Looking to improve client intake for your law firm? How do you increase client conversions? How do you turn more of your prospects into new clients?
Why Client Conversion Fascinates Me
As a long term law firm marketing man, from both inside law firms until 2003, and since then running my law firm marketing consultancy, I quickly realised that the first form of marketing that you should undertake is not to simply spend more money making the telephone ring more, but instead to ensure that when the telephone did ring, everything possible was done to turn that prospect into a new client.
Whilst all of my competition and most law firm owners were looking for the next marketing tactic to use to generate more client enquiries, I realised that I probably didn’t need to make the telephone ring more, I just needed to ensure that more of the prospects calling converted into new clients.
By how much?
Well, that depends on your numbers.
You cannot start this process unless you know your numbers.
How Much Do You Need To Increase Your Client Intake By?
Every law firm owner should know how many EXTRA clients they need to take on to reach their ideal turnover.
To keep things simple, let’s just deal with one solicitor or fee earner.
Let’s assume that this fee earner wants to increase their billing by £10,000 each month, and that each new client is worth an average of £1,000 in profit costs.
We now know that this solicitor needs an additional 10 clients each month on top of their current client intake to reach their new target.
Now that we know this, let’s look at their existing client intake/conversion numbers.
Current Client Intake
I am going to use numbers that I commonly see in my many discussions with law firm owners every year.
The same solicitor in the story above receives 30 enquiries every month and converts 7 of those into new client instructions.
His client conversion rate is 23%.
Now I know from experience that this is a fairly average conversion number across many different legal services, from business to consumer to business to business legal services.
By looking at these numbers, I hope you can now see that to generate the additional 10 new client instructions each month, he or she now has two ways to increase their turnover by £10,000 a month by taking on additional 10 clients.
- With a conversion rate of 23%, the solicitor can make the telephone ring an additional 43 times every month; or
- The solicitor can work on every aspect of their client conversion process to dramatically increase the conversion percentage to 56%.
Which do you think is the most cost effective option?
Which option should the law firm choose first?
They could spend several thousand pounds a month to generate 43 more telephone calls, or they can fix all of the gaps in their client intake processes to improve the client conversion from 23% to 56%.
If they take this option, it will repay them every time that they decide to grow turnover, because they will be able to spend a lot less than any of their competition to grow.
Summary – Improving Client Conversion / Intake
Mastering the art of client conversion has been a permanent quest for me since I entered the legal world and started marketing legal services.
It is why I coined the phrase The Meaningful Conversation and devoted an entire chapter of my book, The Law Firm Growth Formula, to the topic of client conversion.
If you are serious about growing your law firm, mastering the client conversion process is an incredibly smart thing to do.
It will allow you to grow your law firm for a fraction of the cost that your competition will have to pay, giving you a much more profitable business.