Episode Transcript
Generating leads is the easy part. Any practice can turn on ads this month and have inquiries coming in by Friday. The thing that decides whether those inquiries become consultations, and whether your practice grows or stalls, is what happens after the lead comes in.
That’s the subject of this episode. Back by popular demand, I’m joined by Isaac Moosley, founder and former CEO of Atlas KPI, whose first appearance was one of our most popular episodes. We get into why follow-up is the number one success factor in a practice, and why most practices are terrible at it.
Key Takeaways
- Follow-up, not lead generation, is the number one factor that decides whether a practice succeeds or fails.
- Most practices manage leads in Excel. It was never built for that, and leads die in the spreadsheet.
- Know the difference between a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead, and treat them differently.
- Consistent follow-up processes with predefined responses lift conversion rates. Winging it doesn't.
- Decisions built on data beat decisions built on one bad experience and a strong opinion.
Why This Matters Now
Every lead you pay for and then lose is money you already spent. The practices that win aren’t the ones generating the most inquiries. They’re the ones losing the fewest. When we rebuilt lead handling and follow-up for a midtown Toronto surgeon, consultations went from 72 to 125 a month. Same doctor, same procedures. The difference was what happened after the phone rang. If your leads are coming in but your consult calendar isn’t filling, the leak is in your follow-up, and that’s exactly the kind of problem our lead generation team in Toronto fixes.
Not All Leads Are Worth the Same
The quality of a lead varies, and we get into that in this episode. Isaac started Atlas KPI because, unlike a lot of people in this industry, he was paying attention to the numbers other people ignored: what actually makes a practice work, what takes it to success, and which figures deserve your attention.
What Running Atlas KPI Taught Isaac
I asked Isaac to take me through what he learned running Atlas across many practices, and what led to his new venture building medical PRM software. His answer surprised me.
The Disconnect Between Your Agency and Your Practice
When Isaac worked with practices through the dashboard, he noticed the difference-maker usually wasn’t operations. It was the front end of the business: the marketing. There’s a whole disconnect where the marketing agency can’t access the EMR and has no ability to track lead activity, so nobody sees the full picture.
“Without data, it’s just another opinion.”
MQL vs SQL: What Counts as a Lead
What is a lead, exactly? Without getting too technical, Isaac breaks it into two figures: the MQL, or Marketing Qualified Lead, and the SQL, the Sales Qualified Lead. Mixing the two up is why so many practices think their marketing is failing when their sales process is the real problem.
The Two Things Holding Practices Back
From the agency side, the biggest things holding practices back are these: one, not knowing their numbers, and two, not being able to follow up with leads. Everything else is downstream of those two failures. We covered the money side of this in the patient follow-up system that prints money.
Data Beats Anecdotes
“If you don’t have the data to back up what you tell me, you most likely just had one bad experience that made you come to this conclusion.”
Excel Is Not a Follow-Up System
Most practices that at least try to follow up end up managing it through Excel, which was never made for that. They end up with a huge list of names, phone numbers, and sometimes emails. No reminders. No sequences. No accountability for who called whom and when. That’s not a system. That’s a graveyard with columns.
The Wrap-Up
Isaac and I close out with what’s coming next for his software. My clients who’ve seen it are excited, and I think the industry will benefit from it. Listen to the full episode for the details we didn’t fit in these notes.