Get ready to transform your law firm's intake procedures with actionable insights from Chris Mullins, the Phone Sales Doctor. This episode promises to deliver crucial tips on building an effective intake team in your firm, putting the spotlight on both inbound and outbound sales. Chris guides us through the necessity of a well-devised system to convert digital leads aggressively and the importance of chasing leads promptly to ensure they don't slip away.
Moving forward, we uncover the vital role of an intake sales manager and how they drive your law firm's success. Tune in as we reveal strategies for monitoring and auditing calls, providing constructive feedback, and employing technology to enhance call handling. Chris lends her expertise in explaining the significance of presence, body language, and the nuances of tone and voice during calls.
Learn more about Chris and get her book by visiting intakeacademy.com
Get ready to transform your law firm's intake procedures with actionable insights from Chris Mullins, the Phone Sales Doctor. This episode promises to deliver crucial tips on building an effective intake team in your firm, putting the spotlight on both inbound and outbound sales. Chris guides us through the necessity of a well-devised system to convert digital leads aggressively and the importance of chasing leads promptly to ensure they don't slip away.
Moving forward, we uncover the vital role of an intake sales manager and how they drive your law firm's success. Tune in as we reveal strategies for monitoring and auditing calls, providing constructive feedback, and employing technology to enhance call handling. Chris lends her expertise in explaining the significance of presence, body language, and the nuances of tone and voice during calls.
Learn more about Chris and get her book by visiting intakeacademy.com
This podcast is brought to you by Spotlight Branding. Whether your firm only gets a few referrals or it's 100% of your business, you have the opportunity to double your referrals through educational, informative content. The pros at Spotlight Branding can help you create that content through blogging videos, email newsletters and more All designed to help you increase your referrals and attract the kinds of clients you want to work with. Visit spotlightbrandingcom slash pod to learn more. That's spotlightbrandingcom slash pod.
Speaker 2:This is Center Stage putting your firm in the spotlight by highlighting business owners and other industry experts to help take your firm to the next level. Hey everyone, and welcome to Center Stage. I'm your host, john Henson, and this week we are focusing on a crucial part of your law firm and one that can really impact the ROI of your marketing, and that is your intake team. And, specifically, we're going to talk this week about how you can build an effective intake team for your firm. And joining us to help us do that is Chris Mullins. She was on the show gosh probably I think it was probably sometime last year, you know, just talking about the reception role and that front end role, and so she joins us here to talk again about building a really effective intake team. So, chris, thanks for joining us once again.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I appreciate it, John.
Speaker 2:Of course, and so, for people who may not have caught you the first time around, tell us a little about who you are and how you do help law firms in this area. All right.
Speaker 3:So it's chrismullinsintakeacademycom and I'm known as the phone sales doctor. Primary focus area has been intake for like 30 years now, and I would say probably the last 20 years. It's also been attorneys and negotiations and paralegal and client care. So what happened was through all intake training that we do in Bound Outbound, when managing partners would sit in on the class as they realized that a lot of the skills being taught were needed in other areas, so for client retention. So yeah, and our main focus is conversion and for clients it's retention.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so, and I think when a lot of law firm owners they're starting to think about the different roles in their company, they kind of maybe get a little tunnel vision on it. They kind of look at things very rigidly. Ok, well, my intake person that's just another word for receptionist and I think when you tell a lot of people like it can also be kind of a sales role, which sounds kind of strange, especially for me. When I first got into this I didn't think of a law firm needing a sales person in the same way that maybe like a company that sells physical products would. But you kind of say that there's a lot of in that. So what does a sales role or even a sales sort of approach look like in a law firm?
Speaker 3:Well, the law firms. They're spending huge sums of marketing dollars. That leads to get into the firm either by chat or web forms or phone. So if you're doing that, then you have a business that has a profit and you have a bottom line, your responsibilities, and so you're not going to spend that kind of money if you don't have a system in place to convert. And when you convert, converting is sales and it's that simple. It's that. Yeah, that's what? Yeah, I mean you can't get away from it.
Speaker 3:That's what it's at the end of the day, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I think a lot of law firm owners, if they do see something as sales or even just kind of the leads that they generate, they see it almost exclusively as inbound sales. They're waiting for the people to come to them. Maybe they're doing some marketing to try to get people into that funnel, but generally a lot of them probably see it as exclusively inbound sales. But there is an element of outbound sales as well for a law firm, and so how can a firm's intake team make that happen?
Speaker 3:The outbound part, you mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well. So before I go there, though, I just want to kind of emphasize that, yeah, inbound calls is it's inbound sales. So we ask them to call us. They called and so that's selling. We wanna convert them.
Speaker 3:It's not a done deal just because they called, and so the outbound part is chasing, because not everybody is gonna say yes like right away just because they called you. It's not a guarantee. And so you wanna have a process in place where you're chasing which is picking up the phone and so it's outbound by doing that. And it's not easy just because they called you initially, because the moment they hang up, there's an emotional gap there where we're losing them like TikTok, tiktok, tiktok. We're losing them and most intake departments are not set up to be able to do both inbound, outbound or have an outbound team, because we just haven't gotten there yet.
Speaker 3:But the problem with that is if it's 10 o'clock on Monday and married and signed and we don't call her back to check in at 12 o'clock, we're gonna lose her. We probably already did lose her, but we're gonna lose her. And so outbound sales chasing there's all kinds of different ways to do outbound. If you do in digital marketing, your leads are coming in not by the phone, right, a lot of them. Well, you definitely need to be pretty aggressive with those, and those are even harder to call.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I completely agree with you because I mean, I've even seen this kind of in my own personal experience. I've told this story a bunch of times when I got a traffic ticket and I was looking for a law firm to handle it. A lot of people, when they don't have an immediate need, a lot of people are gonna be sending out feelers to different law firms. They're gonna fill out web forms on several different law firm websites and it's usually not 100% of the time, but the majority of the time it's usually the law firm that reaches out first to respond to. That is the one that ends up getting that business Right. Speed to lead.
Speaker 3:It's all about speed to lead and you gotta keep in mind something that prospective clients that are reaching out to your firm, however they got in, whatever the entry point, is their consumers like you and me, and we all shop right, If I'm gonna go buy a car, I'm not gonna call one dealership. We all shop. If I'm looking for a roofer, I'm gonna call a few of them and it's whoever handles me the best over the phone and acts like they're happy and they want their business and they ask for the sale. They're the ones that are gonna win. I think the number is I don't know if this is 100% accurate still, because it might be a little bit old but I believe it's like prospective clients are gonna call three to five of your competitors before they make their phone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and especially for us as a marketing company, like the stuff that we do will only get you to a certain point. Right, at some point we basically have to hand off the responsibility to you. Like it's our job to drive people to your website and it's our job to design a website that gets people to fill out that form, but once they do that, there's really not much else we could do. And so when you talk about the ROI of your marketing and you talk about, well, oh well, my firm hasn't grown or I'm not getting enough clients, it's. I think this is one of the places where you have to look at where sometimes it's not that the marketing was doing something wrong.
Speaker 3:It's that you lost out on a lot of these opportunities because you weren't quick enough or you didn't have someone on your team reaching out quick enough to get these people to actually book that consultation and sign that retainer 100% and I would recommend that marketing companies what they do is they add to their checklist, you know, when they work with a new, or even before they sign up another law firm and say this is the audit we're gonna do to diagnose how things are going, before we can say not just you say, I do, but before I say I do and we're gonna check intake. And because for a marketing agency, you wanna make sure, you wanna know that they have a team and they can convert, and if they don't, it doesn't even make sense because they're just gonna come back to you and be like well, why aren't we converting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Let's then imagine that, okay, we have a law firm here, they have someone in this intake role. What are just some basic skills or even like personality traits or characteristics or something that make that an intake specialist that a law firm needs to have.
Speaker 3:They need to be okay with the S word sales and the S word script. They've got to be okay with that. And you know their mindset is they need to like if you ask them out of the blue hey, what's the desired outcome of your job, what is it? You want them to say conversion. Most will not. So you want them to have a sales mindset. You want them to obviously have a customer service mindset. You want them to be able to handle rejection. You want them to be able to understand that their voice and their tone and the cadence in which they speak has a big plays, a big factor in the relationship game. You don't really want to hire people that say I love people, I just I love people and I love talking on the phone. Because most people say that they're just they're looking for a customer service job, not really a sales job. And so you want to dig a little bit and because that's the typical answer and you just want to do a little bit and find out what does that mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they can be great with customer service, but they also have to be okay with metrics and scripts and goals and monitoring and getting feedback and handling criticism and having goals and, you know, really, really a very strong focus on sales. And if so, you've got to hire those people. Those are the people you have.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, what's interesting me and I'm really curious to get your thoughts on this and how you coach you know business owners on this. You know in my experience, a lot of really good sales people have the communication skills. They are able to establish that rapport with people. They're great talking with people and all that. But a lot of them, I think, struggle with the details and keeping those notes and doing the metrics and all of that. How do you, how do you coach people on trying to find that balance or finding the right person? Who can you know who has as many of those skills?
Speaker 3:Well, I think, I think. Well, one thing is I have never known A sales team in any business that didn't have salespeople that were always getting in trouble. So the salespeople, the ones that are converting, and they're really good at it, first they know it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But that's what they do well. All the other stuff they don't and they're in trouble a lot, right, I mean that's. I mean they're risk takers and that's what they do. They convert and that's what you hire them for. So the other things that are really important, I would say good salespeople are good about metrics because they that's how they make their money. Yeah, goals and all of that, but all the other things that come with the job they need to also do a good job. But that's that's up to leadership and management to provide the right training and across the board, like period, and we don't really have the best onboarding processes really in general. So if we just take care of the onboarding process and do the right thing and have a really good curriculum in place, that particular individual, they'll be OK because they have the right training and then they have mentors and coaches in the department that are helping them because we want them to sell.
Speaker 3:Yeah so we got to take care of the rest for them right.
Speaker 2:So the one other question I had just kind of in this area when you are like either posting for this job or you have this position in your firm, do you Advise that this is like a commission based role or is it, you know? Because, like for me, I hear a sales position and someone's doing, you know, having a sales philosophy in mindset when they're doing this. I got to imagine then that there's some sort of you know bonus or some sort of stipulation in order to get them to convert that. Do you advise that this is more of a commission based role then, as an intake specialist, or what do you suggest?
Speaker 3:No, I wouldn't say this type of selling when, where leads are being fed to you Pretty, you know, high qualified, basically because of the marketing, I wouldn't say it at all, commission, but I I do feel that there needs to be a bonus plan in place, a spiff or something in place for and everybody needs to have a goal. So there needs to be team goals and when the team is pushing each other so that they can get there, and then individual goals and there should be some sort of monetary reward for that. But don't make it easy, don't, don't, don't make it easy. I mean, it's this is selling, and so you know, you've got to know what their baseline is and then and then just push them to go to go further. But yeah, I think that. But not not all sit, not all commission, not a hundred percent commission Got it Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's just. It's just interesting because, like you know, and just me in my mind and thinking about you know, especially like how our sales team is here and how, and I understand how that's structured and so it's just interesting kind of seeing like how it might be different, even just for the clients that we serve, and so, you know, it's really interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think like just have different levels of Like a bonus for them. So you know, everybody meets the goal, you get this, but when you exceed, you get this, and then maybe, and then even would be great, is when they Get retainer signed, and these are high level cases. Yeah really big ones, then there should be a little bit more for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree for sure. And so, kind of on the other side of that, you know, as as the the owner, obviously these are people that you're managing and I feel like a lot of managers. When it comes to managing like the intake role, obviously the best way to kind of really gauge how well of a job they're doing is to listen to some call recordings. But I feel like a lot of managers are hesitant to do that for one reason or another I have no idea why because it's such a great tool to provide feedback. So what do you then advise? What does that rhythm look like for monitoring or auditing calls? What should you be listening for, or anything? Because, as a business owner, you're going to really hone in and say, well, I would have said this differently or I would have done this differently on probably every single thing. They're probably not going to get it 100% right every time. So how do you coach, then, business owners on how to kind of set that rhythm up for listening to call recordings and providing that feedback?
Speaker 3:Well, so first off, you want to have an intake sales manager. You know it's all about selling. So if we do what we tend to do, is we just have a great person that can manage intake. But they're not even hard to be that sales manager. They're not going to think that way, and so that's just not going to be natural, it's not going to happen. And then you're going to have all kinds of other problems. So that's one thing. The other is that what typically happens is we get great intake people and then that person gets promoted to supervisor or manager, but by default it's only because there's a hole in the department and things are falling apart and we need somebody. Oh, mary, she's been here long enough, let her go do it.
Speaker 3:So now we have somebody that has no idea what's going on, let alone the call monitoring, and the other thing that's happening is that you have Mary, you call manager, leader, supervisor, whatever you want to call that person, and every consultant, like Chris Mullins or somebody else, comes in and they say everybody agrees. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, we're going to listen to calls. That's really, really important. It never happens because Mary is doing a bunch of other things, not even managing the department reports all kinds of stuff. So now she's completely doesn't even have the time to do it. So the first thing is, top down again, the mindset has to be sales, sales manager, and let the sales manager monitor calls and help the team and coach them, let them convert, figure out another way to take care of all the other things. I mean you can have an assistant, you can have people that grow into other positions. They start here. There's other things that you can do, but the most important thing to conquer is the sales and the conversion of the monitoring.
Speaker 3:And then, as far as teaching using the monitoring, one of the best ways to do it would be to you have the technology where you I could be the sales manager, the intake sales manager, and I could be listening to a call live while you're on the phone, john, talking to Mrs Smith, and then I could there's a whisper and I could just tell you what to say when you're in trouble and you're struggling, and Mrs Smith won't hear it. So that's the the primo best right. Do that with management by walking around too, because as you're walking around, your presence is there, that that vibration of your presence is being felt by everybody. It's going to motivate them more, and then you can watch their body language and see somebody like like, do we have a problem somewhere which helps with the calls? That's the best. But if you can't do that, if you don't have that system in place which I really don't get that expensive anymore to do that then just listen to calls, however you. You can do it, whether it's at your desk or you access the call recordings and listen for tone of voice, listened for language and words that are being used.
Speaker 3:Does it sound like that intake specialist wants to be on the call or they don't want to be in the call? Did they? Do they sound like? Yeah, you know what I mean, mary. So, yeah, I mean, you know it's up to you. Do they sound like that? Or do they sound like you made the right decision calling? You're not alone anymore. You don't have to look any further. I'm gonna send you the retainer right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah so what? What are you hearing and what do you feel as the monitor when you're listening to the calls? How does it make you feel? Because you're a person too Right, yeah, and are we asking for sales? Or are we just kind of like question answer, question answer, question answer. Yeah, we are we on our way to converting from the beginning to the middle, to the end, or are we just stuck With question answer, question answer, question answer and we're never even gonna get to the rest? Do we understand the person's Emotional pain? Did they? Did they reveal what it was before we even asked it and we didn't listen for the opportunity and stop everything and put the brakes on and jump on it and talk about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah so those are. I mean, those are. Those are some things that you really want to think about. And then they. Then there's a formula that I teach called PAS problem, agitate solution. It's not something that I develop, it's way old school. So pass problem, agitate solution. Have you taught your intake team how to identify the real problem? It's not the car accident, right? Everything that's unfolding, how the life is falling apart. Specifically, I used to take my mother to chemo every Tuesday morning and now I can't. Now there's nobody else because I don't have a car and she's not growing chemo. Yeah, and when they identify the problem, did they agitate it and Repeat it back and instill some urgency? And then did they solve it? Yeah, I said in a retainer. So those are like the things you want to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then one final thing that when I ask you about you know, because I know a lot of our audience Probably utilizes this as a vendor but like some of these receptionist companies out there who you know have the virtual receptionist, Do you have any experience in working with them on behalf of a law firm? Or have you coached Any law firm owners on how to work with a vendor like that? Or do you really just prefer Someone who's in-house and in that position?
Speaker 3:Well. So we're always coaching the law firm on how to Communicate and work and build a partnership and a relationship with the call centers. I mean we're teaching them they're your team. Here's how you have to act With them, hold them accountable. So that's that.
Speaker 3:I 100% believe that it's better for your law firm to have your own team. I Mean you're gonna, you're gonna get much more with your own team. Then you are with a call center that it's working with the gazillion law firms. I mean they can't they can't really dedicate themselves to you, but your own team can. So I highly recommend your own team. I highly recommend hiring virtual and have your own Virtual call center, if you will. Your own virtual. It takes sales team 24-7, 365 days of the year. People have accidents and have DOI and criminal issues and everything at one in the morning, and three of them. These things happen. So so just do it. And it's also a lot more inexpensive Than it is to have a call center. You know somebody else's call center. That's the way to go 100%, but it's a last last, last resort. Okay, maybe you need to have the call center, maybe for an emergency backup, but you have to treat them like they're your team and listen to those calls and hold them accountable.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, how can people learn more about you and intake Academy and in all the ways that you help?
Speaker 3:Right, you can go to intake Academy comm, you can email Chris at intake Academy comm and you can opt in to download my book for free when you go to intake Academy comm and you'll get a couple of great articles and You'll also receive our weekly Monday morning email stimulator.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I know that you have a ton of great resources. You know especially dedicated lawyers. I know you've contributed some really great articles to our website Just around just that intake specialist role and so definitely recommend checking out everything that Chris has going on there. One final question for you before we wrap up here If you had one final piece of advice for our listeners, what would it be? Just one.
Speaker 3:Listen to your calls and give feedback to the team. That's it. If you just do that one thing, your conversion will improve. Little hinges swing big doors.
Speaker 2:Love it? Yeah, absolutely, and so you know I can't recommend, you know, just the ongoing coaching to your intake team. Enough, just because it makes the stuff that we do look that much better. But yeah, that's just, that's me being selfish there. But, yeah, really appreciate you coming on sharing all this great insight, as always, and that's going to do it for us here this week. If you have not done so yet, please leave a rating and review for the show and that's it, chris. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Thanks for listening. To learn more, go to spotlightbrandingcom. Slash center stage.