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3 ways to ensure if you build it… they will come

Buddy of mine texted me this picture from his recent road trip, and I immediately knew exactly where he was…

If ya know, ya know. And if you don’t… It’s Iowa. At the filming site of arguably the greatest movie of all time…

Field of Dreams.

Even if you haven’t seen the movie (and you should ASAP), you’ve heard it’s most famous quote:

“If you build it, he will come.” (IT being a baseball field, and HE being the lead character’s father.)

Just build a thing, and people show up. Such a great premise for an epic fictional tale.

Reality is, there’s more to success than simply building a great facility.

Pretty offices are awesome, don’t get me wrong. But what else do we need to build to serve more people and own our markets?

1. If you build it…. AND build the marketing machine around it.

Talking with a practice who recently opened a beautiful new office and was hoping to increase their refractive numbers. The surgeon was surprised they weren’t doing more cases, even though they hadn’t done anything to promote their refractive services.

“I figured we’d get more referrals just by opening,” she told me. I wish it were that simple!

Reality is, your biggest battle – whether you’re a start-up practice or a been around for years – will always be the battle against obscurity.

Meaning you’re fighting against the fact that most people don’t know (or remember) you exist.

Referrals, reviews, social media, influencers, radio, PR, giveaways, endorsements. There are plenty of ways to get the word out (some are more effective than others), but the key is you must get the word out.

2. If you build it… AND you build the team and culture within it.

You are not your building. You also need to build the team and culture within the building.

If you gave me the choice of A. Mediocre team in an amazing building or B. Amazing team in a less-than-awesome building, I’m putting my money on B.

The foundation of your practice isn’t your lobby, your chandeliers or your coffee bar. It’s the people responsible for giving your patients an excellent experience.

And everyone plays a key role. Tom Brady is the greatest of all time, but he wouldn’t have won a single game (much less 7 Super Bowls) without the other 21 guys on offense and defense playing their roles.

Continuously build and develop your team. Invest in them.

Think of yourself like a D1 college football coach. Nick Saban is always recruiting new talent, always evaluating if everyone is in the best spot, always planning for the next play/quarter/game/season.

3. If you build it… AND build the work ethic to drive it.

To build a behemoth practice takes work. I’ve seen it over and over. The practices that continue to level up – they are so incredibly focused, and they do the work.

Yes, it’s work to plan and build a beautiful new office. And that’s just the start.

The veterans in this game know what we all learn at some point – If you’re ambitious and want to grow, you’re never problem-free. But your goal is to upgrade to higher quality problems.

You fix your lead problem… which creates a conversion problem. You fix your conversion problem that results in surgery booking challenges. You fix all that and have a physical-space constraint. You fix your space issue you have a “grow your team” problem. And on and on and on it goes.

So whether you’re the practice owner, admin/manager, or working as a part of a team within the practice… there’s plenty of building to do.

This should not discourage you. In fact, it should encourage you.

The chance to build, to grow, to serve more people, to change more lives… it’s an incredible opportunity we’re privileged to have.

Take joy in the fact you’re doing the work to build a team culture, a marketing machine, a strong, patient-focused work ethic. You’re not stagnant. You’re not stale. The market isn’t passing you by.

You’re leading the charge, baby! So let’s build.

– T-Cole

Where to spend your money and attention? (Quick reminder)

With so many ways to advertise these days, it can be easy to get distracted, overwhelmed or just generally off-course in how you allocate your marketing time and money.

Let’s look at 10-second way to ‘gut check’ your current activities and make sure you’re on the right track…

Last night, I was going back through marketing legend Dan Kennedy’s No BS Marketing to Seniors and Leading Edge Boomers book. It’s cataract season, so a great time to brush up on my senior marketing skills.

(Highly recommend the book btw, grab a copy here)

In the book he talks about how our efforts and our marketing budget are often misaligned with where we actually get new patients.

The example he gives – and it’s a perfect one – is patient referrals. If you give great patient care and deliver excellent results, your patients have every reason to talk about you to their friends and family.

And if you look at your conversion numbers, they should reflect this. For many practices, anywhere from 20 to 40% of their treatments each month come from happy patient referrals.

So if that’s the case… are we allocating 20 to 40% of our time, our strategy, our marketing efforts, our budget toward nurturing that new-business channel and working to increase It?

Seems obvious, right?

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Most practices are not prioritizing patient referrals as a marketing channel. Patient referrals are somewhat an afterthought. Most practices certainly don’t have meetings about refining their “Patient Referral Marketing Strategy” or spend significant (if any) budget dollars on increasing those numbers.

They spend a lot of time and money talking about Google ads or social marketing strategy, even though patient referrals are likely the more lucrative channel for driving business.

I am NOT saying you should avoid Google ads, or Instagram ads, or any other type of marketing in particular. You want to build an online ecosystem so everywhere someone digitally turns, they find you.

Here’s what I am saying: take 10 seconds, look at your top 1-2 sources of new patients, and ask yourself if you’re devoting proper resources to nurturing and growing that channel.

And if not, adjust. Reallocate time, money, people, goals.

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You don’t have to knee-jerk and do a complete 180. Just start with 1 meeting to evaluate what you’re doing to encourage patient referrals, to make patients aware they should send their friends, to thank them when they do, to stay top of mind with your patients in general.

Then start adding little pieces to your referral system.

For example, one thing we’re starting to launch for clients is birthday texts. They upload their database with patient birthdays included, and we text patients “happy birthday” from the practice.

If it makes sense, we’re giving patients a birthday gift card that expires in a month. For a medspa treatment, or credit toward new pair of designer shades sunglasses, etc.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science to run a patient referral program. Doesn’t even have to be expensive.

Just think more about it, and if you have questions or want an entire blueprint on this stuff, let me know. I might put something together.

Best,

T-Cole

PS – Definitely grab the Dan Kennedy book if your audience is affluent seniors. You’ll get a ton of insights…

Solving “speed-to-lead” for nights and weekends

Happy Monday! Being that it’s the start of a new week, there’s a good chance you had a number of prospects submit contact forms and self-tests on your website over the weekend.

I’ve talked numerous times about how “speed-to-lead” is vital if you want to maximize conversions. By that I mean when someone submits an online contact form, we want to get in touch with them in 5 minutes or less.

This is common sense, but it’s also backed up by a study published in the Harvard Business Review. I don’t know the exact details off-hand (you can google it), but they found a significant drop-off between leads contacted within 5 minutes later and those contacted over 10 minutes later. Like a 3x – 4x drop off. Massive.

But what about leads that come through in the evenings? Or now that it’s Monday, what about anyone who sent in a form between Friday early evening and this morning (2.5-day span)?

Or for that matter, what about leads that came through when your counselors were all busy, and no one could call them back for a couple hours?

Add up all these scenarios, and we could be talking about the majority of your online leads.

How do we solve for speed-to-lead then?

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The best solution is to hire more people, train them up on your brand and get them to follow up with your leads 7 days a week, 16 hours a day.

But that’s expensive (cost money and time to develop them). And good people are hard to find right now. If you could wave a magic wand and have all your dreams come true, this would be the way to go. But I have no wands, and neither do you.

And when you think about it, you probably have good people on your team already. They just need extra bandwidth and support to reach their full potential.

Another solution is to outsource fast lead follow-ups. It’s more cost-effective and doesn’t take as long as it takes to hire and train your own people. And there are some solid outsourced lead-contact groups out there.

But with an outsourced group, the people who talk to your prospective patients don’t know, love and believe in your brand. It’s not the end of the world, but you ideally want your people telling your stories with conviction, which can’t be faked.

So what’s the optimal solution? Cost-effective, on-brand, gets to leads quickly and allows your awesome people to do more of what they do best?

The approach we’ve seen be most effective: installing Programmatic Patient Journeys (PPJs) as a support system for your current appointment bookers. PPJs have grown in popularity among growth-oriented elective surgery practices since coming out of the pandemic.

Why? Because they solve for A. Speed-to-lead B. Scheduler teams that are running lean (either by design or by default) and C. The need to provide an incredible patient experience.

What’s a PPJ? Simply put, the Programmatic Patient Journey combines Artificial Intelligence and conversational messaging to act as a Virtual Patient Coordinator for your team. A strong, streamlined PPJ starts SMS conversations with new prospects, re-engages the ones who haven’t responded, and even alerts your team in real-time when you have a hot lead that’s ready to book.

Quick example – one of our favorite Programmatic Patient Journeys that we architect for our clients is the Self-Test Pre-Qual journey.

When someone takes a self-test, the PPJ messages them immediately based on their results. Now this is tailored to each practice, but the general approach is:

We introduce the practice, tell them they qualify for a consult and explain them the next step is to come in, and that we’ll be in touch during office hours.

Then we ask a very simple question: “What works better, mornings or afternoons?”

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Practices fall into one of 2 camps:

Most practices are coming into the office this morning (Monday) with leads all the way back from Friday evening, leads that haven’t been touched in 2.5 days. And we all know how hard it can be to get in touch with new prospects that haven’t been contacted in days or even hours.

But practices that are using Programmatic Patient Journeys were able to launch text messaging conversations with those leads within 30 seconds. On Friday night, on Sunday morning, during lunch hour on Weds – whenever. Like clockwork.

These practices arrived to the office with a handful of prospect responses to our simple question. Responses that say “mornings, thanks!” or “early afternoon is usually best.”

And now these teams leveraging the Programmatic Patient Journey have a huge advantage when they reach out to these prospects to complete the consult scheduling process.

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So if you don’t have Programmatic Patient Journeys running already, it’s time to start. Don’t get left behind.

Your speed-to-lead will be off the charts, you’ll end up booking more consults, and your scheduling team will have the support they need to flourish in their roles.

AND your Mondays will be set up for success. Wins across the board.

– Troy “TGIM” Cole

PS – Questions about setting up a PPJ? Don’t know how to script it? Curious about the tech? Hit reply and ask away.

Most people are surprised how cost-effective and straightforward it can be. Let me know, I’m here to help.

PPS – If you’re one of the consult schedulers at your practice, and this sounds useful to you (it is), don’t just wait and hope your admins read this and are interested.

Take initiative. Forward this along to your manager and tell them it sounds like a PPJ might be helpful to your growth efforts. Your managers and admins want you to be proactive in your role. Show them you are.

Did they post this for me?

I’m down here in the Alamo City about to spend the day with one of the best refractive practices in the biz. (the San Antonio LASIK experts at Parkhurst NuVision in case there was any question).

I wanted to send a quick message about this timely instagram post that came across my feed.

So I tried intense cardio in a sauna a couple weeks ago at a place called HOTWORX (which you know if you’ve been reading my recent emails. If you’re new or you missed one and you want to catch up, the story starts here, and continues here).

The original reason I even shared this with you was to show you lessons to be gleaned from my SMS exchange with Paul, the owner of HOTWORX.

Turns out there’s another big takeaway, and it reinforces one of my favorite marketing mantras:

Your customers/clients/patients are your best source of marketing content.

Now, this applies in a dozen different ways. Here’s how (I’m assuming) it happened with HOTWORX:

I told them I thought it was a great workout facility, but the place seemed more geared toward and designed for women.
He explained to me that it’s also for men, gave me some recommendations and invited me back (all good things).
Then I’m guessing he thought – “Well if this one guy thinks it’s for women, others may as well.” And then he looked at his marketing to determine WHY guys might think that.
Then they made the following post on Instagram:

I scrolled back through a number of “Warrior of the Week” posts, and they were all women. This is the first one I saw that was a guy.

(And to reiterate, I am supportive of niching and focusing specifically on women…. or men…. or moms…. or whatever. I recommend it! And if that’s what they wanted to do, awesome. BUT if you’re trying to appeal to both men and women, and your target audience doesn’t perceive that, then something is not being communicated clearly.)

So I was glad to see Paul took my feedback, considered it, and then adjusted the marketing message to clarify the audience he’s going after.

This is one of many ways to “Let your patients create your content.”

Listen to what your prospects and patients are saying – in reviews, in phone convos, in consults. What are they asking, what are they objecting to, what are they confused about?

Use their language in your marketing and their questions to fuel the content you create.

Make it a great Thursday,

– Troy “Comin in HOT” Cole

Why I’m So Bullish on SMS (HOTWORX conclusion)

If you saw my message yesterday, you already know I didn’t die when I tried high-intensity cardio in a sauna. (And if you didn’t, catch up here).

And no, I’m not describing some hair-brained, home-cooked workout scheme. It’s actually one of the fastest-growing franchises in the fitness space – A place called HOTWORX.

I visited the newly opened HOTWORX with my wife and apparent masochist, Susan, who for some reason enjoys this torturous exercise program.

The sense I got about HOTWORX is that of the old Secret brand deodorant – strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

And I told them as much in my reply to the check-in text they sent after my visit.

So what did they say in response? And what can we learn from it? And why does it speak to the power and utility of SMS?

Here’s their reply, which is great:

Now let’s talk about it…

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Timing isn’t ideal, but it’s not bad. I sent my message reply on Friday, after I received the initial message from Kaylee. Paul messaged me back the following Tuesday.

Now, do I recommend waiting 4 days to SMS someone back? No.

Is it the end of the world? No. Especially in this case, where maybe the owner doesn’t normally reply to these kind of messages, but this one got escalated to him.

As I read the message, I wasn’t thinking, “How dare they not message me for days.” I actually thought “Cool, the owner took the time to message me and reply personally.”

We recommend doing the initial reach-out to leads within 2 minutes of them coming through, 18 hours a day, 7 days a week (don’t SMS people at 1 a.m.). And we even have a service where we use SMS to do that on your behalf to make it easier.

But after the initial outreach, maybe you had a lead reply later in the day yesterday and you haven’t got back to them yet. Or maybe you had a convo that just didn’t go anywhere, and it’s been a few days.

There’s a good chance those people still have the same problem they did when they reached out in the first place. So pick up the baton and run with it like Paul did. And when you do this via SMS, it’s easy and feels natural.

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He didn’t take my response as a “no.”

In my previous message I asked if you thought I was a NO on HOTWORX, or if I was actually likely to sign up. Responses were all over the board.

I told them in my reply, “I thought it was awesome, but I think it’s more designed for women?”

Paul could have focused in on my objection – “I think it’s more designed for women” – and convinced himself I wouldn’t come back.

But he chose to focus on my positive feedback – “I thought it was awesome” – and he knew I just need a little re-education to likely move forward.

You see this every day in your practice.

👉 “I really want to have the procedure, but…”

👉 “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, I just…”

👉 “Yeah it would change my life, but…”

Whatever comes after “but” is usually an assumption that requires extra education, creativity or both to address.

Replying by SMS allowed him the time to thoughtfully assemble a message that addressed my concerns. Hey, sometimes you need a minute. Especially if you have newer sales folks who are still honing their skills, SMS gives them the time cushion to think through and respond appropriately.

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I like that it came from the owner.

Feels good when the owner, the CEO, the surgeon reaches out personally to discuss, doesn’t it?

But here’s a question: Did the owner actually send it? I’m assuming so. It’s a small, new business. Not like they have a big marketing department.

But not necessarily. The message could have been anyone.

For example when we send SMS messages on behalf of our clients, we send them from Emily, your ever-helpful and handy Patient Education Advocate.

Is Emily real? Does it matter? It does not.

One of the beauties of SMS is that as a platform, SMS makes it easy to create these “multi-player engagements.”

When the car salesman says, “Let me go talk to my manager,” is he actually going to talk to someone? Maybe sometimes. But whether he is or not, he’s creating a scenario that involves multiple people, which gives him more play and leverage to get the deal done.

Similar to what we’re doing with SMS (without any car salesman vibes).

OK so how do you use multi-player engagements to increase conversions in your practice?

I’m not getting into all our secrets in this essay. But a couple quick and easy ways:

Do what Paul did. Someone replies with an objection, have the “manager” or even one of the docs jump in and reply.
If someone comes in for a consult and doesn’t book, have someone in your Patient Advocacy department message them – “Saw Dr. X said you are a perfect candidate for Y, but you didn’t schedule. Wanted to reach out to see what other questions you have?” Or even “To make sure explained everything clearly. How was your time with him?”

You’ll get responses. Then you know you’re still in the game.

“But we don’t have an official Patient Advocacy Department, Troy. We don’t have an Emily. Who’s gonna do all this?” Literally none of that matters.

One person can send all of these messages, and you can even automate some of them. Since it’s all based on actual comments from your team and doctors, the messaging itself is true. And that’s what matters most.

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Paul Educated Me. Paul took the time to explain to me WHICH exercises were his faves, which I might like, and the results he’s seeing. He did this to educate me out of my false belief.

He related to me as a guy, which is great.

I would have liked to see him empathize a little more (“I see how you might think that, Troy. Let me give you a little more insight….”) but all in all, I like the education part of the response.

You are often faced with the need to educate people out of their wrong beliefs. You might do this by discussing your experience having surgery yourself, sharing a story from another patient, talking about how Dr. X would answer that common question, or redirecting to an aspect of the decision that’s more important than what they’re fixated on.

SMS is but one channel you can use for this.

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Paul had a call to action. OK so he replied, he explained, so what? What next?

He gave me a call-to-action to come back in to try more classes.

Always ask. Always be planning the next step with your prospects.

For you, the ask and next step might be a consult, might be calling back later today, might be sending them more info via SMS about your procedures then following up after, might be checking in when they move to town in 60 days.

Always make the ask and have a plan.

And it’s great to start an SMS convo (ex. “I’ll text you more info…”). Because then you have that open line of communication where you can follow-up easily and conversationally.

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So good job, Paul. Not sure if I’m going to join yet, but I told him I’d come check it out again.

And I hope this illustrates just a few reasons I’m super bullish on SMS and messaging in general going into 2023.

Yes we still want to get folks on the phone when we can. But SMS presents a powerful tool for creating conversations and compelling patient experiences.

Convos are opportunities to book consults. You want more consults? Conversations are the key. And when used correctly, SMS facilitates such conversations.

Enjoy your weekend!

– Troy

PS – Not sure if your SMS game is firing on all cylinders? Reply to this email. Let’s talk about what you’re doing and what you’re missing, and what you need to do to close the gap. Or better yet… text me. 😎