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[VIDEO] Solving the one virtual consult “road block” all practices face

Last week, I emailed you about the 4 myths surrounding virtual consults.

In case you missed that one, you can check it out here. (Be sure to read it if you didn’t. It’s worth 5 minutes of your time)

Now, there is one very real road block that all practices must face if they want to see all the benefits of virtual consults:

“WHO is going to do them and HOW do we fit them into our already hectic/busy schedule?”

These are real concerns. And if you don’t plan it out properly, you’re setting yourself up for a struggle.

We have 2 different ways we address this through our Patient Prime System.

Way 1. We connect you with someone in your shoes to build your logistics plan with you.

Remember Liam Neeson’s famous line in the movie Taken?

“What I do have are a particular set of skills.”

We have people with “particular sets of skills” on the Patient Prime team. Including the person who runs one of the most successful Virtual Consultation programs in the country, with a 70% conversion rate from Virtual Consult to surgery.

As part of the onboarding process for Patient Prime, you have the opportunity to meet with her. She will work with you to plan out the personnel, scheduling and management of your Virtual Consultation program based on your specific needs and team availability.

Who better to help you than someone who’s in the trenches and runs this program successfully on a daily basis?

Now, up until this point, that was your only option for Virtual Consult logistics planning. And it’s an amazing option, don’t get me wrong.

But here’s what we’ve heard from a number of practices:

“Troy, we love the virtual consult concept. We see the need and know we need to move on this quickly. But when it comes to logistics… we just don’t have the manpower to do them. Period.”

We don’t want those practices to be left out in the cold (and it’s like 15 degrees here in Texas as I write this, so I know how lame ‘the cold’ can be…).

So here’s what we’re doing… 👇

Way 2. We’ll do your virtual consults for you.

Rather than you having to figure out who is going to do the virtual consults, how to schedule them in, and how to handle bandwidth issues…

We take all that off your plate. Our team will conduct the virtual consults for you, and book these patients directly into pre-op for your practice.

To summarize what we do with the Virtual Consult portion of our Patient Prime System, by adding this done-for-you virtual consult:

👉 We help you market virtual consults
👉 We book them
👉 We confirm them
👉 We remind prospects to show up
✅ AND we conduct the Virtual Consults

And you’re only interacting with these people once they come in for a pre-op.

Limited on bandwidth? Then this is the perfect way for you to grow your surgical volume.

If that sounds interesting to you, here’s the thing:

This opportunity is limited. Because this is a beta program, we can’t/won’t open it up to everyone.

We’re looking for 3 practices that want more refractive surgeries ASAP. And we’ll handle everything up until the point they walk in your door.

So if you’re interested, reply to this email so we can jump on a quick call to make sure you’re a good fit.

– Done-For-You Troy

PS – Michael and I recorded a video going through the Done-For-You virtual consults in more detail. We also show you the actual year-over-year data of a practice before-vs-after virtual consults. You can see that video here.

PPS – If you know someone who might benefit from this, pass it along. I always send these opportunities to my private email list first, and then open them up to others. So it’s fine if you share this with another practice you know personally.

The 4 Virtual Consult myths holding practices back

The team at Zeiss ask me to do an interview on their podcast (the episode is 🔥🔥 by the way. I’ll shoot you a message once it’s live). The topic of virtual consultations came up.

While we’re seeing many practices jumping on board with our Hybrid Model of Patient Engagement (a combination of in-person consults and virtual consults)…

We also talk to a lot of practices who want to do it… but they’re hesitant. They don’t see how the virtual consultations fit into their workflow. Or they have concerns about the efficacy and longevity of virtual consults.

Why? It’s often due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how virtual consultations should work.

During this podcast interview with Zeiss, I shared the 4 common myths that are holding many practices back from reaping the benefits of virtual consults.

I thought you (or someone you know) could benefit from those, so here they are…

MYTH 1. Virtual Consults have to be long/drawn out/complex

Many people have this idea that the virtual consult needs to be comparable to the in-person consult process. Obviously you can’t do scans on a virtual consult. But they feel like the VC should still be long, highly detailed, with lots of information presented.

We’ve even talked to practices who have tried virtual consults, and they tell me they typically spend an hour with a patient on Zoom.

Not only is this not necessary, it can actually hurt your conversion numbers. Long virtual consults lead to boredom and information overload. This is deadly combination when you’re trying to get someone excited to take the next step of coming in for a pre-op.

THE TRUTH – Virtual consults only need to be about 15 minutes long. They should only cover brief medical history, rapport building, the prospect’s pain points, and have a strong call to action.

Structure your VC the proper way and hit the right notes, and you can get in, get out, and get the prospect on your pre-op schedule… all in short order.

MYTH 2 – A doctor needs to be involved in virtual consults.

We prefer our surgeons focusing their time on their highest ROI activities – doing surgery, leading their teams, working on their business.

Which is why the virtual consultation process we have developed does not require a doctor to be present.

We have practices converting the majority of their virtual consults (50-60%, sometimes more) into surgeries with our virtual consult format, and no doctor engages with the patient until they are in the practice to pre-op for surgery.

MYTH 3 – “Now that our city is opening back up from lockdowns, and patients are coming into the office, we don’t need a virtual option.”

I’ve heard this several times, and it makes sense at first glance. If you’re open for in-person, why do you need the remote option?

You need it if you want to engage more people. Just like Chipotle offers in-person dining and home delivery (we did a video on this), you benefit when you have multiple ways a prospect can engage you.

Sure there are plenty of people who will come into the practice now. But others – either due to fear, convenience, or other random reasons – aren’t coming in for an initial consult.

By offering only in-person consults, you’re only catering to a portion of the market.

So you either leave the rest of the market for your competitors to scoop up, or you offer a virtual option and capture those too.

You don’t care how new patients get to you. What matters is that they get to you. Give them more than one avenue to do that.

One final note on this: our home-centric, convenience-focused consumer lifestyle isn’t going away. People are used to Zoom meetings, at-home workouts and grocery delivery. Get on board with virtual consults now and lead the way in your market… or play catch-up a year from now when one of your competitors is eating your lunch.

MYTH 4 – “We tried virtual consults, and we didn’t get much from them, so they probably don’t work for us.”

When practices tell us this, our first question is to have them describe how they have done virtual consults. When we dig a little deeper, we find out that the practice didn’t actually market and promote virtual consultations as an exciting option for prospects. They just kinda… offered em.

They treated virtual consults like this extra little thing they could facilitate if someone asked. Or the virtual consult was an option on their website somewhere, but not actively promoted as a great way to engage with the practice.

Imagine if LASIK was this “Extra little service you offer, and if someone asks about it, you tell them.” Would you be doing much volume? Of course not.

And it’s not because LASIK isn’t great, or because it doesn’t work. It’s just because you didn’t frame it and market it in the appropriate way.

Virtual consults are a great way to grow your surgical volume in a highly efficient manner, as you’ve seen in some of our case study videos. BUT they have to be marketed in the proper manner. Don’t expect people to discover them and see the value on their own. We have to show them the value.

BIG TAKEAWAY – There’s a right way (and many wrong ways) to market and conduct Virtual Consults.

And if you’ve been hesitant to shift to the Hybrid Model of Patient Engagement, or if you haven’t seen much success with virtual consults, it’s probably due to one or more of they myths I’ve dispelled above.

Fortunately you don’t have to figure this out on your own. We have an entire system built to launch this Hybrid Model for you. I’ve worked with the LASIK Marketing King – Michael King – to package all this up for you.

Everything we’ve learned about how to do virtual consults that convert to surgeries…

All of the ads, landing pages, schedulers, communication tools, reminder messages and sales training… everything that works to get you more refractive surgery patients…

It’s all packed into our Patient Prime System, ready to deploy for practices who are a good fit for the program.

If you want to achieve (or maintain) your status as the go-to practice for vision correction in your market, the Hybrid Model is the path.

The question then becomes…

Do you want to build the car, build the road, and try to navigate this path yourself?

Or would you rather get in the back of our limo and let us take you to your destination?

I’d love to hear your answer…

– Troy “Limo Driver” Cole

PS – Maybe you’re already doing virtual consults and killing it. Great! But you have a colleague somewhere who isn’t. They need to read this message. Do them – and me – a favor and forward this to them.

We’re on a mission to help local, independent surgeons dominate their markets and crush the chain LASIK centers that are commoditizing the industry. I appreciate your help in reaching more amazing surgeons like you to join us on this mission…

How Getting More Patients is Like Baking a Cake

Refractive surgeons reach out to me when they decide they want to do more surgeries.

And usually, they tell me something like:

“We need more marketing.”
“We need better marketing.”
“We need more leads.”

(I had calls with 3 practices last week that started exactly like this.)

Now, all of these things are most likely true. And all of them are important to filling your surgery schedule.

And most marketers, agencies and ad folks will say, “We can help with that! Sign here please.” We used to do the same thing.

But is that really the best idea? In my experience, no. It’s actually irresponsible. And more often than not, it’s a waste of money.

Why?

It comes down to Sequence, a vital yet often overlooked aspect of practice growth.

Better marketing is an important step to take. But it’s rarely the first step to take. And this is where sequencing comes in.

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Consider your favorite dessert. I’m a Lemon Cake guy.

Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse has an amazing layered lemon cake. It’s the perfect recipe, and when followed to a T, produces an unbelievable treat that hits the spot after a nice 16-oz medium-cooked ribeye with sautéed spinach.

But let’s say they take the recipe… and decide to shake things up a bit. For example, they take the baking soda, and rather than mixing it into the cake batter, they leave it to the end and sprinkle it on top of the icing.

Is it going to be as tasty? No. It might actually be disgusting.

But why? Baking soda is part of the recipe, after all.

It’s because this key ingredient was added out of sequence.

The same thing happens in your practice. The first ingredient – the first step – is not to pour all of your hard-earned money into paid marketing or lead gen efforts.

Because if you don’t have your sales / consultation / fulfillment / conversion processes nailed down, more marketing will do you little good. In fact, it can actually hurt you – drain your funds, result in a poor patient experience, and lead to net-negative word-of-mouth.

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So if you want to grow your practice, make sure you’re following the 3 Practice Growth Steps in sequence.

Step 1 – Make sure you have a weapons-grade sales team and process. If you don’t, train your people or hire better ones (or both).

This is your biggest point of leverage within the practice. A sales team with excellent skills will convert more surgery patients, and they can do it at a premium price point.

Many practices have “good people” in their organization, but they haven’t been trained in the specific processes and mindset of moving a person from Lead to Prospect to Consult to Patient. This needs to be priority #1. You’ll make more money just doing this.

(And for anyone reading this who thinks “sales” is a dirty word – that’s a whole other essay. I’ll just say that if you’re the best surgeon in town, and you truly believe you can help people, then you have a moral obligation to do just that. Which means having an excellent sales team that can communicate clearly and help prospects make the hard decisions they need to make to better themselves.)

Step 2 – Make sure you’re optimized to convert as many patients as you can from those who are already interested in your services.

There are people out there who are actively researching you and/or your procedures.

Without getting too far into the weeds here, you want to:

– Add multiple “engagement assets” to your website.
– Make sure you’re ranking on page 1 in search engines for your specific key terms.
– Put a plan in place to get 5-star reviews from every happy patient.
– Optimize your paid search (AdWords) campaigns.

These are all avenues where people are actively looking for your solution, and you want to give yourself the best opportunity of engaging and converting them.

Step 3. Then you can move out into lead generation – advertising to cold audiences via social media ads, radio and whatever other avenues you deem appropriate.

At this point, your foundation is in place, and you can start to reach new audiences through marketing.

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There are obviously sub-steps to each of these, but this big-picture overview gives you the lay of the land. You should be able to better navigate your surgery volume challenges with this sequencing framework.

Even knowing the sequence, some practices aren’t clear on whether they’re ready to move from step 1 to 2 to 3. This is another reason they call me. So we can assess and steer them in the right direction.

If you’re stuck in your practice growth, it’s likely you’re out of sequence. Just like a Lemon Cake with a baking soda topping, you’re not nearly as amazing as you could be if you were in sequence.

If you want help with this, give me a shout. We can take a look at where you are, your challenges, your bottlenecks, and where you need to focus right now.

Maybe you need a robust communications/sales training for your team. Maybe it’s time for you to plug in a bunch of battle-tested lead generation campaigns.

We don’t know until we dig in (just like you don’t know if a patient is a candidate for sx until you deep dive into their scans and find out what’s going on with their eyes).

Don’t waste time, energy and budget fighting an uphill battle out of sequence.

Reply to this email, and we’ll help you figure our your sequencing plan. We’ll also share what’s working right now to get more patients in each of the steps I outlined above.

Talk soon,

Troy “Sequence is the Shortcut” Cole

[🔥VIDEO] Follow Chipotle’s lead to add another 30-40 eyes next month

It’s time for the Thursday Thunder, my friend! Got a 🔥 video for you today, featuring the King + Cole Boys.

In today’s episode…

Troy thinks Chipotle holds the key to refractive success, Michael talks about gamifying frozen yogurt toppings, and the guys finally come up with a name for the show.

In addition, you’ll discover:

– COVID’s Fast-Forward Effect on consumer behavior (and why this is important to your practice)

– Chipotle’s Hybrid Model of customer acquisition that you can use to attract more surgery patients now

– The hidden limitations of only doing consults “the old way” (even if you’re busy, you’re still capped)

– The “first mover advantage” that’s out there for the taking (if you take action immediately)

– And more…

Go watch it now.

– Troy “Double Steak Burrito Bowl” Cole

PS – You don’t actually have to watch it unless you just wanna see our handsome mugs.

Turn on the video and listen in your car or during your workout. You’ll still get the full benefit of the content…

Is the Old School “Mindset of More” keeping you stuck?

I had a call yesterday with a practice that was “interested in doing some marketing.”

An acquaintance put us in touch, and I told them we could talk to see if they might be a good fit for us.

Pretty quickly into the conversation, I realized they are not our ideal client. Several flaws in the surgeon’s thinking jumped out at me. I wanted to share those with you today to make sure you aren’t making the same mistakes.

I call this the Old School “Mindset of More.” Old School is great if we’re talking about hip hop, classic cars or work ethic. Not so much when we’re talking about refractive surgery.

Here are 3 ways the Old School Mindset of More doesn’t serve you in the modern marketplace…

1. A desire for more “Marketing” (with a capital M)

Mad Men. Slick suits. High rises. Think back to the days of Don Draper delivering his pitch for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The flash. The flair. It’s fun to watch on TV, but not necessarily tied to the mission at hand – filling your surgical suite.

This big, ambiguous concept of Marketing is what the doctor had in her head.

Dr: We want to do more Marketing for our practice.

Me: Ok, tell me more about that. Do you want to do more refractive surgeries?

Dr: Well yeah, but we need branding and Marketing.

Me: That’s fine. But I’m just making sure that your goal is to do more surgeries. Because that’s what we do.

Dr: Well yes, but what about our other Marketing?

Me: We aren’t worried about other Marketing. We have a proven product and process to get you more surgeries. That’s the play. We just run variations of that play over and over and over to fill your schedule.

Dr: But but but Marketing.

This Old School “More Marketing Mindset” stifles growth and sucks up budget.

Uncommon opinion – you actually don’t want marketing. You want a full surgery schedule.

Just like your patients don’t want LASIK. They want the results LASIK can give them.

Don’t get fixated on more Marketing. Get fixated on more new patients.

2. A focus on getting more “stuff” vs getting more results

There’s this horribly flawed idea that getting more “stuff” is automatically better in life.

This doctor told me, “We need to work with someone who will do everything – posters and brochures and commercials and signs, all that.”

We don’t do those things. And it’s not because they don’t need to get done. You need good brochures and materials and signage.

We don’t do them because when it comes to resources and opportunity cost, we focus 100% of our time and effort onto the plays that we know get surgery patients for our clients. Namely, our E3 Sales Training Workshop and our Patient Prime System to generate more consults that turn into surgeries.

Why? For the same reasons you probably don’t treat every different eye condition on Earth.

Why wouldn’t you just do “everything eyes”? Because of the massive resource allocation, the distractions, the lack of effectiveness that come with such a ridiculous model.

You offer a few specific solutions, you’re amazing at them, and your patients love you for it.

Take fitness for example. Would you rather:

A. Have a gym with access to every piece of equipment known to man, or

B. Have a trainer give you the exact exercises, exact workout plan, exact training and accountability you need to hit your goals?

Most people would say B and even pay a premium for it.

Yes, A has more “stuff.” But it’s also more overwhelming. It’s more complicated, and more confusing. Option A is a distraction standing between you and your goal.

This Old School idea that “more is better” is ridiculous.

There’s a practice in your city with more office space than you. Does that make them better?

There’s a practice in your city with more collective years of experience that you. Does that make them better?

Doing “more” is not necessarily better, and in many cases, it’s actually worse. Streamlining, simplifying, and taking the proven path to results without any fluff or distractions – that’s what’s better.

3. A fixation on more volume (at all costs)

I was glad to hear this practice is priced higher than their market average for LASIK.

I’ve talked plenty of times about the many reasons you are obligated to charge premium prices for your procedures.

Poblem is, they were ready and willing to give up their premium pricing for the sake of volume.

She told me, “We’re willing to go significantly cheaper to get more prospects in the door.”

You can imagine my response. “Yeah, don’t do that. Some small savings programs for specific groups is fine, but you should not do market-wide mass discounts.”

Her response? “Well, we’ve been told by cutting our price in half, it’ll be attractive for more people. I don’t really want to do that, but we’re considering it.”

She was so fixated on volume, she was willing to sacrifice her profit to get there.

“Volume volume volume at all costs! Brand be damned. Premium positioning be damned. Profits be damned. We’re going after volume!” 👈 This is an old school way of thinking.

Don’t get me wrong – more surgery volume is great. And we grow volume with our programs.

But sacrificing profit? I hate that. You hate that. My humble but accurate opinion – you’ve worked too hard for too long and put too much on the line to be the Wal-Mart of vision correction.

This Old School “more volume at all costs” mindset needs to die.

In conclusion, this practice – and many others like it – are too stuck in the old school mindset of “more” to take advantage of today’s opportunities in the marketplace.

But practices who are of the New School mindset…

That are interested in actual results vs “more Marketing”…

interested in doing what works vs doing more “stuff”…

and interested in profit (while also increasing volume), are in a much better position to achieve the success they say they want.

If that’s you, and you want more surgeries, reply to this message.

Have a helluva Tuesday,

Troy “Less Talk, More Rock” Cole