A CRM for firms that sell on trust

In professional services, sales is rarely called sales. A partner at an accounting firm gets a question from a founder she has known for ten years. A lawyer gets a referral from a notary. A consultant runs into a former colleague at a conference. Most work comes from the network, from existing clients and from referrers. And a large part of revenue repeats: annual accounts, tax returns, ongoing legal counsel, a fixed day a week at a client.

That means the commercial knowledge sits with the partners. They know which client has a question about an acquisition, which referrer has sent three matters already, and whose annual engagement needs a conversation this year. That works until a partner retires, or the firm grows from ten to forty people.

You may recognise this Monday. Five inquiries arrive through the website. Two land in the general inbox, one with an assistant who is off sick, and two with a partner who is tied up in a case all week. The founder who has no reply by Tuesday calls another firm on Wednesday. Nobody notices, because the inquiry was never recorded anywhere.

There is a second leak: cross-selling. A tax client has an employment law question, but the tax adviser does not know the firm has a team for that, or forgets to pass it on. Or the consultant who wraps up a project never asks about the next phase.

Lumo keeps inquiries, clients and engagements in one system. An inquiry arrives as a lead with an owner and a status. Mail with known contacts lands on the client by itself, private to the user unless they share it with the team. And the organization timeline shows what was said, agreed and signed. So the firm does not depend on the memory of one partner.

Automations take over the fixed steps. A rule reacts to a new lead, person or organization, to a deal being created, changing stage, being won or lost, to a completed activity, or to a lead or deal that has been stale for a number of days. It creates an activity or note, updates a field, assigns an owner or adds a label. It does not send email. A dry run shows what it would do before you switch it on.

Four rules firms often use:

• Lead created with practice area Employment: assign it to the head of the employment team.
• Lead still New after a day: create a call for today and add the label Overdue.
• Deal won: create a task Open the file for the fee earner and a task Review in three months for the partner.
• Deal lost with reason Not our field: create a note that the client was referred elsewhere.

In reports you build the numbers a partner meeting needs. Inquiries per source and per practice area. Time from inquiry to first call. The share of inquiries that turn into engagements. Won engagement value per partner against a goal line. And a list of annual engagements with a renewal date in the coming quarter. Every chart drills down to the records behind it.

Say a firm in Leeds with 28 people, split across accounting, tax advice and a small legal team. For this example we call it Hartley and Partners. It has four partners, an office manager and a business support assistant who sorts the inquiries.

The firm creates two pipelines. New engagements with the stages from the example above. And Annual engagements with the stages To discuss, Proposal sent and Agreed. Every recurring client has one deal per financial year in the second pipeline, with one product line per year.

An intake form on the website puts every inquiry into Lumo as a New lead, with the practice area as a select field. The assistant sees them on the Today screen and assigns them. Inquiries for the legal team go straight to its head through an automation.

Three partners work in Gmail, the fourth in Outlook. He puts the BCC address on every client email, so his conversations reach the timeline too. All mail connections are set to private. Only the office manager shares hers with the team, because she handles the general correspondence.

Every month the firm reviews a dashboard with three reports: inquiries per source, engagements per partner and annual engagements due for renewal in the coming quarter. A tax adviser who hears an employment question creates a lead with the right practice area, and the rule does the rest. Cross-selling becomes a habit instead of a good intention.