The 5 Minute Countdown
By Greg Fox
Owner, Marketing Specialist
Congratulations, your digital marketing is working great! You’ve got people completing your website contact form or calling you and leaving phone messages.
Now it’s all on you. When a person wants to talk with you about their legal problem, they want it now. How long does it take you to respond to an inquiry?
It’s essential that your firm has the discipline to respond to inquiries for information in a timely and consistent manner. You’ll optimize the contacts and qualification of responses to sign more clients.
When you receive a contact form, an email or a phone call from a prospect during business hours, your receptionist should be skilled at handling the question. If it’s after business hours, you should have an answering service that will immediately contact you or a member of your firm.
Contact forms that come in after hours should be emailed to a member of your firm as soon as they are received. This person will be responsible for responding at once.
Once the query is made, it’s a race between you and the clock.
Take a look at these response times and your possibilities of winning more clients for your law practice*:
Response Time
Under 5 minutes
5 to 10 minutes
30 minutes
Next Day
Chances You Contact the Prospect
Excellent
4 times less likely
21 times less likely
60 times less likely
This data was compiled by Leadresponsemanagement.org over a 4-month period. LRM.org surveyed companies that followed up on web leads. The surveyed group represents over 40 industries with a broad aggregation of company sizes from $10 million to $1 billion in sales.
The study focused on what was the most efficient response time and a key query was “when does a lead go cold?” It was determined that the speed of the first attempt to contact a newly generated lead is critical. Slow response speed and the number of unproductive call attempts correlated to a decreased close rate.
The bottom line: If you can respond within 5 minutes, you’re friendly and professional and, of course, if the case is worth your time, you’ve got a good possibility of signing a new client. If you take longer than 5 minutes to answer the inquiry, your opportunity begins to fade quickly.
To learn more about how you can efficiently generate and close more leads, contact us.
*Lead Response Management Study
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