Lawpath is a leading online legal platform that offers a range of services for small and medium-sized businesses across Australia. These include essential services for new businesses such as registration of company names and applications for trademarks.
Tom Willis, Chief Marketing Officer at Lawpath, shared that as an online platform, it is able to keep costs low and offer customers the legal protection they need without breaking the bank.
“Most small businesses have limited resources when starting out and they don’t want to pour them all into protecting a business that’s not yet making a profit,” said Willis. “Lawpath offers affordable protection for businesses by leveraging technology and by helping our customers to invest in a way that makes the most sense.”
Salesforce supports Lawpath's approach by helping it to build more long term relationships with customers and support them more personally as new needs emerge.
Demand for affordable and convenient legal solutions has helped Lawpath grow quickly. However, in its first few years, the company’s interactions with customers were largely transactional. What this meant is that customers would typically engage Lawpath for a specific task like company set up and, once completed, the relationship would go dormant. If or when customers came back for something new, Lawpath had no history or context about their business.
“Everytime a customer came to us for something new, they would have to start from scratch and tell us about their business again ,” said Willis. “It wasn’t the experience we wanted to provide and we also wanted to be more proactive in suggesting what they might need next.”
For Lawpath to get closer to customers, it needed a CRM. It was still working out of spreadsheets and lacked a single source of truth for its customer data. Willis said that while they evaluated a few solutions before Salesforce, none of them offered the capabilities Lawpath needed to scale.
“We were growing at such a rapid rate that we knew if we put in a solution that was just a quick fix that we would soon outgrow it. With Salesforce, we saw a foundation we could build on,” said Willis.
To provide a more proactive and personalised customer journey, Lawpath has used Salesforce to connect all of its customer data. This data includes details of how they've engaged with different marketing campaigns or pages on Lawpath's website. It also includes a history of all purchases, phone calls, and Live Chats.
Lawpath now uses this information to reach out to customers in a timely manner and provide guidance on what more they can do to protect their business. For example, for a new but growing business, Lawpath may recommend implementing a formal HR policy or employment contract.
Managing customer relationships through Salesforce has helped Lawpath to reduce customer churn across its legal plans by more than 30 percent. Additionally, if a customer has a complicated legal challenge, Lawpath can connect them to a marketplace of more than 1,000 lawyers. It can also pass on its rich history of the customer to make the handover more seamless.
“In a lot of ways, Salesforce has helped us move away from being so focused on acquisition to thinking through the customer’s journey and how we can be there to help them at every step,” said Willis. “It has also provided us with an opportunity to increase customer lifetime value.”
In addition to helping Lawpath to better understand and support its customers, Salesforce has helped to drive massive efficiencies across the company’s sales and operations. With Salesforce Inbox offering integration into Gmail, reps are able to manage opportunities in Salesforce right from within their email. Lawpath is also using High Velocity Sales within Sales Cloud to automate workflow surrounding lead management. As a result, reps are more productive and focused.
Everyday an average of 350 leads come through Lawpath’s website and High Velocity Sales distributes these automatically and evenly across sales reps. It also prompts reps to follow up with leads if they don’t answer the phone.
With the increased effectiveness of sales, Lawpath has been able to keep pace with a 400% increase in lead volumes over the past three years while increasing conversion by 50%. Willis shared that the streamlined workflow and Salesforce’s integration with Slack also helped to ease the transition to home working during the pandemic.
“Business has increased during COVID-19 as we found more customers coming to us to open up new businesses. It would have been very difficult for us to manage that working remotely if not for the collaboration and single source of truth that Salesforce has provided,” said Willis.
Lawpath is continuing to increase the efficiency and intelligence of its sales processes and is leveraging Tableau to extract more insights from its data. For example, by combining data on sales, marketing, and customer behaviour it can get work out what the ideal customer interaction looks like and know how many touch points are needed to drive a sale.
The company has also adopted Service Cloud for case management. While Lawpath typically receives a small number of support enquiries, the efficiencies provided by Salesforce helps to ensure they’re responded to quickly and median response time has been reduced by 32 percent. Case data is also linked to customers’ records in Salesforce for a 360 degree view of all interactions.
Willis shared that replacing multiple disparate systems with Salesforce has made it easier for employees to do their jobs and has also helped Lawpath to attract new talent. The company has also handled a lot of the Salesforce implementation themselves by drawing on resources like Trailhead.
“One of the things that I love about Salesforce is that for whatever business challenge we have, there’s always someone out there that’s already solved it and we can draw on their findings to resolve things on our own,” said Willis.
We were growing at such a rapid rate that we knew if we put in a solution that was just a quick fix that we would soon outgrow it. With Salesforce, we saw a foundation we could build on.
Tom WillisChief Marketing Officer, Lawpath
