How Martindale-Hubbell Used Conversational AI to Double Upsell Dollars

Rich Heller, Sales Manager at Martindale-Hubbell, shares how he uses Conversica in upsell campaigns.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Rich. Can you start by telling us a bit about Martindale-Hubbell?

Martindale-Hubbell has been helping lawyers find clients for over 150 years. We provide a platform for attorneys to showcase their credentials to people who are about to hire an attorney.

We started as a print directory and today we have morphed into two high profile websites – Lawyers.com and Martindale.com. Lawyers.com markets to consumers and Martindale.com is a B to B website marketing to corporate counsel. Our websites help people decide on which attorney to hire.

While we list every attorney in the country, our paid customers get a full robust profile on both websites and stand out in search results, while attorneys who are not customers just get a bare-bones complimentary listing.

What’s your role and how does your team use Conversica?

I’m one of the sales managers and I have a team of 11 sales reps who work with our attorney customers. They discuss with the attorneys how they can use our directories and the other products we sell to help achieve the goals of the law firm. We have thousands of clients, so, each sales rep has a big client list.

Upselling new products to the attorneys is a major part of what my team does. We use Conversica to help us identify the attorneys that are interested in these products.

Our normal process would be that the sales reps would call the attorneys to discuss their current campaign and during that conversation, they would suggest adding new products that would enhance the attorney’s campaign. Conversica helps us by having the AI Assistant send out emails giving the benefits of some of these new products.

Since attorneys are busy, very often it is hard to get them on the phone. Usually, we have to call or send emails several times, and sometimes we still do not get a response. I like that the AI sends out seven emails over 21 days because sales reps sometimes do not have the bandwidth to contact the attorneys that often. We found that a lot of the attorneys did respond after the fifth, sixth or seventh email.

What Conversica did for us was make it easier to identify which attorneys are initially interested in additional products, so our sales reps can spend more time having productive conversations with these attorneys.

What results have you seen from Conversica?

Our upsell campaign started in September 2021 and ran until November. September was our biggest month of that year in upsell revenue, October was our third biggest, and November was our fourth biggest. Three of the four biggest months of the year were during the Conversica campaign.

If you compare September, October, and November 2021 versus September, October, and November 2020, we saw a 103% increase in upsell revenue!

We sent emails to over 10,000 attorneys with an engagement rate of 34%. That is off the charts!

We were very satisfied because other marketing campaigns we have done had a much smaller engagement rate.

The bottom line is we found Conversica to be a very effective tool. As I said, it told us the customers who raised their hand, saying, “Yes, I’m interested in these new products,” as opposed to trying to find who is interested and who is not.

What kind of response did you get from your customers?

There were a lot of funny stories with our AI assistant, whose name is Amanda Seever. Our customers think she is a real person. The attorney will tell the sales reps, “I’m working with Amanda right now, I’m good.” The rep then has to explain, “No, that’s my assistant.” We had a few of those stories.

We even set a voicemail for Amanda, just in case someone called the main number looking for her. A few people did leave messages.

We had one person figure out that Amanda was AI, but just about everybody else thought she was a real person.

What was the adoption like?

Setting up the conversations in Conversica was a pretty easy process. You just have to fill in the blanks. It is like Mad Libs, if you ever played that game. If I needed to change it, it wasn’t a problem.

Once you set it up, it’s on automatic pilot. Using the Conversica AI technology makes us feel like we’re cutting edge. The future is here now.

Do you have any advice for others setting up similar Conversica campaigns?

Put the benefits of your products in the emails that are sent by the AI. In our case, the products that we’re selling help customers get on page one when searched on Lawyers.com.

This message caught the attention of a lot of our customers and, as mentioned, our response rate was very high and we had a very successful campaign.

Curious how other companies are using Conversational AI for their revenue teams? Explore more Customer Stories.