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The Personal
Injury Mastermind

The Podcast

193. Ethen Ostroff, Ethen Ostroff Law – Outbound Intake: Get the Most Out of Existing Leads

Don’t let that next most important case slip through the cracks. Call that lead back! Not following up is a missed opportunity to capture the leads that you’ve worked so hard, and spent so much money, to get. Founder and CEO of Ethen Ostroff Law (@ethenostrofflaw), Ethen Ostroff understands this and has developed an incredibly successful system that he shares with us today. In fact, this system is SO successful that he has partnered with Bill Hauser of SMB Team to fulfill his vision: to place a million jobs. Ethen breaks down the exact social media strategy he uses to get leads for just five to ten dollars, how to successfully set up an outbound follow-up team, and how virtual assistance can help grow your firm even after the leads have signed on. 

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What’s in This Episode:

  • Who is Ethen Ostroff?
  • How does Ethen use Facebook to acquire $10 personal injury leads?
  • How virtual assistants can help with an outbound lead follow-up strategy. 
  • How to establish an org chart for your intake team that will fill your pipeline.

Past Guests

Past guests on Personal Injury Mastermind: Brent Sibley, Sam Glover, Larry Nussbaum, Michael Mogill, Brian Chase, Jay Kelley, Alvaro Arauz, Eric Chaffin, Brian Panish, John Gomez, Sol Weiss, Matthew Dolman, Gabriel Levin, Seth Godin, David Craig, Pete Strom, John Ruhlin, Andrew Finkelstein, Harry Morton, Shay Rowbottom, Maria Monroy, Dave Thomas, Marc Anidjar, Bob Simon, Seth Price, John Gomez, Megan Hargroder, Brandon Yosha, Mike Mandell, Brett Sachs, Paul Faust, Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert

Transcript

Ethen Ostroff:

How many million dollar cases have you let slip through the cracks because you didn’t make one more call?

Chris Dreyer:

One more call can pay for your intake department. Don’t let that next important case slip through the cracks.

Ethen Ostroff:

So we tend to get a little spoiled by our margins and it masks inefficiencies at our firms.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the no excuses, no BS legal marketing agency that works harder than the competition. Each week you get insights from some of the best in the industry, but before we get started hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s get it.

All right guys, let’s be honest, are you following up with your leads? And I don’t mean just one call back and a voicemail. I mean a system. How many calls, texts, and emails are you sending to your high value prospects? It can take up to 15 points of contact to get that prospect to sign. There’s nothing worse than being a digital agency owner to see leads created for that firm to just be ignored. Sales cures all problems in business, so get on that money train. Ethen Ostroff understands this and has developed an incredible successful system that he shares with us today. In fact, this system is so successful that he’s partnered with Bill Hauser of SMB Team to fulfil his vision.

Ethen Ostroff:

My vision is to place a million jobs and to represent more people than anyone ever.

Chris Dreyer:

Today, Ethen is dropping a ton of knowledge, so listen up. He breaks down the exact social media strategy he uses to get leads for five to 10 dollars. How to successfully set up an outbound follow-up team and how virtual assistants can help grow your firm even after the leads have signed on. Here’s Ethen Ostroff, founder and CEO of Ethen Ostroff Law.

Ethen Ostroff:

My dad was a personal injury lawyer and my vision was originally to go into business with my dad and I actually worked with him for the first three years, four years of practise, but I really grew up around the law. So we were talking about cases at dinner since I was a little kid. Kind of hard to avoid going into that path when your dad did it. I was also fascinated with specifically personal injury because it really resonated with me to help people who were going through something that wasn’t their fault. So I really felt like it was a unique offering where I kind of benefit when they benefited and I also kind of grew up around it.

Chris Dreyer:

Yes, you got that immersion at the dinner table, so to speak, and probably different conversations that other individuals didn’t have. It’s nice to see that too, where you have that pinnacle at the top of the mountain where you know what you’re going to school for and you have this path because so many people… So take me after that point. So you get a career, you get your law degree. What’s next? What happens afterwards?

Ethen Ostroff:

When I was in law school, I went to Drexel for law school and Penn State for undergrad, I basically interned at my dad’s office the entire time I was in law school. My second or maybe my first year summer, he had his biggest trial of his career. He represented 23 victims from a Greyhound bus crash and that was at trial in Philadelphia and I lived in Philadelphia at the time. So after I saw what goes into the jury deliberation, the science behind how you present the evidence, I was hooked. I knew that was what I needed to do. And also my dad was really a very savvy marketer in the space. He was the first person in the Philadelphia area to have a website in the early nineties, first person on the Yellow Pages in Western PA. So once I got towards the end of law school, I already bought my name, my domain, I owned casereferrallawyers.com.

I had this big vision that I was going to launch my website, cases were going to just flood in, as many listeners might have and of course they didn’t. But when I started, I worked at my dad’s firm in really a litigation role handling about a hundred fender-bender cases. And after I started there, I kept seeing these opportunities for improving the efficiency of the way they did things. Why are we asking clients the same question in litigation that we should have had really cleared at intake? Because I felt the frustration of my clients on the phone being like, “I’ve already answered this three times, why don’t you have this answer right in front of you?” And I never had a good answer for it. All of these client frustrations about how we were asking the same questions about how… We didn’t necessarily have everything organized the way we wanted, I couldn’t push a button and spit out the amount that they would net minus their bills, minus the expenses on the case.

And I just became fascinated with the operations of the law firm. So kind of long story short helped my dad and the managing partners see the value of an operator and a technologically efficient person in sort of a COO CSO role and convinced them to hire somebody who only really worked there for about three or four months and quit unexpectedly. And then all of a sudden 15 months after starting practicing , there was just this gaping hole in operations and I gave up my caseload and moved into this kind of operations and marketing role.

Chris Dreyer:

A lot of people when they look at those profit leaks, they don’t look at the efficiency and utilization enough. They’re more looking for when we’re talking about profit, they’re looking for more leads, maximizing value in a number of different tactical approaches. So it’s interesting that you saw the efficiency side and how that can impact profit. Tell me about that experience when you transitioned into this operational role. What did that look like? How did you impact their firm in that role?

Ethen Ostroff:

Conversion percentage is universal across all practice areas. The higher your conversion percentage, the more consistent your average fee will come in the door, whether you’re an upfront cashflow model or a backend cashflow model. In terms of how I saw sort of efficiency issues, I was handling files that were not as organized as I wanted them to be. By the time that I was looking at files if it didn’t have a demand written on it, maybe they just threw it right into litigation. The file was just a mess. So the problems would kind of come on the client. And what I started to realize is specifically in the personal injury industry, we have million dollar clicks every day, if not the highest, one of the highest margin clicks on the internet. So we tend to get a little spoiled by our margins and it masks inefficiencies at our firms. And we kind of kick our feet up when we have our first $5 million settlement because that’s going to pay for overhead for the next whatever amount of time and put a little cash in your pocket.

So I thought, how crazy would it be to have this highly efficient high margin model where there wasn’t slippage on conversion percentage, there wasn’t slippage on getting your 90-day check in on bill balances, on how fast you get a police report, on how quick you get a deck page, on every single consistent repetitive admin task that should be done by the time your case hits litigation but just generally isn’t. I started feeling the pain as the lawyer handling that file that felt very disorganized. And then when I moved in this ops role at my dad’s firm, they were on Needles at the time. Chris, have you heard of Needles before?

Chris Dreyer:

Oh, old school. Yeah, I just had a previous attorney on that we was talking about. It was Alex Limontes from Hurst Limontes, and Bill Hurst, and he was talking about how when he became an owner, he had to take that over and transition.

Ethen Ostroff:

So Needles was amazing in the nineties. In fact, my dad actually used to speak when it was Pins before it used to be Needles. He would fly to Atlantis and speak next to Aaron Brockovich and it was the next cutting edge. So getting on the Needles was from paper files. Now 2015, 2018, 2020, it still looked like it did in 2003 and we were using it like we did in 2003. So when we did an injury check-in, instead of having a formulaic way to put that information into the system so that we could report on from the highest level, show me all the matters where a surgery is scheduled so I can revalue my case. We would just type a free form note and we’d have to go dig through the file, note, note, note, note, note, note, what’s going on? Okay, got to dig a little deeper and I thought why not be able to pull the most relevant information all the way to the top, and it is doable with the right system.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, so fantastic. So you adjusted their technology, you improved, you eliminated these redundancies, you made things more accessible. Kind of jumping ahead, what was that point where you kind of cleaned up and you improved these operational processes and improved throughput and efficiencies and all the things? When was it you’re like, okay, I’m ready. You already had these websites, you already had this plan. When was it that you decided this is the moment I’m going to transition, I’m going to start my own firm?

Ethen Ostroff:

Interesting question. I mean I didn’t know I was going to do it. When you are starting a firm, if you start your firm on a system that is really the system you should be on when you have 250, 500,000 cases instead of starting on the cheap case management system to save a little cash upfront and then having to migrate later to the system you really should have been on from the start, that is my strong suggestion to people who are listening. I know it’s not exactly on point, but it’s really important. Because the stuff that got me to want to leave my dad’s firm was the migration from case management A to B, and I moved them from Needles to Litify. And Litify is built on top of something called Salesforce, which is not designed for a personal injury case, not designed for that workflow. You have to really customize it for it to even function.

And when we went live in September 2020 on Litify after moving from Needles to Litify, it was an absolute disaster. And not necessarily, yes, the product needed improvement, and I had to change tons of stuff after we went live, but the real problem were the people that were at the firm for 15, 20 years who liked to label the documents the way they liked to do it, who liked to do intakes the way they liked to do it. The culture impact of moving from system A to system B when you are involved in a five, 10, 15, 20, 30 million dollar revenue firm and you know you’re on the wrong system, it was the culture of just pulling people’s teeth out. That is what exhausted me.

Even when I finished the product, I was still pulling teeth out. If you are the one person at your firm who sees the value of a Litify or of a Salesforce based system or a Filevine or something that really can scale with you on where you want to take your firm, if there are people that you think, oh, they’ll get it once we get there, they won’t. A lot of the time change is the thing that wears you out and forces your hand to either leave and start your own thing or just give up on what you think that is the right answer.

So for me, what got me to leave was I was starting to delegate all this work to virtual assistants, seeing the value there. I was seeing the value in the reports that I was starting to develop for Litify. I was the third lawyer in the country on TikTok sort of side note and I had a couple of hundred thousand followers on there and shockingly wasn’t generating the kind of volume of cases that I expected. So I really dove into social media ads. A few months before I decided to leave, it was July 2021 and I wound up leaving in December 2021, in July I was tipped off by somebody about the CPAP recall. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the CPAP mass tort?

Chris Dreyer:

I have.

Ethen Ostroff:

And I generated roughly 650 leads on an average of between five to 10 dollars a lead. I sent them all out.

Chris Dreyer:

There’s some good arbitrage there, opportunistic.

Ethen Ostroff:

Yeah, really good arbitrage there and on Facebook, you really should be converting at least at 8% on those kinds of leads. I referred them out and I’m going to leave the firm I sent to on unnamed because it just doesn’t make sense to just kind of throw them under the bus. They got a 3% conversion rate. The systems I built there knowing they worked, the infrastructure of virtual assistants delegating all admin tasks and intake tasks, running successful lead gen campaigns, I was like, you know what? I know I can do these things myself. I know that I can convert better. I know that I can generate cheaper and I know that I can compete on day one with every single firm in the country. Because my numbers were better than most of the best firms in the country even before I even started my firm.

January 2022, I officially launched Ethen Ostroff Law and what was Turn Key Ops and is now Attorney Assistant. And really I was targeting cases that took five, six, seven, eight years to pay me. So TKO and my virtual assistant company was really my cashflow generator so that I could cover the overhead of my growing firm.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s talk about the social media strategies. So everyone just said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you generated this at this case acquisition cost. Are we talking landing page, unbound split, ads directly? Are we talking boosting? Are we talking… Break this down, and we don’t have to get your secret sauce.

Ethen Ostroff:

I don’t care. I’m really transparent. I screen share my Facebook ads account constantly when I meet with clients because if more people are giving the information out the way that I do, that means more people are going to know things that they didn’t and more people are going to be helped. I don’t care if people copy what I do. I don’t copy what other people do because I create. So if people want to copy me, great. More people are going to be valued from it. So my strategy generally speaking, and I’m going to be very clear for those who are listening to this, this strategy does not work unless you have a stellar intake department specifically for outbound follow up. If you don’t have that, this strategy will not work for you. I promise. My strategy is to run vertical form video ads generally between 10 to 20 seconds on Facebook and Instagram and I tried on TikTok and I got banned because they don’t love legal advertising on there.

It is vertical form, punchy, quick ads that I call misconception content. For example, do you or a loved one use a Philips CPAP machine? Please watch this short video. You may not realize this, keywords right there, you may not realize this but your Philips DreamMaker, et cetera was recalled because it causes lung cancer, esophagal cancer, throat cancer, kidney failure, and liver damage. If you or a loved one have cancer and use a Philips CPAP machine, click below. And then I do a lead form right on Facebook.

So these are very cold leads. It’s speed and follow up. That’s how you get them to close. I then use a tool called Zapier that grabs those leads, then creates intakes in my case management system Litify, and then in my Litify system I automatically relate what campaign it was generated from, what ad set generated it, what ad it was generated from so that I can get a true cost per case basis based on the ad it was generated from. Not only the campaign but the ad.

They never actually leave Facebook to convert for me. These are a really, really cold passive audience. So the conversion rate on lead form is very low unless you have stellar follow-up outbound dialing and speed. So that’s the main strategy. We are now developing our retargeting strategy. The numbers I was telling you about before were without even any retargeting.

Chris Dreyer:

Wow, that’s incredible.

Ethen Ostroff:

So now it’s not just first video attribution, now I’m creating drips that go in different kind of directions. So I have one that’s like, Hey, you watched 50% of my video on… insert your topic. Hey, you clicked through to my website but you didn’t convert. Hey, you didn’t click… Again, there’s so many different branches of it and if anybody watching this or listening to this wants to learn all those different branches of retargeting, just start with ChatGPT and ask a few questions. You’ll figure it out.

Chris Dreyer:

Fantastic. Let’s talk about the outbound process that makes this work, right? And I’ll kind of jump in here. Most attorneys that I work with, without giving their intake a grade, let’s just say that most of them do pick up the phone or it kicks to an intake center and they pick up. I’d say sure, that’s fine, but most of them don’t do any follow up. So that’s it. Any follow up, right?

Ethen Ostroff:

Yes.

Chris Dreyer:

The top firms are following up 15 times or more, right? They have a process, they’re getting a text, they get an email, they’re getting a call. Where does the virtual assistant fit in? Tell me about this from the follow-up perspective because I think it’s just a extremely missed opportunity for most firms.

Ethen Ostroff:

At my firm there are three job types, receptionists, closers, club, and I’ll get into what that means in a second and follow-up intaker. Receptionist, closers club, follow-up intaker. My entry-level position is follow-up intaker. There are four lead types, Chris, four different kinds of intakes. Live leads, they’re on the phone right now. Form fills means they filled out a form on your website, on Facebook, a Google ad, something like that. And then scheduled callbacks, “Hey, call me back tomorrow at two.” “Sure, no problem.” In that order. Live leads, form fills, scheduled callbacks, conversion percentage decreases. Therefore any bonuses you build off of those kinds of leads needs to be different based on the intake types. My closers club are the people that started as follow-up intakers and based on conversion percentage and closed case rates, they can graduate into my closers club. My closers club touches exclusively live leads, form fills and scheduled callbacks, highest conversion opportunities.

Follow up takers, only touch leads that have already been touched. And if you’re building a bonus structure out for your intake department, the more calls that have been logged on that intake, the more money gets paid to that person if they close that lead. For example, a lead closed on the 14th call needs to be worth more to the individual making that call than the second call because if it’s the same, the 14th call will not happen. On average, according to HubSpot, it takes five follow-up attempts to close someone’s shopping around.

The way that my process works is I have 15 calls, texts, emails, a minimum of every three days made and then they go under review. I just hired my first date side attorney. I’ve 17 dialers on my team, and you don’t need 17 dialers but now that we’re chasing 2100 leads, I need it. After the 15th attempt, they go under review and my lawyer that I have will look through those leads daily and say if there’s a signature injury or some sort of thing in the description when they originally converted that makes it worth our time, we’ll kick it to a 22 cadence follow up.

So it’ll get touched 22 times if there is something on the lead that says we should. If there isn’t, they’ll be turned down after 15 attempts for non-responsiveness. So what I would ask for the audience is how many times are you really following up with your leads until you give up? Is it two? Is it, “I think it’s five” because then it’s really not. I hear that all the time from attorneys. “Oh, well they’re supposed to be doing five.” Well, guess what? It’s really two. Guess what? It’s really three. So typically when I talk to firms, if they say it’s three, it’s usually two. If they say it’s five, it’s usually three. If they say it’s 10, it’s usually 10. And with Google leads, if they converted on your site, guess what? They convert it on two others on average. So speed and follow-up is what you need on either lead source.

Chris Dreyer:

What I love about this follow-up system is that it can act as a compliment to existing lead gen services firms are already using. Ethen’s process is unique. Not many firms do it like this and he’s getting amazing results. It would be easy to understand if he wanted to keep it all to himself, but he’s doing the opposite. So what’s the why behind teaming up with Bill Hauser at SMB Team? To share his knowledge with the world?

Ethen Ostroff:

Why did I decide to do this? Two reasons. One, my vision is to place a million jobs and to represent more people than anyone ever. And I fulfil that vision for myself by either being a part of other people’s infrastructure or scaling my own. So that’s the why, is I need to have a global impact or I won’t feel that I had an impact. So in terms of how I’m helping other firms, I’m trying to convince firms, Hey, this is what you need to do to close your leads. People are like, yeah, sure, whatever. So we created, and I’m giving Andy Stickel credit, this was his idea, it’s genius marketing auditmyintake.com, and I’m sure Chris will have a way to put a link somewhere at some point, auditmyintake.com, if you sign up on the first page, it’ll take you to a Calendly booking.

When you book your Calendly call we will begin the audit. We will, and I’m going to be completely clear about this if you’re listening to this, I hope that your paralegals, your intake department whatever aren’t because we are going to pretend to be clients. Of course you have to sign off on us doing this. Call your law firm and do different methods of attempts and we are going to see how you chase us. And then we’re going to give you a score and we’ll give you a report over a meeting. I promise there will be value from this. The clients that we’ve done this for are existing Attorney Assistant clients and now since January 2022, we’ve placed over three hundred virtual assistants. We’re with 85 firms across the nation, not just personal injury, of all areas. Intake is agnostic. It’s not just personal injury that needs to do better on closing their leads.

I was just on a call earlier with a really large criminal defense firm. We have firms in every area. Everybody can learn how to chase and follow up better. We will help expose your issues for free. If you never want to hire a VA through us, no problem. You can keep your report and move on. But I promise in that meeting you will learn a few things that will upset you because you need to know about these issues. Let me just tell you a story going back in time. When I was at my dad’s firm, there was a lead that came in from my TikTok source, which obviously frustrated me that it didn’t get the attention it should have. Lead came in, it was a car crash lead, two attempts and it was turned down for non-responsiveness. I call the client myself. Turns out that they plus three other passengers not at fault. All catastrophically injured. That case wound up being half million dollars in insurance available, half million dollar case. From one more call.

So I’m going to ask you how many million dollar cases have you let slip through the cracks because you didn’t make one more call? One more call can pay for your intake department, it can pay for your litigation department because you brought in that next most important case that you’re letting slip through the cracks right now. I’ll help you expose those holes and then we can help you plug them if you want. Or you could just take our strategies and figure it out yourself. Are these outsourced intake companies? Are they doing follow up? It’s a great question. So generally speaking by the minute services are inbound reception. Now Smith AI, they may do a really nice job, but I know that they do a $10 intake. That pays for at minimum a good amount of time that a virtual assistant could be dialling out on multiple cases. By the minute services do inbound support.

There’s two lanes of traffic happening here, inbound and outbound. I’m going to ask a serious question. Do you know that alert communications, Lex Reception, Ruby, do you know that they pronounce your firm the right way? Do you know that if a call drops that they’re calling that person back? What you do know is that they’re not, if that call doesn’t connect on day one, calling that person back the next day. Definitely not happening.

Outbound follow up, especially for nights and weekends. I’m going to ask the audience. Ask yourself seriously, do you have dedicated in-house people that know your scripts, know your systems making outbound dials between 5:00 to 9:00 PM and weekends? I don’t know why you don’t because answer rates are the highest at nights and weekends. Close rates are the highest on nights and weekends and yet we all work 9:00 to 5:00. Smith AI’s got it, 6:00 to 9:00, whatever.

If you have people that know your scripts, your conversion rate’s going to be higher. If you have people doing outbound follow up, your conversion rate will be higher. You don’t get that from the Smith AI. You don’t get that from the Ruby. They don’t have that as a service. They don’t work exclusive people to exclusive firm.

Chris Dreyer:

So if I’m a firm and I hire Attorney Assistant, my virtual assistant will be exclusive to my firm. It’s not going to be a fractionalized type of situation?

Ethen Ostroff:

As of today, we only place full-time VAs at firms. We don’t do part-time as of today. We are exploring different avenues in the future of fractional concepts of intake because we have some clients that maybe like my intake department better than theirs and they don’t want to take the time to build out their intake department. So I have some people that will pass me their leads to go close.

So we’re building a couple models that are where people can leverage my IP and my intake department. But as of today, placing full-time intakers on projects is our practice. We are doing something though for firms that start with five plus VAs at the outset. We are giving them the option to place a fully trained intaker from my law firm in their original implementation. So you get someone that sets the tone, that knows how I do things and that can kind of be developed into your supervisor and really kind of take you from the start on overdrive. So we have a few clients that just went live with that concept, but for the most part, our bread and butter is placing full-time follow-up intakers who develop ideally into closers.

Chris Dreyer:

Because the lead source matters. You just said Facebook’s inbound. If I’m only getting inbound leads, I may only need a couple virtual assistants. How do you make that decision? How do you estimate how many outbound people they need? Do you start with one and say, “Oh, we need to ramp up?” What goes into that?

Ethen Ostroff:

Generally every 250 leads you need another person. If you’re chasing them down 15 times the way that I suggest you do, it’s a lot of work in a month for one person. So 250 leads per month usually leads to another person. If you don’t even have 250 leads, then you might not be following up with the ones you already have. That’s an opportunity for more work. And then the small firm who maybe really does just need one VA… In full transparency, our pricing model and our business really you see benefits at two VAs for a lot of reasons, but let’s say you’re just not there yet. If you are the one VA person, you can teach that person first primarily to do outbound follow up as their main task and then you could double them down with a consistent repetitive admin task in the background.

Let’s say that you are a personal injury firm, just making this up, or criminal defense and there’s a consistent repetitive filing you need to put out or maybe a template letter that you send out consistently every time a case opens or you need to go get a deck page or you need to download a child support lien or organize medical records. So sort of the pre-contract work is intake reception, which is answer and transfer. Answer and transfer. That’s what a receptionist does. If your receptionist does intakes, they’re going to be a bad receptionist because they won’t be available for the next call. You need outbound follow up and then ideally closers club. And typically if you have takers, you should graduate them on day one into the closers club role and I promise they will love to hear they never have to do follow-up again, I promise.

In terms of the post-contract roles, we don’t just place intake even though that is our primary area where we see the highest ROI for our firms. We also do consistent repetitive admin behind the scenes. I don’t recommend you put virtual assistants on client contact roles on active clients on day one, if ever. What I do suggest is building towards what I call the assembly line approach behind the scenes one task at a time.

So it might be sitting on hold with doctor’s offices to get medical records. It might be doing some sort of wills trust in estates consistent filing or template letter that’s just the same every time you do it. It might be getting a deck page, it might be getting a bill balance, it might be… The list goes on. We have tons of these things.

In the background that don’t require client contact we also place people for those roles as well. So if you have a log jam at your bill balance department or requesting releases from insurance companies, whatever, we can also help with that too. But those tasks, in my opinion, you really need to have an organized case management system and task-based management system to even consider those tasks. But intake, you can bring someone in as a receptionist tomorrow.

Chris Dreyer:

So what if I’m a big firm, I’ve got a CRM, Needles, Filevine, whatever, and I haven’t done the follow-up. Can your team go back and hit, the statutes of limitations are going to change, do you go back and hit the old historical archive and try to resurrect some of those guys? Do you find any success there or do you move right into active last three months contact or two months or whatever?

Ethen Ostroff:

It’s a great question. I would say on day one, you should touch all your active leads and make sure they’re being chased properly. You can find cases within cases if you train your team right. So what you’re describing is like a data mining mission. Hey, go back and here’s a list of all the leads we’ve ever generated forever. Go hit them all until there’s nothing left. Go for it. If you can find one case out of that a hundred batch of leads that generates an extra $20,000 of revenue for you, you might have just paid for your virtual assistant right there.

So I would say maximizing your active cases and actually typically your active cases are your most likely to convert. So I would make sure you’re really caught up there. If that’s nothing and you are totally caught up, then you might want to double them down with an admin task if that’s your preference. Or you could have them go data mining your old leads.

Chris Dreyer:

How could people get in touch with you and then tell us the secret shopping URL and where people can get in touch there as well.

Ethen Ostroff:

So if you want to get directly in touch with me, my email is eo@ethenostrofflaw.com and my name is spelled E-T-H-E-N. Just to make sure everybody knows that it’s actually spelled correctly, even though it might look incorrect. E-T-H-E-Nostrofflaw.com. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have a direct question for me. I’m pretty responsive. I book time pretty, Bill my business partner might get mad at me, a little too liberally at times because I just really value long-term relationships with people. That being said, in terms of the audit my intake, it is just simply auditmyintake.com. And then again, there’s two parts to convert on there to make sure that we actually start your intake. The first page is just simple contact information. It’ll take you to a Calendly booking. We ask for some more detailed information so we can do the audit correctly. Until you book on our calendar we’re not going to start the audit. So we do have a bunch of people that have just gone from stage one and never did stage two, so just want to make sure you’re aware of that.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Ethen for sharing this with him today. Let’s hit the takeaway, it’s time for the pinpoints. Decrease your lead acquisition costs with misconception content. This type of content is quick and punchy. These vertical ads are only 10 to 20 seconds long and run on Facebook and Instagram. They educate the viewer and then show them the very next action to take.

Ethen Ostroff:

For example, do you or a loved one use a Philip CPAP machine? Please watch this short video. You may not realise this, keywords right there, you may not realise this, but your Philips DreamMaker was recalled because it causes lung cancer, esophagal cancer, throat cancer, kidney failure, and liver damage. If you or a loved one have cancer and use a Philips CPAP machine, click below. And then I do a lead form right on Facebook.

Chris Dreyer:

Remember though, misconception content is only as effective as a dialled in process for outbound because these leads are very cold. Speed and repetition are critical to winning the contract. Develop a systematic intake department with a bonus structure that incentivizes these follow-ups. One voicemail is not a follow-up system.

Ethen Ostroff:

My entry level position is follow-up intaker. There are four lead types. Live leads, form fills, scheduled callbacks, conversion percentage decreases. Therefore, any bonuses you build off of those kinds of leads needs to be different based on the intake types. My closers club are the people that started as follow-up intakers and based on conversion percentage and closed case rates they can graduate into my closers club. My closers club touches exclusively live leads, form fills and scheduled callbacks. Highest conversion opportunities.

Follow up takers, only touch leads that have already been touched. And if you’re building a bonus structure out for your intake department, the more calls that have been logged on that intake, the more money gets paid to that person if they close that lead. For example, a lead closed on the 14th call needs to be worth more to the individual making that call than the second call. After the 15th attempt, they go under review. If there’s a signature injury, we’ll kick it to a 22 cadence follow-up. So it’ll get touched 22 times if there is something on the lead that says we should. If there isn’t, they’ll be turned down after 15 attempts for non-responsiveness. So what I would ask for the audience is how many times are you really following up with your leads until you give up?

Chris Dreyer:

Keep systemizing. Virtual assistants are great for those repetitive tasks that happen behind the curtains. A Henry Ford special assembly line to law firm management does not stop once the contract is signed. Use virtual assistants for those important but routine day to day tasks.

Ethen Ostroff:

What I do suggest is building towards what I call the assembly line approach behind the scenes. One task at a time. So it might be sitting on hold with doctor’s offices to get medical records, consistent filing or template letter that’s just the same every time you do it. We have tons of these things in the background that don’t require client contact.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about Ethan or getting that free intake audit, check out the show notes while you’re there. Please hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode on Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.Io. Alright everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.