Inner Architect Media had been contracted to review the intake process for a new law firm client. The meeting was going well when my partner emphasized the point that, “CRM campaign management is one of the foundations of your entire marketing program.“

Almost spontaneously the client asked, “But what does that really mean?

I offered the beginnings of an explanation, “CRM stands for customer relationship management. A CRM looks at Campaign Management as the planning, implementing, and gathering of results of marketing activities related to a specific goal.”

That’s when things got real.

“You’ve reviewed our intake process, are we doing something wrong?”, the client asked.

My partner, an intake processes expert, gently and frankly offered her assessment.

From what we’ve found, you don’t have a digital repository (CRM) where your data can be collected and recorded. Your collection process for each sales channel is made up of  low tech Post-it Notes, loose handwritten entries, emails, voicemails, Word documents, and pdfs. Much of what your team is collecting can be lost. Without a CRM,  you don’t have an organized action plan to collect and follow up on the data and leads your marketing campaigns are producing.

The rest of the meeting was a kind informational exchange, but our new client was very concerned. We assured her we would deliver a plan that would organize and bring order to her intake process.

Step One: CRM Build

As we explained to the client, the first step to establishing a true return-on-investment (ROI) for all marketing campaigns is to build a robust CRM. We then outlined the role and benefits of their soon-to-be built CRM.

With no digital record keeping in place, we designed the new CRM to act as the home for all of the client’s marketing intelligence originating from each sales channel. The main benefit? It is here where the client’s data is stored and leveraged, not lost.

Design, Setup & Customization

The client played an important role in helping us to determine what data fields would be necessary to capture, track, and analyze over time. Since every law practice is different, the details that weave through firms’ cases are different. Once data fields were defined, we designed a process for capturing or integrating the data.

  • Custom modules including Leads, Intake, Clients, and Cases were established.
  • Examples of the fields chosen for their legal practice included case type, deadlines, and referring sources.
  • Integration with other tools like web forms, email, and call tracking were set up to help feed the sales channel data to the CRM.
  • Productivity and accountability were baked in using automation rules for task reminders, follow-ups, and notifications.
  • The final step was to finish with a data migration phase.

CRM Reporting

Our client’s concerns for transparency were valid and based on their dealings in the past with an agency that didn’t communicate well. We met with the firm’s internal team to review the reporting dashboard build. Reporting is a key to evaluating progress and is a welcome safeguard. Here are a few examples of reporting tools we created for the client.

  • Lead source reporting
  • Intake conversion rates
  • Custom reporting
  • Custom views by user/role

Step Two: CRM Campaign Management

The final pieces of the CRM were finished. Step two, the planning of their CRM campaign management strategies, began with a review of available client lead data.

Lead Scoring

Systems for scoring lead quality provide a roadmap for developing a lead follow-up plan as well as a vehicle for campaign optimization. Let’s take, for example, a lead scoring system of A, B, and C, with A being a top-quality lead. For an A lead, we know that there was something about one or more of the unique attributes of the lead that was a winning factor. This is the key to optimizing campaign performance. We collaborated with our client to come to a final determination of which type of attributes were good benchmarks for each lead grade.

CRM Campaign Management: Historical Baseline

Armed with a small collection of data, we began to build a baseline (starting point) for the client’s marketing programs. This data baseline is the starting point from which all present and future marketing campaigns can be evaluated for effectiveness. With the CRM set up and capturing data, the client’s marketing data will be organized and available on demand for firm decisionmakers and marketing stakeholders to view.

Analysis

Our client wanted to be able to produce a monthly report for its partners and intake team. Here are the templates we created and trained their intake team to produce on their own:

  • Source and channel for each signed case
  • Source and channel for each lead
  • Status of open, closed and referred leads
  • Summarization of unqualified leads

With this intelligence in hand, we were able to help the firm to recognize lead acquisition trends and potential obstacles to lead conversion.

CRM Campaign Management: Testing

Data analysis provides a path for testing with an intent towards improving results. The  standard strategies in how we approach our work include testing of ad copy, landing page copy, bidding strategies, audience targeting, and keywords. As the client’s CRM matures, we are able to conduct this testing using past performance as a guide. This intelligence will likely influence client goals and impact ROI.

Sales Channels

The sales channels displayed (below) are those Inner Architect has found to be most impactful for generating cases. After reviewing these channels, the client agreed to add Live Chat to their mix. Data from each sales channel is recorded in the CRM database. (Sales channels are not listed in order of priority)

Incoming Phone Calls

This channel may be the most impactful on brand success and reputation of all the sales channels.  It’s based upon the experience the caller has with the person handling your phone calls. With the power to land new clients in real-time or completely alienate them, our client needed to fine tune their processes.  Inexplicably, this channel, and the resources assigned to it, is often undervalued by firms.

Live Chat Leads

The most cost-effective sales channel available. Inner Architect’s Live Chat service utilizes human chat agents not bots. Agents are trained to listen and capture contact information. Agents will never communicate legal advice or anything other than building rapport with the interested party in an effort to gather and record contact information. Our client was willing to integrate this channel into their sales funnel and has been happy with the low acquisition cost per case and the overall ROI.

Website Form Submissions

Along with capturing contact information, the website form can capture marketing data in fields that are hidden from the prospective client. People that take the time to fill out a website form are motivated.

Email Leads

Like form submissions, people willing to write email correspondence are motivated to find answers. This channel provides a layer of privacy until the prospective client is ready to engage completely.

CRM Campaign Management: Data Output from CRM

The following are the benefits and goals we strive to achieve when analyzing the data from our client’s CRM.

  • ROI measurement: As explained, this is the goal of analyzing sales channel data, testing, and implementing intelligence from the data.
  • Lead attention assurance: This is the key to the lead follow-up plan we designed for the client. By understanding the quality of each lead, resources can be correctly assigned. This increases efficiency, is a more focused targeting strategy, and provides cost savings.
  • More leads and revenue: Maintaining lead quality and lead status data in the client’s new  CRM, and giving their decisionmakers access to it, enables data gathered after the lead was captured to be optimized for marketing efforts.
  • No risk of losing leads: By introducing technology into the lead generation process, the incidences of lost lead information should decrease significantly. The loss of Information lost by Post-it Notes, paper tablets, or voicemails can be eliminated.

Caveat Emptor or What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Buyer beware! The simple but powerful Latin phrase is applicable in marketing. No matter how sophisticated and complete a firm’s marketing program is, there is one concept that can derail everything beyond the absence of a CRM: Your response time.

In today’s information-rich culture, consumers expect instantaneous answers to their questions. In a seasoned Harvard study (The Short Life of Online Sales Leads), the biggest challenge facing professional services firms is responding to leads fast enough.  That challenge remains the biggest opportunity for firms that are prepared to connect with prospective clients rapidly.

Inner Architect Media was commissioned to provide a market analysis to a long-time law firm client. The assignment was to test the firm’s phone response times vs. the phone response times of their biggest competitors.

The results were a wake-up call. The firm’s biggest competitors had response rates from immediate real-time responses up to a two-hour response window.

Consumers don’t have to wait for answers. If your firm doesn’t act immediately, the prospective client will simply move on to the next firm and repeat the process until they are provided with the information they seek.

If client acquisition is a numbers game, then the basis of those numbers begins with your rapid response to incoming leads from all your client acquisition channels.  By instituting this mandate, our client was able to reverse the negative perception and land more new clients.

Questions to Discuss

Our work with our new client uncovered many questions that were never asked or went unanswered. Is your website converting leads to new clients? Are your response times capturing new opportunities? Does your firm have the processes in place to capture data, analyze the data, and answer the question: What is the ROI of our marketing efforts? When your firm can answer these questions, then you can identify what is working, what is not, and how to proceed.

Author’s Note

Dean Guadagni and Susan Hanshaw co-wrote this blog article using Inner Architect client experiences, data, and analysis to provide a snapshot of our work.