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We’re talking about a dirty 4-letter word on today’s show. Or at least… a word that a lot of people *think* is dirty.

That word – S-E-L-L – Sell.

A lot of folks, particularly in Medicine, find the idea of selling offensive. Of course, you should get money for what you do, but when I talk about selling, I mean as it relates to being a salesperson.

Should you be selling your services? Should the idea of selling even be part of the conversation in your practice? Let’s discuss!

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Transcript

Let’s talk about my favorite four-letter word.

Hello, my friend. It’s your boy, Troy. Welcome to a fresh episode of The Practice Growth Machine Podcast where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

We are talking about a dirty little four-letter word today, or at least a word that a lot of people think is dirty. That word S-E-L-L. Sell.

A lot of folks, particularly in medicine, find the idea of selling to be offensive. And of course you should get money for what you do, that’s not what I’m talking about. When I’m talking about selling I mean as it relates to being a salesperson.

Should you be selling your services like a salesperson might sell a product? Are you a car lot? Should the idea of selling even be part of the conversation in your practice?

Let’s discuss.

First of, it’s important to remember that everyone is always selling all the time. “Troy, I’ve never had a sales job in my life. You’re crazy.” Maybe you’d never had a business card that said sales on it, but here’s a question.

Have you ever talked to your spouse about a new car that you wanted to buy, or maybe you’ve talked to your child about why to eat their vegetables, then you’re selling.

You’re selling ideas. That’s not much different than what you’re doing every day in your practice. You sell your team on why your practice is the best because you believe that, and you want them to believe it too.

You sell your patients on why vision correction, or a facelift, or dental implants, are the right decision for them because you believe that it is. And you sell yourself on buying that new piece of equipment that will help you get better results for your patients.

Yeah, it’s expensive, yeah, it’s going to be an investment, but you believe it is going to help, and so you do it. So what’s the common theme among all these examples I just listed? They’re all things you believe in, and that’s a key operative term.

Our beliefs and our convictions drive what we’re selling and who we’re selling to. Ultimately, selling is about persuading. That’s why we talk a lot about persuasion here on the show.

Here’s something I know about you, you aren’t going to persuade someone to take action that’s not in their best interest. If a patient is not a good candidate for a procedure you won’t persuade them to have the procedure. In fact, you just aren’t going to do the procedure.

It’s obvious, but it’s a beneficial reminder for you, and for your team as well. Your team can be confident in your recommendations because you come from a place of true belief that what you’re recommending is in the best interest of the patient.

Let’s say you have a patient who is a good candidate for a procedure. You know it will improve their life, improve their self-confidence. Is it okay to assertively sell to that person? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Jay Abraham is one of the most widely respected marketers and speakers of our generation creating billions of dollars in profit for giant brands all over the world. Look him up. Jay Abraham. Jay is well known for his strategy of preeminence, which I want to share with you today.

This is a focus on serving your patients and helping them make the right decision for them. It is very patient-focused. It’s not us, we, look how awesome we are. It’s 100% focused on the patient and how we can serve them.

Jay talks about those who practice preeminence coming from a place of here’s what you should do, here’s how you should do it, and here’s why you should do it. That sounds pretty bold, right?

But if you truly believe, and there’s that word again, believe, that your procedure can help someone have a better life, listen, it’s your moral obligation to do everything you can to help that person choose your solution.

Let’s say you’re a cancer doctor, and you’re sitting there with a stage four cancer patient. Are you going to say, “Well, here’s a few options that would work for you. Just let us know what you want to do. Give us a call if you have any questions.”

Of course, you’re not going to approach the situation in that way. You’re going to say, “Here’s the treatment you need, here’s when you need to start, here’s what you need to do, and here’s why this is the recommendation that gives you the best chance of beating this thing and getting your life back.”

Maybe the procedures that you perform aren’t as life and death as dealing with cancer patients, but that doesn’t matter. If you can truly help someone you need to be bold, be clear, and do whatever you can to help them make the right decision.

Is that selling? Definitely. But is it bad? Is it wrong? Is it icky? I don’t think so. I think that’s exactly why you spent decades of your life in medical school building a practice focusing your entire life around your medical specialty because deep down you feel that moral obligation.

Let’s recap.

Selling is something you do all day every day whether you know it or not. You sell what you believe in, so take comfort in that. And if you believe you are the best surgeon, or doctor, or dentist in town and you believe your offering can help someone, you have a moral obligation to do everything in your power to help them choose your solution.

That doesn’t mean be a scummy used car salesman. It doesn’t mean trick people into taking action. But it does mean being clear, bold, and decisive in your communication with your patients, and this goes for your team as well.

So get out there and sell the thing that you do that’s making the world a better place. We’ll see you on the next show.

For more persuasion tools and scripts visit the free resources tab at TroyCole.com.

If “friends and family” is your most valuable referral source, we should be asking “How can I get more of those?!” Today we talk about why and how to get more friends and family referrals through a process called “Post-Acquisition Marketing.”

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Transcript

Spend more of your marketing budget and attention on this.

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy. Welcome to a fresh episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast, where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

Today we’re talking about an aspect of the patient journey where you should be allocating more of your marketing budget and attention. We’re talking about post-acquisition marketing, marketing your practice to people who have already had a procedure with you.

“Oh, come on Troy. Why would we want to promote ourselves to someone who already had surgery? Why would we even need to do that and how would we go about it anyway?” Hey, these are all great questions, so let’s get into it.

Where do you get your most qualified referrals? Friends and family referrals are consistently in the top three referral sources for the practices we work with. Usually, they’re the number one referral source for patients who are highly qualified and ready to buy.

Why are friends and family referrals so awesome? First of all, we trust our friends and family more than we trust companies that market to us. That’s just the way we are wired.

Look, I’m a big fan of marketing. It plays an important role in growing your practice brand and building the know, like, and trust factors when attracting new patients. Friends and family referrals allow you to speed this process up because when someone you already know and trust says, “Look, I tried this product and it’s awesome,” or “I had a procedure with his doctor and it changed my life,” you listen.

Even if you aren’t ready to make that same decision right then, you hang on to that suggestion, put in the back of your head until you’re ready to pull the trigger.

Another reason is when someone’s referred by a patient who had a procedure with you, you can bet that person’s already asked the patient a thousand questions. Did it hurt? How much was it? How was the recovery time? Etc. So they’re already pretty educated coming into the appointment and they’re ready to go.

Now, how does all this come back to the concept of post-acquisition marketing? Well, think about it. If you’re advertising on a radio station, let’s say, that’s sending you a lot of happy patients, what do you do?

Well, if you’re smart, you look for ways to invest more with that station or at least with that demographic, since you know it’s working for you. Same thing goes for your happy patients.

If friends and family are one of your most valuable, if not the most valuable referral source, doesn’t it make sense that you would spend time and money trying to increase that referral source?

“But once someone has a procedure with us, they’re happy. We changed their lives forever. What more can we do?” You’re right, but here’s the deal. People forget things quickly.

A better way to put that might be that changes, even big changes in our lives become a new normal for us. It’s why a new car is awesome for the first few months and then it’s just our nice car. A new pair of shoes is fun and exciting, but then it becomes just another pair of nice shoes that are in our closet. And sure we like those things, but they don’t carry the weight and excitement that they do when we first get them.

Same thing goes for your procedures. We call it the honeymoon phase. So let’s take vision correction as an example. Right after surgery for a few weeks, everything is fun and exciting and new.

But once you’re out of the honeymoon phase, clear vision is your new normal. And sure, patients appreciate it, but they usually aren’t singing it from the rooftops like they are right after their procedure happens.

So one of the main reasons we want to do post-acquisition marketing is to keep that honeymoon phase going, keep stoking the fire of their excitement and leveraging that to bring in more of their family and friends.

Now let’s talk about a few ways you can implement post-acquisition marketing in your practice.

Number one, t-shirts. People like free t-shirts as long as they’re fun and they feel good. So don’t cheap out on this one. For an extra couple of bucks a shirt, you can go from cheapo stiff cotton to a nice soft feel, more fitted shirt that people will wear just because it feels awesome.

And it doesn’t need to have your logo gigantic across it. Use catchy sayings, fun graphics, and of course have your practice name or logo or your URL somewhere on the shirt.

I like sending shirts and other gifts in the mail versus presenting them in person, because hey, who doesn’t like receiving a package in the mail? That way it feels more like a gift being sent from a friend versus something you’d just do for everyone who comes into your office.

Here’s another tip. Include a postcard in the box that prompts the patient to post pics with their shirt and tag you and use your hashtags in the post on social media. Can you say free marketing?

Number two, thank you notes with gift cards. Thank you notes are a lost art, and even if your notes are pre-printed and you just sign them, letting patients know you appreciate them, putting their trust in you makes them feel great.

I like to include a small gift card. Nothing crazy, but a Starbucks card or maybe a pair of movie tickets. Nothing expensive but something they can go and enjoy as a small token of your appreciation.

Number three, referral gifts. All right, so this is the part where I say I’m not a lawyer and different state boards have different rules about this. That said, money talks. If someone refers you a patient, a thank you referral gifts can go a long way to making sure it happens again.

You don’t want to have any kind of official referral program where you say, “Hey look, if you send me a patient, we’ll send you $50 bucks.” That’s generally frowned upon regardless of where you practice.

This is why it’s better to send patients a thank you note after the fact with an Amazon card for example, after they refer someone. At that point, it’s a thank you as opposed to an upfront incentive.

And yeah, that means keeping a bunch of $50 Amazon cards on hand, but what does that new patient they referred worth to you? $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 bucks? A $50 thank you gift on a $5,000 procedure is a 100X return on your investment. I’ll take that all day long.

And number four, e-cards for birthdays and anniversaries. So this one’s easy. Set up automated emails to go to patients for their birthdays and the anniversary of their procedure day. This costs you virtually no money or time, and it provides you simple ways to remind your patients throughout the year that you exist and that you’re awesome.

Now we have an entire year-long outline that we use for our clients to map out the post-acquisition marketing strategy. What to send, when to send it, templates for cards, scripts, t-shirt designs, etc. If that’s something you’re interested in, shoot me an email, troy@troycole.com.

So to wrap this up, for around $50 bucks or so, maybe even more if they’re referring a lot of people to you, you can create experiences for your patients that keep your practice top of mind and keep them referring happy patients into your practice.

All right, let’s talk about what we learned today.

To recap today’s episode, spend money and time where you know you’re getting a return. Happy patients are your most valuable referral source, so invest attention and budget into that referral source.

The longer you can leverage that honeymoon phase, the more patient referrals you can generate. Use gifts in the mail, e-card reminders, and thank you gifts in your post-acquisition marketing strategy to make this happen.

All right, get out there. Get started on your post-acquisition marketing strategy today, and we’ll see you on the next show.

For more persuasion tools and scripts, head on over to troycole.com and click on the three resources tab right there at the top of the page.

We tend to want to be as efficient as possible in our businesses. But sometimes, it helps to be *inefficient* and do the unscalable things that turn prospects into patients, and patients into evangelists for your practice.

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Transcript

It’s time to do things that don’t scale.

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy, welcoming you to a fresh piping hot episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast, where we teach you the persuasion tips and tactics you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

Today we’re talking about inefficiencies. Normally when you hear that word it’s in a negative light, because we want to be more efficient, right? Speed, automation, trimming the fat, stretching our time and money, we want to be efficient.

But today we’re actually talking about the good kind of inefficiency. To put it a different way, we’re going to cover why and how you need to do unscalable things in your practice that can make a huge difference to your patient’s experience.

Paul Graham is the founder of the uber-successful Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. He’s got a great essay on this called Do Things That Don’t Scale.

We’ll use that as the backdrop for why you should do unscalable things, which unscalable tasks you should focus on in your practice, and how they can benefit your practice as you grow. All right, let’s get into it.

First of all let’s talk about why you should do certain unscalable things because it seems counterintuitive, especially as you grow you want to be more efficient, you want your activities to scale. So why even go down this road?

Well, think of all the noise that’s out there in the marketplace, and I’m not just talking about your other competitors, but think about all the marketing messages and everything that is hitting your prospects from every single business out there that’s trying to get your prospects’ attention and get their money. It’s a jungle out there.

Now you hear me talk a lot about getting attention, and yes, you absolutely must get someone’s attention before you can even start to turn them into a patient. If somebody doesn’t know who you are, they certainly won’t end up in your surgery suite. That’s a given.

But once you have attention, you want to show your prospects that you’re different. You want to stand out and ultimately you want to make a connection. Maybe you’ve heard the quote that people don’t do business with companies, they do business with people. That’s where all this unscalable activity comes in.

Remember we don’t just want to take care of our patients, but we also want to turn them into evangelists for the practice. So how do we create that wow factor that really takes it over the top for your patients?

In Graham’s essay, he talks about the need to surprise and delight customers as a major reason to do things that don’t scale. So let’s take a second and talk about some examples of unscalable things you can do to surprise and delight your patients.

When we work with our consulting clients we map out every decision point along the patient journey and then we script and systematize the different touchpoints, the nonscalable engagements, and the automation, all of it. We build the whole thing out.

Today I just want to give you a few examples of unscalable tasks that you can do that make a huge impact in the relationship with your patients to surprise and delight them. Now look, you might be inclined to say, “Troy, we don’t have time to do these things.”

I promise you the benefits of doing these unscalable tasks in your practice are well worth the few extra minutes it takes to make them happen.

Example number one, call your patients the night of surgery just to check on them. Yeah, it’s going to take a few minutes to do each call, but when you consider the amount of care and concern that’s conveyed by your two-minute phone call, it’s totally worth the time to do it.

Example number two, take pictures with your patients after surgery. Now look, this only takes a few extra seconds, and you’re going to need to have somebody else there to take the picture, but this signals that surgery day is a day to be celebrated and commemorated. You hear me talk a lot about celebrating and creating these special moments, and that’s huge when you take that photo on surgery day.

Not only that, but you’re giving your patients an asset that they can now go and share on their social media pages. They’ve got that picture. They can share it. They can tag you in it, and that’s free publicity, free marketing for your practice. Who doesn’t want that?

Example number three, sign thank you notes to your patients. You don’t have to write the thank you notes out. You can have these pre-printed if you want to do that but just sign those.

Take a few minutes to sign a stack of them and then have your team send those out. It’s a nice touch that shows how much you value them putting their trust in you and your practice.

Example number four, have live human beings answer the phone. This isn’t something that you individually have to do as a doctor, but your team should be doing it. Maybe that means you need an extra phone person to accomplish this. Is it worth it?

Well, think about how many phone trees and automated phone systems that you encounter on a regular basis. The phone is your first one-on-one impression with a patient. Greet them with a vibrant, happy live voice, not a robot recording. It makes a difference.

Example number five, take time to find out why patients chose you and why they chose you now. The best marketing messages come straight from the mouths of your patients. Now this might mean longer conversations with patients, but the benefit is that you get so many insights into the reasons why your patients chose you over lower-priced competitors in the marketplace

When you know that you have better marketing, you have better-talking points, you have better ways of understanding the obstacles that keep people from making the decision that’s right for them, which in most cases is having a procedure with you. All right, let’s recap.

To wrap up, these are just a few examples of the unscalable things you can do in your practice to surprise and delight your patients and create a truly magical experience. All the stories that you hear about big companies who have legendary customer service – Zappos, Nordstrom, Ritz Carlton, is because they go above and beyond for their customers and go to great unscalable lengths to care for them.

Become known for legendary patient care by doing things that don’t scale and your practice will continue to prosper as more patients come to trust you and refer their friends and family.

That’s it for today and we’ll see you on the next show.

For more persuasion tools and scripts visit the Free Resources tab at troycole.com.