Introduction to lead management

Lead Management is the process of acquiring and managing leads (potential customers) until the point where they make a purchase^[1]. This is a more involved process than standard advertising and is most applicable to e-commerce stores that generate individual relationships with customers^[2]. A lead is a potential client who shows interest in your law firm^[3]. Whether they fill out a legal client intake form or call to inquire about whether your law firm is the right fit, a lead is someone who has indicated that they’re interested in paying for your legal services^[4].

Lead management is the process of tracking and managing prospective customers^[5]. It is the process of capturing leads, tracking all touchpoints with your business like email, chat, or website behaviour, and qualifying and engaging them until they purchase your product^[6]. Every business, big or small, depends on leads^[7]. For businesses to grow, you have to convert leads to loyal customers^[8]. And to do that right, you need to get complete visibility into sales and marketing leads in an organised manner^[9].

Sometimes referred to as customer acquisition management or contact management, it generally encompasses the following processes^[10]:

The Process of Lead Management

Lead generation:

Businesses create consumer interest and inquiry into products or services through a range of marketing tactics^[11]. These often include blog posts, advertisements, white papers, social media, events, and PR campaigns^[12]. During the lead generation activities, there are various means to reach potential buyers, such as email, website, social media, webinars, and paid ads^[13]. A good lead management legal software ensures that every lead is automatically fed into the legal practice CRM system from web forms, emails, and chat, preventing prospects from falling through the cracks^[14].

Customer inquiry and capture:

Consumers of marketing respond with interest and their data is recorded, which creates a sales lead^[15]. Be it sales or marketing operations; your teams shouldn’t be wasting time hunting for information on each lead or manual data entry^[16]. Complete legal software with lead management functionality automatically populates a lead’s profile with publicly available information such as their job title, location, timezone, company name, and social media profiles^[17]. It can track a lead’s activities on your website- pages visited, links clicked, resources downloaded and email engagement^[18]. These valuable insights allow salespeople to understand their intent and personalise sales efforts and it gives your marketing team the much-needed context to craft email campaigns^[19].

Lead qualification or filtering, grading, distribution, and contact:

Leads are sorted by the validity of the request, prioritised based on the likelihood of becoming a customer, and then dispersed to sales reps to be contacted^[20]. One way to effectively qualify leads is through a contact scoring model, a model that ranks your contacts based on their interest in your product or service, demographic information, buying journey, and engagement with your company^[21]. Lead scoring is a key part of the lead management process to determine the lead’s potential interest in your product or service^[22]. Depending on the size of your marketing program, a lot of work can go into defining how to accurately categorise and sort individual leads^[23]. A predictive scoring model in commercial legal software helps you prioritise contacts you interact with by going through historical data and assigning a score to every contact based on factors like job title, website behaviour, and engagement with your company^[24].

Lead distribution:

In this phase, the information that you captured in the first three steps to identify different segments of leads based on their interests will be used and likely positioned in the sales cycle^[25]. The sooner your sales reps contact leads, the more likely they are to win them over^[26]. Manually assigning a high volume of leads to the right sales reps can be time-consuming and delay lead response time^[27]. Leads are sorted by contacted or uncontacted and scheduled for follow-up processes^[28]. They may be put into drip-marketing campaigns or followed up with on the phone by a company rep^[29].

Lead nurturing:

 For the leads that are not quite ready to pass off to sales, enter them into an appropriate lead nurturing campaign^[30]. Many of these leads will still be in the research or awareness phase, figuring out if your product will solve their pain points^[31]. Lead nurturing seeks to educate and demonstrate the value of your product/service^[32]. With a lead legal management software in place, you can send nurture campaigns to these leads who are not quite ready yet to make a purchase^[33]. This is where you educate and demonstrate value through content and promotional offers thereby helping them in their decision-making process^[34].

Tracking and measuring leads:

As all marketers know, we need to track, measure, and track and measure some more^[35]. So while your leads may have been handed off, be sure to evaluate all leads with the sales team and continue to refine, score, and evaluate as needed^[36]. The key is to make sure the lead keeps moving through the sales cycle without being lost or sent back to marketing for more nurturing^[37]. One of the most important things you can do as part of your lead tracking efforts is to monitor where your leads are coming from, formally and systematically tracking this data from the first contact your law firm has with each lead^[38]. Knowing how each lead is generated is important because the information will inform your marketing strategy and let you know which referral attorneys to thank^[39].

Importance of lead management

The process of managing leads helps businesses understand which tactics are bringing in the best leads, so you can optimise your sales strategy to be both effective and efficient^[40]. Additionally, since lead management documents a person’s full history of interactions and experiences with your company, you can analyse exactly how a person was converted from a prospect to a lead, to a customer^[41]. You can see at which point in time your lead numbers get stuck, slip away, or skyrocket, and analyse this information to identify improvement possibilities that will ultimately increase sales and productivity^[42]. At the same time, consistently keeping in touch with your potential customers and nurturing them through the sales process puts your product at the top of their minds^[43].

At its core, lead management is the art of turning potential customers into actual ones.

An example of this balance may best explain the importance of lead management^[44]. Suppose that, after some highly favourable recent media coverage, your company receives an onslaught of new lead^[45]. You’ll now have to balance tending to the prospects you were already nurturing with qualifying, scoring and nurturing all kinds of new leads^[46]. Without an effective lead management strategy, you’re more likely to neglect or entirely miss promising new customers^[47].

A lead management system funnels leads through a process of multiple engagements, so buyers become more familiar with the company or products and more comfortable with the decision to buy^[48]. Your sales agents can use lead management to curate their approach around each potential customer’s needs and where they are in the sales funnel^[49].

Lead management prevents your sales team from wasting time on unqualified leads. A process that starts with using the right prospecting software tools^[50]. Agents will have clear guideposts for how to nurture leads and how to streamline the sales process for potential customers who are likely to convert^[51].

Lead management for law firms

Lead management derives from a concession that not everyone who visits your law firm’s website or other online properties are ready to become a client^[52]. The generation and management of leads within your law firm stem from applying a marketing funnel methodology and the integration of tools, tactics and technology at each juncture within the funnel^[53]. Lawyers are faced with the never-ending task of generating a pipeline of fresh leads, compelling them to focus at least part of their energy on marketing and business development^[54]. Healthy law practice has a lead nurture campaign in place, ensuring new cases become active as soon as current cases are resolved^[55].

In their 2019 Legal Trends Report, Clio reported that out of 1,000 law firms tested and surveyed, 60% didn’t respond to emails, and 27% were unreachable by phone^[56]. While they concluded that these telling results “will undoubtedly hold back firms from achieving high-growth success^[57]. They also state that “this deficiency presents a major opportunity for law firms to innovate and differentiate themselves within their markets^[58].”

While a healthy lead generation strategy will drive new legal leads to your doorstep, maintaining a strong focus on lead management will make it easier and more efficient for you and your sales team to convert those leads into paying clients^[59].

Here are a few ways to a holistic approach to lead management for your law firm can help you and your team drive more conversions:

1. It can help you stay organised as you track and follow up with potential leads^[60].
2. It can save you time by providing a repeatable framework you can use to quickly qualify and convert leads^[61].
3. It can save you money by helping you identify which marketing channels are providing the highest ROI and increasing the number of conversions from your lead generating strategies^[62].
4. It can boost your reputation by showing that your law firm is attentive and responsive, ensuring that every lead has a positive experience when contacting you (whether or not they hire you)^[63].
5. It can keep your law firm top of mind if leads look for legal help at a later time^[64].

Overall, once you’ve implemented a lead generation campaign and generated leads, you need to manage these leads, qualify them in terms of where they are in the buying cycle and then nurture them through the process until the time is right for you to convert them into a customer^[65]. Mismanaging a lead is almost worse than not generating the lead at all^[66]!

Acquiring quality leads is one of the most challenging aspects of any law firm marketing effort^[67]. But, while law firms often focus on lead generation, they tend to overlook the process of how those leads become clients^[68]. By managing your leads in a systematic and structured way, you can and will increase how many of those leads you convert into new clients for your law firm^[69]. Many small business owners still use spreadsheets to organise and track their leads^[70]. If you know how to use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can use either of these tools for lead entry and tracking^[71]. However, spreadsheets require much more manual data entry than a database and they are easy files to corrupt and/or delete entirely; therefore, this method should be used with caution^[72].

To make your intake process effective and efficient, you should first choose the right legal software tools.

To maximise the results of your lead generation campaigns, you should implement a system that allows you to smoothly transition leads into customers as efficiently as possible^[73]. You need a defined process for dealing with all the leads, a process that everyone who is involved is aware of and committed to following^[74]. Good Law Software is a leading legal software company that offers many features such as lead management and also case management and accounting for law firms. The legal practice management software for lawyers has been reviewed to be highly effective and handy among its users.

The solution that best suits your legal practice depends on the size of your practice, the volume of leads you intend to generate, your budget and the resources available to manage the system^[75].