For consumer professional service providers, such as personal injury law firms or consumer lenders, your lead nurturing program could be the most vital component to growing your business. Within your lead nurturing program, the first 5 minutes are the most critical.

If someone told you that a high-value prospect urgently needed your services and you only have 5 minutes to land this prospect, what would you do? I’m sure you would get on the horn immediately. Additionally, you would put your best foot forward to convince this unicorn that your firm is their best option. You certainly would not sit around waiting for a convenient time to call them nor would you want them contacting your competitors while they are waiting for your call back.

Unfortunately, this happens every day in in the personal injury law firm vertical. Consumers expect immediate relevant communication especially when they are looking to hire a professional service provider. A handful of firms do indeed put their best foot forward, but many great firms simply do not respond quick enough with their lead nurturing activities.

According to the Best Practices for Lead Response Management study by InsideSales.com and MIT there is a 10x decrease in qualification if you don’t contact your prospects within 5 minutes. Therefore, enhancing the actions you complete within this critical timeframe will have a game-changing impact on your ability to connect with, qualify, and retain clients.

After talking to many professional service providers regarding their lead nurturing processes we noticed a common theme. Firms were unable to connect with many prospects who submitted web forms. Firms tell us that a lot of their prospects “just go dark”. To increase your firm’s ability to connect with your prospects, the Compass Growth Partners team has put together a list of 5 actions that you need to complete in the first 5 minutes of nurturing your leads.

 

Action 1: Direct your prospect to a Thank You page after filling out a web form. There are several benefits to using Thank You pages as a component of your prospects’ customer journey. Additionally, there are many opinions from digital marketing experts regarding the content on your Thank You page. Without going into extreme detail, the punchline is that moving a prospect to a landing page is very easy to implement and has 3 primary advantages:

• Collect marketing data on the Thank You page.
• Instantly pushes your prospect into the next step in their customer journey. If hitting “submit” wasn’t enough to move your potential client from the consideration stage to the engagement stage, your Thank You page will. Without a Thank You page, your potential client may take a step backwards in the journey and second guess their actions.
• Gives you an opportunity to serve content to a captive audience. They just hit “submit” and need to know the next steps. You can easily communicate the next steps on your “Thank You” page.
• This is your opportunity to provide additional links to pages on your site that lets them know they made the right choice in reaching out to you.

For more information on reasons why you should be utilizing Thank You pages, check out this article from HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/the-top-5-reasons-why-a-thank-you-page-is-crucial-to-your-marketing-strategy

 

Action 2: Immediately send an auto response email saying, “Thank you”. In today’s technology-driven market, the consumer simply expects to receive a confirmation email immediately, but there are many companies who do not send an auto response. After managing the marketing operations stacks for a portfolio of advertising agency clients, I understand the technical hurdles associated with this communication step, but your team cannot afford to ignore this component of the customer journey. Here’s why:

• Communicates to your prospect that you received their information.
• Reduces the frequency that a prospect submits a duplicate intake because they received the email confirmation.
• The auto-respond email allows you to set expectations with the prospect.
• Allows you to set your firm’s communication style and corporate temperament. For example, each of the following greetings suggests a different tone: “Thanks a bunch for contacting us”, “Greetings”, “Hi <<first name >>”, and “Welcome”. You can set your tone right from the start of the engagement.
• Allows you to give the prospect additional information about your firm and why you are their best option.
• Not having this in place indicates that you are not keeping up with the competitive environment associated with today’s customer service standards.

 

Action 3: Call the prospect by phone within three minutes of submitting the form. THIS IS A MUST. There is a good chance that you will get a voice mail. However, you significantly increase your chances of connecting and converting the prospect into a client by making that first call within three minutes. Whether you connect or not, here’s why this is a must:

• In the personal injury space, consumers generally retain the first attorney they talk to.
• Demonstrates that your office is well organized and increases the prospect’s confidence in your firm.
• Shows an elevated level of customer service.
• Your prospect’s interest in hiring your service is at its peak when they submit an inquiry and connecting with them within three minutes keeps the interest level high.

For an outbound phone call to be made within three minutes, your marketing operations and your technology stack must be aligned. Additionally, your staff must have the resources needed to prioritize outbound calls above other tasks.

 

Action 4: If you don’t connect via phone send a follow-up SMS (text message). Make sure your company’s terms & conditions and privacy policy account for SMS messaging before implementing an SMS response as a component of your lead nurturing protocol. If allowed, this can be a very powerful tool because it gives you the ability to get your contact information front and center on the device that the prospect will most likely use to return your call. Just be sure to keep the message to 140 characters.

 

Action 5: Send a follow up email after the phone call. This is your chance to send additional relevant content to your prospect. Here is why this is important:

• Gives the prospect additional contact info.
• Allows you to reaffirm the next steps.
• The follow up email allows you to reaffirm that they made the right choice in contacting your firm.
• Gives you the opportunity to deliver content to the prospect that is relevant to their inquiry.
• Allows you to direct your prospect to your digital assets such as your video library or blog.

 

Remember, by reaching your prospects with multiple touch points within 5 minutes you significantly increase your ability to connect with and convert your prospects from leads to clients.

 

Take-away action you can do right now: I urge you to submit a form on your website and time how long it takes to get notification of the new lead, or a call from your staff. If it is more than a few minutes, investigate the cause of the delay.

For each new client engagement, Compass Growth Partners conducts a pre-approved “Secret Shopper” evaluation. This gives our team a baseline of each new client’s lead nurturing processes. Give us a call today to see if your firm passes the First 5 Minutes test.