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Why Do I Need an Intake Process – Discovering Your Intake – Part 1

By on April 6th, 2022 in Uncategorized

Whether you have a written procedure, a rockstar paralegal signing up clients, or neither of those things, by default, you have an intake process. Either you’re bringing clients in or pushing clients away. You and your team are responding to potential new clients in some way – and that is your default intake procedure.  

However, the problem with default intake procedures is that they are not consistent and, therefore, not reliable. They typically do not maximize your results or your conversion rates.  

You shouldn’t be leaving the success of your sales and marketing to chance. So how do you redesign your intake procedure?

Intake is where all of your marketing efforts are going to be given the opportunity to pay off. If you don’t have a consistent way of handling all of the leads that come in through marketing, you’re just wasting a lot of money on marketing. 

What is Intake?

In the initial intake process, you’re collecting information to determine whether clients are a good fit for you and whether you are a good fit for them. Make sure you don’t scare potential clients away with the voluminous info requests and don’t ask for their SSN before you even tell them how you can help.

What Intake is NOT 

1. It’s not marketing.

2. It’s not a lead magnet.

3. It’s not a lead nurturing – We DO want to build follow up into our Intake Process and sometimes send them back into the lead nurturing funnel if we lose contact with them

4. It’s not onboarding.

Benefits of Intake Procedure

  • Lead sources: Before spending more on marketing, know your numbers and why these numbers are important – these will give you a better idea of what kind of marketing will work. 
  • Conversion rates: It’s helpful to see those conversion crates either across the board or at different stages. When you have an actual process, you can break it down into different stages of the process to see what your conversion rate is at each stage. 
  • Leads to more sales: Having an intake process leads to more sales and more consistency.  

Best Practices

1. WHO: The attorney should NOT be doing intake; don’t give away the farm! If you have someone who is not an attorney on your team, let them do this. Consulting and selling clients on the idea that you can solve a problem for them does not require a law license. Look at what’s the highest and best use of your time within the business.

2. Speed in response – Have the tools and technology in place to help you respond faster.

3. Technology – Make use of e-signatures, using legal CRMs, and tracking apps. These will enable your team to take a lot of the process off your plate while you are still able to monitor the status.

4. Follow-up – Help the client as their life gets in the way. No response from a client DOES NOT usually equal that they are not interested.  Use the same method/tech they are using to reach out when you respond. 

If you want to learn more about the intake process, check out Episode 036: Why Do I Need an Intake Process – Discovering Your Intake – Part 1.