Intake Training Strategies

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody. It’s Allison Williams here, your host of The Crushing Chaos was Law Firm Mentor podcast. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:30] We’re going to talk about intake strategies and in particular strategies for training your intake professional. So I recently had the opportunity to speak for the SMB team’s conjoint process with Andy Stickle. As you know, these are two marketers and they were hosting an elite abundance challenge and I decided that I would participate. I was one of several speakers and what I ended up speaking about was training for intake professionals, and I decided to share that with you guys because what I really loved about this particular presentation is that something ironic happened during the presentation that made my point and I love it, love it, love it when that happens because it’s not scripted. So I’m going to tell you what actually happened when we get to that portion of the discussion. But today we’re going to talk about five different components of your intake training, the things that you need to be listening for when you are listening to your intake professional to ensure that they are ultimately getting the job done. So just a couple of points to start and then we’re going to dive into those five key strategies.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:50] So the first thing that you always have to remember when you are training an intake professional is that you have to structure your intake onboarding, right? This should not be something that you are winging. It shouldn’t be something that you sit down periodically and check out what they’re saying. You need to have a structure for how you train your intake professional because this is a sales role, a sales job that you are giving to someone in your law firm. And that means that this person, success or lack thereof, is going to have a direct impact on your bottom line. So you really don’t have the luxury of giving them a script, a wing and a prayer, and the opportunity to come check with you with questions. This is not that kind of job. A lot of people think of intake in a law firm is kind of like a lower-level position, you know, like the college kid who’s thinking about law school but not sure or even some people I’ve seen try to put high school student volunteers on the phone, as long as the person is reasonably comprehensible, they can speak well, they’re engaging enough with the public. They figure, Hey, this person will be able to take down the basic information and schedule appointments. But there is an art to not just getting appointments scheduled, but getting the right qualified leads primed and ready to buy in your actual sales conversation, your, your legal consultation.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:14] So it’s more than just getting the appointment booked. That is a great part of it. Obviously, if you don’t get butts in seats, you can sell, but getting the people who schedule primed and ready to buy happens through a very specific type of sales conversation. So it’s important that the people who are on the front lines, the people who are on the phones or intake in your law firm, that they get that so that they’re not just going through the motions, but they are working and handling their part of this transaction to increase your ultimate conversion rate and thus get you more clients.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:50] Now the second thing to know about intake before again we go into those five key strategies is that you have to record and be prepared to discuss the recordings of your intake professional with that person. Now for those of you that are already got your druthers up saying, hey, wait a minute, recording, that sounds inappropriate. Keep in mind you have to know whether you are in a one-party state or a two-party state. You have to comply with the law regarding recording telephone conversations. So if you are in a one-party state, that means as long as a person who is a party to the conversation is recording, there is presumed consent by the other party on the other line, right? So if John and I are having a conversation, I can record or John can record because by virtue of me speaking to John, I am giving my consent to John recording me. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:39] In a two-party state, both parties have to expressly give consent in order that recording be permissible. So you have to know which applies where you are before you record. But, even if you are only recording one end right your intake professional, then you are going to get data about how that person comes across, how they ultimately handle the conversation that you’re just not going to be able to get by getting a summary after the fact or walking into a tail end portion of the conversation, it’s just not the same. So we talk a lot about the value of recording and how to use it strategically. And in one-party states and two-party states in the Intake Mastery course that we sell here at Law Firm Mentor. But whether you are taking that course or not, just know that recording is something we highly recommend so that you can get to the things that we’re going to talk about, those five key strategies.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:36] All right. Third and final key point that I want to cover before we go into the actual strategies is that the process of training and intake is an ongoing process. It’s never a set it and forget it. Now, for the most part, you are always going to think about your law firm as a, as an ever changing, ever evolving ecosystem. And that means you’re going to have to review things, review policies and procedures, review systems, review people all the time in your business so that it maintains its vibrancy and its effectiveness in the marketplace. But there are certain things that are pretty easy to set and forget. And unless there is some major substantive change, you don’t have to go back to it. Right. So for instance, how you filed documents in your law firm, once you establish whatever protocol you’re going to use, whether you are a paperless office and you are just using your online system or you use physical paper and electronic data, there’s going to be some system that interfaces with your practice management software and your utilization of paper records when they come into your office. Right. You’re going to have some process for that now unless you change your practice management software or start adding in or taking out features of it or decide to move from a paper, paper utilizing office to a paperless office. You don’t generally have to go back to review how you’re filing documents very often. That doesn’t, that doesn’t generally move the needle one way or another, it doesn’t generally impact operations. But intake and in particular, people on the phones, how they are engaging, how they are interacting is something that you must consider an ongoing process because people are dynamic, right? And a lot of things can change in a person’s connection with your audience. They are interactivity with people on the other end of the phones just by virtue of them having done the job a certain amount of time. There are some things that they’re going to get naturally better at. Some things are going to just get sloppy at because there’s only so many hours in a day. There’s only so many ways to do the job and oftentimes the way that they do it can evolve over time.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:49] So I want you to have those things in mind as we go into the specific strategies we’re going to talk about today. And I’m going to give you a little, a little word. You can call it a word and call it an acronym. It’s teppt, TEPPT your TEPPT. Those are the five characteristics that you’re always going to be looking at and ultimately training your intake professional on when you are training someone to do intake and or improve their conversion rate through intake in your law firm. So what does that stand for? It stands for tone, empathy, pace, pitch, and transition. So let’s talk about them one by one.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:28] So first Tone. Part of the reason why recording is so valuable is that you must master the way you sound on the phone. When you are screening people to handle intake in your law firm, I want you to simply ask yourself, how do they sound when I speak to them? If I hear nails on chalkboard when I speak to you, you’re not the right person for intake. Why? Because you create a barrier to entry. I as a prospect hearing that voice and turned off and I have to get myself turned back on after I have overcome the sound of that person’s voice in order to hear what they’re saying, engage, and so forth. You want to remove every obstacle that there can be to a person engaging on the phone. So that means if the person that is going to be on the phone’s front lines for you is somebody whose voice is not pleasant. You have already put yourself behind the eight ball.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:20] The other thing to consider is that your tone is not just something that is a static, high tone, low tone. It really is that your tone, your tonality has to be one that is soothing. And by soothing, what I mean is that if someone were to listen to your voice, whether it’s listening to the sound of your voice on an audio recording, on a transcript, or an audio transcript, listen to you singing, listen to you talking. There’s a certain flow to your voice. It goes up and down, right? It isn’t, it isn’t monotonal. Right? It’s multi-tonal. It, ebbs and flows. And again, that’s not something you’re going to be able to hear or be aware of simply by virtue of one little snapshot in time. You have to hear how the person presents in a conversation, because that’s ultimately what they’re going to be doing for your law firm. They’re going to be having conversations.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:16] All right. Second item to be concerned about, okay, these are the top five strategies that you have to understand. You have to optimize to improve your intake and your training process for your intake Professional. Number two is that the person must master the art of Empathy. They have to sound like they care on the phone. Now, as soon as I say they have to sound like they care, that implies that they don’t actually care, right? That it just sound like it. And I’m not saying that. Right. We obviously want our professionals to care about the people that they’re speaking to on the phone. But caring for a living is tiring, is not a passive activity. It takes a lot out of you to emotionally engage with a human on the phone, especially if you’re doing that over and over and over again all day. So there is a certain person who is going to be naturally more empathetic, naturally more caring, naturally more concerned than others. But there has to be a balance because there is typically going to be greater challenges with somebody who is too empathetic than somebody who’s not empathetic enough.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:22] In other words, we can always teach you how to sound more empathetic. If you naturally have high empathy, that’s great. But if you are so empathetic that you are the kind of person that as soon as you hear a sob story, you’re going to buy into the story that the person doesn’t have money. You’re going to feel like you’re oppressing them by virtue of telling them that you’re going to take money from them for a consultation, then obviously there can be a barrier there. So you want to make sure that your person doesn’t overextend in the area of empathy. But you do want a person who naturally instinctually understands that when a person is reaching out to your law firm, typically not every practice area, but the vast majority of practice areas the person is reaching out with some form of problem that they need help with and hence your role as the person. The first person that they really speak to about their problem in the firm is to convey on the part of the firm that we’re sorry that you’re here, right? You’ve come to the right place, but we’re sorry that you need to be in this place and that message can be stated outright. That message can oftentimes be conveyed by virtue of how you engage with the person, which we’re going to talk about, but you want to make sure that empathy is there.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:31] So I’m going to give you an example of a lack of empathy. This comes through my own law firm, one of our former intake professionals. He’s now a third-year law student. But I think I’ve told this story before, but I’m not positive, so I’m going to share it again. Sorry if you’ve heard it before, but it still is funny as the first time. So this particular intake professional had gone through our training process, right? The training protocol that I designed that we provide to the public and Intake Mastery through Law Firm Mentor is the program that I created for my own law firm and then tweaked and improved over time. So he had actually gone through the process, the process, and he was at the stage of monitoring. He had gotten through all of the, the intake training and was kind of in the maintenance phase, if you will. And from when he had his one of his very first phone calls, he spoke to a woman. And we had, we had gotten the calls recorded. So we listened to the calls. And I coached him around what he had done wrong with that particular call. But ultimately, that person did not schedule an appointment. Zoom ahead to present, he’s now in the maintenance phase, the monitoring phase of his intake training. And this person calls back and the person called and she was sobbing and she was so upset.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:47] And it took her a while, took him a while, rather, to calm her down enough that she could even speak. But when she did speak, he asked her what, what on earth caused this, this great deal of emotion? Are you okay? And she said, Well, I came home and my husband was on my sister and she blurted that out. She was obviously still very emotional. Now I’m a family law attorney, so we get stories like that, not to, not to uncommonly. That’s, you know. Sex outside of marriage is not something that’s new to a family law attorney. But this woman was very upset, understandably so. And my intake professional immediately blurted out, All right, so then are we ready to schedule you for Monday at 9 a.m.? Now, obviously, we want that urgency point that he found. We want him to seize upon that urgency to get her scheduled. But of course, we don’t want to see him calloused and indifferent to what she expressed. We would have preferred that he had said, Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry you had the experience that we’re here for you. Right. So, you know, conveying empathy, teaching what to say and how to say it is something that you can do. But to the extent that your person already has a natural level of empathy baked into just the human experience, all the better.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:09] Now we talk about that when we talk about who is the right professional that you want to hire. And that is a separate module Intake Mastery. But right now we’re talking about training and you can train up the topic of empathy.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:23] All right. Next up in our TEPPT acronym here is P and this P is for pace. That means you must convey power through your posture as conveyed through your pace. So the intake professional, again, is not a passive actor. They’re not simply someone who takes down name, rank, and serial number and passes that information along. They are a guide. I want you to think about going as the intake professional, going across the street to the prospect, taking them by the hand, and guiding them safely back to the intake professional side of the street. They are very much in a facilitating role. They are taking information, but they are guiding the extraction of that information in a way that naturally lends itself to moving from awareness of firm to scheduled appointment. So when that pacing comes up, the pacing is typically what we, what we train on for, how a professional can ultimately move from being someone who takes information to being someone who gives information even through questioning and the use of the appropriate pace is going to help to solidify that authority. Right. The idea that there’s power in our pace. So what I mean by that is that what you want to get into the habit of doing and this is for your intake professional, right? They have to get into the habit of altering the pace consistent with what they want to convey.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:59] Right. So there is a psychological phenomenon that I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with called mirroring. Right. It is an instinctual act on the part of a person who wants to build a relationship with another person that they would mirror that person. There is also the opposite of that. Like we tend to not want to mirror when we see someone in an adversarial posture. Now, when I say adversarial, I don’t mean that this person has to be your nemesis or even your adversary, as you would think of in a litigation posture. Right. This person, the adversary in this scenario would be somebody who you’re not trying to connect with that person. You are countering that person. So part of the reason why and I’m sure if for any of you that have had any of our sales trainings or have ever heard me speak about sales, you know that I always talk about this idea of getting on the same side with your prospect. You don’t want to tell them no, because as soon as you tell them no, you have now created two opposite positions. You’ve created a polar opposite positioning between you and your prospect, and that tends to create a wall between you. What you want to do is you want to lower the walls. You want to get on the same side.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:16] So the way that we think about that and use that, that psychological phenomenon of mirroring is that when we are speaking with someone, we tend to take on the pace that they take on. So when a person is speaking really fast, even if we don’t speak as fast as them, we tend to naturally speed up. And similarly, when they’re speaking very slow, we tend to slow down. So when you’re aware of your pace, you can speed up when you’re talking to someone who speaks slowly and you can slow down when you are speaking to someone who speaks quickly in order to convey that there is a distinction. Right. And that is not truly oppositional. Right. They’re speaking fast. You’re speaking slow. That would seem to be an opposite. Right. Technically, you are doing something opposite to them, but you’re not conveying an opposite through words. In other words, you’re not disagreeing with them. You are stepping into a different role because again, as the intake professional, you want to be the person who’s leading the conversation. So from a communication standpoint, you want to be the person who is taking control of the communication. And you do that by doing a pattern interrupt. And the pattern interrupt is you’re speaking quickly. I will speak slowly or more appropriately. You will speak deliberately.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:38] All right. Next up, the next P out of our TEPPT our TEPPT acronym is Pitch. So you have to learn how to close the sale. This is what we’re talking about when we say the pitch. Most people are aware of the pitch. The pitch is I’ve got the data and now it’s time for me to tell you, here’s how you schedule an appointment with us. Here’s what documents to bring, here’s what it costs, and let’s get you on the calendar. Except that’s not what your pitch is going to be like. Your pitch has to be tailored to meeting the needs of your client or your prospect, and in particular, connecting their urgency point with your solution. So that is the reason why in the Intake Mastery course, we actually walk our students through this process of getting to urgency on the intake call. Right. Your goal is to figure out why that person is deciding to make a buying decision at this time, not everyone has the same motivators.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:38] So if you are thinking, well, of course a person would be calling me in urgency because they’re in jail and everyone wants to get out of jail. That may be true on its surface, but the why behind that, the motivator behind that is much more deeply wired to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and those things that are underneath the surface that motivate our behavior. The motivation for any given one of us as a prospect is going to be different than the next person, or even if it’s the same, couching it in a way that appeals most to what is most emotionally triggering for the prospect is going to be a more effective way of closing a sale than simply making a generic pitch of saying Here’s ABCD and E from my script and therefore give me your credit card number, I’m charging you X and let’s get you scheduled. So I want you to think about that as you go into talking to your intake professional about the pitch, because the pitch is something that you’re going to want to practice with them a lot. This is the part of the sales conversation that they need to really lean into, that they have to master. And at some point in time when you as the owner of your firm, handoff to an office administrator, or a lead paralegal, or a managing attorney, or whomever else is going to be overseeing this particular part of your law firm, it’s really important that they recognize the incentive that’s there for really mastering the pitch. And here’s the thing mastering the pitch is only a part of the process. If you don’t get to urgency, if you don’t ask the right questions and you don’t set up your sales conversation in the right way, then when it is time for you to pitch, that pitch is not going to be aligned with the urgency point for that particular prospect. And because the conversation did not go through the necessary steps, you are less likely to convert that person to a paying scheduled appointment.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:40] All right. The fifth and final strategy that you have to go over, that you have to master when you are going over the process of intake and taking your intake professional through a training protocol is the T, which stands for Transition. Now, remember earlier in our conversation today, I told you that when I spoke recently for another, another program that I saw the protocol that I’m talking about play itself out. Someone actually tried and tested it on me in live real-time and it worked out really well. And it was regarding transitions. So what I mean by transition is that you have to learn how to guide a conversation without controlling a conversation. Guiding, not controlling. The way that we guide a conversation is that periodically when we ask a question, a person is going to be going down their own rabbit hole. They’re going to be telling you things that are completely irrelevant to what you need to know in order to book an appointment. They’re going to want to give you the whole story, soup to nuts and you don’t want to make them feel like you don’t care, right? Even though your mind is saying, I don’t need to know what color shoes the police officer had on. I really don’t need to know that your spouse and you had a fight about Cheerios versus toothpaste. It really doesn’t matter. You might have all that stuff running through your head, right? But if you convey the that’s irrelevant. I don’t care about that. Tell me something else to the prospect. They are going to be in that adversarial posture and depending on who the person is, they may or may not get so triggered by this that they tune out or have to work hard to come back around to you. So I don’t want you to think that if you do interrupt someone that you’re going to piss him off to the point where they hang up the phone. Right. I’m sure we all have had conversations where we have been persistently interrupted and it’s frustrating. And sometimes you say something and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just sit in a little bit of nuisance and annoyance with the person. And ultimately the person has to work hard to ingratiate themselves to you again. So that’s what you want to avoid. You want to stay in the place where you are giving that person that prospect a positive experience. So when you talk about transitions, what I always teach is that you have to learn how to interject instead of interrupting. Now an interjection is going to feel a lot like an interruption, but I’m going to teach you right now how they’re different.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:12] So if I’m interrupting, Prospect is talking, talking, talking, talking. And then I just jump on in there and say, Hey, listen, I know that you really want to tell me XYZ, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right there. I have interrupted. I have jumped into their line of thought, whatever has been communicated and I’ve cut them off. And the challenge with that are, for the reasons that I’ve said earlier, you really are creating an oppositional relationship with your prospect, even at the emotional level that they may or may not convey to you. So we don’t want to do that. Here’s what we want to do. Instead, we want to interject. So the way that you interject is you say the person’s name, you pause and then you speak, but you’re going to say their name in a very particular way. You’re going to say the name with a little lift, like a question mark. So instead of saying, Hey, John, you’re going to say, Hey, John, right? That little lift in your voice. That sounds like you’re asking a question. When you do that, I want you to think about a stream of water that is flowing. I want you to think about if you had put a plank of wood in that, all of a sudden you lift it up, you’re going to have a very different reaction in the water. And if you simply put down a flat plank. Right, John, that’s a flat plank. Nothing happens with the water except it just rolls right on over the plank. But when you lift that plank up, when you go, John, with that little lift, that little lift is very powerful because that lift. First signals to the mind that there’s something different going on. So the person that is speaking in their declarative sentences, all of a sudden they got a question that is oppositional right, but it is simply a change in the form of communication. It’s not a substantive change. And then that pause is also very necessary because that pause is going to essentially be signaling to the other person that you are waiting for permission to speak, right? You’re not going to say, hey, John, I want to tell you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Because as soon as you lift the voice, you have done a pattern interrupt. But if you don’t pause, what you’re saying to the prospect is, Hey, I’m the one in charge here, I’m going to take off now because I’ve just stopped you, which is essentially akin to an interruption. The interjection has to have the name, the lift, and the pause. Once that pause has occurred, you now have essentially, by tacit silence, gotten a permission from the other side to speak, whatever it is that you need to speak.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:52] Now, the other thing to consider is that when you pause, sometimes the person is in their own head, right? They’re more concerned about getting it all out than they are about having a dynamic, a dynamic conversation, or didactic conversation with you on the other side. Right. They’re not having that necessary exchange because they’ve been speaking for a while. Hence your need to interject. So you might have them still talk a little bit even after you have done the interjection. But they’re going to then get the fact that you interjected. And if they don’t just say their name again. So let me tell you how artfully this was done while we were in this presentation that I gave just last week. So the one of the coordinators of the program. I’m speaking about this particular strategy. And the person said, Hey, Allison. And they, you know, I heard something, but I wasn’t quite sure and I had a very short window of time to present. So I want to make sure I got through everything. So I kept talking and then they said my name again. They were like, Hey, Allison. And I was like, Yes, yes. And they were like, Oh, see, it does work. And I was like, Yeah, it does work. It’s like, Yeah, I just interrupted you so that I could show to everyone that it really does work. And the beauty of that was that was completely unplanned.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:14] I did not tell anyone what I was speaking on. I did not tell the coordinators what I was going to be presenting about transitions. They had never heard this content from me before, but I gave them a strategy and they used it in real-time and they saw that it worked. So I wanted to share that with you because, one, I thought it was clever. I guess it would have been really crappy if I had never like heard them or if I had heard them and just kept talking, it wouldn’t have worked. And then it would be like, Oh crap, that didn’t work. But they were trying out a theory because they knew instinctually that that makes sense. And I, you know, one of the reasons why I think they knew that is because I’d give an example earlier of toddlers. Right. If your toddler is kind of playing with pots and pans, they’ve gotten some food on the floor. They’re making a mess. There’s, there’s whatever food they’re playing with everywhere. You come in to the kitchen and you’re like, Oh, my goodness. Stephen you say the person’s name, the baby’s name, and they immediately look up. Right? Now they might look up and keep going because children don’t have the same level of regulation that adults do. But saying your name is a powerful way to grab your attention and we are now signaled. Right. Part of the reason why we give children names in childhood is not just so that we can identify who they are. It’s also so that we can get their attention when we need them. So we learn early on in our developmental years that when it’s time for someone to get us to pay attention, they will say our name. So we already have that instinct, but that pause, that lift, and that pause does more pattern interrupt, stops the flow of conversation, and it changes the stance from a declarative stance of someone speaking to an interrogatory stance of someone interjecting and asking a question. So I want you to think about that as you go into training your intake professional. Now, of course, this is just a very small window into kind of going behind the scenes, going behind the curtain of the Intake Mastery Course. But I wanted to share this particular portion with you guys because I know that for those of you that have started the process of hiring an intake professional, whether you have outsourced it to a reception service, or you’ve got your first person, or maybe you’ve got a shared role between a legal assistant and intake, or a receptionist in intake. And your thought is, how do I get the person better able to engage with the public in a way that’s going to get, get us the result that we want a higher scheduling rate. This is the way how right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:53] This is the, this is the how-to it is really important that you spend time cultivating the way that they use their voice, the intentionality behind the way that they use their voice, and of course, what to say. So in the Intake Mastery course, we actually have scripts so that you can structure out what they are going to say, what they’re going to ask. Some things have to be set a certain way. Other things. There is more flexibility. All that’s built into the multitude of scripts that come with the Intake Mastery course. So if you’re interested in that course, you can find out more on our website at Law Firm Mentor dot net forward slash Intake Dash Mastery. We will have a link to that in the show notes to this episode, and I want to thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor everyone, I will see you next week.

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:47] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. To learn more about today’s show and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you enjoy today’s episode, take a moment to follow the podcast wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating and review. This helps us to reach even more law firm owners from around the country who want to crush chaos in business and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor everyone. Have a great day!