Great Leads, Empty Calendar

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I want to tell you about a law firm that was doing almost everything right. They had a website bringing in leads. They launched a webinar campaign and brought in even more leads. And their cost per lead, this is the part that gets me, was sixteen dollars and forty seven cents on average. In this business, that's about as good as it gets. But they were miserable because all of those leads were not turning into clients. Their booking rate was in the basement. So even at 16 bucks a lead, the actual cost to sign a client stayed sky high. And they were convinced, absolutely convinced, that they had a lead problem. Hi, I'm Jennifer Goddard. I'm co-founder and CEO of Integrity Marketing Solutions, and this is the Marketing Lawcast. Today I want to talk about the most expensive mistake I see estate planning and elder law firms make, which is spending good money to fix the wrong problem. Because that firm I just told you about didn't have a lead problem at all. And by the end of this episode, I want you to be able to tell whether you have one either. So here's something you don't expect to hear from someone who owns a marketing agency. Sometimes the answer is not more marketing. The whole conversation in law firm marketing tends to default to more. More traffic, more leads, more calls. And look, visibility matters. I've built a 30 year business helping firms get found. But I'll tell you what I've learned in 30 years. If the rest of your system isn't ready, more leads just means you're paying to disappoint more people. You're pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. So let's go back to that firm. They kept coming to us wanting to change things, change the webinar, change the ads, add more questions to the lead form to filter out the bad leads. And we could have done all of that. We could have happily taken

Diagnosing Visibility Vs Message Vs Intake

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the money to rebuild their whole funnel. But on a strategy call, we started asking about something else. We asked about their follow-up. And right away the attorney got a little defensive, which honestly I understand. He said, Oh, we follow up with every lead. Okay. But we kept asking, who follows up? When do they follow up? Within minutes or whenever somebody gets around to it? And what do they actually say? And somewhere in answering those three questions, you could almost hear it click. He realized he didn't have a marketing problem. He had a sales problem, an intake problem. The leads were fine. The follow-up was where everything was falling apart. Now here's what I love about how this firm handled it, because it tells you everything about doing this the right way. The attorney didn't go looking for someone to blame. He signed himself and his whole staff up for our sales training. And the person who'd been handling the follow-up? It turned out she was just uncomfortable with a more sales oriented approach. That's not a character flaw. That was a good person in the wrong seat. Nobody got fired, they just played a little musical chairs and found someone who could really thrive in that role. The same leads, the same webinar, the same ads, the same lead form. Nothing about the marketing changed. And suddenly their calendar was full. Over the next five months, that firm put a little over $10,000 into paid ads and brought in a little over $200,000 in new revenue from the exact same leads they had been throwing away. So why am I telling you this? Because that firm thought they had one problem when in fact they had a completely different one. And they nearly spent a lot of money fixing the thing that wasn't broken. That's the heart of what I want to give you today, a way to tell which problem you actually have. Because they're not the same problem, and they do not have the same fix. Think of it like going to the doctor. You would not want a doctor who hands you the same pill no matter what you walk in with. But that's exactly what a lot of firms do with marketing. Every problem gets the same prescription, which is spend more. So let's actually diagnose it. If almost nobody is finding you, your traffic is low, the phone isn't ringing at all, okay, that's a visibility problem. That is the one where more marketing, more SEO, more advertising is genuinely the answer. But if people are finding you and they're not reaching out, you've got traffic, but no calls or no form fills, that's usually not a traffic problem. That's a message problem or a website problem. People showed up and something told them you weren't the firm for them, or they just couldn't tell what to do next. If people are reaching out but they're not booking, they call, they inquire, and then they evaporate. Now we're looking at intake. That's the firm I just told you about. That's a follow-up problem, a sales problem, a how do we treat people on the phone problem. If they're booking consultations but not showing up, that's usually a reminder and trust problem in the gap between the booking and the meeting. If they're showing up but not hiring, now we're talking about the consultation itself, your process, your pricing, the way you build value in the room. And if you're signing plenty of clients, but they're the wrong clients, bargain shoppers, when what you want is real planning clients, that's a targeting and message problem. You're attracting the wrong people on purpose without even realizing it. Six different problems, six different fixes, and only one of them is solved by buying more leads.

The Intake Call That Haunts Me

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I want to slow down on that intake piece because in our world, estate planning, elder law, probate, it matters more than almost anywhere else. And I want to tell you a second story. This one is harder. We sometimes do intake audits for our clients where with full permission and with names redacted before we ever hear a thing, we listened to recorded calls. And I listened to one I will never forget. The caller was an elderly woman. You could hear it in her voice. She was uncertain, a little scared. And before she could even tell anyone why she was calling, she was put on hold three times, each time for over a minute. When she finally reached a person, here was her story. Her husband was in the hospital. He didn't have much time. They needed to get their planning in order. They owned property in another state, and she wasn't even sure her name was on everything. She doesn't drive. Sit with that for a second. This woman with her husband dying, found this law firm on the internet, which could not have been easy for her, and called for help. The person on the phone let her say all of it. And then without so much as I'm so sorry to hear that, she said our first available appointment is in two weeks. Two weeks for a woman whose husband was dying that week and who couldn't drive to the office anyway. She didn't take the appointment. And I hope with everything in me that she found someone else who could help her in time. Here's the part that has stayed with me. I know that attorney. I know her very well. If that story had ever reached her, if she had heard one word of that call, she would have moved heaven and earth. She would have gone to the hospital. She absolutely would have gotten their plan done. But she never got the chance because the call never reached her. It died at the front desk with someone who was cold on the day that woman needed warmth more than anything in the world. Now you might be listening to this thinking, nobody in my office would ever treat someone that way. That attorney would have told you the exact same thing. That's why I say marketing doesn't stop at the click or the form or even the phone ringing. Everything you spent to get that person to call is wasted in the last ten seconds if the person who answers can't meet them where they are. Your marketing and your intake have to tell the same story. If your website says warm and compassionate and your phone says two weeks, your prospect probably believes the phone. So what do you actually

Four Fixes That Raise Conversions

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do with all this? A few things, and I'm going to keep them concrete. First, and I know this one is uncomfortable. Listen to your own intake calls. Record them, get permission, and actually sit down and listen. I promise you will learn more in one afternoon of listening than in a year of guessing. You'll hear the holes, you'll hear the two weeks, you'll hear exactly where trust gets built and where it gets dropped. Second, walk your own website like a scared, overwhelmed person who just got bad news, not like the attorney who already knows what everything means. Can a frightened person tell in about five seconds that you understand what they're going through and what to do next? If not, there's your fix. Third, if your diagnosis points to intake, don't reach for the ad budget. Reach for training. Get the right person in that seat the way that first firm did, and give them a real process. Same leads, full calendar. I have seen it happen time and again. And fourth, measure past the lead. Don't stop at how many leads did we get. Track how many called, how many booked, how many showed up, how many hired, and which ones became the clients you actually want. That right there is the difference between activity and growth. So here's the one thing I want you to walk away with.

Final Takeaway And How To Get Help

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Before you spend another dollar getting more people to find you, make sure you are taking care of the ones who already did. The leads you're losing right now are almost always cheaper to win back than new ones are to buy. That firm that I started with had the answer sitting right in their own office the whole time. Most firms do. If you want help figuring out which problem you actually have, where trust is getting built in your firm and where it's getting dropped, that is exactly the work we do at Integrity Marketing Solutions. You can find us at imsrocks.com. And if you'd like to start a conversation, go to imsrocks.com forward slash apply. I'm Jennifer Goddard, and this has been the Marketing Lawcast. I'll see you next time.