By Legal Futures Associate Moneypenny
It takes an average eight calls to reach a prospect – so it’s easy to see why outbound calling can feel frustrating, or even thankless, and why it may even fall off the to-do lists of your team.
But with the new year well and truly underway – it’s important to ensure your legal firm is doing all it can to supercharges its sales efforts, and that means getting a head start with outbound calls.
Whether it’s seeking feedback on quotes, booking appointments or qualifying leads – proactive outbound calls are essential. It’s how hard-fought opportunities are converted into business.
Here, Bernadette Bennett from Moneypenny, which offers outbound as well as inbound call handling to legal firms across the country, shares five tips to maximise outbound activity.
- Categorise calls. Think about the different types of calls you need to make. Perhaps it’s to qualify conveyancing enquiries, chase up feedback on personal injury cases, get feedback on quotes, reawaken old data or gather client information to speed up onboarding. Categorising calls will help to ensure the right person makes them, identify how promptly calls must be made and where support might be required.
- Set targets. If you’re faced with a huge list of calls to make it can feel daunting. Set targets so that the team feels motivated. They might relate to the number of calls or the conversions you want to hit (this could be incentivised), but they could also be in relation to how much time will be spent on the task each week.
- Be prompt. If your outbound activity is following up leads then it’s important to be prompt. We know that 30-50% of sales go to the firm that responded first. Make sure your outbound teams know the urgency of different types of calls. Responsiveness wins business.
- Embrace CRM. Most legal firms know the value of CRM systems, but it’s important to ensure everyone tasked with sales calling is using it properly. Put CRM guidelines in place, stipulate the core information that must be captured and ask for calls to be recorded directly into CRM as they happen. It will save trying to decipher hand scribbled notes at the end of the day.
- Remove the headache. 92% of legal firms struggle to handle new enquiries due to being time poor and under-resourced. For these firms outsourced support is the answer and it’s why we launched our outbound service. Using our experienced legal receptionists to qualify leads, provide detailed quotes, convert enquiries, assign the matter to a fee earner and push the relevant data into firm’s case management system, we take the headache out of outbound. We respond to leads from any source, calling them promptly from the firm’s office telephone number and guaranteeing a professional experience. Problem solved.
Bernadette Bennett, Head of Legal Sector at Moneypenny, said: “Failure to prioritise call backs and follow ups can lead to a leaky sales funnel, as well as bad sentiment. After the economic turbulence of the last couple of years and the increasingly competitive nature of law, firms must prioritise client care and progress all opportunities before a competitor gets to them.”
Moneypenny handles more than 2 million legal calls and live chats each year for more than 1,000 legal firms in the UK, including 70 of the Top 200, thanks to its dedicated team of 95 legal receptionists.