How to Use CRM to Grow Your Law Firm Business

Growing your practice is crucial for your business, and doing it efficiently is an important part of that growth. 

A couple months ago we talked through Customer Relationship Management systems, or CRMs and the benefits they have for helping you grow your business. At efelle we use one for our potential and current clients to keep track of our interactions, where they’re at in a lifecycle, and to gauge their level of interest. 

How to Know If You Should Be Using a CRM

The easy answer is if you’ve got customers/clients, then you should probably have a CRM. Having a CRM gives your team a database of all of your interactions and client info, so it at any point in time, you can check in to see where your client or potential client is at.

That being said, CRM’s are most beneficial to firms who are doing business development. With efelle, we keep both our current clients as well as potential clients in two separate pipelines. The current client pipeline shows us what ongoing services they may have, any website updates given, and other useful info. For the potential sales pipeline, we have different “stages” which let us know where we are at with the client - have we had one contact with them and need to schedule a more in depth meeting? Have we presented a proposal and need to follow up? 

Every business and firm is different, but the best thing is, you can customize based on your process. Here we give an example of different stages for your potential law firm clients. 

First Contact 

When you first speak with a potential client, keep a record of their request and qualify them as a potential lead. Whether you have a front desk assistant that qualifies leads or they’re sent directly to the person handling, keeping a log of notes so the entire team as well as your business development team member can be very helpful. 

This is also a great place to note how they came through to you - was it a referral, outbound marketing, or inbound marketing? You are able to customize the “Deal” properties in Hubspot and this is a great place to add this in. For efelle - we have a “Source” drop down menu that offers our different possible lead generating sources. This can help you track your efforts and see where you are getting your leads from.

Meeting Set

Once you have your first official meeting with your prospective client you can best understand what scope of services the client will need. This allows you to draw up the contract based upon a mutual understanding you’ve hopefully already established with the client.
This stage is helpful for you to reference when writing up the contract for the client and so you can be sure you have a consistent understanding of their goals and needs. 

Proposal / Contract

After you’ve agreed upon services to be provided by your team and your proposal has been written, you can send out the contract to the client. At efelle, we keep the initial draft on the contract right in Hubspot at this stage so we can reference it easily when speaking with the client. 

Contract Review

Have you talked through the proposal or contract with your client? We include this as a crucial step to alleviate any questions or roadblocks they may have. A lot of businesses and firms can miss this step, but being there to talk through your contract and remind your client how your offer can meet their needs and achieve their goals can help get pen to paper.

Closed Won/Closed Lost

You either win or you lose. If you’re able to move forward with the relationship then you can begin your relationship and moving them to “Won” can notify your accounting department about the new contract. If it’s “Lost” we recommend including a reason in case it’s for a reason that could be alleviated in the future or the client could be remarketed to. 

As you get more familiar with your CRM you are able to customize more and more options to best fit your needs. We work with our Hubspot to continuously learn of new features that will benefit our process. The best part is that you are able to continuously tweak the system and update it to best fit your needs. When we first started we had something like ten stages but realized that we wanted fewer options so we reduced it to six based off of how we used the CRM. 

Want to talk through the best options for how to enable your CRM to best work for you? Reach out to our team here and one of our Digital Strategists can walk you through the process.