Learn from the experts behind the growth of sterlinglawyers.com Anthony Karls, President of Rocket Clicks/co-founder of Sterling Lawyers, and Tyler Dolph, CEO of Rocket Clicks, interview the experts in all the areas that will drive revenue and increase profits for family law firms
Get technical knowledge and learn from the experience of those who paid the price to learn what it takes to grow from an idea to an exclusively family law firm with 30+ attorneys.
Lead Follow Up System: Why 48% of Law Firm Revenue Walks Out
The Math: Why Only 25% of Consults Sign on Day One
The Time-and-Reason Rule Every Intake Call Must End With
Morning Follow Up Workflow That Lands Same-Day Callbacks
Intake Team Culture That Makes the Process Actually Stick
Full Follow Up Framework: The Webinar Preview
Do you realize that you can literally double your firm if you implement a strong follow up process? If you are not doing this, this episode will change your life. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. This is a podcast designed for family owners who want to grow their profits, multiply their cases, and set a clear roadmap on what they need to do to build the firm of their dreams. I am your host, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our law firm only marketing agency called Rocket Clicks that was born out of our very own law firm, Sterling Lawyers, that will do over $20 million in revenue this year. Today we are continuing our intake series stemming off of our intake webinar. We are talking about the power of follow up. And Mary and Tony are with us again. And they are going to walk through the metrics, the why for why your firm needs to do follow up, and then how it's going to impact your firm as a whole. Mary and Tony, we are back. We're continuing our conversation on intake. Last episode we talked about the the amazing webinar we had on the intake process at Sterling and how we want to continue that conversation and really talk about the power of follow up, because that is where so much revenue is lost by firms who are not doing follow up. And so we're one week away from this webinar. It's going to be next week. It's going to be on the power of follow up. And Tony, I want to get us started by just going through the math, like help our listeners understand how important follow up is. And if you're not doing how much revenue you are losing at your firm. So to start with the sets portion, so of ten of our last 10,000 consultations set, only 59% are set on the first day. So the first phone call 40% more than 40% are scheduled after. And it's it's not all they're scheduled on day two or day three. There's a large percentage. Over 20% are scheduled after the after the second week. So it's really important that you're doing follow up. And then on a revenue side, deals so funded agreements that you actually get after the consultation, only 25% are signing on that first day, only 52% are signing in the first week. So even if you want to like say, well, I don't do follow up and I'm going to get everybody in the first two weeks. Sure, maybe I'll give you that. Not doing follow up is costing you probably close to 48% of your potential revenue by not having a follow up process or post consultation. It is a huge, huge number. could double your firm. If you're not doing follow up today and you implement follow up, you can double your firm. It will have a dramatic impact on your firm's revenue, even if it's even if you do poorly, maybe you don't double because you're not going to implement it expertly, but you could easily see a 10 to 20% lift on revenue. If you just start to follow up, you just start implementing a follow up process on your leads that are coming in and you're and getting those into sets and the consoles you have and following that, following up with them and getting those into funded agreements. It's it's a massive amount. And this is why often when we meet with clients, we will say, you probably don't have a problem because we're going to run your numbers and we're going to benchmark you against firms that we've coached and firm in our system and our own and our own internal numbers. And it's like, okay, yep, we're going to get you more leads because we want you to grow, but we want you to exponentially grow. And this is where the exponential growth happens. That is, in saying to think about even if you do a poorly just do follow up. Just do follow Yes. You're doing $1 million a year. Would you like another $100,000 by just doing some follow up? Because you don't have to pay the person that's going to do a follow up $100,000, which is going to be Wow. Okay, so let's get a little tactical Mary, talk to us about the follow up process and give me like the just the in the weeds how we think about follow up with sterling and literally what you hold your team accountable for. Every phone call is specific to the pain that the individual is in. We talked a little bit about this in the last segment, but now to get technical. If I'm on the phone with you and I'm speaking to you, Tyler, I'm not leaving you to voicemail. I'm not sending you a text message. I'm actually speaking to you. The end of that conversation must be a call to action. It has to have a time and an action that you and I are taking next to get you one step closer to that. Yes. So that could be 12 p.m.. Call Tyler back on the consult fee. It could be 9 a.m.. Call Tyler back about the custody concern, specifically medical. 10 a.m. Call Tyler back about baseball practice. It's specific. And just to confirm the goal Mary, is whenever you talk to someone on the phone, you are establishing and scheduling that next. 100% every single time. That is the biggest miss that I see in salespeople all the time is they'll come back and say, I had great call, great water, next steps. Oh, I'm not sure I'm going to call him back. It's like, no, why is it not No. Absolutely not. Because here's the reality. First of all, I don't I can't guarantee that you're not going to get sick, Tyler, and you're not going to have a sick child. And if I need to cover your dashboard and if I don't see the reason that I'm calling back, I'm going to have a terrible follow up. I'm going to have a terrible follow up call. It's going to go nowhere. That individual is not going to feel cared for. They're going to be guessing if they made the right decision by trusting Sterling with that story, and you risk losing them all together. So it does two things. It allows the client to feel cared for by you and anyone else that touches them. And it also allows you, as the individual, doing the phone call to feel in control of your day. Like so real practically. Ideally, this is a test that you create in the system, and then you put a tickler on your calendar to make sure you do it on that day. If you don't have all of that functionality, everybody should have a calendar. Just go put on a calendar, put on a calendar, just a ten minute meeting for yourself because they're not going to be on it. Were you reminding yourself that, oh, okay, I got a call. I got a call Mary back at 10:00 today. Great. And you did that 3 or 4 days ago and had 45 or 50 additional conversations. You have no clue what you talked to Mary about. You need to put it in the notes. Let's put in the details of the event. And like, just it's small little things and you're going to see significant improvements in your in your sales numbers just by doing these small little things. Tony just touched on something that really matters. Human created custom tasks versus systems generated automatic tasks because I keep saying, If I'm talking to you, I'm not leaving you a voicemail. I'm not leaving a text message because you and I both know the reality is, is, Tyler, you're going to ghost me one of these times. You're not going to answer. You're going to be too scared. You're going to be too busy. You're going to have a sick kid that you it doesn't allow you to answer the call. Okay, so then my human created task is done. I'm going to leave notes about what happened. I'm going to leave a voicemail. I'm going to send them a text message. I'm probably going to send them an email as well with some sort of resource that sterling is created. And then I'm going to rely on system generated automatic tasks as a safety net. This is going to keep the prospect nice and warm. It's going to allow me to not forget about them. It's going to allow me to look back at my notes and think about what we talked about last, or what we didn't get to talk to yet. And then again, the second I get you on the phone, I'm getting another either human created custom task out of you, or I'm scheduling you your consultation. 100%. There is always something scheduled at the end of the call then leveraging the power of your CRM. And so if you are listening to this and you are not using CRM or you have a CRM, but you also have a spreadsheet or you also have a notepad, go all in the data and the scheduling alone will make you more money as a firm owner. So powerful. Okay, so so we're doing this right. We're we're believing in the CRM. We're holding our team accountable. How do you make sure they're saying the right thing? QA comes in again. Not only scores your initial fact finding calls, and the first time you have a conversation, your QA needs to be scoring every single touchpoint after including the times you're leaving a voicemail and sending a text message and sending an email, as well as the times that you actually connect and you have a human conversation and you're role playing those types of scenarios to it doesn't always have to be these long winded role playing where you're doing full fact finding conversations about the very beginning of the the history between you and a client. They can be follow up role playing as well, and it's just as important. Every day. Yeah. When was the last time your team called to book a lead who didn't book? If you can't answer that, neither can your intake team. And that means every lead. Who said I need to think about it is sitting in your CRM right now without an owner, without a follow up date, and no next step? That lead is not dead. That's revenue that you will not get that you forgot about. At Sterling Lawyers, 75% of our revenue comes after that first conversation, 75% meaning even if you just do this poorly, you will change your firm over night. We track this across thousands of cases, and we found the money in the follow up. We're teaching the exact follow up system behind that number in a free training. How do we prepare for every call? What do our agents actually say? And what is the cadence that runs behind every lead until they book? Please see the link below so that you can sign up today. Follow up ones, the shorter ones, they're, they're they're probably almost more impactful because they're easier for the coach to deliver because it's easier for them to review it. But then the application applies to the whole sales process, because likely what you're going to find in your team's follow up, especially in voicemails. I see this all the time in the system we're building currently. We're scoring every single call up on the is there generic voicemails? Right. So they're not they're not as specific as yeah, they're not as specific as they could be. So and then the person does actually legitimately get from fuze like who's who's Mary. Who's that person. Because I doubt they remember. They probably have a hard time remembering your name at all on the first phone call. Like they're so in their head and full of emotion about telling the story. That's hard. They're not going to remember Mary's name and memories. Going to call them back in seven days. They have no clue who Mary is. Hey, this is Mary from Sterling. Just I'm just following up on our conversation last week, Wednesday. Mary? In the last episode, Mary did a great job of kind of a mock call with me and knowing that I have kids and even brought up the fact that I have kids on that next call. And immediately there was that association of like, oh, she she gives a shit. Like she actually cares about me and my situation, which is our whole premise for doing intake and follow Just care. It's not hard. Be a human. So, Mary, how many follow up calls is your team doing on a daily basis? And how do you make sure that they're getting through all of them? Well, you have a dashboard that you're going to check every single day and ensure that your dashboard is being handled correctly and promptly between. I have 16 intake agents on the phone every single day. They average between 35 to 45 outbound calls. The end of the month typically is a little heavier, and then holiday seasons a little bit heavier as well, because those are really painful Christmas time, Thanksgiving, Easter, Father's Day, Mother's Day, those holidays where you really want time with your kids can get heavy. Then you're going 45 to 55 outbound calls per day. But that's just the reality is your dashboard is your life. You should be able to come in and use a CRM that tells you exactly where you need to be, who you're talking to. It should have a very quick application where you can pull up notes from your past conversations. What's prevented them from moving forward? What's the next step closer to that? Yes, it's the standard. It's the standard that the managers hold them to. The team leads hold them to. There is a way for you to prioritize your day that allows you to take both inbound calls and to care for the client you've already spoken to. I was just going to say, I bet if some someone's listening to this and they're thinking, but my my intake team is there for intake, they need to make sure that they're answering the phone. How do you manage that, that narrative? Or do you have someone come in who's who's had that kind of narrative and you've had to dispel it by helping them better schedule their day? Or like, what do you do for that? I point out our history and what we are able to do for our clients, and the reality is numbers don't lie and our numbers will tell you over and over again that follow up matters and it matters massively. And so if you want to tell me you want to churn and burn your way through the day and only take inbound calls and you never want to do a single follow up, then enjoy not being the most the best version of yourself, because you will just stay stuck in a fake reality that you think you're doing a great job, but in reality, you're actually hurting the clients you're talking to. It's just so easy to pinpoint this with the way that we've tracked our numbers over the history of sterling. Well, I mean, just tying it back to the fact that 50% of your deals are not going to come via that first inbound call. Now? I was going to say their numbers aren't going to be as good as the rest of the team. Like they might have a they might have a streak where they're performing at level, but because they're not doing follow up, like you're going to see it like we just we just talked about how often they come after that first phone call. So if you're not doing it, you're not going to you're not going to do it. Your individual performance are not going to be great. it'll be really hard for that person to survive in the system. The way I like to set up my day when I was an agent is I spent the first hour of my day going through the systematic scheduled tasks. They were not the ones that I had physically created a time and a reason for the call. I wanted to get through those 30. I wanted to review those notes, call those 30 people within the first hour so that they had all day to get back to me, and all 30 of those were going to be very specific. There was not a single day that I left the same voicemail for all 30 of those individuals. I didn't send all 30 the same text message, the same email, the same YouTube video, the same webinar link. They're all specific because every one of those individuals had a different pain that they they gave to me. So they were specific follow ups. And then the rest of the day, I'm bouncing back and forth between answering a call and being off the phones for my next scheduled call, and just really making sure that you can do that well. It's a fast paced environment. I think most sales agents love that, but it's the reality. If you have to have a really good daily workflow that you can adhere to and not get tired of, and to really motivate yourself, I still do it to this day. I have the same daily task list that I write down. At the end of my day. That is the start of my next day and I just do it over and over and over again. It's what matters. I would I would say what's important there is like there's there's probably a whole episode. We could do a daily workflow. We spent a lot of time talking about it. It's honestly when we find an agent that's underperforming, we just we let's look at what you're doing all day. And like we analyzed our workflow. They're usually not following what we prescribed and ask them to do. And they're doing some version of their own. And like it's just stuff isn't getting done in the right order because like, what you what you should have heard is Mary does her follow ups that aren't strategic follow ups, they're just system generated follow ups all in the morning. Why does Mary do them all in the morning? He said it so they have all day to call her back so that she can then convert it. So what's the difference between doing that. And then I'm going to leave my follow ups to like kind of when I have time and I'm going to I'm going to rush through them at the end of the day so they get done. Guess how many of those people get back in touch with get back in touch with them, because that person now has their at the end of their day, they want to eat dinner. They got to pick their kids up the nights crazy. We got homework, all this stuff, blah blah blah. I don't have time to talk to me. And they wake up the next morning. Things are going crazy. They're not thinking about Mary at all. That text message or email or whatever is buried in their inbox. They're not thinking about it. They're not calling her back versus do it in the morning. Like huge difference, small like super small nuance. But it's you're going to put yourself in the best position possible to be to have high performance. And it's these small things that make a big difference. It really feels like if you're implementing this for the first time, you just need to test and you need to document and then build processes around what's working. One secret we touched on a little bit in the last episode was the power of having a great culture of your intake team, and I get the benefit of seeing some of the emails that Mary Sensor team, and they're amazing. There's so motivational. Like, I get jacked up just reading your emails to your intake team. When did you start that and why did you find to be so successful? I think I started probably two years ago. The reason why I started it is because we are dealing with some of the heaviest moments of an individual's life, and those moments can feel really burdensome to the intake agents. And one way that we can overcome that burden is by sharing it together and realizing that you're not alone in this, and that your pain or your struggles, someone else on your team is probably experiencing it. But there is leadership that's walking this with you, and that I'm never too good to go on the phones. If we need Mary to go on the phones or Mark or Julia or any of the leads, we'll go on the phones. Absolutely. We'll go on the phones with you and we'll walk alongside this pain point wherever you need us to. And so those emails start off as a way to prove like I care about you as a person just as much as I care about the person you're talking to. Because if you're not secure, if you're not feeling motivated or distressed, it's going to breed into those phone calls. You're going to be stressed on the call with the client who's already stressed. So I knew I needed to take that on. That was something that I needed to shoulder as the leader of this team. It's they're great and you've really built a very high performing, successful team. From what I've heard in talking with you guys, it really stems starting with great process, ensuring that you're doing QA, making sure that like the the team is doing what you're asking them to do, when you're asking them to do it, and then understanding how important this is for a business. The stats at Tony started with this podcast with or astounding. They're insane. It just has to be done. It's like non-negotiable. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't lose the I think it's it's process, but it's also like how do you how do you support the team that's doing it? Because like a supportive team that feels empowered, it's going to perform way better in the prescribed process you're giving them than a team that's feeling burdened and hyper dominated. And in an authoritarian regime, if you're just focused on just just to the process, just to the process, why isn't this working? Just just follow the process. Like that's not going to work from a management perspective. So you need both. It's not just one versus the other. Truth and love, Tyler. Just be a human. It'll be a good human. There's a lot some humans you know. Yeah. Let's clarify what we're talking about. I love it guys. Really appreciate your time. Like I started out this podcast, we are doing a full webinar on our follow up process at Sterling next week. The details for that webinar will be in the show notes, but we will give you the exact framework. We'll give you this the the entire step by step process. So make sure to see us there. Thank you so much for being here. To both of you. And we'll see you again
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