Optimize Your Conversion Rate: Make the Most of Your Leads

Do you feel like you should be generating more revenue from the leads your marketing efforts are currently bringing in? If you're pouring money into marketing but seeing minimal results, especially if you think you and your marketing partner have tried everything, this episode is for you. 

As a law firm owner, conversion rates are a critical metric to track and understand if you want to get the most out of your marketing spend. In this episode, Melissa digs into what a conversion rate is, why it matters, and how improving it can massively increase your firm's revenue without needing to spend more on marketing. 

Tune in this week to understand how to calculate your firm's conversion rate, identify the common barriers to tracking and improving conversion, and implement practical strategies to optimize your intake process. You’ll also learn how to set achievable goals to increase your conversion rate over time, so you’re converting more leads to paying clients in your firm.

If you’re a law firm owner, Mastery Group is the way for you to work with Melissa. This program consists of quarterly strategic planning facilitated with guidance and community every step of the way. Click here learn more!

If you’re wondering if Velocity Work is the right fit for you and want to chat with Melissa, text CONSULT to 201-534-8753.

What You’ll Discover:

• Why conversion rate is a critical metric for law firm owners to track and understand.

• How improving your conversion rate can lead to a significant increase in revenue without spending more on marketing.

• The important difference between qualified versus unqualified leads.

• Common barriers that prevent law firm owners from effectively tracking and improving their conversion rates.

• Practical strategies for optimizing your intake process and increasing your conversion rate.

• The expensive mistakes some law firm owners make to get more clients in the door.

• How to set achievable rocks and plan targeted projects to improve your firm's conversion rate over time.

Featured on the Show:

• Create space, mindset, and concrete plans for growth. Start here: Velocity Work Monday Map.
• Join Mastery Group.
• Schedule a consult call with us here.

Enjoy the Show?

Leave me a review in Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen!

I’m Melissa Shanahan, and this is The Law Firm Owner Podcast Episode #275.

Welcome to The Law Firm Owner Podcast, powered by Velocity Work, for owners who want to grow a firm that gives them the life they want. Get crystal clear on where you're going, take planning seriously, and honor your plan like a pro. This is the work that creates Velocity.

Hi, everyone, welcome to this week's episode. I am so glad you're here. As many of you know, I live in Golden, Colorado, which is about 15 minutes outside of Denver, and fall is in the air. I love it. I'm so excited.

I love summer for all the reasons people tend to like summer, and I love the fall for all the reasons that people tend to like the fall. Every season just brings with it something pretty great. I can feel it in the air and it makes me excited. It makes me excited for orchards. It makes me excited for pumpkins. It makes me excited for sweaters. So I'm really looking forward to what this season brings.

I hope wherever you are, it's gorgeous just the way you like it as well. Before I get into today's episode, which is a really important one, and one that I'm excited to dig in on with you guys about marketing and conversion rates and etc., but before we do that, if you are not on our email list, I highly suggest you go get on our email list.

We are going to be working in a low barrier to entry kind of way with law firm owners who have a firm under a million dollars, who would really like to get organized and get their hands around the data and the financials inside of their firm and start to get organized and make some plans that make sense for them.

If you are not on our email list, and you want to know about this when we open up an opportunity to do it… and again, it's reasonable, and it's hands on. We are excited to help with it… then you need to make sure you are on our email list. Now if you go to VelocityWork.com, on any page, if you scroll all the way down to the footer, you will see a place that says “Join our newsletter to stay up to date on enrollment, memberships and collaborations and our podcast.” That is the place to drop your email.

There are other places as well. We have a Mastery Group waitlist; you will see a spot for that on our site. There's also Monday Map/Friday Wrap, where you can download the guide. It's a small little pop up in the corner. You can do that as well. But the most straightforward way to make sure you’re on the email list… you can do any of those… but it will be down at the bottom.

Now, on top of that, if you would like to talk to me about where you are with things, get a sense for what we're going to be offering and what we do have to offer, or if it’s a good fit at all, there is a place on our site, several places actually, to book a consult. I highly recommend you do that.

I love meeting law firm owners; I love talking to them about their situation. I am always super honest. If I lay out for you how we work with people, if it feels like a good fit, you'll know it. That's great. If it doesn't, that's okay, too. It's not wasted time. You can find that button under the “Work With Us” tab.

But there are a few places on our site where you can book a consult; in which case I'll meet you very soon.

Let's dig into today's episode. If you are pouring money into marketing and you're seeing minimal results, or if you are putting money into marketing and you're thinking, “I should be making more money for what I'm getting,” you don't really know if the results you're seeing are up to par, up to snuff, any question marks, gray areas, but especially if you feel like you should be having more revenue come to the door based on the calls that you get, the leads that you get, then today, this episode, is for you.

This episode is also for you if you just want to educate yourself. Maybe you're unsure. Maybe you don't even know, or you're not even asking, those questions that I was just asking because you just aren't there yet with asking those kinds of questions. But use today as an educational episode, so that you're thinking smart about this stuff as you move forward.

It makes you more discerning when you are choosing a marketing partner. It makes you a better partner for the company that you're partnering with. It makes sure that you are not being sold some b.s. by a marketing company or someone who's handling your marketing.

And it's not that I think that professionals in the marketing world, especially that work with law firm owners, I don't by default think that they have unethical motives or intentions. But the truth is, sometimes some of them don't care as much as others, and you don't really know what you're getting.

This is like taking your car to a mechanic. There's something wrong with it, you're not exactly sure what, and if there's someone that isn't as honest as they could be, they'll tell you that all these things need to be done and it's expensive. If you don't know any better, how are you supposed to say, “Well, no, I know that's not true. I'm going to go down the road.” You can always get a second opinion.

But this is what people do. They don't educate themselves enough to really understand it. And so you end up trusting this professional that's given you a quote or given you a plan, and you just run with it. The problem is, if you're not awake at the wheel, if you don't have some basic understanding of what to look for in terms of results, then it can be really problematic. It can leave you feeling very lost.

And what we're going to talk about today is conversion rate, which actually has less to do with the marketing side, although there is some responsibility there which we'll talk about. But it's more about you taking the reins where you can to ensure that you are not squandering the money that you are spending with this marketing company, or the resources that you're putting out towards marketing.

So we're going to dig into this a little bit. I see law firm owners all the time who don't take action because they don't have the data, and they don't really know. Or they aren't set up to track the data. Some don't know how to track the data. There's no judgment on that. This is not what we went to school for. You went to school to be a lawyer. So this is a learning journey.

But there are barriers that law firm owners have, and I want to work with you today to eliminate your barriers so that you have a better read on what is going on with the leads that are coming in, and understanding if they are solid leads, or not.

And once you get those leads, how are you handling them? Are you tracking what happens with them, and so on? So this episode is really meant to put you back in a position of power. Or put you, initially, into a position of power when it comes to marketing in your firm and making sure that no one can pull the wool over your eyes, that you have data.

Things have to add up, and I'm going to help you get your head right around this topic today. Alright, so we are going to focus on conversion rates in this episode. However, I want to make a note right up front about leads. You do need to know if the leads that are coming to you are qualified or unqualified.

“Qualified” means that they are the right kind of case for you. That it is someone that could actually hire you. You can provide services to them, and they could actually hire you.

If someone calls you, and it's for a practice area that you don't handle, that's an unqualified lead.

Now, you can get nittier-grittier with the definition of “qualified vs. unqualified”, but at its core, that's it. Is the lead calling you a need that you can fulfill? That you do? That your firm does fulfill? If so, they are qualified.

This is important to know because whoever is handling your marketing, whether it's you or someone else, when you understand the number of qualified to unqualified leads, for the ratio, then you can start to see if you are drawing in the right kind of potential new clients with your marketing efforts.

If you are spending resources to get leads somehow… and I don't just mean paid... but if you are spending any resources to drive leads your way, and 40% of them are not even clients you could take, 40% of your leads are unqualified. That is no bueno. We want to try to fix that.

That may happen at the beginning, but there needs to be a focus on making sure that the majority of the leads coming in are qualified, they could work with you, you could serve them. And so that's the first thing to look at.

That is not what I'm going to dig into today, but this is a conversation that needs to be had and needs to stay alive between you and whoever is driving the marketing train.

I highly recommend that for every single lead that you get, whether it's on the phone, a phone call, whether it's through a chat bot, whether it is through an email through your website, it doesn't matter, every single lead that you get should be logged and noted as “qualified” or “unqualified”.

And you should look at this data weekly, monthly. You can decide on the cadence, but you have to start tracking it. And once you start tracking it you'll get some insight.

Now, the marketing partner you're working with this should stay alive in conversation. They may be tracking some things on there into that might be insightful, but the truth is, by the time you get this lead, they're either qualified or unqualified, and sharing that information, that data that you're tracking with your marketing partner, is a very important piece of the conversation. A lot of people don't do this.

And so it lets marketing companies remain sort of outside of this dialed-in nature, and that's not helpful. That's you lighting money on fire, and we're not going to do that.

So it's very worth tracking every single lead you get. They were qualified; you could serve them and they could be a client. Or they are unqualified.

Now, once that's done… So tracking that is important because it allows you to have more intelligent conversations about what's happening with marketing. And maybe that means that the marketing company can redirect some of their efforts because there's too many unqualified, they can try to figure out why that might be happening, and how to continue to get closer and closer to a higher ratio of qualified leads.

That effort is most likely on the marketing company, but it is worth that conversation. However, this conversation doesn't really depend on how many qualified vs. unqualified leads you have. I'm going to be talking about what you do with the qualified leads. And what you do with the qualified leads will determine if you converted them to being a client or not.

And we are going to track conversion rates. Knowing your conversion rate, and actively working to increase your conversion rate, can make a huge difference in the bottom line for your business. People don't realize how much of a difference it can make. I'm going to cover that with you today.

I'm also going to cover barriers that most law firm owners have to being able to track this well. I'm going to dive into some real-world examples using numbers, and show you how, with different fee structures… I'll speak to each fee structure… but I'll give you a sense of how big of a difference this can make for your bottom line.

Okay, let's talk about the “leaky bucket” metaphor. Many of you probably heard this, some of you may not have. I'm going to do a refresher here. It is best to think about your firm as a bucket. There are leads pouring into the bucket, just like water, but if your conversion process, your system for this isn't optimized, it's as if the bucket has holes.

So the leads go into the bucket, but then they leak out because we're not capturing the leads very well, and you're left with very few new clients compared to the number of leads.

And no matter how much money or effort you put into generating leads, if you don't fix this problem, you're never going to get ahead of the game. You're always going to have very expensive acquisition costs. Meaning, you're always going to be spending a lot to get a little because we're not taking care of conversion very well.

“Conversion rate” is the measure of how many leads you actually capture that you actually convert into being a client. And if this rate is low, pouring more money into marketing is a waste. You're spending more to fill a bucket that is leaking.

Now listen, your leads or your new client number will go up, but not very much if you do put more money into marketing and you don't change anything about conversion. Yeah, your conversion process, your intake process is broken. Your sales process is broken, so you're not getting as much bang for your buck when you spend all this money with leads and not very many convert.

Yeah, if you spend double, you'll get double the number of new leads that you're currently getting. But you shouldn't even have to do that. You just need to capitalize on what you've got. Let me give you an example.

If you get 50 leads a month, but your conversion rate is only 25%, that means 25% of those 50 actually become new clients. So you're getting about 12-13 clients every month with those 50 leads.

Now, let's say you decide to spend more in marketing because you want more clients. So instead of focusing on conversion rate, you just focus on putting more money into marketing. If you increase your marketing spend by 50%, that means you're going to now generate about 75 leads. But your conversion rate never changes. How you're handling those leads once they come in doesn't change, so your conversion rate is still a 25%. Then you get 18-19 clients, instead of 12-13.

Yes, that's an improvement, but you paid a lot to get that small improvement. The increase in new clients is minimal compared to the increase in costs of marketing that you just put yourself into.

So the real issue is the conversion rate. It is not the number of leads; it is what is happening with those leads once they enter into your sphere. Don't try to fix the problem with more leads, you need to fix the conversion process first. You have to plug the holes in the bucket so that every lead you generate is actually captured. And then you could think about increasing your marketing spend.

Now, I'm not looking for 100%, it doesn't have to be 100% of conversion rate. But you need to bump it to something that you're really happy with. Here's the thing, you aren't going to know where it is right now and what you can get it to. You can't really work on it because you're going to have to measure progress without tracking.

So the tracking of qualified leads, that convert to becoming a client, you have to track that number. If I have a tracker, which I do for people that join our sphere for Mastery Group… and actually, at the beginning of the call when I said we're going to release a low barrier to entry offer to help people get their hands around some of this data, and get organized and be able to sit in the driver's seat in a better way…

This is one thing that's in the tracker: What's the number of unqualified leads? What's the number of qualified leads? Then, of the qualified leads, how many converted to a new client? There are some steps in between there that we give you the opportunity to track. But when you're getting started, these are the numbers that matter the most for you to have insight into, high level, what is going on.

The more data you have, the better. Once you get three solid months of data, that'll be great. But until then, if you haven't been tracking this, just looking at it week over week will open your eyes to the truth of what is going on inside of your firm. And it will help you identify the actual problem for why revenue isn't up where it should be.

This is one of the most common reasons why people feel a little strapped; that they're working harder, not smarter. And it's because they don't really understand. Their eyes aren't drawn on what to focus on so that they can have more ease to get more revenue. So this data is very, very insightful.

You will see patterns starting as early as one week of tracking this. You will start to see, even if it doesn't hold exactly that way, week over week, maybe it fluctuates. So maybe the first week you're tracking it's 17%. The second week you track is 28%. The third week you track is 24%. It's going to fluctuate, but your eyes will be open.

Because most of the time it will surprise you. You may have thought that you were lower than what you were. You may have thought you were higher than what you were. But this is why we need facts, not feelings. This is why I talk about this so much, facts, not feelings.

I don't care if you are right. I don't care if you're right, you don't know you're right until you start tracking. So tracking is a very important part of this.

Now, barriers to beginning to track this stuff, that I hear is, a belief that you need some expensive software, or maybe even inexpensive software. But you need an app, you need a piece of software, you need a process that someone's going to give you in order to track this easily. But the truth is, you need a spreadsheet and that's it. Get scrappy with this. Don't wait until you have the perfect solution.

There are definitely times in my business, and when I'm working with other clients, when we're thinking through software and technology and what to adopt for their businesses. There are times where, yeah, we're going to make a decision to move forward with some new tool. But it doesn't mean that we go blind until that tool is in place. No, we get our data.

So we set up a spreadsheet, an ugly, simple spreadsheet, that has a place for me to put… in this instance, we're talking about this example… a place to put a number for unqualified leads, a number for qualified leads, and a number for those that said yes to us. When you have those three numbers, this is all you need. Because the equation at the end is: The number that said yes, divided by the number of qualified leads. That's your conversion rate.

When you turn it into a percentage, that's the conversion rate. I'm just going to say this just in case it's helpful. You divide the number of people that said yes to you and your firm, divided by the number of qualified leads you had, and then you multiply that by 100. That'll give you the percentage.

When you have this, it’s so easy. You do not need a tool that's pretty, helps you get super organized, and has all this capability that you're not really going to touch for a while. So sure, if you want to get a tool, get a tool, but do not use that as a reason to not start tracking this yesterday.

The other barrier I see is just overwhelmed with data entry. That's why they think, “Well, okay, I know I can set up a sheet, but I don't have time for that.” It's almost like the cognitive load of saying yes to this overwhelms them. Again, this is feelings, not facts.

If you actually sit down and think about what it would take to spin this sheet up… And I don't even mean you. For your firm to be able to have this sheet and to begin to start using it… if you sit down and think through the action items that it would take to get that to happen, and you think of who could help you do those things, or who could get those things accomplished, you may not even need to be involved at all. Likely, you don't.

This is not a difficult task. They may need direction, but you can tell them to go listen to this episode. Just get it done. Think like an owner. Don't think like a doer. Think like an owner and get this done. Don't let it overwhelm you. It's just not worth it.

The third barrier that ends up happening is that people aren't consistent with the tracking. Again, when you sit down to think what is actually going to take to make this successful, yeah, you’ve got to set it up. Yeah, they have to know, whoever's going to put in this information, they have to know where to go put it.

But the next one is, who's going to keep up with it? Just assign it. Just decide. Have them decide. If you are truly solo, which I don't work with a ton of truly, truly solos, but if you are, get a VA to help with this stuff. This is the stuff that you really shouldn't have to be doing.

People are inconsistent with tracking because they hold on to it too long, and they don't actually delegate this out. Give ownership of this to someone else so that you can look at it when you want to look at it.

And I would say the final barrier is what the numbers will reveal. Some people resist tracking certain things because they fear the data will reveal inefficiencies or underperformance of themselves or of people in the firm. This can be uncomfortable, but we have got to get used to being comfortable with the truth.

The truth should be comfortable. It may not be pleasant, but you should be more uncomfortable with not having the truth than with having it. Because when you have the truth, then you can do something with it. You may not like what you see, but now you're in a position of power to actually shift it. If you don't know the data, you can't shift anything.

So knowing these numbers will help you pinpoint exactly where to focus your improvements and your efforts and implementation. It's the only way to actually grow and to grow without building on a house of cards.

Now we have talked a little bit, when it comes to data, about what it looks like if you don't fix conversion but you spend more money on marketing. That can increase your leads, but just minimally increase your leads, and for a lot of extra money.

So now I'm going to talk through some math on what it looks like if you actually improve your conversion rate. And you will be surprised how fast this stacks, how fast this adds up to be very meaningful for the firm. let's just say, again, 50 leads. You may have a lot less than that, you may have a lot more than that, I'm just using this as an example number.

Let's say there's 50 leads coming in. And just as before, we're at 25% conversion. You've been tracking, and on average you're about 25% conversion of the 50 leads that come in. So you get about 12 clients a month with those 50 leads.

Now, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to keep this with flat fee for a second. And then I'll speak to hourly and contingency; which I don't need to spend a lot of time on there. But for flat fee practices, let's say that the average case value is $3,500 but you ask for a $1,500 deposit upfront.

So in the month that you convert them, at minimum, maybe you'll hit the milestones to get the remainder of what they are. Oh, but when they convert, you will get $1,500 per. So if you do get those 12 clients, which is 25% conversion rate for 50 leads, that's $18,000 upfront. Okay?

And then, over time, that'd be over $40,000 in value to the firm. But upfront, it's $18,000 because it's a $1,500 deposit. All right, now, let's say once you start tracking, you realize you're 25%, you realize that kind of sucks, “I want to move that up.”

So then you start to… In our world, that's when you would declare, “Okay, this quarter, I'm going to do a project that will improve the conversion rate,” and you'll name the project. In some cases, it may be training your team. We can go into those more in just a minute, but you're going to do something to improve the conversion rate.

You get it up to 35%. That's a bump. That's good, but it's still not quite where you want it. Maybe you want it up closer to 50%-60%-70%, but it's better than 25%. Here's how much better it is than 25%. Thirty-five percent conversion rate, with the same exact number of leads… you don't change that at all… means that you get 17 new clients instead of 12.

Now once they pay their upfront deposit of $1,500, instead of, in that month, generating $18,000 of revenue from these new clients, you now have generated almost $26,000. That's notable. That's a position in your firm potentially.

For this example, if you're getting $1,500 of as a deposit, or upfront when the client hires you, then instead, if you improve your conversion rate from 25 to 35%, you get almost $8,000 of increased revenue. That's a big difference. You can see how this adds up.

Now, some people don't do this, they don't look at their conversion rate. Instead, they'll say, “Hey, marketing company, I want to spend more because I need more revenue. I need more leads.” And their conversion rate sucks, but no one's really looking at that or talking about it. And so then they will say, “Sure, gladly.”

So then you double your spend, and you do increase your leads. And in that example we gave earlier, if you increase your marketing spend, and so you end up getting maybe 17 or 18 new clients, you'd still make the exact same money we just said to, almost $26,000, but you're spending double to get them. And this is because you are not fixing conversion, you are just adding to the leaky bucket.

Really, the takeaway here, I want you to see just increasing from 25% conversion rate to 35% conversion rate with a $1,500 deposit, that's what you would get in the month that the client signed, it will increase by $8,000.

For each of you listening, I want you to think about your scenario. If you are flat fee, maybe you get more than $1,500 from the client when they sign, maybe you get less. But think about your scenario and what this means. And if you just increased it, and got five new clients a month with the same amount of leads, what would that mean for your firm?

Now, for hourly, or for contingency, this may not pay off in that same month in the same way. But who knows? You could spend five to 10 hours on a new client's file when they come in. That's not necessarily true, but what I want to say is, it's not as direct. You can't calculate perfectly. But the value that it brings to your firm, the revenue that you know will be coming to your firm, dramatically increases if you increase your conversion rate.

So whatever pace is true for your firm, it will dramatically improve the revenue that the firm gets without spending more on marketing. This is the thing. People burn money on marketing, and it's unnecessary. In so many cases, you should validate and know that your conversion process works, and that it's tight, and then it's solid. And then go spend all you want, because then you know you're going to capture those leads.

So then the question becomes, “Okay, Melissa, you've convinced me. I'm going to start tracking... I have been tracking... I'm going to pick it back up again… I'm going to add a field or a column to my spreadsheet now because of this episode. Okay, awesome. What am I supposed to do to actually affect it?”

Now, here is the thing, it doesn't take much to tweak for improvements. And when I say tweak, sometimes these are big leaps. Most of the time, when conversion rate is a lot lower than what you like it, there are things that you can do to optimize and to get organized that will affect it greatly without a lot of extra work.

This might involve training your intake team, for example. Maybe recording their conversations and listening how is each person handling this. And by the way, it's totally separate, you can track per person if you have multiple people handling intake. You can track per person.

Because if you can start to see if someone has naturally higher conversion rate than someone else, you should listen to what they're doing. And you should listen to what the other person is not doing. You can glean a lot of insight from that. Nevertheless, you should train your team on how you want things handled.

Auditing first is a very important step to figure out what is being done, what you want to nip in the bud, and what you want them to start doing. It doesn't have to be this magical script that's perfectly salesy and going to close the lead, not at all.

You can hire someone to help with sales. But before you do that, can you just cut through the noise of the crap that you know isn't working, and that probably isn't going to lead to good conversion? If someone's being wishy washy on the phone call, or if someone sounds very unenthusiastic, making little changes about that…

They need to be smiling when they're talking, because that actually goes through over the telephone. Or that they need to be more professional in their email response to a new lead… Just looking at these things, and trimming the fat, can be very, very helpful.

The second thing you could do is improve communication with leads. So not just improving in the ways I was just talking about, but maybe improving the turnaround time in terms of response. Is there too much of a space between when they're contacting you and when someone is getting back to them? What is the amount of space? Is it a full day? Is it sometimes more? Is it 12 hours? Is it always under 12 hours? What do you want it to be? What do you think it should be for your firm?

And thinking about your firm as a business, imagine putting yourself in the person's shoes, the potential new client’s shoes who's calling you, what would make sense? When do you need to get back with them? And does your firm have that kind of protocol or policy?

Also, implementing regular follow-up procedures even, so you could have a whole process around this. How often do you follow up? What does the follow up look like? Do you have templates that people can use? Do you do it by email? Do you do it by phone? There should be a system.

Again, you don't have to have a perfect system; there isn't a perfect system. Having a system is the most important thing. Making sure that everybody does things the same way, in the same cadence, abiding by the same system is the most important thing.

From there, you can start to shift. After you've tried out your system for a bit, you can figure out what's working, what's getting responses, and what's not. And then shift according to that. Just having a system is the first thing that needs to happen.

When I'm saying this, this is true for all the efforts that you would put into improving your conversion process. You have to treat this as iterations. You are not going to be handed a perfect intake solution, though many companies will lead you to believe that that's true. You just need a system. The most important thing is that you have a system.

And when you have a system, from there you can iterate and then have a version B that's improved. And then version C that's even better. But you can't get to C without having the very first iteration of it. So this is more about just getting something into place that feels like it could be really great or a strong improvement.

And then making improvements along the way as you start to get feedback in the data. But then maybe also feedback from the clients. But the data will show you what is working, what isn't really having an impact, and you can make decisions to shift from there.

I want to remind you guys that a “goal” is a number you are shooting for. A “Rock” is a project or an initiative that you're going to implement so that you can get yourself to the goal, so that you can get yourself to the number.

So, like I said before, if we're starting at 25% conversion rate, your first milestone, your first goal is to get yourself to 35% conversion rate. The Rock may be centered around training intake staff, streamlining or documenting your intake process, infusing that process with regular follow ups, clear client communication; everybody's handling everything at the same time.

And so the Rock may be called or titled “Develop and train staff on our intake process.” And you can put your firm's name “… intake process.” And that would require… When you break down that project, you're going to have to sit through and think through all of the things that need to be a part of that process. And be able to create and develop it.

Then you're going to have to go through and decide how you're going to train the team. Get it on the calendar, etc. The Rock is a big project. But that is an example of a Rock that could get you from 25% to 35%, or from where you are right now to bump it.

Let's say you get to 35% because of your efforts with that Rock. Okay, well, maybe in the next quarter you set a goal to get to 45%. And to get yourself to 45%, or to bump it another 10%, maybe your Rock would look for something or be centered around implementing a system like a CRM software, or automated communication tools.

It's the next level, right? It's optimizing. It's building on the work that you already did. And so whatever your Rock is, you name it very succinctly, very specifically, and you execute on that. And then you measure your progress and you see if you get yourself to 45% or higher.

And then once you get yourself to that milestone, the next quarter, you could say, “Okay, we're going to increase it to 60%.” And the Rock that you choose may be, again, iterating on the work that you've done already, refining the intake process, continuation of training, or making sure that team members are focused on improving conversion.

Maybe you have some sort of incentive that you would release that is not a requirement. Every firm does things that are different for them. But that's an idea, right? Maybe it is having an expert come in and help you build out the next phase of the software that you are using so that it's more useful to you and you have more capability.

And then with that, in that work, you guys get yourself to 60%. I just walked through the goals and the milestones and the Rocks associated with them so that you guys could see the building of it is very important. Building on version one, and then you improve it, and then you improve it. There are iterations to this.

That is the best way to build something. All too often, we try to make big swings of improvement. We will throw cash at the problem. If we're starting from zero, and it's like, “Man, we are a mess here. Our conversion rate is 25%. It's not where I want it, at all. I'm just going to pay somebody to come in and help us get set so that we have a 60% conversion rate,” that is not how this works.

And it's not worth it. Do the work, it's not actually that hard. This is where we're talking about facts, not feelings. It does not take long to sit down. And if you have a quarter to do it, and you do have a quarter to do it, it takes time to implement this stuff, even if you hire somebody to come in and do this “work” for you. If you think you don't have work there, you're crazy. You absolutely have a ton of work there.

But it doesn't happen fast. It will happen over the course of a quarter, maybe even longer. And so you sitting down to identify the obvious, the low hanging fruit, is a better, smarter move as a business owner. Because you can optimize on that. You can get more cash to the door. You can get more revenue as a company. And then you'll have more to spend on an expert when you really want to.

People do that too early, too fast. They try to skip steps, and it will bite them in the booty. So what I'm trying to say here is you have to track. And once you see those numbers, you decide what you want to do with those. And don't say ‘I don't know,’ you do know.

I am not an expert on marketing and conversion, but I know that if I walked into your firm right now, and sat down and looked at the way things were done, and did a bit of an audit on how things are handled, very quickly I would see the low-hanging fruit; little things that should be done differently, that can have a big payoff.

You can do that too, so you don't need to spend a ton of money to make huge headway with your conversion rate. Don't fool yourself into thinking that that is not true. This is common sense stuff. It is putting yourself in the shoes of the client and thinking through all the touch points and the steps that they have with your firm. It will be obvious to you what should be improved.

So the whole point of this conversation is that conversion rate really matters. And that tracking it and knowing it and being in tune with it matters. And if you want to affect it, do the work to do that. Don't lie to yourself and say that it's too complex and you don't know what to do, you absolutely do. This is not rocket science.

Once you have totally depleted and gotten to the top of your insight, into what would improve this, then maybe think about hiring someone to come in. But don't do it from the bottom. There are too many little things you could change, if you’d just think about it.

So that's the episode. Get familiar with your conversion rate. Rely on your conversion rate. Make sure to improve it, to use it, so that your business can grow in the right ways instead of bloated ways; like spending more on marketing if your conversion rate isn't good. Know your conversion rate. And the more you know about it, the more easy it will be to do something for it.

All right, everybody, have a wonderful week. I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, you may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map/Friday Wrap. If you go to VelocityWork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans. So, that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to VelocityWork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to Quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.