This episode is a teaser for the Ben Glass Law Inside Baseball podcast, a private podcast available only to Great Legal Marketing members.
Want to get access to the podcast along with 101 case studies of successful firms, the Ultimate Practice Builder Bundle, our 10 Step Plan for Marketing Success, and much, much more?
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
This episode is a teaser for the Ben Glass Law Inside Baseball podcast, a private podcast available only to Great Legal Marketing members.
Want to get access to the podcast along with 101 case studies of successful firms, the Ultimate Practice Builder Bundle, our 10 Step Plan for Marketing Success, and much, much more?
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
What's up, guys, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. This is going to be a quick hitter of an episode. I'm in the middle of four days of mastermind meetings with the Great Legal Marketing Hero and Icon groups, but wanted to get something out to you on a Friday morning. So this episode is a snippet from the Ben Glass Law Inside Baseball podcast, where Ben and I share ideas and tips and tricks and things that are working that we're actually implementing in our law firm.
Speaker 1:
This is a private podcast. It's only available to members of the Great Legal Marketing Journal and if you want to get on that list, I've got an offer for you that I'm going to put in the show description because I think it'll probably be hard for you to follow this URL. But if you go to wwwgreatlegalmarketingcom backslash glm-journal-special-offer, and that's why I'm putting in the show description are you going to find an offer to get on our our mailing list for free for 30 days, with a little bit of an upsell behind that. But to bribe you into the upsell, I'm going to give you 101 law firm case studies, law firms that we've helped. We'll send you the great legal marketing ultimate practice builder bundle and you're going to give you 101 law firm case studies, law firms that we've helped. We'll send you the Great Legal Marketing Ultimate Practice Builder Bundle and you're going to get on the list for this Inside Baseball podcast.
Speaker 1:
So if you dig, what you hear next in this short snippet, again, it's stuff that's working inside our law firm. So there's so many people in this industry that are not actually implementing any of the stuff that they teach, so many coaches and gurus who are not actually doing any of this stuff and we are. And that's what makes great legal marketing different is that we have effectively a laboratory within Bangalow's Law and we share what works. We share what doesn't work. So I hope you dig today's quick hitter of an episode. If you do, make sure that you subscribe so that you don't miss anything coming out of my mouth and then hit the link in the show description if you want to get on this inside baseball private podcast distribution list. See you guys beyond the breach.
Speaker 2:
We're on a mission to show you how to build a thriving vision. No more living a life that sucks. Let's build a practice that serves us. Welcome back to Inside Baseball with Ben and Brian at Ben Glass Law. Let's talk about outsourced phone answering. We had a little experiment recently.
Speaker 1:
So one of the things that we changed recently is we moved away from like a phone tree, voicemail after hours and weekends service to live 24-7 phone answering. So somebody, somewhere, a live human being, picks up the phone on the nights, picks it up on the weekends and picks it up when it rolls over at the front desk and rolls over at the front desk. And if you aren't listening to the phone calls that your service is having with your clients and your potential clients, this story is going to scare you.
Speaker 2:
Well, everybody says it's better to have a live phone answer until it isn't. Actually, in some cases the phone tree was better. But what happened was we went back to a vendor that we had used we won't name the vendor here, we've mentioned them to our mastermind groups who we'd used in the past, came back to them and said hey, we want live phone answering. And they said we are going to put our A-team on your account.
Speaker 1:
Well, the reason that we'd cycled off of them in the past was because they were good until they weren't. And so, you know, pre-covid, we were listening to these calls and it was going 13, 14, 15 rings before somebody picked up and I was going I can't believe anybody's waiting on the phone for this long to be picked up. And so we moved to a digital phone tree that our guy, our tech guy, set up, and it was reasonably good, we thought, at least when we set it up. But our conversions went way up after we moved back to the answering service, well, at least after we moved to the second answering service. So within 48 hours of being on the first answering service, there was a call that had come through with somebody who only wanted to set an appointment to come in and talk about their auto accident.
Speaker 2:
I've been in an accident. I want to set an appointment. How do I do that? Here's my injury.
Speaker 1:
What else do you need to know in order to set an appointment? And this conversation went on for about 18 minutes.
Speaker 2:
And one of the problems with the conversation was that the woman asked like, are you actually live at the office? And this guy said yes, he was. And then she started asking about streets and counties and what county is this in? And he tried to answer those questions and it was all a lie and so we listened to that call. Here's the teaching points we listened to that call, we got frustrated, we lost that money. So our case value is probably $18,000, average case value. So that was $18,000 call and we brought it up with the phone company that we're using, a live receptionist, and said, oh, this wasn't really good.
Speaker 1:
And they said- I forget actually what they said. I do know that they didn't refund us all of our money.
Speaker 2:
Well no, they said, hey look, sorry, we're going to retrain. And literally four days later a very similar call came and it was also horrible. So it has Brian and I like throwing up into the bucket because there's another potential $18,000 out the way. And this is where it really gets interesting, because we said to the phone answering company listen to these two calls like we are done and we would like our money back please, because we had prepaid for two or three months.
Speaker 1:
They said well, they said no, Said no, we couldn't have our money back, but they did offer to move us to the A team, which is what we were promised to begin with. So here's what you need to know about. That is that each of these companies have an A, a, b, a C and probably a D team, and if you were being promised to go to the A team, that means you are not currently with the A team. And so, listen, these tend to be low-paying jobs. They tend to be somebody who's working from their house or from their basement, and I'm sure that it is not easy at 11 o'clock on a Thursday night to be answering the phone from somebody who's halfway across the country with an auto accident case. But if you are spending your money on one of these services, you absolutely owe it to yourself and to your law firm and to your family to be listening to those calls and making sure that you're getting your money's worth.
Speaker 2:
All of our calls are recorded here and Virginia is a one-state permission type state. Calls are recorded here and Virginia is a one-state permission type state. And the other thing to remember is that you might get the A-team for a few weeks and you might listen to those calls for a few weeks and they might be awesome. You have to periodically go back and listen to calls because you will not have the A-team forever and there are many of them, I think, hoping that you don't go back and listen to the calls At the end of the day, having live in-person in your office is, I think, where you want to be. We get it. That's an asset you can build. It takes a while to build it. It takes a while to find the right person and there are good outsourced phone answering teams and companies. It's a lot of what we talk about in our mastermind groups and, to some extent, in the newsletter as well.
Speaker 1:
It is really hard to staff a 24-7 answering service by yourself, and so these outsourced vendors are the kind of companies that many, many of our members are using, and I'll tell you. I'll just drop the name of the one that we're happy with, because we're happy with them. Smith AI has been answering our calls now for about a year and a half. It's relatively inexpensive. The price is basically on par with everybody else and the pricing, I think, is per call and not per minute, which is why they're not incentivized to talk for 18 minutes with somebody that we can't help or run up the bill. They're incentivized to run through your script, get you a good concise transcript of what happened and move on to the next one, and what you need to do is add great little marketing.
Speaker 2:
We never take any money for endorsements like that, of any type. We're happy to tell people who we like and who we're using. We're also happy to tell people who has failed for us All, right until next time.
Speaker 1:
And I hope that's helpful to you if you're running a solo or a small law office, as many of our members are. If that is helpful, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any more episodes, and then be sure to check out the link in the description of the show for the offer to get on the Great Legal Marketing Journal list. Make sure you get this Ben Glass Law Inside Baseball private podcast dropping into your Spotify, dropping into your Apple podcasts every single month Till next time, guys.