By Daniel Coulton Shaw & Alex Zakucia
The podcast currently has 39 episodes available.
Your old receptionist would probably teach the new hire their old habits with mistakes.
The best practice is to record videos on all standard operating procedures and put them somewhere where you can share them with your team.
Imagine how many times you have already onboarded someone and how much time you would save if you could share with them one link where they would have all these videos.
For more best practices, join our free facebook group here.
Always drive every patient enquiry to the call first.
But there are still some that do not want to call, or they are not ready yet. To capture those potential patients as well, you need a contact form.
Most forms we see on the clinic's websites are not that good. Usually, name, email, and sometimes phone, which people put the fake phone number. Yeah.
That information you're going to get from that potential patient is going to be weak. And also, you're not proving your quality as a clinic of excellence through the form, which you can do if you set up the series of questions correctly.
The more questions you add to the contact form, the fewer enquiries you'll get, but they will be of higher quality.
The perfect form needs three qualifiers, which are need, time and money.
Based on the answers, you can score enquiries. Your non-medical team should prioritise high-score enquiries (e.g. needs high-value treatment, needs it now and have money to pay for it).
Lastly, add your contact form link to all your social media and third-party profiles instead of your homepage.
We've created a template contact form you can copy and implement in your clinic. You can grab it for free in our facebook group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/clinicboost
Introduction
Dear clinic owner/manager,
Thank you for reading this. I know our time is valuable and I will do my very best to earn your trust by getting straight to the point.
So, the purpose of this blog post is to share with you in less than 5 minutes with 5 simple images, exactly what you can be doing right now as a clinic to reach more new and high-value patients.
Think of it as getting an "MBA in Clinic Marketing" and explain it in such a way that even a 12-year-old, a non-English speaker can understand it.
About
Before we get started, (and because I really want you to take this information seriously) please allow me a moment to briefly introduce myself.
I am the co-founder of a relatively successful dental clinic, (5 doctors / 5 million euros per year) with learnings from 13 years of consulting for more than 126 clinics both small & large across 26 countries to increase their revenue, reputation & results collectively by over 31% - yes, even during the COVID pandemic & lockdowns.
During those years, I too have been confused & misguided in the past about how best to reach new patients, thinking that there are so many different ways to choose from.
I was wrong.
I want to save you from the same mistakes.
So here it is:
No matter what "marketing agencies" and "business growth consultants" want you to believe...
There are only 2 ways to get your clinic more new or high-value patients...
Only 2 Ways
Yes, just 2. And that would be to:
1. Do Marketing (nothing new here, apart from the fact that there are just 6 sources of new patient inquiries for you to focus on, so easy to do, and just 1.5 of those strategies cost real money, (1.5. is not a typo, I'll cover that later)
or...
2. Optimize The New Patient Journey (most clinics overlook this, but it is even easier to get more patients this way - and there are only 5 things to look at which I'll cover later)
Ideally, you're doing both.
But, unless you've just opened your doors to your very first patient just a few weeks ago, or no matter if you have just:
10,
100,
or 1000 patients per week in your clinic,
I'd start with...
Read more here:
https://www.clinicboostmethod.com/blog/only-2-ways-to-reach-more-high-value-patients
Do you remember the last "great idea" that you tried to implement in your clinic?
How did it turn out? Take a moment to think right now about the last "big improvement" that you thought about but never managed to implement.
What happened there?
Well, if you're like most clinic owners, this "great idea" slowly suffocated. In-between patients, team motivation issues, technical, legal or other competing priorities in your medical practice and life outside of the clinic, your "great idea" then quietly took a bow and disappeared without anyone noticing, not even you.
If you've done the thought exercise that I mentioned above, you've probably remembered once again that "great idea" you wanted to implement a few months ago. Now you may have decided that it wasn't the right time anyway and that you'll do it sometime soon.
Perhaps this isn't your case; every "great idea" you have is put into place and gets tested and worked in the clinic immediately. However, in our day to day dealing with clinics owners and their teams all over the world - failure to implement good ideas and grow isn't as unusual as you might think.
We have found that the best practice of the "quarterly review" changes this problem forever for the clinics that we work with.
Instead of the "daily whirlwind" of dealing with patients, team & admin issues devouring all the time and energy your team desperately needs to focus on growing your clinic, the quarterly or annual review (when supported by the other 3 accountability cadences that we suggest implementing through the clinic boost method) makes sure that your "great ideas" get implemented fast.
In this podcast, we'll discuss why the most successful clinics have a morning/afternoon off for getting their whole team together every 3 months away from the clinic to reflect on the 3 months past and set goals for the next 3 months to come.
We'll also share with your the exact quarterly review & quarterly agenda taken from clinics of excellence so that you can implement the same in your medical or dental practice.
Ready? Let's dive in.
Why have a quarterly review in your clinic?
Without the quarterly review, you'll continue to stay in chaos with:
"We're already too busy!" I hear you say, so why have a meeting that takes half a day!? Yes - why do most successful clinics have a scheduled practice of taking a morning/afternoon off for a meeting with the whole team every 12 weeks and at the and / beginning of the year?
Well, just like you do with your patients, this is a necessary time for a check-up of each system and person in your clinic to see if you are moving towards your ideal state.
It's also a time to set new targets & implement new best practices.
Here's a summary of how we suggest you should do it, based on the best practices of the clinics that we have worked with.
The CBM Quarterly review
Who: everybody
Where: Away from the clinic
Duration: 2-3 hours
When: every 3 months
Preparation: Scoreboard, Printed 4 Questions of Accountability, Printed 4 Quarterly Questions
The CBM Quarterly agenda
Part 1
Part 2
(That's a quote by James Clear from a great book Atomic Habits.)
When I talk to clinics they usually belong to one of these 3 groups:
1. Freestyle
They have vague goals. Just doing day to day work, hoping things will get better in the future.
2. Goal oriented
This is much better, these types of clinics do have exact goals based on facts, but they are struggling to achieve them.
3. Systems oriented
This is the way. These are the clinics that not only have goals but also put systems in place that are executed every day to bring them closer to their target and track their progress.
By having systems that are followed, your clinic goals are not wishful thinking anymore but a reality that just needs to catch up with the present.
What systems do you have in place to support your goals as a clinic?
When you are tracking your patient journey numbers (such as messages, calls, consults...etc) don't rely on the automatic log of activities in your CRM.
Make your admin team log it manually as well. It helps them to:
- be accountable
- perform better
- know how they are standing in real time instead of end of the day
Try it and see your new patient numbers rise.
Here we explain how we look at hiring and how it closely mirrors the patient journey.
A good thought excersise is to simply a pick a patient who visited your clinic today and think about how they experienced your patient journey.
Does it match how you want it to be for the majority of your patients?
Let's say potential patient decided to write you a message.
- Have you engaged them in conversation or just send them big templated response?
- How quickly have you responded?
Then you call with them.
- Are you listening or talking too much? (80% of talking should be done by potential patient)
- Have you identified their true pains and needs?
They book a consultation.
- Are they greeted when they enter your premises?
- Coffee/tea served?
They go for treatment.
- Everything explained before? (fear of unknown)
- How long did they wait?
Post-op consultation
- After-care package?
- Did they give you review/testimonial?
Here's a brief summary:
Importance of being proactive vs reactive, by taking 5m a day to look at:
Reactive clinic owner/manager will never find the time to make changes to grow.
If you don't roll the dice at all (i.e. do marketing) you will loose.
There are 6 results you can get, when you roll (i.e. do marketing).
You might think that the goal is to only roll the highest possible result.
But the ones who win are the ones who roll the most.
The podcast currently has 39 episodes available.