In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price are joined by Brooke Birkey of Level Up Law Firm Business Coaching to discuss one of the most critical aspects of running a successful law firm: the intake process. Brooke brings a wealth of experience and knowledge, highlighting how law firms can make the necessary shift from traditional receptionist roles to intake specialists who are focused on sales and client relations. With the rise of digital marketing, Brooke explains how this shift is not only essential but also highly beneficial for law firms looking to stay competitive in today’s market. Brooke dives into the importance of emotional intelligence in intake, stressing how key it is for intake specialists to connect with potential clients, particularly in areas of personal injury, criminal defense, and divorce law. Brooke also shares strategies for identifying caller types and effectively training intake staff to navigate these calls while balancing emotional intelligence and professionalism. The conversation also explores the differences between fee-for-service and contingency-based cases, and how law firms can tailor their intake processes for each type of client.
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Hello, hello, and welcome to the Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, and with me, as always, is my man Seth Price down there in the BluShark and Price Benowitz headquarters. And we are continuing on our path talking about intake, and today we are joined by a lovely woman, Brooke Birkey, who is here to share with us her thoughts on intake and how you can make your intake the best it can possibly be in your law firm. Seth, let’s start us off.
Well, so Brooke, the thing that we’ve talked about throughout this series and throughout our coaching series is what I love here is we get to speak to people like you who have looked under the hood of so many different firms. And you know, in doing that like I have my own firm, Jay has his own firm, we are constantly struggling with intake. Two steps forward, one step back. But what do you see from your perspective, as some of the biggest missteps that law firms make when it comes to intake?
There’s a couple of things that come to mind right off the top of my head. So it’s number one, is the post revolution, digital revolution, mindset shift. So after the digital revolution, you started to need salespeople in intake positions, right? Because before it was more of a reception position, it was a information gathering position. But then, you know, the internet exploded, and different law firms started to spend a lot of money on digital ads and things of that nature, and you started to need to compete in a more industrial way with other firms for business, and just having an information gatherer at the front desk is not going to cut it. And so what we really have to do is to start recruiting for salespeople, but it’s a little bit tricky, because they also have to be able to qualify a case. So that’s not just the sale of, let’s say, a pair of shoes. It’s a fact pattern. So it becomes a bit more of a complex hire and, by the way, a little bit of a higher paying one than it would have been in the past. The second thing is the whole inside out versus outside in perspective. So we deal a lot with emotional intelligence here at Level Up, and we always want our intake people to be focused externally on meeting the needs of that person and what they’re going through. So most of us are dealing with some sort of crisis, right, personal injury, criminal, divorce, that intake person has to have emotional intelligence as a, as a foundation to be able to meet the needs of that person and to really show that they care, but without giving all of their emotional energy away. So it’s, it’s a lot more complex than it used to be.
How do you differentiate something we’ve seen, we have Jay with fee for service. We have both. You know, I think that one of the things, and I look and we had Gary Falkowitz on in a prior week, you know, who focused so much on the plaintiff side. How do you like? To me, they really are two distinct worlds, and I’ve noticed it myself when I’ve had people and tried to get them to do both sides of it. It’s almost like it’s two different skill sets when it’s a contingency case versus a fee for service case.
So you have to have different money mindsets, and it also depends on your intake systems. So are you, are you passing it on to an attorney who is then making the sale, and so let’s say a divorce or a criminal? Are you doing that, or are you relying on your intake specialists to really gather the information, make that relationship and then, you know, pre-sell? So it really just depends on, on what you’re expecting out of your intake specialist. And tell me a little bit more about your experience.
Well, in the sense that, with contingency cases, stuff can be signed right away. It’s just, it’s a signature, right? You need to, you need to emote. You need the emotional intelligence to know how to connect with somebody. But once you’ve done that. It’s, you know, Jay wishes he could just get people to sign, and then they were clients, right? That would be, you’d be a much, much more jovial person. But the, you know…
I need the money. I don’t care.
Right, he needs the money. And so…
Somebody, I need money.
And this is the piece that’s sort of interesting. I’m curious. Let’s take plaintiff’s work aside for a second. We got Jay here, front and center. With the intake process, and you talked before about leaving the reception mindset, totally agree. How do you, from your perspective, the differentiating on fee for service between the person who’s pre-vetting and possibly selling the firm, versus the close? And you know, different philosophies as to whether the lawyer closes, whether you use, you know a non-attorney salesperson closing, dragons by certain tribe’s language. What are your thoughts on? Because the person who can get, pre-sell something right? That’s not as high level. Jay, you probably use some overseas people for that, as we have. But when it comes to collecting dinero, it is a very different piece that generally is, goes a step even beyond a PI intake person, as far as level of sophistication.
Absolutely, and I think that you can have anybody do anything, as long as they’re trained properly. So let’s, let’s take a divorce case, for example. That’s a very hard sell on the first conversation. You, that’s a little bit of a slower sales cycle. But that doesn’t mean that a non-attorney can’t do it. It just means that they have to be trained at that higher level and they have to be paid more, probably.
Right, to obtain that person?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The same thing with the plaintiff side. You can absolutely train anybody to do the close and it, but it’s emotional intelligence. It’s qualifying the case. It’s sales strategies, and it’s also money mindset. So take a look at the divorce case. You’re gonna, you’re asking for a $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 retainer in order to move forward with the divorce case, that person in that sales seat has to be really comfortable with that ask. They have to be comfortable with money, talking about money, which is a lot more difficult than selling a contingency fee agreement, which is, let’s face it, all upside. There’s no downside to a CFA, right? There’s, there’s, there’s no risk. There’s no money out of your pocket. The only thing that could happen with the CFA is that they don’t get a recovery in their case if you chose the wrong attorneys, but you’re not losing any money. So that’s a different perspective. As far as you need to have somebody who is comfortable talking about money and is really comfortable making that multi-thousand dollar ask for the different types, divorce, criminal, things of that nature. Does that make sense?
It does. What do you think are the things that you should be, you know, when screening for that hire? Because that’s the, you know, the next, okay, great. I know what I need now. What, how do you think? What are the best practices in trying to actually get those butts in seats at that higher level? Let’s talk about fee for service for a second, where you want somebody who has that higher emotional intelligence.
Role playing. Role playing is an excellent way to gauge how a person really does if they don’t know the fact pattern ahead of time, if they don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, then you can tell do they have that baseline EQ? Do they have that money mindset where they’re comfortable asking for five, ten thousand dollars. What did they do of their own innovation in the process? And I would say even two or three role plays in the in the course of the hiring process, to get at it from different angles.
No, I agree completely. I love the role play, particularly on the sales side. It’s become an incredibly important part of what we do. But it’s also not everybody who conducts them are done equally, and then it sort of comes, and that, that is, and I’ve found that when done really well, you can eliminate many people. I mean, part of the reason I’ll go off on a rant for a second, that in the sales recruiting world, it’s almost a broken business model, in my opinion, in that the number of people that are great at sales is so limited that if you do your job of screening, you’re going to take very, very few people, meaning, there are plenty of people present well enough to go through an interview, but the whole point, they’re in sales so they can get through the interview. But how are they going to be months 3,4,5, and 6? And you will, there’s a real dilemma there, and I think the role play is one of the few things that can sift that out ahead of time. What, you know, talk to me. Are there any resources for that that you’ve actually said, yeah, I love, you know, this person’s philosophy or that person’s philosophy. Are there any out there that you think are particularly good at helping formulate those role play interviews?
Not really, just based on my experience in doing them and doing different role playing exercises. And you you want to watch the person both when you’re introducing the exercise and when you’re doing it. You want to watch their faces, their eyes, if they get nervous at the idea of role playing, they’re probably not going to be good at sales. Because you have to have that confidence you have to have, that chutzpah, if you will, and moving into the role playing with I’m going to take it here, or I have intention behind it. If you watch their faces, their their body posture, their shoulders, if their shoulders go a little bit like this, then you know, you have somebody who’s uncomfortable with role playing, and that’s not a great sign.
No understood. But are there any people out there, like, outside of legal, that are just that you’ve seen that talk, if it’s one of those things, I’m looking for resources for people where, yes, ever- agree with everything you’re saying. You need to extract this stuff. But for many of our listeners out there that are sort of like, okay, great. I want to do this. What you know, there, there, the Wolf of Wall Street has some great stuff on, like the sales cycle. Jay Blaut, I like a lot of his stuff. Is there any, who are your sort of people that you like, as far as that have that type of sort of connection, that have thought these things through? Because for a lot of people, lawyer wise, we don’t think about this. You’re running the business you want the money in. But, like. You’re not thinking about what, what are the different techniques in order to screen? Granted, you can outsource much of it, but for certain amount, you should know, like everything else, the fundamentals yourself, so that you can have these conversations before you bring it to an expert or somebody like that.
Yeah, I wish I did have somebody that I could give you as a resource, but I will say that my approach is it goes from the EQ standpoint most of the time before it even branches out into other areas. I like Pat Lenchioni for that. He is kind of a thought leader in organizational health, and he talks a lot about EQ and the ways that it touches different aspects of the business.
So I have a question for you now that we’re talking about EQ and emotional intelligence, in your experience, is this something that can be trained, or is it something that either people have or they don’t have? And if they have it, they can get better at it, but if they don’t have it, they’re never going to have it. You know, I haven’t seen as many people in intake as, as you have, and I have had people who we’ve thought were going to be good, and then we listen to their calls and they are flat, and they are not responding the way they should. And so we’ve said, you know what, this is not the role for you. Either we’ve kept them and transitioned them to a better role, not moving the turd, but moving somebody who’s good into a better fit for them, or we’ve exited them. But is is emotional intelligence something that can be trained? Or is it something that is intrinsic?
It’s it’s a little bit of both. So it can absolutely be trained, but it depends in large part on the person’s willingness and how comfortable they are with looking on the inside. So EQ always starts with self-awareness, and that’s why in my training series, I usually start with a couple of personality assessments. I like the Strength Finders, and I like the Myers Briggs, just to give me an idea of people’s natural wiring, and then I introduce the concepts to them looking internally first. And so the idea is, let’s say that. Let’s say that one of my personality flaws is I talk over people, right? So let’s let’s say I get excited. I have a discussion. I talk over people. It’s annoying and it’s disrespectful, but if I’m not aware of it, then it’s never going to come to light. So if I’m not willing to look at myself and say, you know what, I talk over people and that’s disrespectful, I’m going to try to stop doing that. And that’s one of the first steps to looking at your own personality profile, looking at your own self and saying, I had this behavior that’s kind of obnoxious, and I’m going to I’m going to work on it. But if you’re not willing to take that look inside and be flexible in mind and spirit, then you’re really not going to get too far. And it comes to bear in training programs, some people make a lot of advancements and some people don’t. And I think it really comes down to willingness.
So I want to, I want to follow up with that. It has seemed to me, in the last five years, probably since COVID hit, there has been a rush by many law firms to bring in remote, foreign labor people. You know, they’re hiring them through agencies. They’re going on Upwork and that type of thing. And the corporate world has been doing this, outsourcing their call center to India, you know, for 30-40, years, and so that they for good or for bad, they’ve sort of figured it out. But for us, in a small firm, have you seen problems arise in law firms because of just cultural attitudes towards certain things? And so you know me sitting in Connecticut and knowing Connecticut based people, I think people would react a particular way, because we are all the same. But then I bring in somebody from Argentina or Colombia, and they have a much different worldview. How do we, how do we train people to have, I don’t want to say they need our worldview, but if you’re talking to somebody from my hometown, you kind of have to relate to them the way we would. And even if you have an accent, which shouldn’t be a problem in most of the situation, they may come with a just, you know, a more of a flat affect or, okay, so you’re going to jail, you know, in my case, yeah, you’re looking at 120 days in jail, and they’re not as emotive in those situations. How do you get people to either A) find the right people who can display emotional intelligence on par with how a person in a local community would do it, or can, can you train people? Or is there just a cultural divide that like you have to recognize and work within those sort of parameters?
Yeah, so I think that’s a cost benefit analysis. Right? What is the, what is the benefit to bringing on that foreign labor versus the cost of what it will cost in your market, in Connecticut, I would say that the that the cost is higher than, let’s say, DC, because DC has such a diverse population, it’s, it’s different. But there are things that can be done to mitigate the the cultural differences, and it starts with cultural intelligence toward your, your hires, your overseas hires. Tell me about you, tell me about your culture, tell me about how you see things. And then they need to be educated about the way that we do things in your market, so not just in America, but in your market and your specific demographic, and then teach them certain things. And sometimes the whole idea of political correctness gets in the way of this, because you don’t want to tell somebody else from a different culture how to talk, right? But if they if they say something that is colloquialism to their area and it doesn’t translate to your audience, then it needs to be discussed. And so being willing to have those conversations in a respectful way and saying, hey, I recognize that this is a way of saying things in your area, but our demographic doesn’t know what that means, so let’s try saying it this way. Another thing is being geographically aware of what’s going on in your particular area. So if you are doing criminal, you know, DUIs, for example, you want your your overseas staff, to be aware of the major intersections where people get pulled over, or the major stop signs and things of that nature, so they can say, oh, yeah, you were over on Fifth and Eighth Avenue or whatever the case is. Yeah, we got a lot of people that get stopped over there, and then that helps to overcome some of that bias that says, I think you’re somewhere in Venezuela and you have no idea what I’m dealing with.
Yeah, one of the things we did early on is we created, like, a 10 minute here’s Connecticut video that we share with all of our remote people. We talk about Yankees versus Red Sox. We talk about pizza. We talk about the major highways. Every morning, we post the weather in our Slack channel. So if it’s snowing, people who are in the southern hemisphere and it’s 90 degrees, know that people up here are going to be talking about snow. And so you’re not going to say, oh God, it’s so hot today. You know when people will look at you strange and think, oh no, what’s going on. I mean, they accept that people are working remotely, but they kind of want to have that connection. So here’s, here’s something else that I wanted to get something from you on. And it goes back to some of the stuff that you were talking earlier about training and role playing, that type of thing. So many lawyers I know are understaffed, and so they start to hire, and they literally just throw people into roles without training. How long would you say it takes for someone to really, truly be trained on intake, to do it right? Because I, because I, I’ve heard of people being like, well, I hired a VA from a company and they’re going to take over my intake, and I’m saying, well, do you have systems in place? Do they know what to do? Do they know how to pronounce your name? It’s just like they want to wave a magic wand, but they want to wave a magic wand at $4 an hour.
Yeah. So most definitely, I’ll tell you about what we do, and we’ve seen a lot of success with this model. We start with a diagnostic call. I want to, I want to know for a baseline what this person sounds like, how they’re connecting with callers, how they’re navigating the conversation. And then we have four weeks of hospitality, tonality and engagement training. So that’s emotional intelligence. That is color types. So you guys can probably guess the color types we have the angry, the therapy clients, the anxious clients, the, you know, the one that’s crying, you know, we have the five caller types, and then the withholding one, that one doesn’t want to talk to you. They only want to talk to an attorney, right? And so we teach them how to identify caller types and then deal with them specifically, each to their own. And of course, there’s more caller types than that, but that’s a baseline to move through the process. And then we have three weeks of qualifying the case and four weeks of sales training. So take it all the way through, and then we do recorded call review every single week. So whether we do a mystery shop or we review calls, and we want to see how it’s tracking. So I would say 12 weeks, 11 or 12 weeks, plus continue to do recorded call review and quality control. Because once you start the conversation of emotional intelligence, that’s just the beginning, and you have to continue to reinforce it, month over month, year over year, in order to keep growing.
That’s fantastic. Seth?
So, yeah, so one of the things that I’m sort of always struggling with is basically the training process, once they’re in right, the fundamentals, you get through the hiring, but the question of basically up-leveling the listening to recorded calls, having that cadence. What do you think some of the best techniques are for making sure that once you have that team, and you get through the hiring funnel and you have them on board, that you’re not just set it and forget it, but that you’re continuously up-leveling the game?
There has to be a rubric, an expectation, for excellence. So what we do is we have a rubric for the recorded calls that we review, and it’s on a point system. We kind of like to make it into a game. So we want them to beat their, every call that gets reviewed. We want them to beat their last score. So let’s say for hospitality, tonality, and engagement. How well did you do with connecting with the caller at the beginning of the call? One through five. So if you get a three, you’re in the middle of the pack, and you only get three points. If you get a five, you get five points, and it goes on from there. But there has to be some system in place where it’s measurable that you can refer to and also give them that feedback, which is, they need to hear it. They need to hear their own voices. So what I do is I stop and start the call review. So I set up the whole recording, and then I start the recording, and then I stop when I have some feedback, and then I, again, and I stop so they can hear…
Do you listen to it straight through? Or do you do like different, or do you jump around it? One of the things that some people will do is like, bounce to different parts, Spot check versus listen to a whole call the way through.
We listen to it all the way through, and give feedback on every aspect of the training. Because once they’re through the training, they’re responsible for that, so that’s their accountability piece.
And then with that, one of the things I get asked a lot, what are your thoughts on flat salary versus bonuses per signed case versus just a modest incentive based on, you know, some sort of scoring rubric.
That is so tricky. And I’ve struggled with this one as well for different clients. I think the best one that I heard was recently, and it was a bonus, you know, a flat rate for salary, a bonus for signing the case, and then an additional bonus for retaining the case. So if the case was still on the books in a month or two months, I forget what it was, then an additional bonus was, was provided. And that kind of gets around that carrot and stick mentality. Is, we don’t want you just signing up cases that are garbage, just so that you can get the bonus. They have to make it through the vetting process in order to get the full bonus.
Gotcha. So when, when you’re putting those together, you know, is there? You know, rewind. Your thoughts on international versus domestic labor, and how to meld those two, like, what? And I’m going to sort of pivot, because I assume you’ve worked in both plaintiff and non-plaintiff side, where you see these strengths, and you know, strengths and weaknesses of each, for each side.
Sure, yeah, the, the, the plaintiff side tends to do better, I think, with having foreign labor. And I’m not really sure why. It’s, it just seems like, and this is anecdotal. I don’t have any data behind this. It just seems like the the car accident, or the the slip and fall client is is more willing to talk to somebody foreign then, let’s say that somebody who’s getting divorced and they they’re going through something that’s, you know, gut wrenching. But this is all anecdotal again.
So I have a question, and it revolves around burnout. What we have found in our own office is that there comes a point after weeks or months where you have a fantastic intake person, may even be a, you know, like a pod leader in their little group, but they just are hearing the same stories over and over, and it’s draining on them. Do you have any suggestions or any sort of experience in how to keep somebody who’s great at their job, interested in that job, and not saying I can’t do this after a year, like, I just, I’m done. I don’t want to do this. I want no part of intake. You know, I’m sick of hearing people’s stories like, how do you keep somebody who’s really good at that part of the job interested and motivated in that job, because you don’t want to train somebody up and then have them burn out on you.
Yeah, and that’s, that’s a really, real thing in intake, I think the stat is two years for an intake specialist before they really start to burn out. So it goes back to emotional intelligence again. And the the Myers Briggs is the one that I really like to use. It’s, there’s a free version online called 16 personalities. And no, it’s not to diagnose multiple personality disorder. It’s processing style. So before you can even have that conversation about energy management, your team member needs to know how they process information and how they recharge. So the first thing. That’s measured in the Myers Briggs is introversion versus extroversion. Introversion is I recharge by being a loner in small groups, and extroversion is I recharge by being around people.
That’s me.
Yeah. And then we have four other little slots for measurement. The other one to pay close attention to is, is thinking versus feeling. So thinking is more linear, logical. Feeling is somebody that’s strongly empathic and feels everything. So let’s say that you have a team member that is 76% feeling. They’re going to have a harder time with these sad stories than somebody who is more linear, logical 74% thinking. And so the first step is to help them identify their processing style. Do you need to recharge by being alone, or do you need to recharge by being with other people? And then to help them manage their thinking versus feeling? We don’t want you to give all of your emotional energy to every single client. That’s why we practice empathy skills without actually having to be emotionally involved in every single phone call.
I love that. You know, I took that 16, I had my whole office through 16 personalities, and that’s actually part of our onboarding process, just so we can see how people are going to interact with one another. I am definitely an introvert. I need to be alone to recharge. I’m a logistician or a, I’m a logician in that, in that thing. So it’s really interesting to see how other personalities and then, and when you give it to somebody, they say, oh, yeah, this is totally me.
Yes.
It’s fascinating. The great thing about this, and this is a little tip for everybody out there in the audience, tell them that you’re doing it at your office, and have your spouse do it, because it has saved me.
Really!
Headaches, because I am as a logician, I want to solve the problem and move on, but my wife doesn’t want that. She wants to have me hear it and not give her a solution. And so I have learned what her personality needs, and it has been amazing. So, free plug.
You’ve used it on the home front?
Oh, heck yeah, heck yeah. I mean, it’s phenomenal for helping me, and as my kids age up, I’m going to give it to them too. I mean, it’s free, right? So might as well do it. 16personalities.com, great resource. It’s our cheap way of finding out about people here in the office. And it turns out, we seem to have people that work in different roles all have the similar personalities, and because they gravitate towards either a customer service or a research or a financial role, they have things that those roles are suited best for people with their personalities, and it’s great and and it’s, the other thing about it is when we have applicants, we can find people you’re not going to do well in this, you may want this job, but this is not the job for you based on your personality type. And that saves a ton of drama and a ton of wasted time, because, like you say, on your web, on your website, you need to identify the lost opportunity costs in doing this stuff, and that’s so important that people don’t seem to pay attention to.
And incidentally, that’s also one of the reasons why it’s such a bad idea to have paralegals doing intake is because it’s a different personality requirement, and it often sounds and feels like a good crossover. And I’m sure any paralegals listening would say, yes, please, don’t put me on intake, please. It’s just, it’s a whole different skill set and personality wiring most of the time.
Yeah, I really think, Seth, do you guys do any personality testing when you guys?
We played around with it back and forth, I can’t tell you that I have figured out. You know, we’ve done the Colby, the print, we’ve looked at the Myers Briggs, but I, the piece that frustrates me is that I find it hard to make the hiring like, what is the actionable piece from it that’s going to help on the on the hiring, like meaning we know what we want, as far as empathy on these calls, but that I have, I struggle sometimes with how to leverage this and having the chutzpah or balls to sort of say I’m not going to make a hire based on what I see in the test.
Well, I think you know, my response to that would be, people may interview really well, but they can’t, and they can change their personality for a 45 minute interview because they want a job, but their core is who they are, and they’re going to default back to that. Brooke, am I right in this situation that like I could, I mean, I could go in right now. I could probably interview for an Associate’s job at, any PI firm in the nation and get an offer. I would be terrible at that job, but I can, I have a law license and a personality, and I can interview for a job and get an entry level associate’s job, but I would be the worst at it. So I think that’s what you’re trying to do, right? You’re trying to identify where you get beyond just the interview and get to the core maybe?
Well, I think at the end of the day, it’s just one piece of information, and it has to be taken with the whole package. And the reality is that anybody can fool you about their behavior for three months or, or, or so. So there’s really no magic bullet to making the right hire. You know, you you could throw away a candidate who had an unfavorable Myers Briggs, and it would have been the wrong thing, because it is, its just one piece of information, but it’s just the the risk that we take in the industry is, you know, we could make the wrong hire. They could fool us, they can behave this way. They could have references, but we’ll know the truth in about three months.
Yeah, the goal is to learn the truth as early as possible, so you’re not wasting time, you know. And I think that’s the that’s the wonderful thing about talking to people like you, Brooke, who live their life in these things, because, because you have seen inside so many law firms, you just have economies of scale that you could say, I’ve talked to, you know, people, and we’ve dealt with 1000 open roles, and we’ve, you know, and I’ve helped law firms place people in these roles, and you can just identify these things, and that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to do this session on intake, these, this whole series on intake, because it is such an important part. And I think it’s only in the last couple of years that it’s really become talked about as separate and distinct. Because, like, I mean how many? I mean the next, I think the next one we got to talk about Seth is, how many people have a receptionist that’s also their marketing director, you know?
I would think that that much, that’s the really small firms, I hope meaning it, but I think that more likely it’s, is, look, I see this repeatedly with BluShark, where you. Again, more sophisticated firms, yes, they have intake. They’re struggling with it, but they’re there. But the idea of a firm that’s used to referrals, having a receptionist and then wanting marketed calls and not having a mindset shift that this is not the same widget, and that it takes a different skill set than passing a referral client to a lawyer rather than bringing that person in. And like many things, people talk about reviews. If it’s not being dictated from the top, it’s not going to happen. I see the same thing. I’m sure Brooke does too on intake, if leadership doesn’t value it. It’s your lowest paid person versus, you know, we now have a six-figure person running our intake who’s not on the phones at all. I shouldn’t say not, unless there’s a high, high value situation. She is nowhere to be found. She’s just managing and organizing.
That’s a really interesting thing, and I’m going to throw this out to both of you, because I don’t do it in my office. I don’t know anybody who does it, but it would be interesting to have your standard digital marketing intake, and then also have maybe a single person, or if you get large enough, a pod of people that deals only in referral intake, because I have to think that referral intake is a whole different animal, especially on the PI side, when you’re talking, you know, major referral fees and developing those relationships. Is it wise to have segregated intake and say, hey, look, you are great with interpersonal relationships. You’re going to do follow ups, you’re going to be sending referral gifts, you’re going to be doing those things. We want to put you in that role. Have you ever seen that? I haven’t seen it. I’m just, I’m spitballing here. Has anybody ever seen something like that, where you have a dedicated referral intake person and then you have-
I see firms that have that, that’s not, I mean, you have to be larger to get to that point. But that’s not, no that that is, it’s because it’s, again, a different skill set depending, like, there’s also intake and referral relationship, right? So again, but love Brooke’s thoughts on this, but like, there’s one person who just takes the call from that, that what’s really valuable is two things, one, if they can build and foster the relationships, and second, if they’re able to not like, referrals are great until you need to deal with it. So if I’m getting a call right now with a referral, the ideal is I could say, hey, send me an email and I send it off to my team, and it’s connected. And that per- like, if there’s somebody who could speak to a lawyer, especially on the plaintiff side, and let them know that we’re going to co-counsel and get them a third and yet, and they’re comfortable. If all of that’s possible without you, that’s really valuable, because the the other, so it’s not just intake, anyone could say hello within reason, but it’s can you add value on stickiness? And can you add value that you don’t need to take the call and it can be brought into the funnel.
I think the conversation goes back even further than that, to what’s going on in the marketing side. So a lot of people see marketing and sales as different roles, but they’re very much like this. They’re very intertwined, and a lot of intake teams have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the marketing department. And that’s as simple as, how much does it cost to acquire a new lead? How much are you spending on one lead? That changes the intake team’s perspective on the value of every single person that calls. Or, what campaigns do you have going on? What are you using? What is the messaging so that we can be consistent when it comes in and then train on warm and cold leads. So every intake specialist should know how to handle a warm lead. They should know how to handle a cold lead. A cold lead is going to require a lot more warming up and conversation. A warm lead is going to be a lot ready, sooner, ready to sign. And so just being able to recognize that, and it’s a bit of an art form. That’s why I think these, these trainings, they just, you should never stop, you know, every every month, if, even if you’re doing it internally, should never stop introducing new information, because it’s a skill set that builds over time and just awareness on how your role benefits the entire business, not just you and your goals and your role, what campaigns you have going on out there that we can, that we can parrot? I want to be saying the same thing on an intake call that you’re talking about in marketing. And every time I’ve done a marketing and sales integration coaching session with the two teams, there’s just so many light bulbs going off, and it’s so fun. It’s just like, oh, I had no idea that’s what was going on. And it’s good for both teams. And one of the actionable things that you can do is the intake team can keep a list of frequently asked questions to feed to the marketing team so that they’re getting ahead of it and answering those objections before they even happen.
I love that. You know, there’s so much that we can do here. Brooke, thank you so much for being with us today. Folks, that’s going to do it for this session of The Law Firm Blueprint. As always, if you want to take us on the go, you can search up the podcast version of this show, wherever you get podcasts, and be sure to give us a five-star review when you do that. Of course, if you prefer, you can watch us live in our Law Firm Blueprint Facebook group or Live on LinkedIn, 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, every Thursday for Seth Price and myself. Brooke, thank you so much for being here today.
My pleasure. Thank you,
And that’s going to do it for us, folks. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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