Whether you run a small solo practice or are a partner at an elite global law firm, this fact remains the same: competition for clients is fierce. Modest growth and rapidly expanding competition is driving many firms in search of methods to stand apart. Yet this quest for a “differentiating factor” may not be the only answer to generating new leads and increased revenues. Sometimes the simplest answers to the most difficult challenges originate from the very core of your firm's business processes.

The most impactful business operations strategy you should place under review is your firm's client intake process. If your intake process is not instantaneously responsive to prospective client inquiries, lacks a disciplined commitment to following up with leads, or is short on recording information that can nurture a positive client relationship, you have a problem that can result in wasted time, costly mistakes, and lost business.

Salesforce is a powerful solution that can help your firm to streamline its intake process, improve lead management, and provide an understanding of exactly where each case came from, along with other vital pieces of business intelligence.

What Is Salesforce and Why Is It So Powerful for Law Firms?

Salesforce is customer relationship management (CRM) software based in the cloud. Your legal, marketing and intake teams can follow the status of each lead from its initial outreach to your firm to where your intake department stands with it today.

How Salesforce Captures Lead Data

With a website acting as the storefront for any firm, prospective clients typically outreach through one of three channels: phone, live chat, or via a web form submission. Each Salesforce CRM is uniquely designed to capture incoming data at the point where the initial exchange with the prospective client is complete.

Many firms use third-party call centers and live chat providers to capture contact data and qualify leads that a staff member will then follow up with. Salesforce integration is offered by many of these third-party providers. This means that contacts that have initiated a chat on your firm's website or have called your firm can be electronically fed into your Salesforce CRM immediately on completion of the chat or call. How this is done depends on the third-party integration. Some have components that need to be added to an organization's CRM; others connect to the organization's CRM through use of Salesforce's unique Organization ID.

Website contact form submissions can also be configured to integrate with a Salesforce CRM. For firms not using third-party phone or chat providers, the answer to how to best integrate is dependent on how the data is received by the firm.

Designing the CRM Architecture

The data fields for your CRM will be driven by the data output provided by your chat, phone, and web form solutions. The CRM design process typically begins with a review of the output fields from each of the inbound lead channels and identifying the data fields that will be useful to track.

Once the initial list of data fields has been developed, it should be determined what other data fields might better support your firm's needs during the intake process. For example, if your firm is a plaintiffs personal injury practice, a number of your initial contacts may be from a family member rather than the injured party. In this case, it would be useful to add injured party contact fields.

Updating the Status of Lead Records

Knowing the status of leads at all times is a vital component to any business development effort. Keeping track of status not only helps prevent potential clients from falling through the cracks, it can enable you to identify trends in your intake process that may point to issues that need addressing. This intelligence can come from a consistent status update coding system that categorizes where a lead currently stands in the intake process.

The update process can be handled in two ways. The intake team can update the status field manually as information surfaces, or through a mass update that is done through the import of a .csv file into the CRM. Salesforce assigns a unique ID for each record which is used to match and update records that already exist in the CRM.

It's not enough to just know if a lead is a closed case, an open lead, or a dead lead. A more detailed coding system will give you deeper intelligence about your inbound leads and how your intake process is managing them.

Your firm can gain some valuable insights by looking at the leads that had potential but didn't close. We had a client that had a category called “unresponsive,” which contained leads the intake team reported, but had stopped communicating. When we saw that this group comprised a sizable portion of the firm's total leads, it opened the firm's eyes to the fact that it needed to break the category code into finer detail to gain more intelligence into why so many leads stopped communicating.

Also, intelligence of benefit is the percentage of unqualified leads, particularly if you are investing heavily in them, and why. Whatever the reason for the rejected cases—statute of limitations, not in the right area of practice, or some other reason—it is good to have an understanding of what kinds of inquiries are being turned away. Rejected cases drain firm resources and an effort to minimize them first requires clarity about the makeup of the leads.

Analyzing Case and Lead Acquisition Sources

Third-party chat and call center providers often output marketing data in their Salesforce integrations in the form of referring site URL, marketing program custom phone number, or other data giving information on the acquisition source. Once records are updated, reports can be run which easily and quickly provide information on the source for the chat and phone leads.

Since most standard web forms don't have the functionality to capture where the user is coming from, leads coming from form submissions require a bit more manual digging. The form submissions have date and time stamps which can be tracked to Google's Analytics service to identify the traffic source.

What's Involved in Developing a Salesforce CRM?

Using chat and call center providers that offer Salesforce integration will decrease development costs substantially since the integration will already be done for those channels. Designing and building the CRM, customizing the output functionality to support your intake team's needs, and configuring the web form integration is what most of the work will entail.

Executing on Your Strategy

If your firm is interested in exploring the development of such a CRM, there are two vital and different skills you will require from a development team: a certified Salesforce consultant and a marketing professional with Salesforce experience. Your in-house or third-party marketing professional should lead the project, design the data architecture of your firm's CRM, and communicate its vision to the Salesforce consultant, who will lead and execute the build.

Susan Hanshaw is the chief marketing strategist for Inner Architect. With an extensive background in digital and direct marketing, Susan has developed and managed lead generation and customer contact strategies on both the client and agency sides. She holds a certification in search marketing from Google. Susan has worked for and consulted with companies from Bank of America, Time Inc., Home Depot and Victoria's Secret to hundreds of small to medium-sized niche businesses. She has been a consultant to plaintiff law firms since 2009.

Dean Guadagni is Inner Architect's chief social media strategist. An early adopter of blogging and Twitter in 2007, Dean has written both long-form blog articles and microblogging campaigns representing top law firms and wine industry brands in Northern California. His social media strategies received recognition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, earning a client the distinction of being a leader in law firm marketing on Twitter. Before joining Inner Architect, Dean helped design blog networks for large real estate brokerages with management consulting firm Domus Consulting Group.