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You hear all the time how important it is to have 5-star patient reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Healthgrades and more.

But when it comes to actually getting patients to leave awesome reviews for you, you feel like banging your head against a wall.

How is it possible to have thousands of happy patients and only a handful of 5-star Google reviews?

I’ve been in medical marketing for more than a decade, creating solutions to big problems just like this one.

The “Review Problem” is one I’ve worked on for a few years now. After trying a dozen different methods to get patients to leave reviews, I’ve finally hit on a winner.

Today, I want to tell you about a way I discovered that you can take your existing reminder software – tools like DemandForce and SolutionReach (a.k.a. Smile Reminder) – and turn them into Google review engines for your practice.

The best part? It’s a completely automated solution. No need to print expensive ‘How to leave us a review’ cards (which don’t work anyway). You don’t even have to ask patients for reviews if you don’t want to.

Why are reviews so important anyway?

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this solution that I’ve stumbled upon, let’s take a moment and review (ha!) why online reviews are more important now than ever before.

Reviews play a vital role in your practice branding today. They’re important for how people perceive you vs. your competition, and here’s why:

When people search on Google and go through the local listings in your city to find a dentist, a LASIK surgeon, a cosmetic surgeon and so on, your reviews are right there, up against the competition:

And the practices with the most reviews are typically the ones that get more engagement. Johnny Consumer is clicking the guy who has 90 positive reviews before the one with 4 reviews.

So the practice that has 10x more positive reviews than anyone else in town has a distinct advantage. That practice has many more opportunities to attract new leads and turn them into patients, and the search engines are helping to make it happen.

If that’s you, great! If not, you’re certainly losing valuable patients every week to your most-reviewed competitor.

Not only do reviews help attract patients, they also serve you in your search rankings in general.

Search engines are looking at many different factors these days when it comes to ranking you against your competitors, and reviews are one of those ranking factors. So good reviews can actually help you rank better in searches in your city.

5-Star Reviews help in many ways… as long as you can get them.

The challenge is that 99.9% of the general public don’t go leave 5-star reviews on their own, despite how great the experience was. And our research shows this is for 2 main reasons:

1. It’s too complicated
2. People forget to do it.

As silly as those two reasons seem, they are what’s standing between you and 500 5-star Google reviews. That’s it. If you can overcome those, you can open the floodgates.

I’m going to show you how to overcome both of these barriers, and we’ll use your current DemandForce or SolutionReach account as the mechanism to make it happen. These are tools you already have in place. Now you finally have a way to leverage them to take your review game to the next level.

What you really have if you have DemandForce or SolutionReach

DemandForce and SolutionReach are excellent appointment reminder solutions.

Not only that, but they also do a great job following up after with patients after the appointment to find out about the patient experience.

So if you have SolutionReach or DemandForce, you end up with a review page that looks like this:

This is a practice I randomly chose as an example of the frustration you experience in your own practice.

Anderson Family Dental is in a small Ohio town, and as you can see, they have 565 patient reviews on their SolutionReach page. Awesome right?

But here’s thing – Their Google listing tells a very different story:

 

**The problem is that none of the amazing reviews on SolutionReach are ever making it to Google or any other of the major, public-facing review sites.**

What a waste of a happy patient stories that could otherwise help you attract new patients and helping you grow your search rankings…. IF ONLY they were left in the right place.

Look at the graphic above. If Anderson Family Dental only had 50 5-star reviews, they would be leading the pack in their city.

Do you think they have 50 happy patients? We know they have at least 500 based on their DemandForce survey page!

It’s doable, it’s simply a matter of getting the right people to leave reviews in the right places.

What you really have with DemandForce or SolutionReach is a tool that’s awesome for gathering feedback, but horrible at sharing that feedback in meaningful ways online.

So what if, instead of directing people to leave reviews on DemandForce or SolutionReach itself, you used these systems as ‘air traffic controllers’ to send awesome reviews to Google, Yelp and so forth?

This was my “aha” moment – keep the mechanism that works (DemandForce or SolutionReach) but change the destination to solve the Review Problem.

So I set about developing a way to ‘hack the system’ and use DemandForce and SolutionReach to my advantage for these clients.

Now you can do precisely this, and it’s as simple as a one-time change to your follow-up emails that go through your reminder system.

Here’s How it Works

With every patient in your system, you can send them a post-appointment assessment email from SolutionReach or DemandForce. I call this the “How did we do?” email. It looks like this:

Now, you see the “Take the Survey” button?

When you click “Take the Survey” you are taken to the DemandForce or SolutionReach system to complete the survey.

What we’ve done is hacked the system so we can send this link to other sites.

Don’t worry, this is a ‘safe’ hack that won’t get you in trouble. It simply gives you the chance to send reviewers to Google, Facebook and Yelp.

But before we started testing this, we wanted to make sure we were overcoming the common obstacles people cite for leaving no reviews or leaving bad ones.

• It had to be fast. The surveys inside these systems can be long and arduous. If we’re asking people to leave reviews, the faster it is, the more likely they will comply.

• It had to be simple. Leaving reviews is overcomplicated. Trying to find the right listing, then the correct button to leave reviews. And each site has it’s own nuances, making the process even more complex. If we were going to ask people to leave reviews, it needed to be simple and straightforward as possible, even providing directions if necessary.

• It had to have a catch-all mechanism for bad reviews. If you’ve seen your SolutionReach and DemandForce reviews, you know that sometimes, you get 1-star reviews. But if someone had a 1-star experience, you want that going to your practice administrator to correct the problem, not going to Google to tell the entire world. So we needed a way to “catch” patients who had a bad experience so those messages didn’t get out onto the web.

• It needed to be easy to adjust to new sites as necessary. There are plenty of review sites out there, and depending on your specialty and geographic area, you may need more reviews on site A than site B. We needed a way to quickly siphon clicks to different review sites if a change was necessary.

So that’s what we did. We put together a digital “review engine” that has all of these qualities. It checks to make sure patients had a great experience, and if so, it redirects them to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, Healthgrades, pretty much wherever you want online.

Once you change the link in the survey email to the review engine link, voila! You’ve just turned your DemandForce or SolutionReach into a review generation machine.

See for yourself (in less than 60 seconds)

To see how this new ‘review engine’ works to help your patients get from “first click” to “finished review” in less than 60 seconds, watch the video below.

This is built around four best practices for getting the most reviews:

1. Keep it Fast. The faster you can from the starting point to the actual review, the more likely people will follow through. This takes less than 5 clicks to get to the point where you’re leaving the actual review.
2. Keep it simple. The simpler the process, the more likely people will follow through. This clicks directly to the Google review screen, and it even pre-populates a 5-star review in Google. Did you notice that? It literally types in ‘5-stars’ for the patient.
3. Keep it immediate. Remember how people forget to leave reviews? It happens anytime there’s a delay between the ask and the action. Make sure when prompted, the patient can leave a review immediately (vs. asking now to leave a review when they get home).
4. Keep it positive. Use a screening mechanism to keep bad reviews off the web. IF you clicked the ‘thumbs down’ button (as an unhappy patient would), you are prompted NOT to go leave a review online, but to email the practice. This reduces risk of bad reviews actually ending up on the web!

 

How well does it actually work?

Here’s feedback from a couple of clients who recently launched this “SolutionReach Hack” to get more reviews online.

(Client privacy is paramount, hence the use of initials below. I am happy to discuss these in greater detail with you privately. Medical marketing is highly competitive, and I handle my clients marketing activities – just as i would handle yours – with complete discretion.)

“Within days of adding the link in to our DemandForce emails, I could already see it creating more reviews. We started using the system with only my primary office, but I’m already adding my other location since it’s had such a positive impact!”
– J.F., North Texas Optometrist with 2 offices

These guys were averaging 2 Google reviews/month when we launched their ReviewGrab funnel, and about 30% of them were 2-stars or less. Within 60 days, they’re averaging 5 Google reviews/week, and 90+% of them are 5-stars.

“This thing has been working like a champ. Having SolutionReach blast the survey link out after all appointments has helped tremendously. Easily we’ve doubled the amount of Yelp and Google reviews since we’ve started.”
– G.P., Operations Director for 10-office ophthalmology practice in Central Texas

Similar story – this practice was averaging 1 Google review/month and has increased to 3 Google reviews/week. They were able to double their total number of reviews on virtually all of their target online properties – Google and Yelp – in less than 3 months.

Up until this point, this system is something we’ve only offered our full-service marketing clients to help solve their Review Problem.

These clients invest significant budgets each month for my team to manage and consult on all their marketing efforts.

But as word has started to spread about this Review Solution and how successful it is, I’ve received many requests from outside our core sphere of clients. So we’ve decided to offer this to a limited number of practices as a stand-alone product – The ReviewGrab Funnel.

Here’s what is included:

• Full ReviewGrab Funnel set-up, start to finish, just like you saw in the demo above

• A special review link to add to your SolutionReach or DemandForce sequence, which is exactly how the clients mentioned above and countless others have made dramatic increases to their reviews

• A texting option that allows you to text the review link to someone directly (However you choose to use it, helping patients leave reviews is always only a few clicks away.)

Besides these standard inclusions, I’m going to share some bonus assets you will get to fully maximize your reviews.

Because generating reviews is one thing, but you also want as many potential patients to see those reviews as possible. So I have some extras for you that are going to help you maximize the value of every review you get.

I’ll get into those in a minute…

Before that, let’s talk about what ReviewGrab is NOT

1. This is not a review generator that creates fake reviews out of thin air.

Google will slap you for fake reviews, possibly even blacklist you. Plus that’s not an ethical way to operate, so we just don’t even get into that.

ReviewGrab is a tool to ask real patients for real reviews in a way that will make them more likely to follow through, and it can operate 100% on autopilot.

If you can’t stand seeing your competitor down the street with 5x more reviews than you, even though you know you’re the better doctor – try this.

2. This is not any kind of push-button money miracle, guaranteeing you’ll make a ton of money from your online reviews. So let’s get that out of the way now.

That’s not how marketing works, as you know. But I need to write that as a disclaimer.

If you see the value in being THE PRACTICE in your market that has 10x more reviews than your competitor down the street….

If you get the psychology behind someone seeing your 300 reviews vs. Dr. Competitor’s 30 reviews and how that benefits you…

and you understand the many ways that can be impactful to your practice growth over the long-term…

then this is for you.

So who is it for:

A few types of practices do really well with ReviewGrab. See if any of these are you:

1. New Practices that want to achieve authority fast

Maybe you’re new in town, not well-known, and you want to quickly establish authority in the market. Reviews from new patients are the perfect way to do that.

And if you’re not yet at full capacity, and you’re spending extra time with patients and really making them feel cared for and special, they will be more than happy to leave you awesome reviews.

ReviewGrab works great in this scenario.

2. Established practices with a strong brand but lack the social reinforcement of great reviews

Maybe you’re an established practice with thousands of patients, but you still only have a dozen Google reviews. I see this all the time, and it’s because the practice hasn’t put an emphasis on reviews because they’re busy.

This is especially important if you’re marketing, and people end up finding you on the web but seeing that your competitor has more reviews than you have, and then you lose that lead.

ReviewGrab is useful for an established practice to help their online reviews reflect what they’re promoting in the community.

3. The type of doctor who wants to dominate his or her market in every way

Working in medical marketing for more than a decade now, there are a couple of schools of thought in terms of marketing domination.

Some doctors are fine doing their usual thing, seeing a comfortable number of patients a day, making a solid living doing it, without any emphasis on growth.

Then there are the ones who are more aggressive in their thinking. They want to grow, they want to serve more patients, they want to establish themselves as the obvious go-to practice in their areas.

Large or small, new or established, if this is you, one of the most visible ways to move toward market domination is through your patient reviews online.

4. Those who understand the importance of defending against bad reviews.

Regardless of how well you serve patients, bad reviews are going to happen. Either from unreasonable patients or from jealous competitors, someone is going to leave negative reviews.

In many instances, you have no recourse to have bad reviews removed. This is very difficult to do.

Your best defense is a good offense, and that means getting as many HAPPY patients to leave reviews as possible.

I have read the emails sent by honest patients who have canceled appointments because they went online and saw negative reviews.

You must protect yourself against losing patients to bad reviews, and more positive reviews are the way to go.

So if you’re in any of those boats, I hope you can see the value in this system.

Leveraging every single positive review (BONUS)

Since you’re still reading, you probably see the value in building up your reviews, and also in having a proven mechanism to make it happen on autopilot.

But getting the reviews is only part of the equation.

The second part is once you have the reviews, you want to leverage them in as many ways as possible. This is where the bonus assets come into play.

These include:

1. New Review Monitoring

We’ll set you up with our Review Monitoring daily email alerts.

This means you will get emails for new reviews that are posted on your online profiles – Google, Facebook, Yelp and more.

Rather than having to manually visit each of these sites to monitor your reviews, we’ll send them right to your inbox.

You’ll know when you receive new 5-star reviews across the web.

And if you do receive an unfortunate negative review, you will see it quickly and can respond in a timely manner.

This puts the power of reputation management in your hands.

2. Review Stream for Your Website

How awesome would it be to easily showcase all of your best reviews from all over the web, right on your website? You can, thanks to our Review Stream.

It automatically pulls your new 4-star and 5-star reviews and lists them on your website in a very attractive layout (see below). This alone is the kind of thing that other software companies charge hundreds of dollars a month for, and we’re giving it to you as a bonus.

3. Review Syndication to Social Media

Why not create positive reinforcement and build your authority by posting awesome reviews to your Facebook page?

With our Review Syndication, you can do just that. We’ll post new reviews – only the best ones – to your Facebook page automatically.

So to reiterate, you get Full ReviewGrab Text Funnel Set-up, The ability to add patients to the funnel via email or text, And the complete backend that guides patients through the review process to leave reviews where you need them most.

You also get additional bonuses – monitoring, review stream and social syndication – to make sure you get the most from your review funnel. Even if you’re already getting reviews, this will help you better leverage them.

How you can take advantage (time is of the essence)

Simplicity is one of the keys to success, so we’ve made this as easy as possible.

There is no software to buy, nothing to download and install on your computers, no need to invest expensive new hardware.

You will have no separate hosting fees, no requirement to buy software upgrades in the future, no dollars earmarked for technical support. You won’t even need to call your IT guy to get this up and running.

The entire process is turnkey for you, and you only pay a one-time set-up investment, followed by an easy payment of $249 per month. This covers everything I’ve described here – your customized review funnel to use as much as you want, along with all the bonuses I mentioned.

This covers your initial office location. Want to add more? That’s easy. It’s only an additional $50 per location per month.

This also includes category exclusivity in your area.

So if you join ReviewGrab and you’re a cosmetic dentist, you lock out every other cosmetic dentist in your area from using this. If you’re a LASIK surgeon, you’re the only LASIK practice in town who will have this unfair advantage. This is valid for the lifetime of your membership.

My promise to you

Just in case you’ve never worked with me, my promise to you is this:

I only want my clients investing in tools and strategies that work for them.

ReviewGrab, like any of my products, solves a real problem that it not being addressed in the market.

It’s easier and faster to get patients to leave you 5-star reviews.

If you disagree and don’t like that, or if you prefer to keep doing what you’re doing now, and getting the same results you’re seeing now, you can cancel any time. No contracts, no long-term commitments, just cancel and you will not be billed again.

A few things to remember:

• This is the lowest price we’re offering for ReviewGrab, during this public launch.

• You may be able to buy later, but it will be at a higher price and without the bonuses thrown in.

• We have a limited number of openings that we’re making available in our software at this time. Excellent service is my #1 priority, and that can’t happen if I open this up to too many people too fast.

• So we’re starting with 50 openings. Once those are filled, we’ll shut the doors for now and re-open later.

This is a unique opportunity as it’s a product and funnel that we put together for our clients, and we’re opening it up to a few select practices because we see just how beneficial it can be.

How to secure ReviewGrab for your specialty in your area

Click the link below to send me your info and reserve your zip code.

I or one of my team will give you a shout to do a quick demo and answer any questions you have.

If you want to move forward, we’ll get a few key pieces of information from you, and get you set up and ready to start within 1 business day. How’s that for service?

Yes! Let’s Do This

In conclusion, If you feel like you want all the benefits of ReviewGrab for your practice….

If you feel like it’s an important time to get more reviews for your practice, and you want a way to do it that’s easy, fun and actually works incredibly well well….

Trust your gut, give me a shout and let’s get started.

Click Here to Get Started

I hope this has been helpful to you, and I look forward to helping you get more reviews!

To your success,

Troy Cole

 

PS – Maybe you want to challenge yourself to double your reviews by end of year or to have the most reviews in your market within the next 12 months. I’m here to help.

And if you’re frustrated with how many reviews you’re getting now, it makes sense to jump on this offer.

After all, the price only goes up, and the bonus content makes it a no-brainer.

If you’re at all interested, now is the time to jump on this instead of waiting and paying more or risk a competitor joining and staking claim to your market.

Secure the Best Deal Now

 

PPS – If you still feel stuck, uncertain, and unsuccessful in your new patient reviews, give this a shot. You have nothing to lose.

You’re leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table if you don’t have your patients out there singing your praises and sharing their stories with the world online.

What will life be like 6 months from today if you don’t make a change now?

Don’t let Dr. Competitor down the street continue to steal new patient revenue from you, all over something as easily remedied as this.

Make a Change Now

Think about the last time you shared a post on your practice’s Facebook page, and you’re pretty sure it was awesome…

but it just didn’t get the engagement you were hoping for.

Maybe it’s a new blog post on your website. Or a video you made in the office.

When that happens, it’s not because the content isn’t great. More often than not, it’s the context you create (or lack thereof).

Social media is tricky because people aren’t actively looking for the solution you’re selling. To get someone to stop what they’re doing and engage with you is not an easy task.

Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can use to make your Facebook posts more persuasive, and get more of your target audience to comply with your requests — click, watch, share, whatever.

Let’s talk about 4 of these simple tricks now:

1. Focus Around Their Problem, Not Your Solution

This happens all the time. You as a medical professional have a number of solutions to patient problems. And you want to share those solutions with the world. That’s all good.

The mistake is to frame everything around the solutions you offer… and not around the patient’s problem.

For example, if you’re a LASIK surgeon, here’s how not to start a post:

“Do you cringe at the thought of an eye procedure, like LASIK?”

Eek, not good.

But what are the problems here?

1 . We’re talking about our solution (LASIK), not their problem (bad vision, frustrations with glasses/contacts, limitations to life, anything).

2. Therefore, we’re associating negativity (cringing at the thought of something) with the solution (LASIK). Forget about helping your position, this actually hurts it.

3. And we’ve completely overlooked our most persuasive talking point — the patient’s own negative experiences with their current vision solutions.

A better option?

“Do you cringe at the thought of getting sand stuck in your contact lens?”

Now we’re focused on the problem the patient is experiencing — contact lenses are awful.

BONUS: We know patients have experienced this before. What contact wearer hasn’t gotten sand stuck under his/her contacts? This makes for persuasive content, because we aren’t dealing in hypotheticals. It’s real life.

From there, you may want to tease an article like so:

“With beach season coming up, we asked people to compare their LASIK procedures with that oh-so-fun feeling of getting sand caught under their contact lenses…”

See what I’m doing here?

Another example, in the orthodontic space:

BAD:

“Do you cringe at the thought of wearing braces as an adult?”

This is focused on the solution + draws negativity to it = not persuasive.

RAD:

“Do you cringe at the thought of another new client meeting because you’re embarrassed to show your smile?”

In contrast, now we’re focused on the problem, highlighting a frustration the prospect has. Then we walk toward the light, i.e. your solution.

2. Use Numbers Instead of Percentages.

This is an easy one. When it comes to sharing a statistic, use an actual number and not a percentage.

Our brains have trouble turning percentages into mental pictures, which means percentages aren’t nearly as persuasive as the data they represent.

BAD

“90% of people were highly satisfied with their treatment.”

RAD

“9 out of 10 people surveyed said they were so excited with their results, they would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Easy as that. Convert your percentages to actual numbers, and give them some flavor and context so your prospect can “picture” what the numbers represent.

3. Don’t reveal the punchline in the post

This is a big one.

You want people to take action on your post, right? Watch the video. Read the article. Take the self-test.

Well, if you share the punchline — the result, the conclusion — in the post itself, why would anyone engage with it?

“Man Attempts Bank Robbery During Lunch Break. Cops Take Him Down. No One Died.”

Who’s clicking on that? No one. We already know the story. NEXT.

Make it a point NOT to “give it all away” in the text of your post.

4. Use “click bait” to get the viewer to take action

This piggybacks on the previous point. Not only should you keep the punchline a secret, you also need to actively encourage people to engage.

This means using a type of writing called “click bait.” Stick with me here.

You’ve probably heard of click bait. And I hope you don’t turn a deaf ear when I use that term.

While click bait is typically associated with online “fake news” outlets, it’s actually an effective tool to get people to take action. And it doesn’t have to be sleazy.

So what is click bait? At its core, you’re creating a scenario in which curiosity overcomes the prospect and they can’t help but click to satisfy that curiosity.

You see this all the time on your Facebook feed.

“Man saves cat from tree. What happened next left the neighbors stunned!”

HEY, what happened to that dude? And the cat? I need to know. **CLICK**

That’s clickbait.

It doesn’t have to be so spammy sounding. Here are a few of what I would call ‘above-board’ click bait posts.

LASIK — “We asked her to tell us how she felt in the moments after her LASIK procedure. Her response left our office staff speechless.”

ORTHO — “Think you can spot the one with ceramic braces? This picture had the entire office baffled.”

OPTOM — “DRESS TEST: Blue and black OR gold and white? You be the judge.”

All of those are click-bait style teasers designed to get the engagement.

The trick with click-bait is this:

Make the hook ambiguous enough so the reader doesn’t know if it’s teasing something really good or really bad.

In example one —  ”Her response left our office staff speechless.” In a good way? In a bad way? Who knows. CLICK AND FIND OUT.

You’re all set.

Now you have no excuse to write non-persuasive social media posts. Get out there today and start testing your newfound knowledge.

And to make sure you don’t miss a post, click here to join my private email list if you haven’t already. If you like this, you’ll love the juicy nuggets I share in the privacy of your inbox.

On my short list of major pitfalls to avoid in business, leaking profits is pretty close to the top.

But I see it so often with practices, and the type of major profit leaks I’m talking about are so under-the-radar that most doctors don’t even realize it’s happening.

That’s why in the next 7 minutes, I’ll show you why and how you most likely experienced a 7-figure loss in new patient revenues last year AND the steps you can take to make sure it never happens again.

Sound good? Keep reading.

It all starts with a process called your Sales Funnel.

This is the pathway in which John Q. Public transforms from average guy on the street to happy patient who loves you to pieces.

Think of it like an actual funnel – you put people in the top, and a certain number of those people (and their dollars) come out as patients at the bottom.

A funnel that goes right into your bank account.

Even if you’ve never sat down and consciously put together a sales funnel, you still have one.

Your sales funnel is made up of 3 parts:

1. Marketing

2. Conversions

3. Fulfillment

So many people over-complicate this and try to convince you there’s some lengthy, advanced methodology behind it. That’s a bunch of garbage. Tell those people to take a hike.

Optimizing this simple, 3-step funnel is the key to untold riches for you and your practice. To do that, you need to make sure it’s not leaking profits. Which it is. (But not for long.)

Remember, this funnel is going straight into your bank account.

Just imagine:

For every $2 that goes into your coffers, another $1 leaks out. You’ve got a problem.

But don’t worry, we’re going to plug those leaks.

Download a blueprint you can use to find and plug the leaks in your sales funnel.
Click Here

Let’s start at the top.

Marketing is the big, sexy category right at the top of your funnel.

Marketing includes anything you do to promote your practice – newspaper/TV/radio advertising, social media promotion, digital marketing (SEO/PPC), even health fairs and community events fall into this category.

Anything you do to promote your practice is marketing.

You probably either have staff devoted to your marketing, or you work with an agency on it. Maybe both.

Most practices do a decent job of marketing, good enough to get folks interested and turn a profit with new patients.

As long as you have your bases covered, adequate budget to get your name out there, you can profitably market your practice.

For the sake of this example, let’s say your marketing is working decently well for you.

Moving on:

Now look at the bottom of your funnel – Fulfillment.

This just means giving great results.

If the treatment you offer can fulfill the promise you make to patients in your marketing, that’s all the patient wants.

You tell patients you’ll help them achieve awesome outcomes, reach their goals, love their lives more.

As long as you can deliver on those big promises (and if you can’t, you really shouldn’t be making them), then you’re good on the fulfillment side.

I’m going to guess you have great outcomes, otherwise let’s face it, you wouldn’t be in practice.

Alright, so you have solid marketing and strong fulfillment.

Now it’s time to look at the backburner category, the neglected middle child of your sales funnel, the oft overlooked yet absolutely critical reason for your profit leak:

The mid-funnel category – Conversions – is where you lost 7 figures last year.

Here’s the deal – you may have the best marketing campaigns out there, and the best doctors giving awesome results…

but if you don’t have a tried-and-true system for connecting the top of your funnel – the marketing – to the bottom of your funnel  – the fulfillment – I guarantee you have profit leaks. Big ones.

Leaks, plural.

In fact, there are at least 6 ways you’re losing new patients – and by proxy, their money – during the conversion process. Right now. Today. Let’s look at each of these leaky areas.

Leak 1. Your Website.

A young lady, Rhonda Research, hears your marketing message, and she visits your website. Great!

This is the first “hump” to get over with your marketing. Getting folks to engage on some level. And I’m talking about websites because everyone goes online to “vet” you before they ever engage with your practice.

The thing is, once Rhonda gets to your site, what happens?

Does she schedule? Does she contact you? Or does she get sucked back into pseudo-political articles on Facebook?

98% of the time, Rhonda leaves your website and doesn’t return, without so much as completing a contact form.

And when you lose her, guess what? You also lose her $5k or $10k or whatever amount she would have paid for you to solve her problem.

Leak 2. Lead Connection.

Rhonda completes a form. Hooray! You have her contact info, and she is officially a lead.

Now you have to connect with her to schedule an appointment.

Oh wait, can’t get her on the phone? Darn it. There she goes, leaking right out of your funnel.

Leak 3. No-Show Appointments.

Alright, Rhonda contacted you, AND you were able to connect with her and get her to book.

….But her appointment was an hour ago. And she no-showed.

Leak 4. People who have consults but don’t book a procedure.

Let’s say Rhonda showed up for her consult. She is IN the door, meeting with your best counselor, and having a great time. She’s a shoo-in… right?

Not so fast. Rhonda came in alone, and now she wants to go home and talk it over with her husband before making a decision.

Extra sales training would come in handy at this point, but too little, too late for that. You know that if Rhonda leaves, her likelihood of turning into a patient drops drastically.

Leak 5. Procedure/Treatment No-Shows

Alright, Rhonda booked her surgery, gave you the deposit, all is well. Except….

She no-shows her surgery. NO! Why would she do this?

You can’t understand it, but it happened. The surgeon isn’t happy. The practice admin isn’t happy. No one is happy.

Leak 6. Turning Happy Patients into Referral Machines.

Procedure day! Success! Another happy patient to go out into the world and tell everyone about you, right?

Yeah… if she remembers to do it. Problem is, most folks get right back to life and completely forget that YOU are the one who changed life for the better.

Personal referrals are the most powerful referrals. And 4 out of 5 folks trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

If you don’t empower Rhonda to leave reviews and make referrals, that’s another leak.

So what’s your solution?

You need a system.

“Losers have goals. Winners have Systems.” – Scott Adams, the dude who writes Dilbert

If you’re like most practices, you take a reactive approach to these types of leaks.

“Call that person and try to get them back on the books!” <<< this isn’t an actual plan. It’s a reaction.

A system would help you not only recapture people who leaked, but set you up for success so that fewer leak in the first place.

So if you could take your Swiss Cheese sales funnel, add some pipes, chutes, engines and nets to make sure your leaks are plugged and that people keep moving down the path to treatment…

What would that be worth to you?

Let’s do the math on a $5,000 treatment or procedure. Even though I don’t know your practice volume or the number of leads coming in, this will be a useful illustration to give you an idea of the positive impact that comes with improving your funnel.

If you ‘rescue’ a modest number of patients at each of the leak points, check out what happens to your bank account:

Plug Leak 1 =  2 more patients/week from your website.

Plug Leak 2 = 2 more patients/week who contact you and you can get to book.

Plug Leak 3 = 1 more patient/week who doesn’t no-show the consult.

Plug Leak 4 = 2 more patients/month who book at consult.

Plug Leak 5 = 1 more patient/month who doesn’t no-show treatment/surgery.

Plug Leak 6 = Multiple new patients from a happy patient who is empowered and reminded to refer friends and family.

OK, so if you add all these up, you end up with a minimum of 23 patients a month x $5,000 per patient = $115,000

Extrapolate that out to 12 months, and that’s $1.38 million over the course of the year.

And that’s why the second phase of practice marketing – the Conversion phase – holds the biggest opportunity for your practice growth.

If you’re tired of spending valuable time and money to market your practice, only to lose millions in potential revenue, the solution is simple:

Analyze your sales funnel, find the leaks, and fix them.

I’ve got a special gift for you that can help:

I’d like to give you a copy of my Perpetual Patients Funnel Blueprint that I use to uncover hidden and lost revenue for my clients, repair the holes in their sales funnels, and put more patients in the chair and more money in their bank accounts.

Your blueprint is ready. Just tell me where to send it.

Click Here

 

When you cut through the clutter, my clients have one simple goal:

They want to be the Obvious Choice.

Once people start to see you as an obvious choice to their problem, magic starts to happen.

You don’t have to spend as much on marketing.

Patients more actively refer their friends and family members.

You develop a reputation based on value, which means higher prices and an easier sell.

So how do you become the Obvious Choice?

Through Authority Signals. If you’re putting off the right Authority Signals, you’re “the one.”

Really it comes down to three major Authority Signals.

Back in the day, these were major mountains to climb, and here’s how they played out:

1. Practice – You had to be in practice for decades, long enough to accrue tens of thousands of patients who could refer you to others.

2. Promotion – You had to spend Big Money on marketing and self-promotion. Why? Because traditional media channels are expensive, and that was the gateway to awareness in the market.

3. Press – You had to create PR awareness through local market coverage in the news, articles and other media. While you were at the mercy of the media groups as to when, why and how they might feature you, this helped to validate your positioning.

But we’re not back in the day anymore. 

You don’t have to ‘pay your dues’ while you climb the ladder to the top. (That’s what your peers and predecessors want you to believe, but it’s garbage, and I’ll show you why)

Thankfully, with new technology at our disposal and a fresh understanding of how people research and make decisions, you can turn these mountains into molehills and build your Authority Signals in record time.

Let’s work through this list to discuss some of the ways to do this.

Hack the Press

We’ll start with the press. No longer do the newscasters and writers hold the keys to the PR castle. You have plenty of ways to gain “press coverage” to show your market you are the authority.

Here are three off the top of my head:

1. Write and circulate press releases online.

There are dozens of websites that allow you to syndicate your news release to websites all over the country for a reasonable fee. Circulate the release, link to the major websites that showcase it, and share that on social media (with a boost to get it on front of other folks).

2. Target news station employees with Facebook or LinkedIn ads.

Why clog up the reporter’s inbox when you can use social media to get in their newsfeed?

3. Purchase a slot on a local talk show, then leverage the recording of your appearance.

This is one of my all-time favorites. Talk to your local network TV affiliates, see if you can buy an interview slot on one of their local morning shows. Chances are, you can. Make an appearance, and talk about the problems you solve for patients.

Here’s the trick – Then you get the recording of your appearance, put it on your website and use it to generate leads from Facebook ads. It’s not your standard commercial. It’s a news piece, which packs 10x the power of an ad.

Hack Your Practice Promotion

Spending millions in your local market to promote your practice? No thanks.

While traditional media still plays a role in your branding, you can use Facebook ads to pin-point your exact ideal patient online.

Want to target a mother of teenagers who enjoys yoga and lives with 5 miles of your office? You can do that on Facebook, and you can do it with an ad that speaks directly to her pain points.

Consider all the target demographics that may be ideal for your services:

• People with X-mile radius
• Men between the ages of X and Y
• Women between the ages of X and Y
• Mothers/fathers of young children
• Mothers/fathers of teenage children
• People who are outdoorsy
• People who do X job (X = virtually any profession)
• Women who just got engaged
• People with a birthday this month
• People who have visited your website already

That’s 10 different audience segments, and I can think of 3 ways to market to each one. You’re talking 30 different targeted campaigns, all of which you can test with a few dollars and see if they have traction.

The possibilities are endless, and at that price point, you have zero excuses.

Hack Your Best REferral Source

Happy patients are your best and cheapest referral source. But you don’t need an army of 20,000 patients to scrounge up a few personal referrals.

I’m sure you’ll get there one day, but in the meantime, let’s go ahead and hack this Authority Signal now.

YES, a word-of-mouth referral from a friend, family member or coworker is an important part of the decision-making process, especially with something like a medical procedure.

But here’s the thing – 8 out of 10 people say they put online reviews and personal recommendations in the same boat.

Meaning a friend’s referral is great, but recommendations from strangers will do just fine, thanks.

Then the question becomes “How can I get more patients recommending me to the world?”

How about the world’s largest search engine? The place where people are literally looking for your services.

I’m talking about Google. More specifically, Google reviews.

Every day, billions of searches take place on Google. People Googling their way to solutions.

And in your city, when someone searches your specialty, what do they see? A list of practices, all with a few reviews.

Go look for yourself. Maybe you have a couple dozen reviews, like your competitors. (If you have over 100, color me impressed.)

How would the public perceive you if you had 500 five-star reviews?

Do you think more people would click to your practice first? Would new patients automatically assume you have the solution they are looking for?

Would this be an ultimate Authority Signal for your practice? Would it position you as the Obvious Choice since you’ve clearly solved problems expertly for so many other patients?

Of course.

But how do you get patients to leave you these incredibly valuable reviews?

I outline it all in this free cheat sheet.

No excuses – You can be the Obvious Choice

The barriers of building your Authority Signals are now gone. It’s not 1973 anymore. It doesn’t take decades to build a reputation and become the leader in your local market. You can take control of your practice positioning right now, which only leaves the question – Will you?

Need a hand? Someone to point you in the right direction, road map in hand, ready to conquer your local market and attract the lion’s share of new patients?

Get in touch with me here and let’s see if we’re a good fit.

Why do I put such emphasis on curating so many 5-star reviews from happy patients?

Truth is, it’s not about your reviews. It’s about your reputation.

Here’s what I mean:

We live in an incredible time. Anyone, anywhere can go online right now and have immediate access to your reputation at the click of a button.

This means the web can be your greatest asset or your worst enemy for attracting new patients.

Remember these 6 important facts when you consider how much emphasis, energy and budget to apply to establishing and protecting your online reputation.

1. Your reputation is ubiquitous with your online presence. They are tied together.

There’s virtually nowhere you can go online that you aren’t seeing some measure of your reputation.

Google (and pretty much all the search engines) has some kind of review/rating mechanism.

Yelp is one of the most popular sites in the country, and it’s entire premise is to rank and review the reputation of a business.

2 billion people on this planet use Facebook, and guess what: People leave reviews by the millions on Facebook business pages every single day.

The places people are spending their time online – search engines, social media and more – all have components of reputation measurement to them. There’s no getting away from it.

Here’s why this is concerning:

2. You can’t ‘out-market’ your reputation anymore.

You’ve seen the old westerns that have a Snake Oil Salesman scene.

He rolls down main street with his carriage full of ‘Cure-All Elixirs’ and scams the townspeople into thinking he’s got the miracle medicine they need.

He sells his goods and hits the road. He’s long gone before the citizens know they’ve been duped.

And what recourse did they have? Not much. They couldn’t file complaints with the FTC. They couldn’t leave online reviews. They were out of luck. The snake oil salesman could stay ahead of his bad reputation.

Even as recently as a decade ago, it was possible to out-market a bad reputation.

Why? Because patients could only tell a few friends about their bad experience.

If you could market bigger and faster than your bad reputation spread, you won.

But that’s not the case anymore. Thanks to the web and the super computers we each have in our purse or pocket, “we the people” have the power.

If a patient feels mistreated, then can very quickly and easily share that feeling with the entire world.

It doesn’t matter how many marketing dollars you’re spending, if you have a sub-4-star review average on google, or if you only have a handful of reviews, that is a red flag to potential patients.

Am I saying you give poor patient care? No way. I’m sure you do an outstanding job.

Even so, you can still be negatively affected, and here’s why:

3. You don’t have to give poor service to earn a poor reputation online.

This has happened to all my big clients, so I bet it’s happened to you.

You do your best to treat every patient with the utmost personal care and attention. But that one patient keeps seeing the glass as half empty.

“Unreasonable” is the best way to describe him.

And even though you treated him with respect and care, and you even helped him achieve a great outcome…

He still left you a 2-star review on Google.

Or here’s another scenario that’s happened to many clients of mine:

You stumble upon a 1-star review loaded with complaints from a Jennifer Jacobson. You go to check your system… and you’ve never treated a Jennifer Jacobson.

Not only that, but her story sounds ridiculous, and no one in your office can remember anything about her.

That’s because Jennifer isn’t a patient. She’s a fake persona created by a jealous competitor who is trying to smear your name online.

Whether unreasonable patients or underhanded competition, you can earn a poor online reputation at no fault of your own.

Which doesn’t actually matter. You know why?

4. Patients believe what the web says about your reputation.

You may think, “Well, what does it matter with a few negative reviews? Do patients really look at these things anyway?”

Not only do patients look at reviews, but they use them to make decisions. Even when a personal referral is at play.

Consider this true story:

A practice I’m consulting forwards me an email in which a cataract patient, referred by her optometrist, canceled her appointment.

Why? Because she saw a couple of negative online reviews.

Remember, this is an older cataract patient, who you wouldn’t think would be so ‘tech-savvy’ right? Or at the very least wouldn’t trust online reviews as much as someone in a younger age group.

And it’s not like she randomly found the practice online – she was referred by her optometrist, someone she trusted.

Despite those facts, she was troubled by a couple of not-so-awesome reviews, so much so that she canceled her appointment.

Thankfully, she was honest enough to tell us why. For every person like her, there are many others who don’t share their reasoning for canceling. A big part of it is that they don’t like what they find during their research.

How many patients are you losing due to poor reviews, or simply due to a lack of reviews?

Yes, a lack of reviews can hurt as well. Here’s what I mean:

5. If people are locally searching for a provider, in many cases, they have only one differentiating piece of info: The reviews.

Here’s an example from a Google Local search. Take a look at what I mean:

Someone performing this search only has one way to snap-judge your reputation and choose who to click – the reviews.

The first click is the click you want. In the example above, it’s only natural that the practice with 82 reviews is going to get the clicked first much more than the others.

Bottom line is this:

6. Your reputation is out there, and it’s marketing you right now.

It’s not a matter of IF you want to use your reputation to market yourself. It’s simply a matter of what your reputation is already saying about you.

Do you want to be in control and show yourself in the best possible light?

Do you want to create the best opportunity for patients to choose you over your competitors?

Or would you rather leave it to chance and hope that you’re ‘doing enough’ so that patients choose you over your competition?

Hope is not a strategy.

Especially when you consider how much you’ve invested in your reputation:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars for your education.

Decades of your time, hard work and dedication to your expertise.

The personal investments you’ve made to create an awesome patient care team.

All told, we’re talking millions of dollars and basically your entire life – all committed to the life-changing experience you give to patients every day.

What’s it worth to you to protect the reputation you’ve built?

In conclusion, maybe you feel helpless when it comes to managing your reputation online.

I want to encourage you. You can take control, and here’s a list of precisely how you can do that.

• Encourage happy patients to leave reviews on the sites that matter most to you and create a way for them to do it quickly and easily
• Figure out a way to identify and correct as many negative patient experiences as you can before they turn into negative reviews.
• Monitor your reviews across the web, so you know when new ones are posted, and you can respond appropriately (positive or negative).
• Gather and share 5-star reviews on your website so new visitors can read stories from satisfied patients.
• Syndicate positive reviews to Facebook to influence your followers and new visitors.

While this task list is going to take several hours a week, it’s absolutely worth every minute to take control of your online reputation.

If you’re interested in automating all of these tasks and spending only a few minutes a week doing this, let’s chat.

This is something we do for my medical clients across the country, and it works incredibly well. Not only that, but it’s only a few dollars a day to build and protect your most valuable asset as a practice – your reputation.

Book a 10-minute discovery call with me to find out more.

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I hope this essay was useful and eye-opening to you. Don’t lose focus on building your reputation online. It will improve the performance of all your other marketing efforts.