Sales and marketing software for lawyers
Gabriel Safar
Jul 11, 2022
How to choose the right tools 🔨 for your practice.
Many lawyers view sales and marketing as a time consuming distraction from what they love - working closely with clients and practicing law. But you can’t practice law if you don’t have clients 🙁; so for most of us, sales and marketing is a must.
Over the course of my career, both as a lawyer and a CEO of a software company, I’ve personally experimented with many different ways to organize my sales and marketing activities: from post-it notes stuck on my screen to enterprise CRM and marketing automation systems, and everything in between.
So when friends that have hung out their own shingle reach out for thoughts on this or that sales and marketing platform, I usually have a lot to say. I’ve had a bunch of these conversations lately, so I thought it could be useful to summarize them in a quick “How To” guide.
In this post, we’ll cover
What sales and marketing software does
Why these tools are important and their benefits
Tips on how to select the right sales and marketing software tools
List of sales and marketing software tools worth checking out
What sales and marketing software does
For small to medium sized legal practices, sales and marketing software will principally help you manage your communications with future business. These communications fall into two broad categories: one-to-one communications, like an email to a specific individual; and one-to-many communications, like a newsletter or email alert.
Why these tools are important and their benefits
Sales and marketing tools are important because they make it easy to do things that otherwise would be hard or time consuming.
As an example, let’s look at the steps involved in sending out a client newsletter. These steps include:
writing the copy in Word,
laying-out the copy as a newsletter using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator,
setting-up a distribution list in outlook,
adding the right contacts individually to the list; and
creating a spreadsheet to keep track of emails that bounced and people that don’t want to receive marketing communications going forward.
Or you can do all of those things in Mailchimp, which has specifically designed user interfaces that make it so easy to take care of each of the activities involved in producing a newsletter that, well, even a monkey can take care of them. 🙉
To sum up, the benefit of sales and marketing software tools is that they will allow YOU, on your own, to take on sales and marketing projects that we often put off because they are hard and time consuming.
Tips on how to choose the right sales and marketing software systems
Now that we know what sales and marketing software does, and why it’s important, here are 5 tips on how to choose the right sales and marketing software for you:
Tip 💡# 1: Identify if you want to focus on one-to-one or one-to-many communications.
Do you want to send out a client alert to inform your existing clients and prospects about changes in the law? Or, would you rather build a process for reaching out to individuals at a list of companies that you would like to work with? Or do you want to do both? Since certain platforms excel at one communication versus the other, identifying what you want to do is essential.
Tip 💡# 2: Choose your budget.
Many of these tools have freemiums or free trials. That’s awesome, but from experience, these platforms are wired to quickly drive you to paid versions and then to offer functionality that you may not need which layers on cost and complexity. Determine in advance what you are willing to pay and then look at the “most popular” pricing plan for that software (most companies will specifically call this out on their website) and see if it is in your budget.
Example: I use HubSpot to run LeasePilot’s sales and marketing, however, I’ve also launched a new product called Clausebook, which helps lawyers build, use and share their form files and clause libraries. I’m treating these two product lines as independent, and HubSpot has a number of tools to help compartmentalize my activities, which sounded perfect. I went through product demos and started scoping out how to set the systems up, etc. and then came the price - my license would more than double. Thanks but no thanks.
Tip 💡# 3: Make support options an explicit part of the selection process
Different sales and marketing platforms have different approaches to support. Some offer support in the form of exceptionally well documented libraries of videos and articles, others rely on developing a robust community that can answer questions, others invest in chat, telephone and email support and still others rely on customers engaging certified 3rd party consultants. It’s critical to understand how you learn, what approach to support works best for you and what you are, and are not, willing to pay for.
In addition to thinking about how you want to get support, you should think about how your support needs change over time. In particular, your support needs may be very different in the setup phase than in the use and maintenance phase. You should specifically understand the different support options during each of these phases.
⭐️Pro Tip ⭐️ Beware of outsourcing support and maintenance to third party consultants. It sounds attractive to pay someone to take care of an important project for you, but every time I’ve hired consultants (and unfortunately I’m a slow learner so I’ve hired a lot of them) things turned out to be expensive, complicated and time consuming and the results have been poor. My preferred approach is DIY systems that offer access to a coach to help with setup and have good chat support for ongoing maintenance.
Tip 💡# 4: Use the software out-of-the-box.
It’s very easy to think you are a snowflake and your needs are unique. In other areas of life that may indeed be true, but when it comes to sales and marketing, it’s highly unlikely. Most sales and marketing software systems have options to customize features, workflows and dashboards to conform to the way that you work or the way you think you should work. Once you go down the path of customization, setup becomes more complicated, maintenance is ever harder and you will trigger premium features that will drive up the price, all for pretty much no benefit, since, like I said, when it comes to sales and marketing, you’re not a snowflake.
If the software truly doesn’t work for you out-of-the-box, then that probably means you should find another option that will. If no system works for you out of the box, then you should consider changing the way you work so that you conform to sales and marketing norms. It will make your life much much easier!
Tip 💡# 5: Cut bait fast.
Another benefit of using software as it’s configured out-of-the-box, is to try a system and quickly move on if you aren’t happy. I had this experience with Mailchimp. I got a free account, and just started using it with a small subsegment of my contacts for a very limited purpose. For whatever reason, I preferred the newsletter design interface in HubSpot so after giving Mailchimp a try for 2 days, I cut bait and went to HubSpot. It was great because I validated my choice to use HubSpot by trying Mailchimp which helped me clarify what was most important to me.
List of Sales and Marketing software tools worth checking out
Here are some of some tools that are worth checking out for small to medium sized practices.
Hopefully you found this post useful. If you did, please like, comment and share this article.
Also, if you are interested in productivity tools for your practice, check out Clausebook, which is a cloud-based home for your form files and clause libraries available as a Microsoft Word add in. Learn more at www.clausebook.com.
About Gabriel
Gabriel is a commercial real estate attorney who left practice to co-found LeasePilot, a software platform that helps commercial real estate companies draft, revise and abstract their leases faster.
In addition to serving as LeasePilot’s CEO, Gabriel is launching a new product called Clausebook designed to help lawyers achieve a greater degree of organization and efficiency so they can elevate the level of their individual practices.