Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:00):
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA. We're going to look at the CRM tool that I use to track sales within my accounting firm, and I think it's a great tool for other professional sales firms as well. Let's take care of the 800-pound gorilla up front. CRM pricing is all over the board. So this is Pipedrive, which the base version is 10 bucks a month, well, it's 12 bucks per month per user if you pay monthly. And the tool comes with a 45-day free trial. So you can get started for free for first month and a half, and you can pay 10 to 20 bucks a month as you're testing out the tool.
(00:38):
So let's jump back into the tool and see what this does. This is a visual CRM that we use these columns or stages to track sales through the process. So in this example, I have this set up a round of law firm system that we see that most firms do consultations, where the first step is they get a new lead, they schedule a consultation with the lead, consultation is completed. If the consultation goes well, it turns into a new matter. Then we have to request advanced fees. And then, we transfer everything over to the practice management system.
(01:13):
So let's add a deal and run it through the pipe. So contact name is the lead's name. We'll just do Name D. And the deal title for law firms, it's just usually going to be the name of the person, but if you want to put an engagement name, that will also help. So you can add all their contact information so you can keep track of them over time. So they're a new lead. Once they're added into the lead, you can add a note and this will save.
(01:53):
And we go back to the pipeline. So now, we have a lead. So now, we're going to call them, email them, talk to them a couple of times. And once we have a consultation scheduled with the lead, we drag them to the next stage. And here, we can go ahead and add notes about the consultation. And so now, consultations done. So now, we have the consultation scheduled. The client comes in and they complete the consultation. So here we can add notes from the consultation. And so, these are their key issues they need help with. And keeping track of those details are great in trying to close the matter to go back to the pipeline. So the consultation is completed. There's usually some conversations that have to occur.
(02:56):
But once they're a new matter, we drag them over here. So they've signed on, they've hired us, they say they want to work with our firm. Next step is to request advanced fee deposits or retainers. And so, once the retainer is on board, we have our advanced funds. And then, last, we want to make a transition out of the sales system into the practice management system. And so, when that is done, we can transition the deal to this stage. And once we're at this stage and we no longer need to see them within the CRM, we just click one and the deal falls off of our dashboard.
(03:33):
So this turns into a big game to run as many leads through this as here as you can, and every day, just come in and move people up different stages. Once we have some leads that have run through the system, there's reporting that it will keep track of how you are performing. So we can see that this year, we can change that to this week, we can track and get reports of our sales activity, which is tremendous because one of the key pieces of selling is to set weekly goals on the number of new leads you get, number of new consultations you complete, and then the number of new matters you get each week. And here we have real time reporting of progress towards those goals. There's a couple of different reports in here you can use.
(04:32):
They look pretty funny because I've just added all these examples this morning. And so, the reporting looks a little silly. It does look more rational as you run this in for real leads over time.
(04:44):
All right, the other thing to keep track of is you can have multiple pipelines. So I'm in the law firm sales and this is this pipeline for what we're looking at. You could create a pipeline for each salesperson. And so you would have employee one be running their pipeline, employee two would be running their pipeline. And that way then the manager could come in and look at the pipelines independently. Or we could do a pipeline for different types of sales. So say you have a firm that does estate planning, you would have an estate planning pipeline. And then, the firm also does, I don't know, family law. So we'd have a second pipeline for family loss sales just to separate those two different sales funnels.
(05:34):
All right, so let's wrap this up real quick. So pricing is $10 if you're paying annually, $12 a month if you pay monthly. The key feature for the Gold standard is if you use Google email that it will bring in the email that you send back and forth with your leads directly into each of the deals. So we were manually typing notes, which you're probably going to do anyways to keep notes for the sale process that you would also be able to see people's emails in there as well. Got that promo code to get 45 days for free.
(06:14):
And then, here's kind of the market leader for law firm specific CRMs is Lexicata. The pricing here is probably six-fold increase over Pipedrive and I believe you have to pay annually upfront. But they do have some nice integrations. They have a couple pieces where they will integrate with Clio and they also will help you with intake forms. So a lot of similar concepts, just a much more full-featured tool at a much higher price point.
(06:48):
And with that, if you need any help with your law firm's accounting, please contact us over at Law Firm Velocity. Thank you. Bye-bye.
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