole point is you should pick the best programs for you and pick the providers that work with them because you know, software and solutions are modular right now. So, take advantage of that.

Yeah. And then, you know, I know you guys do a tremendous amount of education over on the site. So like, you know, if somebody wants to learn a bit more about this, like what’s the best kind of way to take a next step?

Right, so we’ve got actually sort of two sites, now. We’ve got Smith.AI and you can go to smith.ai to sign up. You can get a free consultation. We’ll talk about aligning with your business goals and your budget. We also have Academy, so it’s the Smith AI Academy. Academy.smith.ai. And that’s actually a banner on our website. If you listened to this soon, if not, you’ll see the big link in the global navigation at the top. Academy has a lot of expert videos around topics of marketing, lead conversion, and intake, business operations, everything from running better, Google ads to hiring outsourced bookkeepers specifically to law firms. So I hope you’ll check that out.

And then finally, if you are interested and I hope you’re interested in exploring how Smith AI can help you, because we really make a meaningful impact,. Check out the reviews online. And if you don’t believe me, the code for listeners here is LFGPod so L F G as in George, who is our head of agent operations, POD LFG pod a a hundred dollars off for your first month.

All right. Awesome. And then we’ll have that in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in, yeah, Maddy this hour absolutely flew by. So we’ll have to have you back on, but thank you so much for taking the time to speak to our listeners. Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here.

Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. For show notes, free resources and more head on over to casefuel.com/podcast.

Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.