Legal marketing budget can run into several thousand dollars a month. This may include everything from tv ads, direct mail, email marketing, PPC, SEO, advertisements in local publications, seminars, yellow pages, directories or other kinds of online and offline media. When your firm’s phone starts ringing as a result of your marketing efforts, you are ecstatic and consider your marketing investment to be money well spent.

But is it really?

Not until you master the art of turning those phone calls into money in your pocket. Unfortunately, many of you are losing a whole lot of coin because you are investing in marketing without making the same investment in conversion.

Fortunately, converting leads into clients won’t cost you much more money than you are already spending to attract those leads, but it does require an upfront investment of your time and energy. Best yet, once you get it down, your lead to client conversion process can run without your involvement. The place to start is to get a crystal clear understanding of where you are right now. Here’s what you’ll want to do:

1. Over the next month, make a commitment to collect the metrics data you would need to track your numbers.
2. Have whoever answers your phones log every phone call.
3. Require that all inquiries be recorded on a prospect intake form, which captures how the person heard of you, all of their contact information, specifics about their situation and whether they made an appointment.
4. Use a spreadsheet to track how many actually made it in for their appointment and finally how many of those callers became paying clients after meeting with you or the other attorneys of your firm.

Each week, sit down with your team and review your lead to prospect conversion number (this is the number of phone calls you received that turned into appointments) and your prospect to client conversion number (this is the number of appointments made that turned into clients). If these numbers are not both at least 75%, don’t spend any more marketing dollars until you fix your client engagement problem because otherwise you are pouring money down the drain. There is NO POINT in spending money on marketing if you are not doing as well as you can to convert your prospects into paying clients once they pick up the phone to call your office.

Here are a few diagnostic clues to find the “leak” where your prospects may be getting away during the client engagement process:

• Your phone is not being answered in the correct way
• There is no system to follow up with prospects who want more information
• There is no system to follow up with prospects in the time period between when they make an appointment and come in to your office for their appointment
• You are not following a script during your client engagement meeting

Well begun is half done! Make a good start by collecting hard numbers on what’s actually happening in your office so you’ll be ready for the fixes as they are presented and understand which fix you need to focus on. You may be quite surprised by what you discover once you begin collecting your numbers.

We can take for example the NJ criminal defense lawyers of Benedict & Altman who have started focusing on optimizing their website to convert more leads into customers. With a site that includes several calls to action for visitors to  email and phone the firm, they are set-up to win in terms of gathering leads. Now, they just need to follow the steps above to convert those leads into customers.