Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:02):
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA from Law Firm Velocity. We often request a leads by lead source report from the clients we work with. We use this tool to ensure the firm is generated in leads that we need to make future month revenue projections. And when we are updating revenue forecasts, we will adjust those forecasts if we see leads dropping off or increasing. We also use this tool to calculate return on investment for digital advertising. So as the firm is paying for AVO ads or we're paying for Google Ads, we want to see the exact number of leads we're getting from each campaign, so we can ensure that we're getting the return that we need. A lot of the CRMs used by law firms don't make this process simple. So making this video to show an example of how this could be done in Pipe Drive, which is a fairly simple to use CRM that costs a whopping $30 a month, which is about half of what a lot of the legal CRMs want.
(01:10):
So what we're looking at is all of the deals that came into the firm last week. So we have the lead source. So lead sources could be a returning client coming back for an additional matter. Here we have a referral from a center of influence. We can also have referrals from clients. Here we have a lead from AVO, and here we have an unknown lead. That way I would like this done is, if you can't objectively tie a lead to a specific lead source, it goes into unknown. So all those folks who call in and say, "I found you on the internet," they go here. If we're running ads on AVO or Google Ads, that we will use a call tracking system to ensure that we know exactly which leads come from which ads. Just the digital marketing is too expensive. We can't guess and attribute organic leads, or people finding us other ways into the digital campaigns.
(02:07):
And then, the other column that we have here is, so this is a referral from person Z. So person Z provided two referrals within one week. So we want to make sure that they get some thank you cards and they're on our radar for additional follow-up. And then the other pieces we have on the system is, we can have who owns the lead, so who generated it or who's it responsible to bring this to a close. And then Pipe Drive supports multiple pipelines. So you could have a pipeline for by associate and kind of keep track of each leads by pipeline, or if the firm has multiple segments that you could track pipelines by segments. So this is a simple report that's actually native to Pipe Drive. You can save this view and it's actually set up, so it uses calculated dates. You can say, I want to see the leads by lead source for last week.
(03:01):
You click that saved report and it comes up like this. We can also push this over to Excel. And so, within Excel we can sort it by lead type and it will actually add sums. So we can see we got five leads for the week, so it'll do the math for us. The other version of this is to edit at the end of the year or the end of the quarter, run a different version of this report that shows every lead by referral contact. And so, that way we know exactly which of our referrals partners are sending us consistent work. So that is an introduction to the reports in Excel. Let's take a look at, so this is the table view. This is what Legacy CRMs will use. Pipe Drive also supports their pipeline report. And in this, when leads move down the process, you can just drag them over to the next section.
(03:59):
So here, this lead move from new lead section to designate that we have the consultation scheduled with that lead this week. And it just is a nice visual overview. We can change these stages to whatever matches for your firm. Let's look in to see what a deal looks like when you add it. Actually, let's go back and add a new deal. So a new deal. So contact is the person who's contacted the firm, if they're with a company, who they're with, pipeline, so it says where you can designate which pipeline it belongs to.
(04:34):
So lead source. And so, this is where we can say that the source came from AVO, it came from a referral from a client, a returning client or unknown. And then if it came up, if it's a referral, we want to type in the name of the person who provided the referral. And this is nice in that this is actually searching out all of the additional contacts we have in the system. So it actually ties this to an existing contact, so the name is consistent across time. It's not loading because Camtasia plus my recorder kind of crashes things. And so it's really easy to add the deals and then maintain them as they work through the process.
(05:17):
And then, one last piece we want to look at is we can put a value on every deal. So if we know the rough approximate case value that the deal is going to provide, that on these deal stages, we can designate what we expect to collect. So here I've defined that if it's a new lead that we have a 30% chance of closing this. And so, the two leads that are in this stage are worth $14,000, and at 30% of that it's worth $4,200. So here, similar thing that we have $13,000 in the consultation schedule stage, we close 40% of those, which is worth $5,200. Then at the top of the screen here, we have the total value of all deals in this pipeline. And then we can see that the expected value is $13,400. So this allows you to maintain the health of your overall pipeline. And these two values are tremendous pieces to put on your weekly scorecard for your leadership team. And with that is a quick overview of how to use pipe drive to manage leads for a law firm. Thank you.
