If Marketing or Relationship Building was part of every Law degree, it wouldn’t be so hard for lawyers to develop customer contacts and turns those contacts into future business growth. Faced with a myriad of choice, people will gravitate to those they know and trust – Lawyers adept at relationship building can hold that position for all of their clients i.e. a trusted advisor. As Greg Story puts it “Lawyers are all in sales, they just don’t know it”
The art of building strong customer relationships is one of the most important issues facing legal firms of every size in the modern business world. That we are social creatures that love connecting with each other is evident in the meteoric rise of social media and professional networking platforms like LinkedIn. It stands to reason that any law firm’s marketing plans must seriously consider the manner in which its people interact with its customer base. It’s the future of your business.
Sales come naturally to some, not to others. For many organisations, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems help to organise customer contact points and streamline the sales process, nurturing the funnel. The problem with ‘off the shelf’ CRM systems is that they almost always grind to a halt in the legal world. That’s because most of these platforms focus on Sales – which is great for Sales Teams, but not so good for legal practices which revolve around relationship building. As much as it sounds cliché, lawyers are very different to most other professionals. Lawyers simply don’t have time to waste, clicking through a bunch of screens to find the relevant information to fill in.
Examples of larger firms adopting Sales oriented CRMs abound. Typically what happens, is that the firm tries to force-fit the system, which costs way too much per head, and it ends up taking up space on the servers because the lawyers who are tasked with accessing them throw their hands up in the air because they are generally too cumbersome. Lawyers are too busy and their time is too important to waste clicking through a whole bunch of sales screens that are unrelated to the task.
That all changes now.
Enter RedView CRM. Built from the ground up, this new system draws on Red Rain’s in-depth understanding of how lawyers interact with technology to manage workflow processes. Red Rain CEO, Stephen Butler, said that simplicity of purpose lay at the heart of the development path for the new CRM platform. “We have a fair idea of how lawyers work – so we built a platform that takes away the white noise for them.”
The team at Red Rain know that legal sales are all about contacts, networking and timing. “If enquiries come in and aren’t handled quickly, those sales leads are lost. CRMs are the solution, but we know lawyers dislike most CRMs because they’re way too hard for them to use. So we created a CRM, that is quick and simpler to use.” RedView CRM is an extension of the popular RedView platform, an integrated suite of modules that allow law firms to drive their existing systems further.
Butler said the intuitive task-based actions help manage the contact/enquiry process with a simplicity that suits the time poor lawyer to keep doing the non-chargeable activities like ‘sales’. “It neatly assigns follow-ups and notifies the management team of the level of activity, so enquiries are captured and optimised.” Furthermore, the analytics behind the simple enquiry handling system provides partners and practice managers (and those in charge of marketing) with a valuable tool for understanding who in the practice is making the most of their business development opportunities and who isn’t. “It’s not necessarily about punishing those that aren’t switched on, but about providing those people with the resources to get better at the process and capturing opportunities before they disappear.”
Beyond a smooth, streamlined enquiry interface, RedView CRM provides mailing list functionality which gives the team the ability to market and remarket comms to customers at regular intervals. Clever APIs built into the platform mesh the product with any website or external source and there is a smartphone app that brings the fluidity of the platform to the pockets of every lawyer no matter where they are.
Butler said it was important that RedView CRM benefited from cloud-based design. “No new infrastructure is required to get it up and running.” Features and benefits of RedView CRM include:
Automation, tracking and oversight of new business development efforts
‘Lawyer friendly/click light’ entry
Seamless integration with web site forms.
Detailed sales analytics to improve marketing decision making
Tools to manage your referrers and nurture those relationships
Mailing List processing for outbound marketing
For more information on RedView CRM, visit www.redraincorp.com/legal-crm