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Who is the “hero” in your patient journey? 🧐

My buddy Cody keeps telling me I need to watch Guardians of the Galaxy.

I’m not big on superhero movies. Can’t say I’ve watched one since Heath Ledger’s Joker performance in The Dark Knight. (legendary)

BUT we do talk about heroes a lot. As in patients being the heroes of their own stories.

It’s easy for those of us who work in these magnificent practices to feel like we are the heroes. Patients come to us with a struggle, and we save the day. Hooray! Professor X would be so proud!

…but it’s actually the other way around.

We have a lesson in one of our coaching programs that goes deep into this concept. We dive into how the patient is Luke Skywalker, the main character, the one on a mission. And ultimately, the hero.

Our role at the practice – we’re Yoda. The ones with the knowledge, the skills, the awareness of the path. We guide the hero to their destiny.

So quick reminder today – take a look at your marketing and sales frameworks. Who are they focused on? What are we communicating? Who is the hero?

(If you’d like to see a strong, visual application of the “patient is the hero” concept, I have a couple examples that should get your wheels turning. I’ll send those over tomorrow if I get enough interest. Reply and let me know if you’d like to see them.)

Patients don’t come to us so they can watch our parade and cheer for us from the grandstands. They come to us because they are on a journey of growth, and they want a leader with the knowledge and skills to guide them through the gauntlet to the riches and rewards that await them on the other side.

So who will step up and lead the Hero on their journey? “Lead you, I will.” – Yoda (maybe)

Troy

PS – Leadership is a pillar of our team coaching programs. We aren’t about memorizing pages of scripts and pushing old school sales-pressure tactics. If you want better LEADERS on your team – ones who can talk about your practice and your procedures and your price with confidence – then our coaching programs may be for you. Hit me back for more info if you’re not in one already.

PPS – Guardians of the Galaxy does look fun. If you’ve seen it, is it worth the watch?

The “Air Raid” approach to growing your surgery volume

Happy Friday! My family and I are on a late-summer beach vacation in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Other than a jellyfish swarm on day 1, it’s been great sun, sand and waves this week.

I’ve also enjoyed a little beach reading. I’m almost through an engrossing book called The Perfect Pass.

It’s about the advent of the Air Raid offense in football. Those of us in the Big XII conference are all-too-familiar with Air Raid. I saw first-hand how Mike Leach’s Texas Tech Red Raiders dismantled my TCU Horned Frogs using this aggressive offensive scheme when I was a cheerleader in 2003. (It was ugly)

If you aren’t familiar with the term (or with football in general), Air Raid was a revolutionary shift in the way football was played. Football was traditionally a run-heavy game with strict routes for each player. The Air Raid offense, in contrast, relies heavily on passing the ball, and gives players the freedom to adjust their routes as they see fit.

The book talks about the group of coaches who invented Air Raid. Many “traditional football” type folks thought they were crazy… until these coaches started destroying other teams with it.

These coaches were able to take teams that only won a few games, and lead them to a 10-1 record the following season. Quarterbacks and teams that broke long-standing yardage and scoring records, accomplishments no one had seen before (or even thought possible).

My favorite parts of the book are when they discuss the philosophy of the scheme. It’s not just “you run this way, you run that way” rigid plays. There’s a freedom to it, but there’s also a mindset to it.

As Hal Mumme, the main coach character in the book, describes it:

“The oddest and most unusual feature of the system: it was less about Xs and Os and more about attitude, optimism, and a way of thinking. To make this offense work, you had to believe you were going to score from any part of the field anytime. You had to be fearless. You had to stop worrying about what the defense was going to do to you. You had to be prepared to flex as the systems built to stop you flexed.”

Let’s apply this.

When you have vision to do something no one else has done… or at the very least to take your team and your practice to levels you personally haven’t realized before…

It takes more than rigid plays and memorized scripts.

Hal Mumme didn’t even have a playbook (in contrast to other coaches with giant binders full of detailed plays). Air Raid had a few simple, foundational components, and the rest was sheer belief, mindset and optimism.

So it goes for your practice. You need more than scripts. You need more than plays. You need the attitude, optimism and mindset.

You want your team to take the Air Raid Approach.

Belief in knowing you’re the best in town.

Belief in knowing your procedures are life-changers.

Belief that $15,000 is the Deal of the Century relative to the life-change that your procedures will provide.

Optimism that “we can get creative and figure out a way” to get you financed and get out of those glasses.

And so on.

So if you’re in the mood for an interesting read, pick up The Perfect Pass. Other features of the Air Raid approach include simplicity, binary choices, reading the situation, freedom to make things happen, and going against the grain.

I bet you’ll find more than a few ways to apply some of these concepts to your practice.

Enjoy your weekend,

Troy

PS – A lot of the Air Raid concepts mirror the approach we take in our coaching. Sure, we have some basic foundational “plays” and scripts we use. But a lot of it is teaching teams how to think, read situations, react, and lead out in ways they haven’t tried before. And yes, it can produce Air Raid-type record-breaking results.

So if that’s interesting to you, football season is a great time to get rocking in one of our coaching programs. Reply if you’d like to discuss coaching, sales or how good/bad the Cowboys will be this year… (I got a good feeling about this season!)

Swipe this “reframe” from a desk chair site

A number of folks enjoyed the email I sent a couple weeks ago re: the marketing placemat from my Toyota dealership. (Check it out here if you missed it – Mimic This “Positioning Placemat” from my Toyota Dealership)

I’m a fan of learning from industries OUTSIDE elective medicine. Then we apply those tactics, frames and strategies to create success in our clients’ practices.

I wanted to share another “In the Wild” marketing element that caught my eye during my recent journey into desk chair shopping.

Check out this graphic that I saw on one of the websites…

(Here’s a link to a full-size image in case you can’t read it)

What do I like about this?

I’m a fan of the classic Apple campaign “Think Differently.”

It’s a concept that’s foundational to our coaching programs. If we know how to think about 1. our job roles, and 2. our patients, AND if we are able to teach THEM to think differently… then everyone is set up for success.

One of the questions we often ask: “What are people actually buying?”

Do they want to spend thousands of dollars to have their eyes zapped with lasers? No. No one does.

So what are your patients buying? Some mix of:

Clear vision, peace of mind, freedom, confidence, safety, a sound investment, a more active lifestyle.

Hear me: it’s not just a one-time, 5-minute procedure your patients are I’m buying. They spend their money on all the implications of that procedure. And those extend YEARS into the future and affect virtually every aspect of life.

Back to the example…

What am I buying when I’m buying a chair?

(besides something to sit on.)

I want something that’s comfortable. That’ll last a long time. That’s not gonna cost me an arm and a leg to get shipped my office. That’s easy to switch out if I don’t like it. That I feel like is a good investment.

Check out the graphic again 👇…

These things I’m ACTUALLY buying… are covered in the graphic. Trials, returns, free shipping, quality, warranty.

Now jump back to the headline. Notice how these little benefits are all wrapped in a container of “We put you first.” And I love the sub headline – “More than just a package, we deliver to you an end-to-end experience that exceeds all your expectations.”

A little melodramatic for a chair? Maybe. On-point for an elective medical practice? 💯.

Can you swipe this very idea and use it? Yeah, I can think of several specific applications of this concept that would be absolute 🔥 for an elective practice. You can probably come up with more.

Use it in your sales scripts, on your site and even brochures. And you can parse these out and “zoom in” on particular ones, depending on your patients’ priorities.

In conclusion, I encourage you to take a moment and consider:

What are your patients ACTUALLY buying?

And are you communicating (clearly and crisply) how you include all these benefits in the care package you sell to them?

– T-Cole

Don’t Forget: They’re people, not numbers

Was visiting a practice last week, and we were talking about the “business” of medicine and how to connect it to patient care.

Because of course we all love what we do in this industry, but your electric bill ain’t gonna pay itself (especially not in this TX heat). We need to make that MONEY!

One aspect of all this that’s SOOOO easy to forget is that the “numbers” aren’t just numbers. We talk in terms like…

Numbers are in a slump…

Refractive is down…

Leads are up….

Conversions are holding steady…

Each of these descriptors is a reference to NUMBERS. But we can’t forget each NUMBER represents a HUMAN.

JoAnna from church. Nancy, your mom’s friend at Zumba. Scott who always plays the Wednesday evening golf scramble with his buddies. These are the “numbers” who are coming to you in desperate need of your expertise.

We talk about NUMBERS all the time, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s essentially a shorthand way to have the conversation about production. And it’s how we measure success and revenue and profit and growth and all those important pieces.

But for everyone from the surgeons to the admins to the schedulers – all the team members across the board – we need breadcrumb reminders that the NUMBERS are simply representative of what we’re ACTUALLY doing here – taking care of people.

Our neighbors. Our friends. Our parents. The numbers represent THEM.

And there are plenty of ways to keep these reminders at the forefront. It’s not particularly hard to do, as long as you build rhythms around it. But it’s OH SO IMPORTANT as part of your patient care culture.

– Troy “People, not Numbers” Cole

PS – If you haven’t already jumped into our coaching program called the Green Room, we dig into all the ways to HUMANIZE your numbers. AND help build the culture and excitement around patient care and surgery conversion, that RESULTS in the positive NUMBERS you want to see.

Hit reply for more info on our upcoming September enrollment, which includes our “Cataract Conversion Crusher” workshop in preparation for cat season…

These 4 “Belief Challenges” may be costing you patients right now

Writing this at 30,000 feet, on a flight en route back to TX from a 3-day shadowing / coaching engagement in Scottsdale. Looking forward to getting back to the cooler TX weather (Never thought I’d say that!).

Today I want to share the 4 ”Belief Challenges” that keep surgery schedulers from booking as many high-ticket procedures as they’d like. Let’s go over each, along with an example to make it concrete for you:

Your people don’t believe in the procedure. “Yeah, I just don’t think it’s that great, especially not for $12,000.”
They believe BUT don’t think it’s worth the $$. “The procedure is awesome, but it’s not $12,000 worth of awesome.”
They believe BUT can’t imagine spending that amount money themselves. “The procedure is awesome and worth it, but $12,000 is still a LOT of money to spend to me!”
They believe BUT can’t empathize with the patient’s reason for having surgery. “The procedure is awesome, but why would someone want to spend $12,000 just so they could see their golf ball?”

Each of these 4 challenges circles back to LACK of belief on some level.

And regardless which ones your team members are dealing with, they ALL result in fewer conversions than you could otherwise be achieving.

When you look at it from a revenue aspect, practices are leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table every week that these issues remain unaddressed. Beyond the money, we’re missing opportunities to truly help patients! Folks aren’t getting the care they need and deserve.

The worst part? These issues often go undiagnosed, and thus untreated.

The good part is, team members can be coached through each of these 4 roadblocks.

EVEN IF they don’t need the procedure themselves…

EVEN IF they’ve never spent high-ticket money on themselves…

EVEN IF they currently DON’T BELIEVE in the procedure…

(I’m not promising every single person on your team can get over these barriers. Some people are stuck in their ways and need to be promoted to their next employer. But with a few shifts in thinking, for most team members it’s possible to build strong belief in a short amount of time.)

Reply with the word BELIEVER and I’ll give you more details on the “Money Mindset Framework” we use to help high-ticket elective surgery teams break through the road blocks and start booking an extra 5, 10, 15+ premium patients in the next 30 days.

Enjoy your weekend,

T-Cole