Once Your Phone Starts Ringing - How to Work Web-Based Prospects
Posted by guest blogger, Kevin Kaiser, of Surety Bond Co., a surety bonding agency.
You've learned all the tricks to bring tons of leads into your business. But now you need to turn those leads into clients. People want to know that they are going to be working for a trustworthy lawyer that will be committed to their case and not just blow them off for easy money. Here are two big tips that are sure to help your practice succeed.
1. Call people back as soon as possible
Why? Studies have shown that every minute that passes, you have an exponentially lower chance of getting clients business. For our surety bond site, we make sure that the leads we are getting in through the site are getting to our agents as soon as possible. And it makes a difference. I keep track of the leads that we are able to close and what is different about those compared to the ones we aren't able to close, and almost every time the only difference from the leads we closed to the ones we didn't close was the amount of time between the getting the lead and the initial call.
You can set up some easy analytics yourself to determine the optimal time for you to call leads. If you have a dedicated programmer working for you, it should be pretty easy for him/her to come up with a fancy program for you. But for those of us not so lucky, you can set up a simple spreadsheet in Excel or whatever program you use. Just enter the time you received the lead, the time you called the lead, determine the amount of time between the submission and call, and if the lead turned into a client or not. Then see what appears to be the threshold for when a lead turns cold and make sure to call them before you hit that time limit.
If you're saying to yourself that you're already too busy to call leads as they come in, hire someone to call them and set up a time for the initial consultation with you. That way they know that you care enough to meet with them in person and will give them quality service.
2. Establish Rapport Using Technology
You might be the outgoing type that loves meeting new people, but I'm sure that all your potential leads are not the same. That's why it's good to help build an initial trust through your website. The Princeton WordNet Search defines rapport as "a relationship of mutual understanding or trust and agreement between people". When someone visits your site, they want to be able to trust the person they are going to use as their lawyer. The easiest way to build that relationship is through face-to-face contact. Be sure to have your picture and information about you that can help build that trust. Simple enough, right? And for the more savvy out there, it would probably serve better to shoot a video with an introduction of yourself and your firm. Be sure to make it lively (nobody likes a boring video), and make sure that it's prominently located on your website. As far as putting it on the homepage, I'll leave that up to you, but do make sure that it is easily found for visitors. Using Google's website optimizer you can even test where the best place is for your video.
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