Typical scenarios to help your law firm choose the right CRM according to Conscious Solutions
Implementing a CRM system for your law firm is a challenge, but it is also an essential element of successful marketing strategies and law firm growth in a number of scenarios.
CRM Headache Solver, Simon McNidder from Promptr CRM shares some typical scenarios that he often hears law firms mention when discussing their CRM systems. Simon loved sharing his expertise with us at the Legal Sector Advisers and Suppliers (LSAS) Conference 2023.
Simon will go over typical scenarios and which is the best law firm CRM for each…
“We just want to send newsletters”
Don’t buy CRM. It’s like buying a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Look at mailshot software, like MailChimp. Easy on your budget and easy to send newsletters, event invites and Christmas eCards.
“We want to streamline and automate our bid process”
If you want to automatically bring in CVs and key experience and automate bid document creation and actions, a specific, purpose-built pipeline tool is so much better than a CRM.
“We want to know who knows who?”
Then law firm CRM systems are perfect for you.
What’s the best legal CRM? Ignore mainstream CRMs, unless you want to sell widgets.
CRM will show your relationships with contacts, what’s happening with them, and who-knows-who (good CRMs show you how well, too), and act as the central record of your firm’s BD.
“We want CRM but… our lawyers won’t use it”
You don’t really want lawyers to log stuff in it. You want them to get the benefit from it.
What’s the best law firm CRM? Whatever you have, lawyers won’t use it, so don’t buy one that requires it – unless you like saying “How do we boost CRM usage?”.
Old-fashioned legal CRMs make lawyers add contacts, update details, click a button to say, ‘I know them’ and then forces them into the database to find information.
Stay clear.
To prove the point, some real-life feedback “Updating it isn’t a £400/hr job”.
“We want a CRM that works with humans, not against them”
More real-life feedback for you: “My clients aren’t in it.”
The best CRM? One that monitors your firm’s email external correspondence and adds new contacts into your CRM, updates them with new details, and adds lawyers as knowing contacts they correspond with.
This is THE game changer.
DO NOT buy a law firm CRM without this functionality.
Off the top of my head, there are four.
But they add everyone. Sense check!
To give you an idea… we use Promptr’s Outlook signature scraping feature and in 12 months have excluded 95% of incoming emails that would have created junk contacts (e.g. ‘noreply@’ and ‘Mum’).
“We want CRM but… who will manage it?”
CRM systems do not run themselves.
Once you buy one, who will monitor the data, train users (e.g. your legal secretaries might need a different session to your partners), onboard new joiners, chivvy up teams, or provide tips?
It’s a fair bet your IT or marketing teams are not CRM experts and don’t have spare capacity.
Possible resolutions are:
- Hire a new person
- Buy external help
- Buy a legal CRM with this service included in the package
“We want CRM but… who will update the data?”
It’s fair to say that whoever gets the data job, it won’t get done.
Lawyers won’t do it. Nor will their secretaries. How many marketing assistants will you get through when you tell them data updating is their job?
99% of people put data bottom of their ‘to-do’ list.
And everyone WILL moan at rubbish data.
Think about this when you ask users to update data, yes, more real-life CRM user feedback: “I found the record, saw it was wrong, thought I should update it, but didn’t”.
Someone has to do it. Either; 1) buy a law firm CRM with this service included in the package, or 2) buy any CRM for lawyers and then hire someone.
“We want CRM but… few lawyers like BD”
Is your firm not full of rainmakers?
A good CRM will help all your lawyers do business development (BD) without noticing.
Sooner or later, you are going to work out that lawyers are not going to hunt around a database for information that may or may not exist.
Show them relevant and timely information in their inbox, which is where they live. Not too often. Not too much.
Find a CRM that gives your lawyers a weekly overview of the key things that happened (or are due to happen) to their contacts, maybe also an option to receive a heads-up briefing about the person they are meeting. They can use both to impress their clients with your firm’s joined-up thinking.
The best legal CRM will give BD tips to tell them what to do with what’s sitting in their lap.
“We don’t want opportunities to fall through gaps”
We all have key contacts we should be keeping in touch with.
But lawyers are busy fee-earning.
The best law firm CRM will give them inbox nudges when key referrers/clients /prospects have fallen through gaps. Or a nudge when contacts a team isn’t working with show an interest in their area.
Nobody will rummage through a database for this.
“We’re not saying we have complaints… but can we identify them?”
Everyone drops the ball one day. It’s human nature.
How impressed do you think a contact will be if they complain and your Senior Partner gets in touch right away?
Imagine if a client emailed a lawyer who was not available / on holiday / covering up the mistake, or they emailed a catch-all address on your website… and their email was left for hours or days before anyone noticed it?
Now imagine what a key member of your firm can do when they receive an alert the moment an email arrives with keywords like complaint/unhappy/unsatisfactory/poor service etc…
The best legal CRMs will do this – proper Client Relationship Management. Systemising and automating best practice whilst removing human database chores.
