Predictable Estate Planner - Heath Rost

Empowering Lawyers To Independently Scale

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Maintaining Your Cool: What To Expect When You Start Generating Leads

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With any attorney taking on an added volume of estate planning inquires or “leads” it can take time to gain momentum with closing, responding to leads, and adjusting and evaluating your process.  That’s just a simple fact.  The added volume of leads is a byproduct of what occurs after an attorney or law firm begins work with a lead generation company.  For a complete and thorough understanding of what this is read: What Is A Lead Generation Company And How To Work With Them

For the purpose of this blog, let’s say your attorney lead generation company has set up (1) the landing webpage, (2) the ads, (3) delivery of leads and (4) a lead tracking sheet.

The four structured bullet points I share today will set your law firm up for success, and help you to produce the outcome you want with your lead generation company.  Treat these like your bible.  For without grasping the complete understanding of the importance of each you could end up jumping from one attorney marketing company to the next, and the one after that.

1) Maintain a lead tracking sheet

It may be helpful to you and your lead generation company to fill out your lead tracking sheet with detailed feedback on every lead that comes through, how it went, what they needed, etc.  Understanding the types of leads that are converting currently is helpful feedback on any campaign.  If your lead generation company is any good, your answers here will be helpful in the event your need to pivot your campaign.  Maintaining the lead tracking sheet is helpful because you will know who you need to follow up with.

 

2) Devise a plan for answering and responding to leads

Devise a plan for making certain you increase the percentage of calls you are able to answer. Set a goal and hold yourself accountable. Notate in your lead tracking sheet whether you answered the lead when they first contacted you, how long it took you to respond and begin to identify trends you see.  Maybe you won’t see any trends at first, but over time it may become black and white what you need to do or how you need to adjust to what you’re doing to close more sales and positively influence your bottom line.

Remember, first impressions matter!  Make sure you answer the phone when your prospect calls.  You might get a different person on the phone when you pick up right away than the person who answers the phone when you call them back a day later. Worse, they may have even contacted another attorney who answered their phone right away and hired them instead.  But I digress, as I said before be on the safe side and answer your phone when a lead calls.

 

3) Know what your business model requires of you

In 2021 many attorneys are shifting their business to be a fully remote business.  If you start working with a lead generation company and you have little to no experience with running a fully remote business then you should approach that relationship from a humble place.  Your lead generation company’s role is not to help you develop your business plan or refine your sales process.  Don’t get frustrated with your lead generation company because you aren’t closing the leads they’re bringing you.  If you are taking detailed notes on every lead in a lead tracking sheet and communicating how it’s going your lead generation company should respond by doing whatever it takes to refine your campaign and make it successful for you.

 

4) Be patient with yourself

You’re going to learn a lot especially in the first couple months working with your lead generation company.  You will soon learn what it’s like managing an influx of day to day business in combination with your leads you’re already working to follow up with.  This adjustment will take some getting used to, so be patient.

 

Finding the right lead generation company for your estate planning practice

As you can gather from the blog today knowing the line of responsibility you carry when working with a lead generation company is of utmost importance in order to form a long lasting relationship.  That is of course our goal with every attorney we work with.  I hope this blog was helpful and will pay you dividends for years to come. If this information was useful, forward it along to a friend then book a call with me using the ‘Schedule Now’ button below. I look forward to connecting.

Onward and Upward,

Heath Rost
Founder, Predictable Estate Planner

What Is Lead Generation?

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Increasing your volume of leads is a byproduct of what occurs after a new attorney begins working with a company for lead generation.  For the purpose of this blog I will cover what lead generation is, and how to set yourself up for success when working with one.  Taken from our homepage:

Simply put, lead generation is the product of attracting, converting and delivering live calls and appointments with people seeking your services where you live. Online advertising through search engines and social media, and setting up the proper retargeting channels are all parts of this process.

But what does a lead generation company do?

Successful lead generation for an estate planner not only includes online advertising, but also encompasses advance nurturing directives including procured landing webpages, calendar integration, lead delivery, tasteful lead followup, and other technical intelligence to make your law firm known and easily approachable.

That is how Estate Planning Lead Pros defines lead generation for attorneys.  If this is your first time working with a lead generation company, or you are just doing research before you do, there are a few things you should understand right now.  The long term goal with any lead generation company your law firm works with is to form a bond, a win win relationship that extends far beyond the terms of your initial agreement. Unless you get off on the right foot with your lead generation company you’ll never build that long term relationship and thus, you won’t have time to adjust to your “new normal.”

How to work with a lead generation company

You should have a general idea for how to work with your lead generation company, which is the subject of this blog.  I promise if you adhere to the next three structured bullet points it will save you a lot of time, money and headache. 🙂

1) Don’t jump to conclusions about lead quality

If you’re working with a new lead generation company, I encourage you to be patient with the leads and with yourself, especially regarding lead quality.  The market will fluctuate and change every day the types of people who are seeking your services and your lead generation company doesn’t have control over that.

2) Adjust your sales process to your leads

Your lead generation company that set up your landing page and your ads will determine the entire flow of this process.  It is your responsibility as the attorney to recognize this process, and adjust to the way your lead generation company is able to produce leads for you.

Do not expect your leads to:

  • Have their wallets open with thumbs on their credit cards the instant you connect
  • Know what you want them to do
  • Sell themselves
  • Answer the phone for you
  • Call at a time most convenient for you — yes you might be on the toilet ?, answer the call anyway!

❗️Website-Only Offer ❗️

For any estate planning attorney that books a call right now, I will provide a personalized hour long training session to you and your team covering how to book more appointments and close more sales. Free of charge when you book!

Your lead generation company should share how the leads will get to you, and help you understand the process your leads went through in order to find you.  That should put you in the right headspace when you do your initial followup with the lead, and whenever you answer a live phone call.

Lastly, have a plan devised and outlined ahead of time for how you will move new prospects (leads) from your starting position–the moment they become a lead–until their new estate plan is signed, sealed and delivered.  If you aren’t accustomed to the volume of leads you start receiving, be patient with yourself.  You aren’t going to close every prospect–every interaction you get when you first get started.  Practice makes perfect, and the more experience you get with prospects the more fluid you will become with your conversations, and ultimately the more estate plans you will get paid to write.

3) Don’t request significant changes to your campaign

Especially if you’re interested in working with a boutique or specialized lead generation company.

This is a big one, perhaps the biggest one!

From experience I can tell you that changing a single design feature or a single line of copywriting can produce drastically different results in a campaign. If you want a true assessment of any lead generation company do not make too many asks outside of what the company has already set up. They know what works best. Further, it’s also why you’ve hired them.  Be kind to your business by reaping the rewards of working with your lead generation company in the manner they produce the best results for their clients.  The better you can be to them the better results you earn from your campaign.

At Estate Planning Lead Pros we are a boutique lead generation company for estate planning attorneys. For 10 years we’ve studied the psychology of converting prospects on your website into leads, how to convert the right prospects into leads, and how to nurture the interaction before and after they become a lead and a client.  We know the language to use and the process that works best for helping estate planners increase their leads, close more sales and grow their practice.

So to wrap this point up, if you’re thinking of working with a specialized lead generation company please do not approach the relationship the wrong way.  Trust their process, and make certain you are hold up your end to make your campaign a success.

Finding the best lead generation company for an estate planning attorney

Not every attorney we talk to is going to be the right fit, just like not everyone is going to get along with each other.  Before we can determine if we would be a good fit we need to have a chance to get to know one another.  We need to meet, and ask each other questions that will help us decide if we can make this work.  So with that I invite you to set up a call with me by clicking the ‘Schedule Now’ button below.  I look forward to connecting.

? Onward and ? Upward,

Heath Rost
Founder, Estate Planning Lead Pros

Why Blogging Is So Valuable For Estate Planning Lawyers

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In today’s blog I’m going to write about a topic I am quite fond of, blogging.  If you don’t know me or this is your first time coming to my website I’ve been working with estate planning attorneys to write blogs on their website for nearly a decade now.  I’ve seen the benefits of having a great blog that come from both an organic and paid search and I want to share three quick reasons why blogging is so valuable for estate planning lawyers.

1) Your customers are asking more questions in this area of law than perhaps any other area

There are a couple reasons for this.  First they may have never worked with an attorney before and want to be more educated before reaching out.  Second is this area of law requires them to do an inventory on their financials and investments prior to meeting with you, so they want to know as much as they can as well.

2) They don’t know how to ask the right question

People are more uneducated when it comes to estate planning than any other area of law (arguably).  The point I want to make here is that they don’t know how to ask the right question, so they have so many different things they will type into their search bar.  That means the pool for you to write a blog that addresses exactly the question being asked is much larger than other areas of law.

3) The more you answer your customers questions they more they know, like and trust you.

The more comfortable customers are with you the more likely they are to fill out a lead form on your website, book and appointment or call your law firm directly.  You want them to spend more time on your website, and the more questions you’ve answered for them the more invested they are in you and your law firm.

That about does it for this blog.  If you’re an estate planning lawyer and you need a high-converting website and/or lead generation I would love to speak with you.  Schedule a call with me by clicking below.

Why A One Page Website Is Really All Your Law Firm Needs (To Get Started)

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One of the mistakes I see law firms make when building a new website is going all-in from the git-go. I believe it is a mistake when you’re building a new website to have more than 1 page max before adding on additional or new content.

That may sound a little blunt, and maybe you completely disagree with me–but hear me out.

The primary reason, and overarching reason a one page website is really all you need is because if your website doesn’t convert leads from one page, what makes us think it will convert leads when it has more than one page? Here are my followup arguments and points:

#1: What you can measure you can manage.

If you have nothing to measure from one page, what are you able to measure from two pages, three pages or more?

Analytics tell you everything you need to know starting with how people find your website and gaging the interest level of those people based on how they found you.

#2: Analyzing user behavior

When you have one page on your website to start, you learn how website visitors (your prospects) use your website. You can track everything about the user experience, study that data and learn from it.

When you know how people find your website with interest levels that are high, you learn the bigger picture, direction and vision for how you should make adjustments to your landing page. You analyze so you can adjust.

#3: Adjusting your 1-page landing website

After studying the data and learning what you can from what it’s telling you, you can make adjustments to your landing page to achieve the outcome you desire. Until you achieve that outcome, there is no reason to add more content to your website.

Start with what you know works, and build from there. That’s the strategy.

#Wrap-up

Using the strategy of starting from a 1-page website and building from there will give you the strongest foundation possible. The less business analytics to analyze when you first launch your new website the better. Having too many analytics to measure from the git-go could leave you spinning your wheels, so play it safe and start small. Lets discuss your website and find out if a 1-page website is the right place for you to (re)start. Book a call with me today.

What Is Lead Conversion?

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To understand how we can go about increasing conversions on your law firm’s website we first need to be on the same page about how we delineate what a conversion is.  For the purpose of this video and blog the types of conversions we’re trying to increase are:

  • Prospect clicks on your phone number on your website
  • Submits a contact form
  • Schedules an appointment

So how do we get more of these types of conversions when prospects visit our website?  We do this using one simple strategy.

Blogging.

Why Blogging To Increase Conversions On My Website?

Especially for estate planning attorneys, it’s important to your prospects when they visit your website that you give off the appearance that you are a patient business to work with.

People want to be educated and they want to learn.  Especially as an attorney it’s important that you be willing to educate them and be patient with them.  If prospects that visit your website don’t know that then they are going to be less likely to reach out to you and become a conversion.

A typical law firm website that is using paid ads will attain conversions from 1%-2% of their website traffic.  Over the past 10 years working with estate planning attorneys we’ve identified a trend a correlation between conversion rate and the number of pages and posts on the law firm’s website.

This means simply that the more blog posts and pages you’re creating, the more likely the prospect is to become a lead.

Why We Encourage Blogging

In terms of organic SEO and paid ads when you have more pages and posts on your website it’s going to result in higher conversion rates.  Higher conversion rates mean that the more people you have visiting your website the larger return on investment your law firm is going to see in the long run.

The Difference Between A Virtual Estate Planner And Mobile Estate Planner

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I love this topic, because for an estate planning attorney the way you market yourself makes a huge difference in whether or not a prospective client becomes a lead for your business.  The way people can work with you tells a huge story about whether or not you’ll have success in growing your law firm, and growing it through your digital marketing efforts.  In this blog I’ll do my best to compare and contrast the two, from a marketers perspective.

 

Mobile Estate Planners Have It Made…. Sort Of

First off, what the heck is a mobile estate planner?  For the purposes of this blog, an estate planner is a licensed and practicing attorney that writes estate plans, wills, trusts, powers of attorney and all the necessary estate planning documents anyone requires in preparation for their demise.  A mobile estate planner is an estate planner that will travel to meet with clients where they are be that in a residential home, nursing or senior-living home, hospital or coffee shop.  A mobile estate planner is not limited by their physical location within the metro area or city they reside and practice in.

As you can probably tell from my description of a mobile estate planner that by marketing yourself as mobile you give yourself a leg-up on your competition as an estate planning attorney.  Not only that, there are several things you can do, depending on your metro area, to gain an organic search advantage through the use of multiple mailing address or offices where you can meet with clients at.

Why is this important? 

Because people like to support local, and with something as personal as managing their estate after their passing they like to know that the person [the attorney] they choose to work with for their estate plan is local, and can be contacted in the event they need to make a change or someone they name in their plan has a question for them.

On the downside, most people don’t know that an attorney that is licensed in the state can write an estate plan for them no matter how far away they live from them. Writing and publishing blogs and making your messaging clear on your website are great ways to overcome this.

Additionally, most people think their county has specific laws and rules that an estate planner that lives outside of their territory will not understand, and therefore something could be missing in their estate plan.  Blogs and great messaging again are the answer here.

 

Virtual Estate Planners Have More Disadvantages Than You May Think

A virtual estate planner is an estate planner that does not meet with clients in-person, ever.  They only meet over the phone, audio and video conferencing.  This can be a big factor in whether or not a prospective client will choose to reach out to you and become a new lead through your digital marketing efforts.  People want to meet in person, they want to know you live near them and understand the lay of the land as it pertains to their estate.

On the upside, if you are solely a virtual estate planner for your metro area or city you practice in, but you also live in that area, you need to make that clear in your messaging or else you could miss out on a lot of business that would convert into a lead through your website and digital marketing efforts.

If you choose to practice estate planning as an attorney in a city you don’t live, you might consider setting up a mailing address within that city, and connecting that with a Google My Business profile.  That will give you an element of trust with prospects that live there, even though you don’t.

Lastly, through your digital marketing I encourage you to make the fact that you’re a virtual estate planner clear up front.  One of the first things your prospects are looking for is a yes or no answer to “are they local?”  If you can answer that question, along with questions like “are they an estate planning attorney” then you’ll be well on your way to converting that website prospect into a lead.

 

Virtual Estate Planning Vs. Mobile Estate Planning: Which One Is Best?

Wrapping up it really depends on how you like to practice law and what your process is.  After converting a prospect into a lead, a lead generation company’s role with your company is not to create the process for you, rather it is to help automate it and free up your time for you.  Depending on what your law firm’s digital footprint looks like currently will determine the best way to go about marketing yourself more effectively as a virtual or mobile estate planner.  If a conversation about that is warranted, I invite you to schedule a call with me now.

? Onward and ? Upward,
Heath Rost

How To Say Just Enough On Your Website To Get More Leads

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What attorneys should not to say on their website

Worst thing you can do: treat your website like its a filing system where you keep track of what services you provide.

What attorneys should say on their website

  • Pamphlet example
    • Your mindset for what to add to your website so it’s “just enough” to achieve the outcome you want is to design it like a physical pamphlet.
  • Cold Email by Eric Finnigan (building a foundation to start from before you scale).
    • Do the work to personalize each cold email.
    • You would never scale that cold email until you have a solution that you know works.

Call to action

  • I encourage you to take a look at your website and see where you can say more by saying less.
  • Pull out a notepad and hand-write what each section of your homepage and each page on your website is supposed to do, and how it feeds into the overall end result you hope the page will achieve.

How we can do it for you:

This is where the value of a great copywriter and a great website designer can play a huge role for you.

At EPLP we’ve already done that, we have the perfect formula already for estate planning attorneys to write more estate plans. We start everyone from a single landing page that converts, and we make sure its completely separate from your existing website so you don’t have to lift a finger to get started working with us.

Fulfilling Potential For Your Estate Planning Law Firm

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“Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results, if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks, in the long run, the quality of our lives depend on the quality of our habits. With the same habits you’ll end up with the same results, but with better habits anything is possible.” James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

I attended a conference recently where the keynote speaker was talking about marketing for the industry he specialized in: law firms. Everything the speaker had shared up to this point in his talk I was really on board with. They were all strategies I’d implemented myself and found success doing: Google my business, phone tracking numbers, mobile websites. But then he started talking about his experience publishing content on his website, and the websites of people who worked with him. It was at this point in his talk though I felt despair.

Blogging Consistently = “Welcome to the matrix”

“Google says if you publish great content people are just going to magically link back to you. That doesn’t work because we don’t live in the matrix” said the speaker, and the crowd responded by laughing.

Myself and other A-listers in content marketing will tell you if you publish great content people will link back to you. I know this because I’ve edited blog posts that have received hundreds of thousands of views in the first month it was published. I’m able to do this because I help people organize and condense their message and story into an easy to read, and easy to consume format. Almost more importantly though, I help them get clicks to it.

The truth is that the only way to publish great content is to be consistent with it. Without having written a good ten blogs already and received feedback on them it’s hard to know if what you’re doing is actually working and what you can improve upon. Your best writing and publishing comes from experience with actually doing it and being consistent about it.  When you become consistent you enter a new matrix, a new reality.

 

Would you rather grind for a day to produce couple Good links, or consistently produce Great links?

The speaker then went on to say “Focus on a couple good links, those are so much more valuable.”

This might be true for the law industry in general, but this conference was specific to estate planning attorneys. Because of this I couldn’t disagree more with that statement. As you’ll hear me talk about on my Facebook Live on Tuesday people are more uneducated about estate planning than any other area of law. And not only that they want to learn.

If you’ve ever watched the movie “Yes Man” with Jim Carry in the movie Jim’s character Carl has to say “Yes” to everything and hilarity ensues. As a loan officer of a bank he has to approve or deny loans every day. When word gets around that Carl is approving everyone’s loans no matter how small they are a long line forms at his desk. Weeks later someone from the corporate office shows up to congratulate Carl for his work. Why? Because people were so appreciative to have their needs met, they were actually paying back on their loans, and the bank was making a lot of money.

I understand this was a movie, but the principle applies really well here. The more people are able have their questions answered the more appreciative they are to have their needs met. When people with estate planning needs have their needs met, and your law firm does that they’re more likely to choose you as their attorney to work with.

A couple good links will help people near you to find your website, but a couple great links not only do a better job of helping people find you, they help convert them into estate planning leads as well.

 

Creating better habits

“If you want better results, forget about setting goals, focus on your systems instead. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” James Clear

Are you ready to develop the right habits and systems to grow your estate planning law firm? Set up a call with me today.