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Sales trainer gets a taste of his own medicine

In case you missed my Instagram story yesterday (it’s linked as the first highlight called “Calls Blocked”, also be sure to give me a follow on IG if you haven’t), I talked about a super-common frustration among the engagement teams we coach:

Prospects who don’t answer their phones.

To recap the story:

I coach most of my kids’ sports teams. Unless I just know nothing about a sport (soccer), it’s important to me I’m out there coaching, spending the time with my kids and serving other families in our community. It’s a passion of mine.

Here in Aledo – where our football team has won 10 state championships (most of any school in the Texas, the country’s most hardcore high school football state) – sports are competitive.

Not just high school sports. Not just select teams. All sports of all ages.

Enter baseball season. We help the draft for our Competitive League on Weds night. Which means yesterday was “Call my new team parents” day.

Here’s the thing – Most of these parents knew when the draft would be. And since only 90 out of 220 kids are chosen for the “competitive league” (the rest play in the recreational league), parents are interested to find out which team their kids made.

They also know coaches call the day after the draft.

I say all this to say these parents had several reasons to be on the lookout for a phone call yesterday.

How’d it pan out for me…?

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We teach booking teams how to fill their practices’ consult schedules. A big part of that is first GETTING A HOLD OF your leads.

I know how tough it can be to get someone on the phone when they don’t know your number (or sometimes even when they do!). So going into this, I made a prediction:

Even though many of these parents are eager to hear the news and know they should be expecting a phone call…

I predicted the majority of the people I dialed would NOT answer the phone. My prediction – while correct – was also an understatement.

Out of 9 people I called, only 2 of them answered.

4 of them sent me directly to voicemail (most phones now have a setting where you can send unknown numbers to voicemail, so I’m guessing that was some of it). And the other 3 rang a few times and went to voicemail.

I share this example because it’s a challenge your phone team faces on a daily basis. Now let’s go through a short list of ways to address it…

It’s Tactics Time! 👇

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7 tactics I used yesterday with these parents, which are exactly what we coach our clients to do in these same situations…

1. Don’t get discouraged. Ignoring unknown numbers is the most natural thing in the world to do. You do it, I do it. Don’t get mad your prospects do it too.

2. Don’t give up. “Well, they didn’t answer, so I guess they aren’t interested.” I hear this way too often. It’s an assumption, and it’s a lie. People are interested. They’re just busy OR they don’t know you and don’t answer OR both. Practices leave tens of thousands of dollars on the table every day by giving up on leads too quickly.

3. Leverage voicemail. Leave a voicemail with a purpose. What do you want the prospect to think when they hear your VM? I want those parents checking the voicemail and thinking, “This Coach Troy guy sure is excited to have my son on the team!” And I left a message conveying precisely that (through my words AND my tone).

4. Take responsibility for action. Don’t just say “Call us back if you’d like to set up a consult.” It’s what 95% of practices do, and it’s a waste of time and energy. Take responsibility for the next action. “I’ll try you again later this afternoon,” “I’ll shoot you a text and follow up tomorrow”, etc. (For my baseball parents, I told them in the Voicemail that I would add them to our GroupMe messaging app, and to be on the lookout for the invite.)

5. Use multiple channels for contact. Don’t just call. Don’t just text. Don’t just email. Use them all. (I used phone calls, then GroupMe, and for the 1-2 who didn’t immediately respond to the GroupMe invite, I texted).

6. Call back quickly. This is one thing working against me in my situation – I was calling all these parents several days after the tryouts. But when you can contact your leads in under 5 minutes, you have a 5x higher chance of connecting than when you wait 10 minutes or longer.

7. Practice managing your biology and your mind. Your team needs to know how to keep their energy up and positive, even on days that are extra busy or multiple ignored call-backs.

These calls did not affect my mood, my energy or my resolve. I had a plan, I executed the plan, and now we’re all in the GroupMe chat and everyone’s excited for the season.

Was talking to the admin for a prospective client this week about energy and mindset. He has a team member who is frustrated, having trouble connecting with leads. I shared the importance of managing feelings/energy around this situation.

This admin said, “We’re fine in that area, it’s not something we need to work on.” Obviously you do need to work on it, because your people are feeling about their leads. No need to feel about them.

Feelings are choices. Mindsets can be trained. And energy can be managed. (Which is why we have entire modules dedicated to this in our Bootcamps…)

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In summary, help your team get their heads right about leads in 2022. Don’t get discouraged; DO get assertive and purposeful in your outreach.

And if you’re hearing defeatist comments like “These leads are bad” or “These people just don’t want help,” then nip that attitude in the bud.

It’s the job of the Marketing Department to bring in the leads, and it’s Sales Dept job to convert them. Both depts should work daily to improve their performance, which means generating better leads (marketing) and being more clever and tenacious with booking processes (sales).

Everyone work. Everyone get better. Everyone benefit.

Team on 3…

1… 2…. 3…. TEAM.

– Coach Troy

PS – We had the option to choose from a selection of minor league team names this year, so I chose the Mighty Mussels. I had never heard of it before (team outta Fort Myers FL), but between the TCU purple and the steroid-stacked mollusk logo, I was sold from the moment I saw it. (Check it out here)

PPS – “Troy – Do practices ever hire you just to pump up their sales teams?” Yes, they just don’t realize it. Most admins think their sales folks need a bunch of tactics (which they do, and we make sure they have them). But an even bigger benefit comes when we teach their teams how to think and feel about what they do. Imagine a team of people who are as excited and confident about your practice as you are? Unstoppable.

⚾️ The Big League Hitter’s Guide to Booking More Consults

My oldest son Cannon is 9, which means he’s playing in his first season of “real baseball.”

What do I mean by that? He’s played ball for 4 years, but until this point, it’s been in a highly controlled environment. Especially when it comes to batting.

Started with tee ball. You literally place a ball on a tee, whatever height you want. Set up perfectly, take as much time as you need, then give it your best swing. Easy.

Once he got a little older, it was on to coach pitch. A little more difficult than tee ball, but still essentially a cake walk. The coach pitches it nice and slow, to the spot over the plate where each boy has the best success of hitting the ball hard and far. Simple.

But now… NOW these boys are playing “real baseball” – meaning another kid is pitching to them. The batter is no longer in control of the speed, the timing or the placement of the ball being pitched. And even though they’re too young to safely throw curve balls, some kid pitchers do have change ups and other “off-speed” pitches to confuse the batter.

This whole transition is frustrating for many of the boys as they start at this level. Last season they were hand-delivered big juicy meat balls, and now they must figure out how to handle this broad range of pitches they’re up against.

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“Real baseball” and “Real practice marketing” share several similarities.

Imagine an elective practice who does very little (if any) marketing. Their patients come primarily from referrals – other doctors and happy patients.

Many referrals of that nature are like the nice, easy Coach Pitch balls. Right down the middle of the plate, not too fast, perfect pitch, easy to smack out of the park.

And then a practice starts to market… expands their reach… courts new audiences that may not have heard of them…

YES, this results in a higher volume of new leads aka more opportunities… but some of them are more like the not-so-easy-to-hit kid pitches. Some are in the dirt. Some are off-speed. Some are frustrating.

It’s a different game when you start to market, or even if you’re already marketing and you test a new channel, a new hook or a new promo.

Is that bad? No, it’s reality. And you have a few options for how to deal with it…

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A practice in this position faces the same decision our players face:

You can hope for fewer curve balls, OR
You can learn how to hit the curve ball.

Do #1 long enough and you’ll get frustrated and retreat to dependence on those referrals. No shame in that. Plenty of people run respectable practices that way.

But if you want to be the dominant player in your market… If you want to help more patients… If you want to put the discount chains out of business…

Do what the big leaguers do – Learn to hit the curve balls.

– Troy “Put me in, Coach” Cole

PS – Doesn’t matter to me which side of the fence you’re on with this. We have clients who do a lot of marketing, and we have certain strategies and workflows in place to deal with the curve balls. We partner with others who do very little marketing, so we work to maximize those referrals. It’s your business, run it however you want.

The BIG thing to remember is that YOU gotta figure out what you wanna be, and act accordingly. We’ve worked with practices who SAID they wanted to play big league ball, SAID they wanted to dial up the volume, SAID they wanted to dominate their markets… but they didn’t want to put in the work or face the harsh truths necessary to play big league ball.

Again, totally fine if that’s you. Just do some soul-searching and figure out who you are and who you wanna be. (And “I thought I wanted this, but I don’t” is a perfectly viable position to take…)

PPS – You will get into situations where you’re seeing way too many ridiculous curve balls. You realize you don’t even want to face a certain “pitcher” (i.e. a certain media platform or a certain type of promo that’s costing you too much time and frustration). So I’m not saying you should think of your entire marketing plan as “Suck it up and deal with whatever you get.” Sometimes it makes more sense walk away.

But in my experience: 95% of the time your team is naturally inclined to look for coach-pitched meatballs. And they bail (often without even knowing it) at the first hint of a curve ball coming across the plate.

So before you say, “This promo / lead source / marketing channel / whatever is trash,” make sure you are SEEING the pitch… SEEING those leads come in… and treating them like the curve balls they are. ⚾️

No, Your Patients Do Not Need Options

I placed an Amazon order for 5,000 sheets of printer paper yesterday. (I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat already…)

As you can imagine, Amazon has hundreds of different printer paper “products” on their site.

Rather than clicking through each one, I did what I normally do when I’m looking for non-brand-specific items on Amazon – I started with Amazon’s Choice.

Anyone who shops Amazon Prime has likely seen the Amazon’s Choice sticker on products. Sometimes it’s on an Amazon product they produce themselves, sometimes it’s from a 3rd party.

Do I always buy Amazon’s Choice? No. But many times I do. Why?

It’s easier and faster than to try to decipher all the different product descriptions myself
If it’s their choice, it must be pretty good
If it’s their choice, that means a bunch of other people are buying it too, so it’s popular = good

Today’s message is not about Amazon.

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In so much of what we do, we look for recommendations. Recommendations keep us going in the right direction, they save us time, and they increase our perceived likelihood of success.

“Which of these signature cocktails is the most popular?”

“Does it make more sense for us to get the family zoo pass, or buy the individual tickets?”

“Which is better here, the steak or the fish?”

And that’s when you want the waiter to step in and say, “The Bone-In Ribeye is our specialty, you can’t go wrong with that…”

We want the recommendation.

And these examples are small decisions in the grand scheme of life. Much smaller than the body-altering elective treatments you offer.

As much as we look for recommendations on small decisions… we definitely want them on the big ones too.

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The Double-Edged Sword of being a practice that offers an abundance of lens options for cataract surgery… or an armory of advanced laser- and lens-based refractive procedures… or a plethora of cosmetic treatments…

You’re a little like Amazon. (gosh wouldn’t you love to have their level of market domination?)

You have multiple great solutions, right? Awesome. And because of this, you meet patients daily who may be good candidates for more than one procedure.

What do those folks want to know? They want to know Amazon’s Choice.

Just because you have multiple procedures in your arsenal, doesn’t mean they should all be immediately optional to the patient.

Your patients don’t want or need a menu of options. They want a recommendation from someone in the know. i.e. you, Dr. Expert.

“Here’s the procedure I’m recommending for you and why…”

Make sure the other doctors in your practice who do your consultations actually make a recommendation. With conviction. Explain your reasoning. Tie it to the results they want and the concerns they have.

Make it clear that you have thoughtfully considered their situation, and you are telling them the way to get on the other side of it.

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You might have people on your team who say, “Well, patients should be in charge of these decisions. They should have a choice.”

Here’s the deal: They do. And they’ve made it.

They chose to reach out to you. They chose to seek help for their chronic condition. They chose to miss work and get dressed and drive across town and come in to see you.

And… AND! The patient already chose their result. They told you their pain points. They told you their ideal destination. It’s your job to recommend the path to get there.

The patient has made their choices. The only choice they have left: NOW or LATER.

If you’re the authority, the expert, the one recommending a certain procedure, explaining the benefits, talking about how popular it is, reassuring the patient it’s the ideal procedure for them…

This instills confidence. Excitement. Momentum. A vision for what the future can be. And as a result, NOW is a much more likely final choice.

On the flip side… if you have people in your practice position themselves as order-takers…

As attendants at the full-service car wash asking me which detail package I would like to purchase…

As baristas at Starbucks who wants to know what they can get started for me…

Well, guess who’s now responsible for “making the right choice”…. The patient is.

And as you already know from your own experiences, that patient is gonna wanna think about it. And do more research. And think about it some more. And weigh the pros and cons. And all that other stuff that gets in the way of your patients getting the results they want and deserve right now.

Worst part of all this is? That patient has no frame of reference for any of this research and decision-making you’re forcing them to do.

We’ve all ordered dinner before. Yesterday wasn’t my first rodeo buying office supplies. I can figure out a meal or printer paper or Zoo tickets fairly easily, even without assistance.

But picking a surgery? Yeah, that’s a new one for 99.99% of your patients. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t know how to research it, they don’t know how to think about it, they don’t know how to be confident in it.

“Here’s a brochure on our procedures, and you give us a call when you decide!” We might as well have said, “Hey just hike through that jungle right there to get to the beach. Just choose your own path, you’ll figure it out. Go get em, Tiger!”

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So if your doctors are like our awesome clients, the ones who make strong recommendations for your patients’ procedures, keep it up. You’re stealing patients from every other practice in town just by establishing yourself as the authority.

And if they’re not… if you have doctors telling your patients, “Well, you qualify for X, Y and Z. Which one do you want to do?” I encourage you to end that immediately.

Not only is it hurting their conversions, but it’s a major disservice to your patients.

And to be super candid, they’re f$%#ing better than that.

Make sure they know:

We’re here to help patients. And that means leading them. You’re in charge. Act like it. The patient made their choice. Now we do our job.

Recommend a procedure and prosper. 💪🏻

– Troy “Not Optional” Cole

PS – We have a specific way we coach our clients to make the procedure recommendation – the certain word track, when to do it, how to do it, who to do it in front of, and what needs to happen right after, all of which increase their closing percentages.

If you’d like our cheatsheet on this simple, paint-by-numbers “Recommendation Rx” process, reply “Rec Me!” to this message, and I’ll get it over to you.

Olympics Lesson – Preserve Your Prospects’ Momentum

Susan and I were soaking up the Olympics last night, and one of the featured events was the Men’s Alpine Skiing competition.

As these guys were traveling a death-defying 80+ mph on skis (which is insane), the commentators continually talked about the importance of momentum.

For example, If a skier takes the wrong angle around the gate, and slides out a little too much, they lose momentum. Not only does this slow them down in the moment, but it affects their speed through the remainder of the race. No momentum = no medal.

To win, you must maximize these two complementary forces – speed and momentum. Put another way, speed on the course is the result of creating and preserving momentum.

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Speed and momentum are also crucial when it comes to winning new surgery patients.

We know that the faster you can reach out to prospective patients who complete your online forms, the more likely you are to connect with them and get them booked for a consult.

This is reflected in the data of a massive study by the Harvard Business Review. Among several eye-popping results, the study showed a 400% decrease in contact and qualification rates when you wait 10 minutes to contact new leads vs contacting them in 5 minutes or less. And contact rates continued to drop the longer it took to reach out to the leads.

(Important to note this study was done before Amazon and Netflix created the “on-demand” consumer culture we have today. The thirst for NOW is higher than its ever been)

And we see this play out all the time with our clients. Anytime we help someone systematize their lead outreach so they are connecting with leads faster, they see an increase in conversions.

There are several reasons for this, one of them being the preservation of momentum…

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Imagine with me for a moment…

Your prospects are the alpine skiers. When they go to your website and fill out a contact form, they are essentially leaving the gate at the top of the mountain, and starting to make their way down to the finish line.

Unlike the world-class skiers in the alpine competition, your prospects are not knowledgeable about the course, or how to create momentum or even how to ski. In fact, it’s impossible for them to generate momentum without your help. You must work as a team.

Contact your leads quickly (within 5 minutes) to preserve (and increase) the momentum they’ve already started creating.

Because if you wait an hour, or until this afternoon, or until tomorrow (cringe) to contact your new leads, it’s much like a skier sliding out of their line and losing momentum. Or like one unfortunate athlete we saw, crashing and coming to a complete standstill.

Not-So-Fun Fact: When someone crashes on the Alpine course, there’s no one there to help them up. So we watched this guy walk back up to his skis, put them on and meander down the mountain. Obviously going much slower – with feelings of frustration and dejection – than the competitors who were able to navigate the course smoothly.

The faster you are able to contact your leads, the more momentum (through the patient journey) you will preserve. And that’s one important way to set up your patience – and your practice – for a gold medal podium finish.

Wanna dominate the competition and serve your patients at the highest level? Contact all your online leads within 5 minutes or less.

That’s all I have for you today. Godspeed to you on a highly productive week!

– Troy “Snowboarding > Skiing” Cole

PS – You may already have guidelines in place to make sure your leads are being contacted quickly. Doesn’t mean it’s happening. Check and make sure it is.

How to Avoid This Critical “Efficiency Mistake”

“Lemme know when my drugs get here,” I tell Susan.

Always around the last couple days of the month, which is when my subscription ships.

They aren’t really drugs. Far from it actually. The box is loaded with a can of protein, workout supplements and vitamins.

The shipment of not-drugs arrives from St. Louis, usually in 2-3 days, direct from 1st Phorm HQ. With the holidays + us traveling, I just opened this month’s delivery.

Yes, it contained my order. Plus one additional item they never fail to include…

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International fitness supplement powerhouse 1st Phorm started like many companies do – single location, single product, slow and steady word-of-mouth growth.

Almost 20 years later, they’re worldwide. A 9-figure (10-figure?) company.

1st Phorm fills a LOT of orders. 1st Phorm has a lot going on. 1st Phorm knows I’m a repeat customer and probably not going anywhere.

All the said, 1st Phorm never fails to add that one additional item to my order…

A handwritten a note, right on my packing slip. More accurately, one of 1st Phorm’s team members never fails to write it. Unique to me and what I’m ordering. 👇

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Let’s talk about efficiency. I’m a fan.

And I’m gonna guess that 1st Phorm – with the tens of thousands of orders a day they are filling – has highly efficient processes in place.

But there’s no way around it – writing a note on every daggum packing slip (which I assume they do because they’ve written one on every slip I’ve ever received, whether the order was big or small) is inefficient. Period.

And let’s say Mr. Hot Shot Efficiency Expert zips in for an audit. He pulls out his clipboard and says, “Ok, let’s look at everything you’re doing and how it relates to the bottom line.” It would be tough to make a case for keeping the handwritten notes.

Glowing, he reports: “Well, if we cut out these handwritten notes, it would save an average of 1.7 minutes per order. At 7,549 orders per day, which would allow us to fill 4,320 more orders daily.”

And just like that, you become more efficient. but at what cost? The cost of providing excellency customer service. The cost of being different from your competitors. The cost of reminding your team how amazing your mission is.

“Yeah, but we can make more money if we’re more efficient.” Can you? Maybe in the short-term.

But the long game – which you should be playing – gets ruined. You become like every other mediocre company. Trying to squeeze an extra buck out of every little activity, which results in falling short of customer expectations.

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1st Phorm knows this. They practice exactly what we teach the teams we coach:

Efficiency is a balancing act.

If you are too efficient in your practice, in every single little thing you do, you lose your humanity. You lose your connection with your patients. Ultimately you lose your competitive advantage.

But if you throw efficiency out the window, and just say, “We just like to spend as much time with every patient as we can…” you unnecessarily limit the number of patients you can help.

Like most things in life, efficiency has a happy middle ground. Be efficient where you can, so when you do have to take extra time with a patient, you actually have the time to take.

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When surgeons come to us to coach their phone teams to book more consults, this is one of the first things we tackle.

How to strike the Efficiency Balance – shortening marathon phone calls, reducing the time between follow-ups, how to batch followups, get prospects on the phone faster, get them in the door sooner. All activities that add efficiency, reduce wasted time and grow your surgery numbers.

At the same time, we coach on how to take the necessary steps to build rapport, build value and make the prospects comfortable to come in to the office. Inefficient activities on their face, but necessary to appropriately serve your patients and set you apart as the premium provider in your area.

So if you want your team to strike the Efficiency Balance – which ultimately maximizes your value to patients and your profits as a practice – then shoot me a message so I can show you how we do it.

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Takeaways…

Outdated Method – Efficiency at all costs.

New yet Still Broken – put efficiency on the back burner.

Growth Path – Strike the Efficiency Balance to provide the ideal patient experience. (This is the one you want).

Have an excellent week…

– T-fficient Troy

PS – I talked about efficiency of time in this email, but this also goes for other areas of your practice.

Efficiency in staffing for example. Be efficient in your hiring (don’t carry a bloated roster), but don’t be too efficient in your pay. Find good people, pay them more than anyone else does (inefficient on paper and in the short term), keep them forever (super efficient in the long term).