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Betties Book Brief | Shut Up and Listen

Betties Book Brief - Shut Up and Listen
This month in Betties Land, we enjoyed the blunt and quick read, Shut Up and Listen: Hard Business Truths That Will Help You Succeed by Tilman Fertitta. The year is already flying by so we were grateful that this book was such a quick and easy read while still being packed full of valuable tips. If you are short on time but ready to learn, this book should be next on your list.

Shut Up and Listen Takeaways

1. “Take the word ‘no’ out of your damn vocabulary.”

Telling a customer “no” is not letting them know you can’t do something, it’s letting them know that you’re choosing not to do something. If a customer wants eggs after breakfast, and your restaurant has eggs in the kitchen, why tell them no? Instead, let them know that you can make them eggs but there will be an additional charge because breakfast hours are over. Find a way that makes good business sense to give the customer what they want and accommodate their request.

Use the word “no” sparingly. You will certainly use it in some instances, like when a guest devours their steak and then demands a refund. Or perhaps the roads are flooded due to a storm and you cannot make a delivery. But using “no” should be a very rare occurrence. Instead, think of using “yes, and…” For example, “Yes, I can do that, and here is what it will cost as a premium for the convenience.”

2. Details matter.

Tilman can tell what his dining experience will be like before he even walks into a restaurant. If there are cigarette butts on the floor or smudge marks on the door because the hostess is inattentive, it is likely that the same lax attitude may be found throughout the rest of the staff. If the hostess doesn’t keep things clean, it’s possible that your service and food quality will also be subpar.

3. You absolutely must know your numbers.

No exceptions! A company that is struggling can find inefficiencies when they know their numbers. It is much, much easier to fix current inefficiencies to increase profits than it is to go out and find new customers.

4. Never lose sight of the customer’s experience.

Mystery shop your business to gain valuable insight into what it’s like for the customer. Listen to feedback and take reviews seriously. 95% of the business is likely going to run really well so never lose sight of the 5% that needs improvement. Always seek out ways to be better.

5. Leverage your strengths.

Learn to improve upon them and delegate your weaknesses!

6. Ignore the naysayers.

Do not give up until they have padlocked your doors shut! Most businesses are failing because people give up on them too soon. If you are taking the steps above, don’t give up until the ship has fully sunk.

7. Choose a partner wisely.

Do not go into business with a friend or family member with similar strengths to your own! Go into business with a partner who is complementary. When they started Betties, Emily’s partner was great at sales and Emily was great at the process. If they had both been process people, we would have had a business capable of execution with no clients to serve.

Have you read this book? What were your thoughts? Let us know in the comments or find us over on Facebook!

How to Choose the Best Virtual Receptionist for Your Law Firm

How to choose the best virtual receptionist service for law firmsSo you’re ready to hire a virtual receptionist for your law firm? Or, you’re ready to at least think about hiring a virtual receptionist. Congratulations! This is a huge step in the right direction for growth in your law firm. We’ve designated 2021 to be a year of growth here at Back Office Betties and we hope to help all of our attorney friends do the same.

There’s a lot to know before you choose the best virtual receptionist service for your law firm. There are countless services that all claim to be the best (we are shamelessly one of them!), so research is key. What are your priorities when it comes to hiring a virtual law firm receptionist? Is it 24/7 call answering? Or can you make do with normal business hours? Do you prioritize high-quality calls or is quantity over quality your motto? Regardless, we’ve compiled all you need to know right here in this handy dandy article!

Why should law firms hire an answering service?

It’s no secret that a phone that never stops ringing is a giant pain in the rear. What is a little surprising, though, is just how much those phone calls interrupt your daily work! Did you know that attorneys spend an average of only 2.5 hours on billable work each day? That makes up only approximately 30% of a typical workday. In addition, according to the 2019 Clio Legal Trends report, only 86% of those billed hours actually get paid.

Do you want to work for free? Certainly not!

The right virtual receptionist or answering service not only frees up your time and reduces your interruptions, but they also help to follow up and collect those missing payments.

Now, you may ask, why shouldn’t I just hire an in-house receptionist to handle all of that?

One of the most obvious answers to that question is: Cost. To hire a full-time legal receptionist, you’re looking at a cost of approximately $4,123.60 per month after factoring in employer taxes and benefits. Add to that the lost income from time spent recruiting, hiring, and training someone, plus the time lost for managing 1 employee (6 hours/week, by the way).

Now spin around and look at pricing for an answering service. With services offering a range of approximately $70 per month up to $1599 per month, even the top plans are going to give you major bang for your buck! The fact that you don’t lose any time managing or recruiting staff is just a bonus. Check out the following graphic we created for more stats on this:

Cost of hiring in-house receptionist for law firms

Is your law firm ready to hire a virtual receptionist?

The first step to hiring a virtual receptionist is deciding whether or not you are ready. If you spend your days frustrated and chronically ignoring calls that come through, the answer is that you probably are! But there are some other key points to consider:

  • Are you ready to hand over the reins when it comes to being the first client contact?
  • Do you want to land more business than ever before?
  • Will you be organized enough to follow up with messages you didn’t take yourself?

If you said no to any of the above, you might not be ready yet! That’s totally okay, but keep in mind that doing the same thing gives you the same results. Bookmark this article and keep researching, but come back here when you feel like you might be ready.

What does your law firm need in an answering service?

Now that you have determined that you are in fact ready to hire, it’s time to figure out your priorities. No two answering services or virtual receptionist services are the same! Some offer extended hours, some offer higher quality calls, some are cheaper, and some are legal experts. Let’s narrow down your priorities to determine what you need to ask your prospects!

  • What are your business hours? When do people typically call you? If you get calls at all hours, you might consider a 24/7 service. If you only get the occasional after-hours call, a business hours only service will be perfectly fine!
  • Do you want help with client intake? Will you entrust your virtual receptionists to intake new clients? Or do you prefer they simply take a message so that you can do the intake at a later date?
  • What is your budget? If you are strapped for cash, you may not have much choice in the matter. You don’t want to overstretch the budget if you aren’t sure you’ll get a return. However, it’s important to keep in mind how many billable hours your answering service will free up (if they take intakes and follow-up off your plate!). Oftentimes the pricier service that offers higher quality call-handling is worth the return!
  • What is the size of your firm? Different services offer different plans and some may be more conducive to smaller or larger firms than your own. Do your research and determine how many people will be receiving messages and/or transfers, then choose your service and plan accordingly.
  • Is your client intake complicated? If you have a lengthy and complicated legal client intake, it is in your best interest to research plans specifically for lawyers. Legal-trained receptionists will help your potential and current clients to feel more comfortable through the intake process. Not to mention, they will be more efficient and understanding of your law firm’s terminology and processes.

Choose the company that best meets your needs.

After considering all variables and deciding what your firm really needs from a virtual receptionist or answering service, and the things you can live without, you can choose the best company for your needs. No single company is the right fit for every law firm, and you might even find that it takes you a few trial runs before you find the company that works best for you! However, once you find that perfect fit, you won’t be sorry. The stress-reduction of trusting someone else with the calls you can no longer handle is worth every penny!

 

Curious how Back Office Betties can benefit your law firm? Request a call with our Growth Solutions Specialist here, or give us a call at (800) 958-8591.

How to Understand (and Market to) Your Law Firm’s Ideal Clients

Marketing to your law firm's ideal clients

Marketing is one of those tricky parts of business that nobody really understands unless you’ve previously worked in the field. There are so many tips out there and everyone thinks that their way is the only way. The thing is, there are a few key principles that every marketing tactic or campaign needs to be successful. Determining who your law firm’s ideal clients are is one of those keys.

Today, we want to show you how to nail down your ideal client. Working under the impression that everyone is your ideal client and needs your services quickly leads to serving no one. Quit throwing everything at the wall and hoping it sticks! Once you know who you’re talking to, it’s a whole lot easier to know what to say.

At Betties, we started out offering our services to any small business that wanted us! We quickly realized that many people and businesses didn’t value what we offered. We also realized that it was impossible to offer the level of service we wanted to while juggling calls for multiple business types. Our team took a step back and asked: Who do we like working with the most? The answer was unanimous: Attorneys. At that point, we were able to nail down the specific problems our attorney clients needed help with. This has helped guide our messaging as well as the services we provide.

If you’re currently marketing to everyone, or not marketing to anyone at all, you need to keep reading! Let’s get your ideal client nailed down so you can start truly helping them.

Steps to identifying your law firm’s ideal clients

1) Brainstorm the problems your law firm solves

Remember those handy dandy bubble maps we made in school before starting a paper or project? Take us back because that’s the perfect start to finding your firm’s clients. You need to know what problems you solve before you can know who needs help with said problems! Start with the types of law you practice and branch out with various case types underneath those branches. Get as detailed as possible so that you can really understand the problems your clients are facing.

2) Make a list of your favorite clients

This step is definitely more so for established firms and businesses. Once you’ve discovered certain people that you love working with, make a list of them. Start to process some of their characteristics and find similarities. Do they live in similar areas? Do they share careers? What about familial status? What are their personality types? Male or female? How old are they? Political affiliations? Answering as many of these questions as possible and finding similarities can make it surprisingly simple to understand who your law firm’s ideal clients are. You may already be working with them!

3) Determine how many client profiles you serve

Your clients may not all be in exactly the same circumstances. Especially if you offer multiple services or practice more than one area of law. If you notice that your favorite clients don’t necessarily overlap, or perhaps you solve different problems, consider creating multiple profiles. Start with the problem you are solving and work backward as to who that solution serves. This will help when advertising different services or marketing on different platforms. If one set of clients hangs out on Facebook, target them there with messaging directed at them. If another set of clients hangs out on LinkedIn, market to them there!

Keep in mind – you don’t want to go overboard. Slight differences do not necessarily require an all-new profile if your messaging can work for both ideal clients.

4) Who are your competitors serving?

If you don’t yet have a robust favorite client list, look at your competitors. Who are they serving and who do they market to? Follow them on social media and check out their lead magnets. Who are they speaking to? What are they offering? This might help you to determine if your ideal client is similar or if you have a unique audience that they can’t help.

If you don’t want to make it known that you are “spying”, Kim Garst offers some valuable tips on software to follow your competitors’ email blasts without actually subscribing.

 

Okay, I know who I want to serve. Now what?

Speaking to your ideal clients

Now that you know who you are talking to, it will be easier to determine your messaging and how you market to them. The most important part of marketing your firm is to ensure that your potential clients want to hear what you are saying. Nothing turns you off of a company faster than a message you don’t align with, right?

1) Create content that speaks to solving their problems

You identified the problems your law firm solves and you determined the problems of your ideal client profiles. Put those together and market directly to each problem that your ideal clients face. You can do this through informative and helpful blog posts and other free content, as well as speak to how you help solve those problems in your advertising and landing pages. For instance, if your ideal client is having trouble planning his estate and wants to be sure his family doesn’t have to worry about anything, you might create messaging around your uncomplicated, done-for-you estate planning services that will set his family up to thrive after he is gone.

2) Show up where your clients hang out

If your ideal clients hang out on Facebook, you want to advertise to them there and have an active Facebook Business Page. If your ideal clients ride the bus, you might want to utilize bus stop advertising opportunities or have your ads inside the bus. Do your clients attend conferences? What kind? Show up as an authoritative figure there!

When you know where your clients are and what problems they are having, it’s easy to attract them to you with marketing that surrounds them.

 

Did you find this post helpful? We’d love for you to share your ideal client profile in the comments or over on Facebook!

The Importance of Ongoing Training for a Successful Team

Betties Legal Academy Ongoing Training

Customer service and our client’s success are two of Back Office Betties’ biggest focuses as a business. We dedicate our time to bringing you valuable information on how to best manage your law firm, we created a company culture that attracts (and retains) only the most qualified receptionists, and we answer every one of your phone calls with a smile and expertise. In order to ensure that our employees stay happy, knowledgeable, and ready to serve your firm, one of the big things that we implement is ongoing employee training.

Ongoing Employee Training Benefits

As time passes, it is likely that policies, trends, and preferences change too. By continuing training throughout your employees’ time with you, they are staying current on policy changes, procedures, and technology. In addition, ongoing training ensures that tenured employees have the same information as new hires. Investing in ongoing training for your employees boosts employee happiness, confidence, and proficiency in their position. In turn, your clients are happier because they are receiving high-quality service from a knowledgable professional.

Boosting Employee Happiness with Ongoing Training

How is it that employee happiness can be so linked with ongoing training? According to CNBC, professionals who were surveyed as “heavy learners” were more likely to be happier, less stressed, more confident, and more productive at work. Light learners were 48% less likely to have found a purpose in their work. They were also 47% more likely to be stressed. Stress + lack of purpose = unhappiness.

In addition, 94% of employees say they would stay with a company longer if that company encouraged and allowed them to learn. The younger generations are driving this home with a fierce desire for continued learning. Specifically, 27% of Gen Z and Millenials would leave their job because they weren’t provided enough opportunities to enhance their knowledge and grow.

Are you giving your employees a reason to leave you by skipping over this vital responsibility as an employer?

Investing in Your Employees is Investing in Your Business

Investing in your business feels like a no-brainer. But how can empowering your employees to learn more be considered an investment? Easy! The American Society for Training and Development conducted a study that showed companies that offered comprehensive training profited greatly over other companies. Those companies benefited from 218% more income per employee and had a 24% higher profit margin than those who spent less on employee training.

According to New Horizons Learning Solutions, this is due to the increased efficiency and confidence of employees who undergo continuous training. Clearly, they are doing something right!

Client Happiness Soars When Employees Are Well-Trained

Reduce turnover, improve consistency, and offer high-level customer service – all are keys to retaining happy clients. Educated employees are more confident and able to help solve more problems than those who are iffy about their company’s policies and procedures. Employees who go through ongoing training are more consistent and follow through on the company’s policies because they remember what they are. In addition, clients like to have stability in who they communicate with within your company. Turnover reduces their feelings of trust. Working with a familiar face enhances that trust. When you take all of this into account, it amounts to high-level service that keeps the client and keeps them happy.

Have you ever had an experience with an employee at a place of business who clearly had no idea what they were doing? How did it make you feel? Did you trust them? Did you enjoy doing business with that company? Probably not. You likely wrote them off as incompetent and moved on, right? Avoid that by continuing to train your employees, even after tenure.

Implementing a Training Program

Ready to create an ongoing training program? Start by documenting every step and process in a central place that employees have access to. We love to use Trainual for our initial employee training and refresher courses. It’s user-friendly and allows you to track employee progress, as well as quiz them on the materials they learned. Trainual also alerts employees when a training has been updated! This allows for seamless ongoing training and ensures your team is always up to date on the latest policies and procedures.

When implementing training that exceeds what your company teaches as far as policy and procedure, it’s important to source courses from reputable sources in your field. Take the course yourself before offering it to your team; you don’t want them to be wasting time on a course that turns out to be invaluable or has wrong information. This is also a great way to continue your own learning! Nobody benefits from not learning. Once you have reputable courses and learnings, be sure to offer ample work time for your employees to take them. Set an expectation of how many hours should be spent learning each week so that your team feels comfortable doing so. You don’t want them to feel pressured to learn off the clock! This could lead to resentment or even just blowing it off entirely.

Another great way to ensure learning within your company is to ask for volunteers to share tips and teachings regularly. As they learn, they can share their notes with the team through email, ensuring everyone is up to speed. At Betties, we do this within our team meetings. Everyone shares something they learned that week, as it pertains to their position in the company. This also allows other team members to understand parts of the company that they may not be directly involved in.

Back Office Betties Legal Academy

As you can tell, we love to train our team to ensure the best customer service. This all starts with Back Office Betties Legal Academy! Every new receptionist goes through a two-week program where they dive into legal terminology and process training. We cover the basics of each type of law that our clients practice, as well as the case types within those practice areas. Our receptionists are guided through the training (using Trainual) and are quizzed along the way. Everyone has to pass every part of the training before becoming a true Bettie and getting on the phones with callers, even if this takes a little bit longer than we hoped.

After onboarding training, our receptionists are updated daily on notes from our clients, updates to case types that a client may handle, and feedback on the way that they’ve handled past calls. This ensures that every single receptionist is constantly improving and striving to do their best. We always keep this fun and light with jokes and memes, as well as our favorite Gifs ;) Who doesn’t want to learn when it’s fun? Our culture stays positive because everyone is striving to improve together and we have fun doing it!

In addition to general process trainings, every receptionist goes through training on the call-handling process of each individual client. After our clients determine their ideal call flow with our Client Concierge, a training course is sent out to every receptionist who may serve that firm. Getting these calls right is vital so training on them is very important!

Encourage Personal Development Outside of the Company

Of course, part of ongoing training goes outside of the lines of process training. To give our team real motivation to continue bettering themselves, we encourage one hour of paid personal development each week. This can be through taking a webinar, reading a book, or taking a course. We also offer an annual budget for each team member that goes towards any course or seminar they wish to take!

Your team is a family and it’s important for them to be their best selves. They’re not robots and should be allowed the time to develop in any area they feel necessary. As team members learn more, they share more, and the entire team becomes more knowledgeable and proficient. Encourage your employees to learn outside of their direct role and they only become more valuable to the team as a whole.

What are your thoughts on ongoing training? Does your company practice this kind of development? Let us know in the comments or take the conversation over to Facebook.

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Take Your Small Law Firm to the Next Level

Take Your Law Firm to the Next Level

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BettieGram Newsletter Snippit
Take Your Small Law Firm to the Next Level

Take Your Law Firm to the Next Level

Subscribe to BettieGram

Our newsletter shares expert advice & practical articles to elevate your law firm’s success.