Consumer Bankruptcy Journal Spring 2016 | Page 13

6 STEPS TO IMPROVE CONVERSION be sure your team is following up with every lead is to track every single one of them religiously! You must have a dedicated system for lead tracking and it must be consistently used. We saw this last week when we secret shopped a client’s office. His top paralegal did a great job answering the phone, answered several of our questions, build rapport with us, but never asked for our name, phone number or email address! It would literally be impossible for our client to follow up with that lead since his paralegal never obtained any of our contact information. This happens all the time! A good lead tracking system should: · Capture a prospect’s contact information. · Ask a few basic qualifying questions to see if the firm might be interested. · Track conversion rates: How many of these leads turn into appointments? How many of your appointments show up? How many sign up at the initial consultation? How many sign up afterward? · Track the disposition of the lead: Who was responsible for follow up? Did it convert? If it was a referral was the referral source thanked? · Set the appointment. By tracking your leads, you can discover the disconnects in your intake process and fix them. 6.  You must have software to manage leads. Once you are consistently getting more than 30 or more leads per month it becomes difficult to keep track of all of them manually, especially if your Intake Specialist is making all the follow up phone calls, text messages, and emails. That’s when automated software can make a huge improvement in your conversion rates. Most of the small firms we consult with have a finite amount of time to dedicate to legal marketing, so having an automated marketing software system in place that nurtures a lead along the path to becoming a client is a game changer. Consider these facts: · Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Gartner Research) · Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (ANNUITAS Group) · Companies that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a 33% less cost than non-nurtured leads. (Forrester Research) First, you should identify the right software to assist in automating the lead management process.  The more you can automate this, the lower your costs will be.  Tracking software is readily available at a relatively low cost, compared to the expense of doing it manually. Good clienttracking software can be shared across multiple computers and can generate easily interpreted reports for the firm’s decision makers. The automated software we implement for bankruptcy firms does all of this a