You often hear us talk about how Intake is the lifeblood of your PI firm. While that is true – something that is often overlooked is the critical relationship between intake and marketing. If marketing efforts are working and intake is operating efficiently, you will be 2 steps ahead of the competition! But how do you know if your marketing is working? And how can you tell if intake is doing well? We will take a deeper dive into a few core reports that can help answer both of these questions for your firm!
Key Performance Indicators for Marketing
Let’s focus first on marketing. Marketing has 1 main objective – getting leads in the door. Marketing works to establish your PI firm’s brand as the firm those in your market should reach out to if they ever need PI services. Every time a new lead comes into your firm, marketing has worked. Now, whether or not that lead meets the criteria of your firm will let you know how well the marketing worked. Marketing’s two main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the number of leads and the want rate.
Number of leads tells us the total number of new potential clients that called your firm for any reason – this number should include all case types, even cases your firm does not handle.
Want rate tells us out of the total number of leads, how many were “good” leads that met the firm’s criteria.
What you consider a healthy “want rate” may vary by case type, location, or type of law firm. Keeping track of each lead by case type is critical to knowing if your firm is meeting its targets. For a typical PI firm that is advertising on TV, we say somewhere in the 40%-60% range for an auto lead want rate is healthy.
Reporting on Key Performance Indicators
You might be thinking to yourself – what reports do I use to tell me this information?
Here are a few key reports that easily help you identify your most important KPI’s
- Intake Summary – Someone in your firm should be looking at this report weekly, if not daily. Your Intake Summary will quickly show you how many leads are coming in, how many met your criteria (want rate), and how good your Intake team is doing in converting those leads into signed cases (conversion rate)
- Once you have your Intake Summary Report, you will want the same report but sorted by different key data. A few variations of this report we recommend are: By Intake Specialist, By Referral Source, By Office Location, etc.
- Pipeline Analysis – we recommend completing this at least twice a year. Ideally, this is something you look at quarterly. Completing a pipeline analysis for your main case types will quickly show you where throughout your process you might need improvement.
Converting Cases
After marketing has done its job, the responsibility shifts to your intake team to get new leads converted into cases. Whether you outsource this part of the process or have an in-house team that handles incoming calls, this is a critical step in the process for any PI firm. This is also where a lot of firms fall short and it can cost you millions when you don’t get it right. Your conversion rate is one of the most important metrics your firm should be tracking. For every lead that meets your firm’s criteria, you should be converting at least 92.5% of those into signed cases.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself if you see changes in your numbers
- If leads are down:
- Is there a certain source that is underperforming?
- Is there a certain area that we market that is underperforming?
- Did marketing recently make any big changes?
- Did intake recently make any big changes?
- Are ALL leads going into the system in real-time?
- If the want rate is down:
- Did we change the criteria of what cases we want to handle?
- Are there new intake people making decisions?
- Are there new attorneys making decisions?
- Does everyone making decisions know the criteria for the firm?
- If the conversion rate is down:
- Are there specialists who might need additional training?
- Is your follow-up process frequent enough?
- Is your CRM helping or hurting to keep track of leads and follow up?
Answering these questions and keeping a close eye on your firm’s intake and marketing numbers is crucial to ensuring that your PI firm is operating efficiently. If you have any questions about how to improve your PI firm’s intake or marketing efforts, reach out to the Xcelerator team today!
