Boost Your Law Firm’s Success by Streamlining Client Intake

Law Firm Growth Podcast Episode 65: Why Initial Responsiveness is Critical for Law Firms with Maddy Martin

Narrator: [00:00:00] 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.

Jan Roos: 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 square by SOPs, and that's because that enables them to focus on new things without stuff falling apart.

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Jan Roos: I'm your host as always, Jan Roos. And I am here with Maddie 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, so thank you for coming here.

Maddy Martin: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Jan Roos: Okay. So I wanted to start something out, which I found out that was really interesting, which we 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.

Jan Roos: I know prior to Smith that AI, you had some really. Cool, interesting startup marketing stuff. So I was just curious, like what ended up attracting you to going into the intake space after your background in the startup world?

Maddy Martin: Yeah that's great. It's a long story. We don't even have enough time for me [00:02:00] to tell you all the things I've navigated throughout my career, but basically econ major went to culinary school after graduating.

Maddy Martin: 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 food 52. They have done incredibly well over the last decade or so I connected with them. I was an early recipe tester.

Maddy Martin: 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, a hundred thousand page views in one go.

Maddy Martin: So that was an exciting time. And then I, 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 [00:03:00] City office that housed food 52. I encourage anyone listening to, to know thyself, right?

Maddy Martin: 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. So I ended up getting connected through AngelList, if anyone knows AngelList, cold sort of interview process with Art Agarwal, who was running your mechanic. And they were, they had proven their concept.

Maddy Martin: 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.

Maddy Martin: Like it was everything under the sun marketing [00:04:00] and everything that I didn't learn at food 52, I learned there. And under great leadership we went through series a series B. It was, pretty sophisticated startup by the time that I. there. And what we did th Not only do we have all these ads, extremely long tail for any, folks who are listening, you can only imagine what the AdWords account looked like when it was Honda civic 2012 timing belt replacement, San Jose, right?

Maddy Martin: We'll get how many variables are in there. And we realized that was actually going to be part of our content strategy. So we built the biggest car repair advice site, basically online, 25, 000 articles. Answered Q and a of the most common questions for the 2, 200 makes and models over about 18 months.

Maddy Martin: And that took a really large team. I really had to step up to the plate and manage everything myself brought on [00:05:00] editors and illustrators and things I had never done before. And at the end of the day, that brought it a ton of traffic. It complimented our ad strategy. It really introduced people to your mechanic.

Maddy Martin: If you think about who your competitors are in any market that you're in, you have to identify like. What are the gaps in 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, cause we're just going through the coronavirus pandemic, but we all remember what that was like.

Maddy Martin: You pass by the pizza shop, you pass by the Jiffy lube. And we realized like. We need to be more discovered than just when someone needs that timing belt replacement that break, 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 it must be reputable, turns out [00:06:00] they weren't such good service providers and many people are afraid of bringing their car in.

Maddy Martin: 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, which we could have done, we really R O an O Took a deep look at an approach into content, and that worked very well for us.

Maddy Martin: So a lot of partnerships there. There was a B to B 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, been thrown into the defense so many times that my confidence level at this point in my career was really high.

Maddy Martin: And I was like, look, I pretty much feel like I can do anything that you throw at me. I went from food and recipes to car repair. You've got receptionists. Cool. I get [00:07:00] it. Like small business owners, just like those mechanics who were posting on Craigslist to get jobs before we started booking them through the engine.

Maddy Martin: That was your mechanic, small business owners that we serve at Smith AI. They are similarly in need of strategic partners and vendors and in 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.

Maddy Martin: And those were things that married perfectly with a flexible month to month plan with affordable services with plug and play solutions that like you don't have to become an expert. And probably didn't go to business school for a reason, right? You went to law school, you went to. Whatever it is.

Maddy Martin: We have a number of clients in different verticals, [00:08:00] 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.

Maddy Martin: It's as simple as that.

Jan Roos: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I find interesting about this. And one of the things is that, 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 this.

Jan Roos: Their way out of a problem, but with the absolute insane deaths that when, 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 lead that just filled out a form to, a consultation that's booked in your calendar.

Jan Roos: And it's interesting that's where you ended up winding up. Cause it's a similar trajectory that we ended up finding as well. Cause it was like, we used to focus a ton on the marketing stuff too, but at the end of the day, we couldn't make somebody be a success if they [00:09:00] weren't calling the damn leads that are coming in.

Jan Roos: Right.

Maddy Martin: 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 Clio report it's Very simple. Two thirds of potential clients base their decision to hire on your initial responsiveness.

Maddy Martin: And during COVID we've seen, 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.

Maddy Martin: 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 [00:10:00] I find this business?

Maddy Martin: 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, a few years ago when people started realizing someone's texting their business number, they better figure out where those texts are going to.

Maddy Martin: 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.

Maddy Martin: 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?

Maddy Martin: Who's the best firm to go with? [00:11:00] 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.

Maddy Martin: 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.

Jan Roos: Yeah. It's interesting too. Like I find this is a super consistent pattern with the people that we're running into for running marketing stuff.

Jan Roos: It's I think there's a lot of bad habits that end up getting instilled as far as intake practices, just because people are used to referrals and you got to think about it. I was actually, Taking a training for our team internally. I was like, this is a situation you graduate law school, you go to the big firm, at some point you want us to, you decide the gigs [00:12:00] up and everyone's starting on day one with referrals.

Jan Roos: So that's usually the situation, but unfortunately that's the thing you don't have competition with the referral, it's not you versus the next person on the, in the Google search results page, it's you who they know that, their brother, friend, cousin, whatever can recommend you, or they can roll the dice.

Jan Roos: So I think the thing that a lot of people have to realize is that getting the stuff down is absolutely key. If you don't want to be at the mercy of other people, happening to bring your name up when you're in the car, when you're in a conversation that you're not in the room. And so it's the key to having these firms that can predict anything, whether it's, NOLO, whether it's webinars, whether it's SEO, whether it's, pay per click, it's you have to figure out a way to close that gap.

Maddy Martin: You have to close the gap and let me tell you, actually, it's really a big green space for you because 39 percent of lawyers are letting calls from potential clients go to voicemail. 64 percent never responded to the potential client's outreach. What does that tell you? To me, It [00:13:00] says, wow, there's a lot of people who are not doing this.

Maddy Martin: 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 and new client. I've got, a better, bigger book of business, and I can be more choosy because the more leads that come through doesn't mean, Oh, I'm going to sleep less.

Maddy Martin: I'm going to have too much work. I don't even want that. Natty, don't tell me I can have more work. No, 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 fit.

Maddy Martin: 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 bigger firm, you want the right clients and you want to control your destiny.

Jan Roos: Yeah, that actually, you're bringing something up that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is like basically this phenomenon of the door [00:14:00] lawyer, right?

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

Jan Roos: 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. On your zoom office or consultation to have it, but ultimately it's also taking the right kind of people.

Jan Roos: And I think there's also a path to charging what you're worth. And 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, if you get to the situation where you have more people, then that's the path to hiring out people to help you with this kind of stuff, hiring out an associate, maybe taking vacation every once in a while.

Jan Roos: Right.

Maddy Martin: Law clerks, are your friend, freelance lawyers, there's a ton of these networks out there, lawclerk. legal, lawyer exchange, there's so many [00:15:00] opportunities to like hand off that work, paralegals, like if you can't find a great one, hire a paralegal agency and they'll assign people to you and you don't have to manage that person.

Maddy Martin: Brilliant, right? Yeah. There are all these solutions to help you get more work done and more of that revenue on your bottom line, actually with greater profit margins. But the thing that's exhausting you after being in this industry for a while, and I haven't 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.

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

Maddy Martin: So are you trying to do your own marketing? Are you trying to get to [00:16:00] every call? Are you answering every email? Or have you outsourced to other people? Some of that frontline, your gatekeepers. 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?

Maddy Martin: 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 the business of the practice, or you may really enjoy, practicing law or being, 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.

Maddy Martin: 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 [00:17:00] to mind, right? What's critical to do now to delegate, right? And and I think that a lot of people think more is on their plate that only they can do than is really the case.

Maddy Martin: 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, 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.

Maddy Martin: Nobody, if you look at your. Most ideal firm that you could become. Do you see the principal doing everything? The answer is never. So think if that really highly successful person has managed to delegate, and I bet they're [00:18:00] not just signing things willy nilly blindly. So can you write, so can you delegate things?

Maddy Martin: That's the way that like. The happiest business owners operate.

Jan Roos: And also not to mention too even if it is something that you apps, I don't know, I've never met somebody who's man, there's nothing I like more than answering a chat that comes to the site. But even if that happens, the case, it's just you have the switching costs too.

Jan Roos: And what we've talked about, I think we've hinted towards it, but 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 at the, it doesn't matter if you're on the way to quarter, if you're in the middle of a consultation with 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 Google list, right?

Maddy Martin: I'll tell you 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 [00:19:00] consultation right there. So two things come to mind. One is, 82 percent of potential clients say that like they expect an instantaneous response to a service or a sales inquiry.

Maddy Martin: 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, 40 percent are going to, maybe 60 percent are going to schedule a consultation with me. And then another, half of that are going to move forward.

Maddy Martin: If I've got my marketing campaign pretty dialed in. Why did I have all those calls? And oh, when it comes to screening, by the way, I 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.

Maddy Martin: I need to answer my own calls because I have my, secret method recipe of asking them the questions. And it's dude, write those questions down and give it to someone and just see like, how did they do? If they ask those [00:20:00] same questions, sometimes it can be extremely effective to a build more professionalism because you're not.

Maddy Martin: Answering your own phones and you want to look like, more professional, established firm 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.

Maddy Martin: 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? 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.

Maddy Martin: But here's the secret thing I'm getting back to with customer support. In providing that instant response, you buy yourself time and you actually stop the search. So if I am looking for a divorce and I contact a family law attorney, And I have been divorced and I [00:21:00] have contacted a family law attorney.

Maddy Martin: So I know exactly what this process is. Basically, you are going to stop looking as soon as you get in touch with a firm and they say, either you've got a warm transfer, you talk to someone right there. Fantastic. Or you have a scheduled consultation. You've asked them. Those questions I've answered them as the lead and you say, look, are you already separated?

Maddy Martin: Do you have kids? Blah, blah, blah. How serious are you? You could even ask them like, A, how did you hear about us? And then B, how ready do you feel to hire an attorney? Boom. Like how great is that to ask to say, like 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'll talk to the intake specialist or you're a nine out of 10.

Maddy Martin: And you're like, I am on my way out. I have everything already filled out on 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. You're going to take that. So [00:22:00] uncontested say that say the magic word, whatever it is. Then you schedule the appointment and you're like having a great conversation.

Maddy Martin: You have the same information every time because you're using that system, that intake form that asks the same questions and gets 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 in the Cleo report, Cleo legal trends report talks about this too.

Maddy Martin: When you are in contact with an attorney, that there's already this sort of like wall that comes down, the stress that comes down and you think, all right, I don't have to keep hunting. I got a guy. 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.

Maddy Martin: Yes, you're a good lead. No, [00:23:00] 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.

Jan Roos: Yeah. This is actually really interesting to you.

Jan Roos: Just remind me of something. I've never shared this on the podcast before, but basically we have a couple of it's interesting. Cause 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 could range from people that are paralegals or people that haven't passed the bar, but we had a recent situation.

Jan Roos: Where we had a recent law grad who'd 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 one of the pieces of feedback we get sometimes it's Oh, what's going to happen if somebody asks a legal question, I'm going to get disbarred and all that stuff too.

Jan Roos: It's you shouldn't be answering any questions of that nature. If you can avoid it on an intro call too, because. That's just going to [00:24:00] lead you to 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

Maddy Martin: tell you something else.

Maddy Martin: 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, I really asked these questions for a reason we need to get this information I can't answer these things for you now.

Maddy Martin: 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 that you'll also say if you charge for consultation. Oh, why can't you just help me figure out if I want to charge or if I want to pay sorry. For the consult, maybe it's 300 or whatever it is.

Maddy Martin: Can't you tell me a little bit more before I put my money down? It's 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. [00:25:00] But we do an evaluation because our firm is selective and you'll be scheduled for a consult.

Maddy Martin: We'll review the information and you'll get a confirmation in the morning of that, 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 happened actually at other times during the lawyer client conversation, right?

Maddy Martin: So that's pre lawyer client, but even post or during lawyer client conversations, think about billing. They're pulling on your heartstrings again. They say, I can't pay my bill. Can I pay 75 percent of my bill? They have outstanding balances and you keep working for them and you let them take advantage.

Maddy Martin: 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. If you laid on the ground rules early, I've got a 10 week puppy, but this applies to leads too. You're much. happier later on. And that client or puppy became much better [00:26:00] later because they know the ground rules and you can refer back to them.

Maddy Martin: You said, look, I told you, the payments do, I told you, we have a process when you work with our firm, you follow our process and 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 run the show as is understandable the rest of the time.

Jan Roos: Yeah. There's also the other thing too. It's 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 lost yourself a nightmare clients down the line. In theory, if you have these hurdles set up and, you can obviously have a range of what those are going to look like, but then you can think about a point where the people, you might not get everyone, but a hundred percent of the people you are working with, they're going to be on board.

Jan Roos: And that's one of those things too. It's like just strictly from, 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 you're [00:27:00] spending your time with lawyering and running the business.

Jan Roos: And like a lot of 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 their job. It's not yours.

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

Maddy Martin: So 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 sure. Maybe it's fun, but is that actually what you should be doing to bring the most value to your firm, your business owner now? And, I would also say with clients, make sure that, the questions to ask to.

Maddy Martin: Bring in the best clients and then avoid those sort of troublemaker clients. If you get that gut feeling, my, my feeling is 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. Was that client as happy as we expected to make them?

Maddy Martin: Are we happy [00:28:00] with the fact that we accepted them as a client? Are they going to bring in other clients? 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 or 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.

Maddy Martin: So if you're not doing that, I think it's important. And the last thing I'll say is, around process for intake, there should also be one line for someone to write in after that consultation. Do you get that sort of red flag feeling? It does this person sound demanding? Are they complaining like crazy about every lawyer they've tried to work with in the past?

Maddy Martin: As Maya Angelou said, like when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Not believe them. Oh, later on when you've been trying, struggling to work with them, believe them the first time and make a decision and move on.

Jan Roos: Yeah. And I got a question too, as far as this kind of feedback [00:29:00] loop thing.

Jan Roos: And then one of the things I definitely want to get into is just you guys have such a wealth of data available as far as when somebody is dealing with, maybe one channel, maybe a couple of channels. At what point do you guys recommend the clients that 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.

Maddy Martin: I think that we're very 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 I'll, there's 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.

Maddy Martin: Yeah. 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 I'll 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?

Maddy Martin: Are they of value? [00:30:00] Don't assume that your high net worth estate planning clients don't want to chat in because, 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.

Maddy Martin: 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. It'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.

Maddy Martin: 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 latency, or you have business texting enabled on your VoIP [00:31:00] phone system.

Maddy Martin: And, 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. Shoot, avoidable, right? Now, the second part of it is how much are you iterating?

Maddy Martin: 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.

Maddy Martin: You say, yes, I'm interested in estate planning. And yes, it's me and my spouse. We're going to make this decision. Do you have, X, Y, or Z net worth, whatever it is, whatever questions you want, where do you live? SIP code state doesn't matter, whatever screening you've got to make sure this is interesting to you as a client.

Maddy Martin: What's the order of those questions? Are you asking hard questions first or hard questions [00:32:00] 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 premature drop off early by asking a really hard question?

Maddy Martin: We're constantly looking at that with our clients and saying, like, how do we understand and implement the, this, the sequence of the conversation to best align with your goal? If you want every lead 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.

Maddy Martin: You need to jump through some hoops. 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.

Jan Roos: So never to, I didn't even get a chance to talk about this, [00:33:00] but so many of these situations where it's like, we've set up, it absolutely needs to be, you need to be available on a channel where clients want to contact you. But it's really tough to get these things all centralized and that'll be an episode.

Jan Roos: Oh yeah. A point for another episode.

Maddy Martin: The last point is you need systems that work with your other systems. I know we were going to talk about this. Does Smithia connect to your CRM to see. 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 have software and solutions are modular right now.

Maddy Martin: So take advantage of that.

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

Maddy Martin: So we've got actually two sites now.

Maddy Martin: We've got Smith ai, 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 do [00:34:00] smith.ai. And that's actually a banner on our website if you listen to this soon. If not, you'll see the big.

Maddy Martin: 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. 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.

Maddy Martin: Check out the reviews online. If you don't believe me, the code for listeners here is LFG pod. So L F G as in George, who's our head of agent operations pod, LFG pod 100 off for your first month.

Jan Roos: All right. Awesome. And then we'll have that in the show notes for anyone who's interested. And yeah, Maddie, 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.

Narrator: Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here. [00:35:00] 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.

Bye.