By improving your shared office space New York law firm’s conversion rate, you can quickly increase revenues without spending a dime on additional marketing campaigns.
I listened in on a webinar called 12 Critical Numbers That Determine The Success Or Failure Of Your Law Firm. It was given by Stephen Fairley, one of the nation’s legal marketing consultants and the president of The Rainmaker Institute.
If you get the chance to take any of his classes, including the “Rainmaker Retreat”, they’re great.
In the Webinar, Stephen advised that there are several key performance indicators every lawyer should know about their practice and one of the more important is your conversion rate.
An attorney’s conversion rate is the percentage of leads that become paying clients.
According to Fairley, if you have a conversation about conversion rate with attorneys, most of them will believe they are “good” or “excellent” at turning leads into clients. And according to Fairley, nearly all of them are WRONG!
Attorneys have a skewed perception of conversion rate.
Often, attorneys believe that conversion rate is calculated based on the prospective clients that meet the attorney for a pitch meeting.
However, according to Fairley, attorneys misunderstand the definition of a lead, and by doing so, mistakenly believe that they are performing well from a marketing perspective.
What is a lead?
A lead is not just the prospective client that shows up to your office for a meeting. “Of course you should be closing a high percentage of those leads, everyone does”, says Fairley.
A lead is anyone who has interacted with your firm (online and off) that has not previously done business with you before. According to Fairley lead conversion for attorneys has five distinct stages, and the prospective client meeting signing up is the fourth one.
If you think of the sales process as a funnel, leads come into the funnel at the top and come out the bottom as either clients or lost opportunities. To get leads through the sales funnel and convert them to clients, your firm must “nurture” the lead through all the stages of the funnel.
Lead nurturing is an entire science, and this is not what this article is about. No one is better at teaching lead nurturing than Hubspot, and if you’re interested, I recommend that you check out some of their free resources.
As self-employed practitioners, we’re always trying to find ways to drum up more business. For a lot of us, our first instinct is to throw money at the problem. Take out an ad campaign. Build a website. Go to a conference. Sponsor a networking event in your NYC shared office space.
You can increase revenues without spending additional capital!
Yet for most of us, the fastest and least expensive way to increase revenues is to simply improve the conversion rate for our existing lead flow. By making the sales process more efficient, and converting a greater number of the leads that your firm is already getting, you can increase revenues without spending a dollar on an additional marketing campaign.
Of course, if you choose to make a marketing spend, your return on investment will only be that much more improved with greater lead conversion efficiency.
Fairley recommends that attorneys look at every aspect of their sales process. The first step is to create a system for keeping track of every lead that comes into the firm. At Law Firm Suites, we use Active Campaign, but you can just use a simple spreadsheet. The second step is looking at every interaction that the lead has with your firm (including your staff), and putting standardized procedures in place so leads are followed up with consistently.
Finally, Fairley recommends that all leads get contacted within 5-minutes of their initial contact with the firm (typically an online contact). Fairley recommends that this task is assigned to a trusted staff member. If you do not have the luxury of staff, a virtual assistant would do.
The idea is to qualify the lead and get them into the office for a meeting with the attorney.
Fairley recommends that this responsibility is NEVER given to an attorney. First, their time is too valuable, second, it’s not in an attorney’s nature to do it consistently.
