Episode Transcript
Key Takeaways
- Trust is built through authority and effective communication, not just expertise.
- Many marketing strategies don’t apply to medical practices due to industry-specific regulations.
- Conversion, not lead generation, is the primary challenge for many practices.
- Tracking inquiries through their lifecycle is crucial for improving conversion rates.
- Scarcity and urgency can motivate potential patients to take action.
Trust and Authority
Understand that trust comes from authority, and authority and expertise is what gets people to trust you, and it’s not the actual expertise. You could be a great physician, but if that’s not well-communicated, it becomes completely irrelevant.
Introduction to Practice Perfect
Welcome to the first episode of Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals and anyone that’s running a professional services business as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. Ana, thank you for joining me today. Before we get into it, today’s topic is going to be all about the number one problems that most cosmetic and medical practices face, but that you may be facing and not even be aware that you have.
Why This Podcast Exists
I’m gonna get into that in just one second. Before I do, I wanted to talk to you about why I started this podcast. When you’re listening to marketing information, when you’re listening to business advice, it’s often coming from individuals that are used to working with businesses, whether that’s B2B or B2C, it doesn’t matter, but the tactics and the strategies that they use are often not applicable to a medical practice. I’ll give you one simple example.
Industry-Specific Challenges
In many states in the US, provinces in Canada, and in many countries, Western countries around the world, we have laws and regulations around fee splitting where you are not allowed to share your income from a patient with any other third party. Now, this differs from state to state and the severity of it and how much is policed tends to differ, but generally speaking, if someone comes into your practice and offers for you to do a referral arrangement in lieu of a kickback, that can put your practice in jeopardy.
Building a Support System
As a doctor, I know that it’s hard. It’s not easy to not have somebody to confide in and that’s the situation you’re probably in. That’s the situation most of our clients are in. When you talk to people at the meetings, when you meet your colleagues, it’s very acceptable to speak about cases. It’s acceptable to speak about difficulties you may have had in surgery or when an implant didn’t work or whatever other medical mishap may have happened.
Conversion Challenges
All right, down to business. What I’m gonna talk about today is the number one problem facing most practices. And it’s not getting more leads. It’s not getting more inquiries to the practice. This is something I’ve seen happen frequently, and I’m seeing it more and more these days with the clients that we take on. And that’s that even though they’re getting a flood of leads, a flood of inquiries to the practice, they’re not able to convert them.
Importance of Tracking
The first part of tackling a conversion rate problem is tracking. And what I mean by tracking is when somebody calls, emails, texts your practice, that you log that inquiry and then you track that inquiry through its full lifecycle and find out what happened.
Differentiating Leads
Now, the advantage to the cold leads, like I said, is scaling and being able to grow your business in a predictable manner, and I want you to start tracking those people separately because they need to be treated much differently than someone that comes in as a cold referral.
Creating Urgency
In the absence of a reason to take action, most people won’t, right?
So understand that you’re not only competing with other physicians, with medispons, with other choices like going to the gym if it’s a liposuction, for example, and maybe trying to lose that weight in other ways or a diet program with the weight loss doctors. You’ve got all of these competitors, but in addition to those competitors, you’ve also got the option of doing nothing.
Conclusion and Next Steps
I hope that’s been eye-opening. I hope that it’s given you something to think about. And more importantly, I hope that it’s given you something to take action on because taking action is the only way to move your practice forward. I’m happy that you’re listening to this. I’m happy that you’ve joined me here for the past while. And I hope that you’ve gotten value out of that. But what would make me happy is if you went and took action on the advice that you’ve received today.