When your firm starts receiving leads, whether it be from an online lead generation source or through another marketing venue, it’s probably easy to keep track of the first few leads you receive. However, once those first 10 leads turn into 100+ leads, it will be extremely difficult to manage. This is why it’s extremely important to have a Lead and Case Management system that helps you track the different steps in your follow up procedure. Also, tracking the leads allows you to accurately calculate your return-on-investment (ROI) and profitability of the leads your firm purchases.
What to look for in a Lead and Case Management system?
There are 4 things that are truly necessary in a Lead and Case Management system.
- Ability to write notes
- Ability to customize information and views
- Ability to send email templates and documents for electronic signature
- Ability to keep track of results and run reports
Writing notes
Does your firm have several staff members following up with the leads or are you a sole practitioner? Regardless of what the answer to the previous question is, having a central location that your firm, and maybe staff, can update to record all interactions with the leads is key. The “Notes” section of a Lead and Case Management software is where your firm can keep track of when the lead was last attempted to be contacted, who tried to contact them, and what happened during that conversation. If your firm does have an intake staff, by inputting full and accurate information in the “Notes” section, you can transfer a lead between staff members, if needed.
Custom Information and Views
Every firm has different needs. Therefore, the most successful Lead and client Management systems have the ability to be customized. Two of the most important customizable features a system should include are the ability to add fields that coincide with the questions the intake person asks during the screening process and creating custom views based on the lead information that has been provided. For example, by adding a custom field that allows the intake person to mark whether or not your firm has sent paperwork to the claimant or not you can then create a custom view that will list all the leads that have outstanding paperwork. Customizing views, based on the information the intake person provides, will allow your firm to find any information required, at a moment’s notice.
Email Templates and Electronic Signature
Have you ever found yourself writing the same email over and over again? Do you have a word document with email templates that you utilize? Would you like to streamline the process of getting the signed fee agreement returned? One of the main ideas behind a Lead and Case Management system is to reduce the amount of time you spend looking for information and streamline as many parts of the follow up process as possible. Therefore, having the ability to create multiple email templates, that will automatically populate the claimants’ information, is extremely important. Another feature, that will definitely save you time, is having the option to send documents for electronic signature. Adobe Document Cloud e-sign services gives businesses, whether they are attorneys or not, the opportunity to create documents, which when sent, will be available to sign electronically. Once the claimant opens their email from Adobe Document Cloud e-sign services and follows a few simple steps, you will receive a PDF version of the signed document. There are even some people who’ve utilized Adobe Document Cloud e-sign services and have been able to retain clients within 30 minutes.
Running Reports
Regardless of what marketing campaigns you are currently running, it’s important to keep track of your results and have the ability to run reports. This can be displayed in a variety of ways in a Lead and Case Management system. For example, within a particular lead, having an ability to update the lead result to either, “desired case”, “signed case”, or the rejected disposition, will later give your firm the ability to run reports that will give you an accurate representation of how the service is working for you. We have found that by keeping track of these three things, your firm will be able to evaluate the lead generation campaign and monitor the performance of your staff.
eLuminate
eLuminate is a Lead and Case Management system that we, at eGenerationMarketing, have developed internally, that includes all the features mentioned above and more. We first introduced eLuminate in October 2013 with a Blog Post by Michael Brescia.
If you’d like to learn more and schedule a free, one-on-one tutorial to experience the flexibility and usability of the software, please call us at 617.800.0089 or submit a ticket here.