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