Join Seth & Jay as they talk INTAKE and how to score your leads and how to categorize them when you can’t get them to return a call. Seth and Jay talk more about promoting in house or hiring outside: which choice is better?
Hello, hello and welcome to another edition of Maximum Growth Live. I’m one of your hosts Jay Ruane, CEO of FirmFlex, founder of the Criminal Mastermind, as well as managing partner of Ruane attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm here in Connecticut. With me as always down there, DC, Maryland, Virginia, the “Delmarva Peninsula,” Seth J Price, what’s the J for, Josephat?
It’s actually J-A-Y, Jay.
Is it really? See, look at this. I’ve known you for what, like 15 years and I’m actually… so it’s the Jay and Jay show.
You know, I never thought of it, you know, all these years. I’ve never really connected it to me. That’s why we’re buddies. A piece of you and me.
Exactly. But anyway, if you don’t know my man Jay Price over there, S J Price, that’s what I’m gonna start calling him. He is the founder and one of the two founders of Price Benowitz that DC Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, powerhouse law firm: family law, criminal law, PI, just a powerhouse with 40+ lawyers, I mean, just gone from a guy in a basement with a cell phone and his law school buddy, to one of the most powerful firms in DC that actually deals with real people and real people problems, like all of us do here at Max Growth Live. He also helped found the wonderful group, BluShark Digital, I’m one of their clients, SEO for law firms. But Seth, as always, it’s another week, it’s Thursday, how’s your week going this week?
No, it’s going much better. And the reason it’s going much better is our intake took a huge hit in Q1. You know, it’s a constantly evolving process. We talk a lot of about intake. And some people call it sales intake, what have you, understanding we have two different worlds watching and I live in both of them, right? We have the contingency world, the PI, med mal, worker’s comp, where you don’t need money, or I’ll call fee for service. We looked at numbers and our numbers of phone calls answered, I always had an answering service as backup in case we didn’t get to a call. And the numbers just slipped. And it was a wake up call, our numbers were okay. But our RPI numbers, which are one of the areas we really wanted to grow the firm, were solidly mediocre, like what’s going on. We realized quickly, the person we had at the top of our intake pyramid was not doing right by us, it was really problematic. Something that I’ve seen before. Look, I can tell a different story next week about a different department where somebody who was one of my favorites that I’ve dined with with my family personally, has a personal family situation and just really checks out. So this guy was there, engaged to our face, which is not the first time this has happened, but not really managing a team. Again, not to go off. But like one of the things that we were told is we always promote from within, and assume that the person who did it really well, subsequently intake, could manage intake, not always the case, we pivoted to somebody who had been a deputy who was disenfranchised by the person that she had to deal with, had left, or went part time, brought her back full time. And good news is things are humming, right, the difference of a person at the top, huge difference.
Well, and that’s something I want to talk to you about. And you know, I know we have a couple topics for today. But this brings up a good point, promoting from within is always a good idea if it’s possible. But how do you deal with, and this may be an issue where you could bring some knowledge to us from both Price Benowitz and from the BluShark perspective, how do you deal with promoting somebody not necessarily based on seniority, but on talent level? Because I can see an instance where someone who’s been doing something for three or four years thinks that they are the rightful heir apparent, but somebody who’s only been there for six months or a year is a star or is better suited for that role.
My head is exploding with different perspectives. The answer is, look, the first thing we do is we look from within, we want to give opportunity, we want it to be there. I think that I probably put a little too rose colored glasses on that. Stories that I’ve heard, a person from a large firm I just was in a meeting with a couple of weeks ago, they actually had somebody who could have been promoted to a more senior position, but instead kept them in the existing position, gave them the money as if they were promoted to keep them there and keep them happy, but then did a national search to bring in the right person at a senior leadership role. That’s one way. I’ll tell you my war story, one of the greatest moves I’ve ever made. Don’t try this at home kids. But we had a woman running the then Price Benowitz marketing department under me, who was fine on substance, but terrible on leadership, god awful. And there was this young intern now, second third year junior marketing associate who was a rockstar to be and I’m like, Hey, he’s not senior. And we’re gonna, what are we gonna do? It’s like a Seinfeld episode. Everything comes down to Seinfeld, when there was a couple that was dating and broke up and Jerry and Elaine each wanted to date the other person. So what I did here is, could I do, or the roommates switcheroo, maybe closer to that episode.
You know, my college roommate did that? He did the roommate switcheroo.
It’s not easy… and probably does not end well… it did not end well. But with all that said and done, I was able to keep the person who was there in management, paid them the same amount, gave him a finite task promoted. Now, President David Breton into that managerial role, and the rest is history. So when done right, it’s magical. But the whole reason I bring this up, and the reason why I think this is so important. I got a call from the Law Man yesterday, I don’t get a lot of calls from the Law Man, just you know, just wanting to chit chat. And he’s like, Okay, I got a question for you. And the question is, how do you account for when you’re trying to look at intake? So to know there’s a problem, many ways you do it, look at your revenue, you could look at signed cases, but very often, you can’t tell, is there a dip in the market, right? Oh, they’re not making the arrest this week in Connecticut, like, is that the issue? Or is your intake shoring up? And how do you know? Right? So what he was asking was, there’s a category of things, you know, what’s a real case, they’ve spoken to either your intake person, you’re dragging in certain instances, you’re a lawyer, and you know, whether or not you got that case, and you can very much say, got it, was rejected or ghosted, and it disappeared. But the question is, what happens if you never make that contact? Somebody sends you a lead, you’ve no idea what’s there. And Bill was struggling with a couple of different issues and I’m probably not doing it full justice. But the idea first is, does this need to be accounted for with another category, which is, you know, in our world I hate the term, but pending initial, is there something where you haven’t yet made contact with it, because that pending initial, if it’s indicative of not calling back fast enough, those things go stale quickly, you may never speak to them, a certain amount of spam calls or spam numbers or people that had a thought overnight, but by morning, they’re not hiring an attorney, whatever it is. But your thoughts on what categories at a basic level, at a fundamental level, what categories of intake do you want to see tracked? And which ones, because the point that I made to Bill is, I thought he should be tracking this for his purposes, because otherwise, it throws off your batting average. If you take all of those as lost, and maybe they were never real in the first place, then you can’t actually get your conversion rate, because you’re blending it in. As you add additional categories, it’s one more step for your people. And every time I do that, I know this. And I have a lot of steps. And every time I add a new step, it means there’s a cost, whether it means a slightly smarter employee, whether it means people getting confused, whatever it is, what are your thoughts on what are the fundamental things that you need to see in order to tell how is your intake functioning?
So this is really interesting, because it’s something that we’re actually dealing with right now. We are changing our intake processing, and actually our case processing, something that I actually got from Ryan McKeon and how they do it in Filevine, we never had it in our CRM, but we’re creating stages for our intake team. So what we have is a number of stages. So we have, and I’ll go through them. We’ve got lead, intake, quoted fee, chasing, paid, signed, those are two different things, opened, then we also have not viable.
But where does that come in?
Let me say the last one, which I think is the most important: lost.
Well that’s the difference.
So what we do is if we have made contact with somebody and talk to them, and they seem like a viable case, and yet we never get through to them again a second time, we’re able to see that they did hire somebody by looking at the dockets and that type of thing. We will mark them as a lost lead. If we get a call in at 10pm at night, hits the answering service and we call them first thing in the morning, but we call them every day for 10 days, send a text message and just get ignored, that’s a not viable. And so, because it was never really anything, we can’t tell. So we’d say that as a not viable client, along with the ones who simply have, you know, don’t have two nickels to go together.
You’re basically saying that if you can’t make contact with them, it’s not viable.
Right, I need to have some sort of contact with them.
Understood. And this is where it gets not tricky, but where it gets intellectually interesting on this area, which is, okay, humor me this. If your team is calling back at 10:30 on Monday, and they called three people overnight, and they’re already taken care of by 10:30, shouldn’t there be some distinction between not viable because there’s no money, it’s not a case you could handle versus this other sort of category where, like, a certain amount is not viable, agree. But is it because, how many times are they chasing that not viable lead? Is it just…
And that’s no, I mean, we chase every lead for at least 10 days as part of our system.
Is that considered a lead?
Well, it’s in the lead stage being chased.
No, no. Yes. Yes. Yes. So what you’re saying is you…
…for us, a lead is a name and either an email and a phone number that says we want your services. And we don’t even know what it is. It’s any, it’s literally like the…
And this is so, if I’m hearing correct, I like this, it’s a lead, it goes through the chase process. By the way, something I’m adding in myself, trying to add some three dimensional pieces, trying to think about that chase process, how can it be more. Right now we’re call, text, email, depending on what we have, but trying to go beyond that to other forms for higher level cases whether, anyway, talk more in a future episode, but what you’re saying is, it gets lumped in as a lead, but if it falls out, it will be given a different designation than something where you’ve spoken to them, even in the chase, that breaks for whatever reason, that one, your team takes a dig on their batting average, where this is almost like a walk where it doesn’t count towards your batting average.
Exactly. Like for example, Seth sends us a case, right? You say, Hey, I got a referral for a case in Connecticut. We’ve talked to somebody because we’ve talked to Seth, right? So in that lead, in the form in our system, you will either ever be retained, lost, or nothing else, because we’ve talked to somebody. So in that situation, my batting average will have a ding, because a real person said, here’s a potential lead, and we fumbled the ball, and we did not, we struck out.
Let’s go back to the answering service, or the overnight form. Those are the ones that are most pain. No idea if it’s real… could be a salesperson, could be somebody that really, you know, drunk…
And if we never make any contact with them, it gets marked non viable, and it doesn’t go against the batting average.
Right, which I like. And again, it’s one more thing, I think for most people, it’s a worthy thing to aspire to, if you’re not doing it. But the next question then is, how do you tell whether there’s, not gold, but how do you tell whether or not that category is being addressed right? We like to think yeah, we’re chasing it for 10 days. Does that mean you’re getting a call a day? Or does that mean they’re really busy, and they didn’t get around to any of the chasing? And that becomes my issue.
So we have one person who is the chaser. The way my intake team works is it rotates. But every week, one person’s sole job is chase. So they’re making the, you know, 200-300 phone calls, sending those text messages. When you’re on intake, it rotates it through. And essentially it goes you know, every fourth or fifth week, you become the fox chasing the rabbits, and so much so that whoever is noted as the chaser for the week will change their icon on Slack to the fox.
I love it.
Because they all have, everybody on my intake team has an icon that they use, an emoji. I’m the rainbow unicorn. So when I post, I do the rainbow unicorn stuff, but I’m looking at my numbers right now. In the last 10 years, we have 16,209 not viable cases. You know, so we’ve talked to a lot of people, those are people that we may have talked to for 30 days or six months and they turned into not viable because they want to go with somebody else, hire somebody else.
Hold on time out, so not viable, versus what happens if you never make contact?
That’s not viable. See right now, I said I just changed and created this lost category in my CRM.
Gotcha. All right, so you’re doing exactly what I’m talking to Law Man about, these great managers. So the idea is it’s loss versus not viable, whatever term not viable, never, never…
Think about it from a PI perspective. You know, you send a retainer out, you never follow up with the people, they don’t sign it, and a day later they sign with a competitor, that’s lost man, because your people didn’t follow up, regardless of whether or not they aren’t, I mean, I lose cases, I lose criminal cases because of money. People say, hey, you know, you charge 10,000, this guy is going to do it for three, well, I make a note. And the good thing about that I’m thinking for the last category is, ideally, we’re making file notes. And we can find out, hey, when we do talk to them, Why didn’t Jairus, Oh, it was money, or Oh, I got a referral to somebody else. And then we can start to see what the problem is.
And I’ll tell you, that’s one of the things that I love when it can happen. And there’s advice I give, and there’s advice as I’ve gotten bigger, I have not been able to do at scale, like I probably need a chaser before any of this. But when you’re at the scale that you can still have the bandwidth to do this. One of the things I love particularly on criminal cases, or any fee for service case, right? Because it’s a different question than on the plaintiff side. When you lose a case, if you can get a hold of the person without violating bar rules, and say, I’m glad you found other counsel, if you don’t mind me asking, I have one question for you: if money wasn’t a factor, would you have hired us? That to me was one of those quality control issues. And it does a second thing, which is, I would say when we did this well, and again, I can’t tell you that I’m doing it well now, because it’s hard to do this at scale. It’s harder, easier to do with Jay Ruane is doing this, then random person intake. But when it’s done well, what I love about it, is that it gives you the opportunity for someone to say, oh, man, I really wish I could go with you. But they were charging 3500 and you charged 4000. And there are times when you’re just like, look, I don’t want to let money stay in the way of it and boom, I would argue you could probably, of the people you get a hold of, probably retain 20% or more just with that question when you have somebody savvy enough and empowered enough to be able to do that. Assuming you have a class A firm.
Right. And the other thing that goes back a little bit to sales theory that we talked about, you shouldn’t be quoting the whole thing. You should be quoting the payments.
Agreed, whatever it is. I’m assuming apples to apples. Look, that’s a whole different issue. The second piece, which sort of goes along with this is, you know, what are your checks and balances. So this is what Umansky was sort of alluding to was that if you allow somebody to mark something as no money, it becomes a crutch. And so something you referenced a minute ago, which again, I did much more actively as a smaller firm, is tracking where people go, particularly with the criminal bar, because family, you may not see a case filed for a long time, right. But in the criminal space, very quickly, you know who’s in there, and you generally know whose court appointed and who’s not. And so, something that we do in cases that are heavy, places that are heavy litigation, when you lose some, again, PI doesn’t work, cause stuff’s on litigation forever. But if you’re able to track when you don’t get a case, who gets it, so you could say okay, if it’s public defender, you’re not losing any sleep over it, maybe you can sell better, maybe you couldn’t. But that’s a big, that’s a big step to go over. But looking at who is your competition? And you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s a former associate of mine, low balling me, you know, what’s going on. Versus if it is substantial, there’s a whole other school of thought discussing, who else are you speaking to? Some people shut down, but many, many people will let you know. And you know what you’re dealing with. That can be huge in understanding. Is it a jump ball between me and other high quality people? Or is it me and a schlock, and I can go a little bit harder on my experience with them?
Absolutely. You know, one of the things that we don’t really talk about is a lot of people will just throw away the data on the people that they don’t retain, that don’t retain them. It’s dead to me, and get rid of your stuff. You know, obviously, in this day where data costs, you know, fractions of a penny to hold. I’ll tell you, we saved our firm during the beginning of COVID, by going through all of my leads, going through all the ones of a certain guy here. So I said, all the ones that are misdemeanors, and DUIs that we’re not, you know, diversion program eligible in our state, go back in time, the last five years, and let’s send them an email saying, Hey, did you get a conviction, we can help you with an expungement, and we turned that into a couple $100,000 worth of money because people are getting their COVID checks and spending it on getting expungements with us. And we really saved our firm, when others didn’t have cash flow, we had it. And that’s really something that you know, you have to start thinking creatively about what you’re going to do. And you can get data, we talked about knowing who maybe your leads are also hiring. But one of the things that we do quarterly, we used to do it monthly, but it just became overwhelming and it wasn’t really giving us the mat, what we needed to know, is we actually have the top 200 criminal defense lawyers in the state of Connecticut. And I can actually track their volume of filed appearances in cases, both in criminal cases, and in motor vehicle cases. So we have what we call our marketing competition spreadsheet, where we have all of the lawyers listed that are our competition, and every quarter of the year we’ll run their name and their juris number, which is how they track things here in the state. And we’ll say, this lawyer, his business is staying about the same, this lawyer, her business is increasing, oh, it’s increasing? Why is it increasing? Let’s look and see what she’s doing. This person, they’ve dropped off the planet, maybe they’re retired, that type of thing. And it’ll allow, and it’s interesting, because we can see trend lines, right. And that can help us, we can see who’s starting to spend more in marketing in certain areas. Because all of a sudden, you’ll see somebody that wasn’t really getting in cases, now their caseload has doubled. And then you go and oh, they have a brand new website, and they have a whole new person working on their stuff. So that you can start to say, Oh, I’ve got to ramp up my competition in this area. And so there’s things that you can do to counter that, you know.
I’m smiling because I was at a BluShark call the other day, and somebody was saying, hey, these guys are really taking over the market. What what do you think about this? I’m like, yeah, that was our handiwork. So it’s kind of a cool life moment, friends of yours.
Good. That’s, you know, and that’s what it’s about. It’s finding, really finding the data points that you can use. And it’s funny, I was talking to one of the members of my Criminal Mastermind the other day, and then we did our session yesterday on digital marketing. And he said, You know, I left that session, and I spent the next eight hours writing out all the things I want to do, all the things that I should be doing, all the things that I’m doing wrong, making sure that I get things straight and that type of thing. And he’s like, you know, running your practice really is a second full time job. And it is, you can go down rabbit holes, like you and I have on some of this stuff. And so it’s being cognizant of the areas where you’re going to get the best return, and making sure, so for some other people, maybe tracking their competition is not the right thing to do.
I’m gonna conclude with this, trying to bring this whole conversation 360, which is the, you know, as great as it feels to get to a point where you’re like, Okay, I’m doing fine. As you push yourself and your marketing takes off to the next level and you add a new associate, you have now four intake people instead of two, or two intake people instead of one, each level of growth comes with new problems. And that if you don’t continue to look and focus on it and just say, Well, it’s worked before, even though I’ve grown, that’s where I’ve gotten burned before and the reason burning was we grew, our volume was insane, and we weren’t adapting and building. Sometimes you have to break it down to build it up, that just leaving it as is won’t do it. So Jay, this is awesome. I loved taking your Criminal Mastermind that was a lot of fun. And you know, have a great weekend.
Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, all baseball, all little league for me all this weekend. Folks, if you want to keep up with this, you can always check us live here every Thursday 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific here on Maximum Growth Live, Of course, you can take the show with you on the go wherever podcasts are available. Just look for the Maximum Growth Live podcast, Series 2022, it’s got a great cover, you can subscribe and follow along. If you want to keep up with Seth you can follow him all things BluShark Digital, on his SEO Insider, as well as all of the social platforms for BluShark digital and for me, follow me in my group Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth here on Facebook as well as if you are a criminal defense lawyer and are interested in growing your business, please join me in the Criminal Mastermind at thecriminalmastermind.com. That’s it for now. Seth, have a great weekend. Enjoy the weather. I’m going to do the same here. Bye for now.
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