I don’t know how you run your firm but I can say that enquiries are an important part of our firm’s life.

We receive enquiries on a daily basis. Most of the enquiries come in via email.

We have simplified our life by providing flat-fee fee schedules so that many enquiries can be answered within a few minutes. Our goal is to reply to an enquiry on the same working day.

But that’s not it.

We have found out that it sometimes takes up to seven follow-up steps after the first enquiry in order to secure a new order. And we seldom follow up because of the constant daily work load that we are facing. We simply forget it.

And this is what we have done in order to never again forget to follow up an enquiry: we are using a CRM system that we have adapted to our special needs.

Here is how it works.

Upon receipt of a new enquiry, we create an “opportunity” for it. An opportunity is an important piece of data in a CRM system. The opportunity contains links to other data in the CRM data base, thereby uniting all necessary information in one single location.

This opportunity is brought up as often as needed, until it turns out whether we have won or lost the sale.

This sounds simple and it is simple. It is just that no one is doing it.

This is why we have developed a simple reminder system.

Every IP lawyer should have such a simple reminder system.

A CRM system should sit in the cloud so that you can share your follow-up work load with others. It must provide a connection with your email system.

A professional CRM system costs about 65 US$ per month, and tailoring it to your specific needs involves a one-time fee of about 400 US$. It has been worth it for us.

Watch the following two videos before you purchase your own CRM system.

– a short overview over our CRM system (9:30 minutes long).

– a step-by-step guide how we use our CRM to follow up an enquiry (9:30 minutes long).