Practice Perfect

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"For me, KPI is almost like a shortcut to get inside your business performance. So when you look at the metrics of customer acquisition costs, so you look on conversion rate except just the number that you see and your result in terms of conversion go up, in terms of acquisitions goes down, there is a lot more to that. It represents an entire aspect of your business."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now you're host, Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:34] Welcome back to another episode of Practice Perfect. The podcast for medical professionals and anybody running a services business as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. On today's show, we're going to talk about something that is probably the second most boring topic in the world. The first being operations which one of our guests is an expert in as well. But this boring topic is probably one of the most important things that you can have in your practice. Something that is going to be the difference between success and failure for a lot of doctors. And what is going to make you money for years to come. What I'm talking about are KPI. If you're not familiar with the acronym, KPI is our key performance indicators. They are the things that matter to a business. They are the numbers that actually move the needle as opposed to vanity metrics like likes on our Facebook page. They don't actually make you any money. Traditionally in my experience there hasn't really been any kind of software or any solution that I've found that has been able to do the job for our clients and for doctors in general. It's a complaint that I hear about constantly and it's an ongoing problem which I think we may have finally solved. Joining me today, I've got Izhak Musly from AtlasKPI. He's the CEO. And I've also got Randy Torben who is the V.P. of sales at Atlas. They are both experts on the subject and we're going to get into it in just a little bit. So Izhak and Randy, welcome.

Izhak and Randy: [00:02:02] Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Nick: [00:02:04] Awesome. All right, guys. I'm going to jump not really into the topic right off the start. I want you guys to tell me a little bit about you. So let's start with Izhak. Give us a little bit of a background of what your history is and how you came up with the idea of AtlasKPI and why you guys started it.

Izhak: [00:02:22] So the true story is that it started from the professional needs that pays to be a general manager in a different software company. We used the time to serve more of the retail industry part-managing the company. I found myself spending a lot of time crunching data within Excel spreadsheets and exporting information from multiple different types of systems just in order to come to the KPI that I needed in order to make a decision. With time, I realized that there is technology to solve my problem and I started to work just like every startup traditional story. Fo r my side-business/mother in law unit of the House. Developing a solution for for my needs. Starting to develop some sort of a system that's going to be able to speak to all the different softwares that I'm using and collect all the data and already run all the population for me automatically so I can really focus on making decisions and be there on the day to day and really experience the business. Not just from the side of the numbers. As I was watching it on it to serve myself, I went on a weekend to visit my father in law which is also a plastic surgeon. And while I was visiting I realized that he's still using papers to run his own practice. Pretty successful doctor with pretty good and established practice. But overviewing the performance on a monthly basis from the accountant, on top of the support in some sales printers report, and I figure that that's even way worse than what I'm trying to solve for myself. This is like different levels of simplicity. That there is so much potential in that area to improve. You start to speak with them about what I'm working on. It's obvious there is definitely a need for themselves to use something like that. I have connect with a couple of experienced people. We interview multiple different doctors. We realized all of them sharing the same type of pain points in terms of not having the data available when they need it available. Although they're so limited on time to run their business, they don't have that information available in their hands when they when they want to make the decision. When they have the time to review. All of them have major dependency on different people within the practice so if they accounted for the past and not support the office manager to generate themselves the report, the market theories, to generate for them some Google Analytics and then also spend with them a lot of time to sit and explain. Because it's information that came. And they just came in numbers, not in a visual way. And that is after we did all those interviews, we realize that that's what we want to focus. That's what we really try to aim ourselves too.

Nick: [00:04:55] I love that story. I think some of the best software I've ever used was born out of necessity. Was born out of people building it for themselves and then they decided to take it to the world although I've got to tell you, I've never heard of anyone brave enough to take on the father in law's business so I commend you, my friend. That is appalled and you're probably better off for it so you know it better work. I can't think of any better guarantee than that. That's pretty amazing, actually.

Izhak: [00:05:25] If I can make him happy, I'm definitely going to be happier.

Nick: [00:05:30] That is a very very bold move. So I would stand behind recommending this software after hearing that. That is a 100 percent guarantee right there. Izhak literally put everything on the line there making sure that this thing actually works and doesn't shoot down. So Randy, I know you're on the frontlines. You're dealing with doctors. Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in this and why you joined the company and what's passionate for you about this industry.

Randy: [00:05:55] Absolutely. Well, in a former life for the company that Izhak was the GM of, I played the same role. And then we went different ways. I ended up working in a software company that focused on efficiency metrics in healthcare. Not necessarily for plastic surgery but for large medical centers and hospitals. And after reconnecting with Izhak and understanding the new project he was working on, after seeing his passion, and I agree the gall to take this project on for his father in law given the family, I also became passionate about it and I was happy to join him. And I'm glad I did because as a professional sales person who speaks to doctors, I hope that I'm able to convey to them that a lot of their practice is also revolving around sales and about sales metrics. And as I've worked for companies where I've needed to track my leads or my customer lifecycle, how long it's taking me to make the sale, these are all things that these doctors and their staff have to deal with but they are not able to utilize some of the same technology that exists in other markets that's focused in other verticals. And so to be able to introduce them to a, in my personal opinion, a sales tool that can grow revenue. But something that's simple enough for a doctor, for an office manager, for an association to use, this is typically the hottest thing since sliced bread. You know what I mean?

Nick: [00:07:43] Absolutely. I think it's something that a lot of doctors are stuck with right now. And what Izhak said there about them still using paper, a lot of them are still in the same situation. So you know, you've got everything from resistance from staff for not using EMR type software to manage their records to just them getting stuck in their old ways or frankly a lot of the time, software just gets in the way more than anything. It creates more of a problem than it solves and that's what I've seen with it with other solutions. But let me ask you both to answer this question. What are the main reasons for having KPIs? What do KPIs mean for you and your mind? And Why should doctors care about them?

Randy: [00:08:21] Well, if I can answer first, we have a saying 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it'. Because how can you tell if you are growing or you're not growing if you don't go where you started? If you started with a dollar and you now have a second dollar, you're up you're up by some would say 100 percent right. If you grow another dollar, you're still growing but you haven't grown by 100 percent. Right? Because now you've already had two, you've gone to three. And so when you can measure everything from your revenue to your expenses to the number of patients you see, you almost begin to understand that correlation between these different metrics. And these metrics becomes KPIs. Standing for key performance indicators. Because they are that. How are you performing? And I can speak for almost anybody. I think we can all in every walk of life always be doing better. And so that's really the focus of these KPI. Is to be doing better.

Izhak: [00:09:28] I'll add to that. When you said what KPI is for you. And for me, KPI is almost like a shortcut to getting inside your business performance. So when you look at the metrics of customer acquisition costs, so you look on conversion rate except just the number that you see and your result in terms of conversion go up, in terms of acquisitions goes down, there is a lot more to that. It represents an entire aspect of your business. If you are looking in isolated, only the revenue that you bring again from the existing customer that's referring to you their friends have much more than just a revenue number. You represent the NPS or how much the customers are happier. What's the level of service that you provide? When you let the customer go lower, your loyalty to customer go to her friend, you did a great job on this customer. If this number is going down, it's not just you losing money but it also means that your services is not the same performance as it was before. Or if your customer acquisition cost is going up, means that it takes from you more now to gain brand new customers into your door and more opportunities. Now you are starting to pay more. Either competition around you increased or your fells went down or different sources are not performing as before. And like Randy mentioned, it's a better way of being able to look at your own business and see if you're really growing on the rates that you want in all the different aspects that businesses need to operate in the right way. So it's all going to work. So just like there is teamwork within people of the business, also the different aspects of the business working in the team. There needs to be a synergy between the front, to the conversiom, to the costs, to the end of the bulk. And I think the KPI is the best way to get the entire picture from A-Z.

Nick: [00:11:08] I think those are both fantastic answers and I got to tell you guys that it's a point of frustration for me when I speak to doctors and they don't understand this. And here's the reality, I started off the show by saying that it's the second most boring thing. Number one, the thing that makes you the most money I think is operations and systematization as well. But I'm not saying that it's boring because I'm taking a swipe at it. I'm saying that it's boring in the sense that it's not sexy. So when a doctor engages a marketing company or a consultant, they'll come in and they'll touch on all the sexy stuff. They will touch on, let's use the analogy of a car. If this were a car, they touch on the engine, the horsepower, the wheels, the paint job, all of that stuff. You know you've got your web site that's pretty, it's painted nice. You've got a lot of good server for your your thing, your web site's fast. All of these things are absolutely irrelevant. If your check engine light is on and you don't know that it's on and then your engine blows in another few miles. And that's essentially what doctors are doing right now. They don't think twice about getting in their car and they would never drive their car anywhere if their speedometer or gas gauge was broken. But they will run their multi multimillion dollar practice flying absolutely blind. Relying on people that may or may not care about their practice. And the reality is that most times doctors are not even in the practice. They are there to do the consultations and then they're doing surgery. And when they're doing surgery, and if it's a full day or two of surgery, a week minimum, that means that nobody is running the show for those two days and then they don't know what's actually happening. And I've seen this over and over again where their dashboard, just like the dashboard of their car is not functioning. Because Most times it's just plain non-existent.

Randy: [00:12:49] Nick, if I can I'd like to add to that. Especially focusing on what you have just said about the doctors being in and out of the practice. That's one reason why it's so important to recognize that the technology in the industry has grown to not only allow these doctors to move from paper to software but to now have that software be available through their mobile phone. Because it's one thing to manage the KPIs from your practice, it's an entirely separate page to make sure that whether they're in surgery, they are at a conference, or they're taking a two week well earned vacation, to be able to recognize where those KPIs are in their practice, to feel comfortable being away, to know that nobody is stealing from them. Nobody is slacking and that their standards are still being met.

Nick: [00:13:43] Absolutely. And you've actually brought up a very good point that I want to touch on before we go any further. And I've got some questions I want to ask you guys before we even get into your software. But I think you've touched on the dirty little secret of the industry. Nobody really talks about this and I've seen this in multiple practices and it's my belief from what I've seen from experience that this is not a one off. It's not something that doesn't happen. When you grow to a certain size and you're not really paying attention to your business, people start to steal. You could have a bad egg or it could be systematic. It can be job satisfaction but I've seen everything from people taking Botox and running a business on the side to just flat out embezzling two to three hundred thousand dollars out of a practice. And the physician had absolutely no clue that it was happening because he wasn't monitoring anything. He didn't have any alarm bells that were going off. He didn't know his numbers and people were just doing this over and over. And the sad reality is that that doctor was doing everything absolutely right. He wanted the best for his patients But negligent staff were doing things like watering down the product. And then people were getting substandard results. And the byproduct of that, that again nobody talks about is that it leads to bad reviews, a bad reputation, and it harms your practice over the long run. And not only harms it over the long run but also ruin your opportunities. It prevents you from growing to the point that you could have gone and it's all because again, they're flying blind. So I just wanted to touch on that. That was a very good point you brought up that nobody seems to want to talk about.

Randy: [00:15:13] Why thank you. And I'm happy to bring that to the attention of people and to your point. Nobody wants to talk about it especially when somebody in my situation is generally talking to both the physician and the office manager. Nobody wants to even think that that could happen to them. But I recently attended a conference where General councelor for I believe it was the ASPS brought up a list of things that you should do if you want your employees to steal from you. You should never check your bank account. You should never check your mattress. You should never question the staff times coming in and out. And he gave this very warm seemingly comical list but it is true. You know if you say on top of things and happened to be looking at your metrics and see that for whatever reason you spend twice as much in office supplies randomly in this month, it's going to be a cause for a question and I don't think that any office manager is offended when you ask them why expenses are up by 50 percent a given month. But as my father said, a question costs nothing but not asking that question could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Izhak: [00:16:26] And I think that with a tool like the dashboard when all the staff members can have their own aspect of the business, just might be able to monitor themselves and know that it's being monitored, that by itself can prevent a lot of everything we discussed. You can just prevent that from the first place then it does never need to come into that playing dirty to ask those questions, to put people in the corner. People don't want to be in the corner but when they feel too much freedom that's when they start to convince themselves that maybe nobody's going to notice. If they see it on the screen, they're not going through that one.

Nick: [00:16:58] Everything happens through incrementalism. I've said this for years. It just takes a little step a day and then you end up somewhere you didn't want to be striving. That's a very good point. So guys, I want to start adding some value to the listeners here. I want to get to giving them something that they can actually use and what I want to ask you guys because you're on the front line of dealing with KPIs on daily basis. Let's talk about a doctor and an office manager separately. What should matter to them? So what are the KPIs that actually moved the needle? What should the physician be paying attention to? And what should the office manager be paying attention to in their dashboards?

Izhak: [00:17:36] So let's start from the office manager. When I'm assuming and understanding the majority of office manager also is playing the role of patient coordinator. Especially from the press. What's important for an office manager and some of them was in charge of the expenses as well. I think that the number one for them in terms of priority will be to look at the conversion rate, looking on the customer acquisition cost, to understand how is it being built. Based on customer acquisition cost and in partner to that, monitor the marketing outright, the return on investment. How much money they pay for new opportunities to come through the door? And sometimes practices and practice managers can get confused of using multiple services. One for the social media, one for the phones, one for the web site, and all kind of different types of services and other offers. When it's really getting simple to the fact of how much did you spend on total marketing and advertising this month and how much new revenue generated at the end of it and quantify the number of opportunities. And how qualified those opportunities were if there were for the purpose they wanted or do not want. This is something that the patient coordinator and the office manager have to look at. They have to look at the quality of what they bring through the door. Quantity of what did they pay for in terms of new opportunities. When it comes to the existing customers, they really will want to review how many referrals did they received. If they integrated it with one of our review systems, they can look how much review they have on different type of websites and make sure that everything over there is clean and good. That comes from day to day and that by itself can move the needle dramatically. Comes to the doctor, I would put the attention into the profitability from different procedures and products. We met many doctors who spend the same amount of time doing consultation for facelift or doing consultation for breast augmentation. Although the amount of revenue that they will generate from that opportunity is dramatically different. So they cannot spend the same amount. So once they have started to have the attention of how much their time cost Which is always the most expensive within the practice and they start to work based on capacities. So they are not spending their time without generating the most amount of revenue that they can for their own practice. And when they understand when they run a med spot. A lot of them these days running a med spot and don't understand that it's a completely different business model that needs to become positively to run by itself, to have its own measurements to run. And we're talking about KPI like revenue by square foot for the medspot so they can really utilize all the rooms and all the area to generate as much revenue as they can. Or even revenue by the hour because it's really businesses run by service. It's almost like a retail business that can generate money on an hourly basis although the doctor is doing consultations or performing a procedure on a different practice. Those are the key that can really be a game changer for everyone. They start to monitor those, they can already start to be on top of their game. And then again, of course, you have the more traditional KBI which is the revenue by providers and the revenue by the location and by the different products and services. So then they can pinpoint and look at the trends and make sure that they push everything within balance or the most profitable one for to go first and really monitor those kind of things. Those for me are the top of their head. Every practice must have been monitoring.

Nick: [00:21:00] Awesome. So I understand that this will give them insight into that. Now I want to ask you guys what is different with this vs. let's say somebody that's using software like I believe the industry leaders next tech or other software. Why do they still need KPIs? Because this is something that I personally myself as a consultant, I have a hard time getting this through to a lot of doctors. But tell me why do you think or why do they need a dashboard if they've got this other software app?

Nick: [00:21:26] Well Let's break this down into a few compartmentalize pieces. We play very well with next step because Nextech of course is storing a lot of the revenue data. Storing the patient information. It is a core functionality of the practice but clearly it's not the only software that they're using. And so it's one thing to allow an office manager to go in and pull all these reports when needed every two weeks before a staff meeting or a management meeting at the end of the month vs. being able to look at these specific data points updated hour for hour throughout the day. coming from the retail side of things, we're used to CEOs and business owners wanting to look at their profitability throughout the day. Now you can't do that in just the EMR because your EMR like Nextech, that's not where you're entering in your cost. That's not where you're putting in your expenses. So it's wonderful to be able to pull the products and procedures that are bringing you in revenue ranging from five to fifteen thousand dollars. But if you can't get a handle on the profitability of those procedures by looking at let's say QuickBooks up against your Nextech, what is it that you're really knowing? You're doing a million dollars in revenue. That's great. Unless your expenses are nine hundred ninety nine thousand. Right. So how do you really know the health of your clients unless you're looking at multiple data sources. And so that is what we do as a dashboard. As you made the car analogy, it's wonderful that you're a full tank of gas. But if you need oil change, you're still going to have an engine problem, right? So we're still looking at it from the reports and the information the next tech are paramount. We just want to get you that information on demand and do any correlation with the other softwares to provide you profitability. Not just revenue.

Izhak: [00:23:36] And I'll add to that again. Reports have been generated from system and especially if they need to be exported. Then present are normally set. So it needs to be done every freakin amount of time. Read on again and read on again which is a huge operational waste. In addition to the limitation of everybody to see it on their availability. And with our system when we can pull all this information automatically. Pretty much with our default, it refreshes every one hour that they don't know our dashboard. And already automatically combine it with the rest of the data from the different systems. The Google analytics, social media, the phone system or like Randy mentioned, from their QuickBooks for the accounting side of things. Already have those blended KPIs with multiple sources of data, already copulating for them those KPIs and with one time and with the next level and multiple dashboards, they're distributed around practically. Everybody is already speaking about the why and not always having a doubt about what is it that people are jumping. And I think that that's one of the main keys. Once everybody have this ability, with a limitation of what they should access for shouldn't access, everybody is a lot more focused into the target. And then not talking about that is completely different. All the add-ons are coming with us. The ability to set up targets, receive notifications, and based on that, automatically calculate the commissions for your people. Al those addition of it gives so much more power to the report that you can export from EMR. And maybe manipulate it and then only spend a couple of hours doing that every week.

Nick: [00:25:15] I think that's a fantastic point you guys are touching on again. It's something that doctors don't pay attention to because they don't factor in the cost of the execution. The cost of labor. And I'll tell you what the clients that we have which are bigger. You know, they're doing over 20 million dollars a year. They do have some robust reporting in place but it takes multiple staff at least eight hours a week working on generating these reports So this is as you know two, three, four people that are taking a full day's worth of work out of their work week. Four days a month minimum to generate these reports. And the issue is that from a marketing consulting standpoint where I look at it is that is something that that employee could do that could actually generate money. So if you could get a computer to do that work, that would free them up to have an additional eight hours a week to do things like social media engagement. To do things like producing better advertising. To do things like taking care of the clients better, right? Replying to e-mails. You know, any number of things. And what happens when that is in process is that again, it's the opportunity cost. It's what could they have done. How much further could they have done? Could they have gone from 600000 ad revenue to a million in revenue that month? And that's something that I find that physicians, because of the nature of the education which is to be very conservative and very careful and very sort of step by step, they don't really pay attention to the what could have been. There are always trying to mitigate the downside. They're trying to avoid risk. They're trying to avoid injury. They're trying to take care of the patient. That's Their schooling. And in a business sense that's fine. But growth needs opportunity. And opportunity is lost when staff are doing things like copying and pasting things from QuickBooks. And I've seen that multiple times. So I think that that's a very very important point that you guys are touching on.

Izhak: [00:27:04] 100 percent correct. Just wanted to answer that. We were very focused on how the practice of utilizing the dashboard when we find that many times, our dashboard is also utilizing the services that serving that practice. Which means for example, from the marketing companies, we're getting a lot of traction. We really would like to get some access into the EMR. Now it's something that no practice will do just like that and give them the user into the EMR. It is an old restriction. So they're going to give the decision that they won't do it. And by not doing it, the marketing services for example stay blinded by what's happening from the other side of the fence. I generated for you all those opportunities based on Google based, on the web site, based on social media. I don't know what happened after they call to the practice. And with our dashboard, what we're also now doing often, creating a dashboard dedicated to the marketing agency, that they can then also see the console based on the different reasons that people schedule out. Based on the lead sources so they can really see how their work is then working on the other side once the customer call. If you really schedule an appointment, what type of an appointment is scheduled, what they're going to be comfortable about. So then they can utilize their effort and their budget in a much more wise way and then reward that practice in a better way as well.

Nick: [00:28:24] Absolutely. And I got to tell you as a marketer, that gets me personally excited because I would say that that's the number one frustration that I have personally is that we generate a ton of leads. And then I hears things back like you know, those leads were this quality, or that quality. And when you drill down into it and with the bigger practices, you can really see this one. They've got multiple sales people handling the same type of lead. Is that the conversion rate on that lead is drastically different depending on what that salesperson did and how they handled it. And it's the exact same quality of lead across all our clients. And I see varying degrees of success because of that. And then we have to drill down into where the problem is. And finding that problem is frankly, it's impossible when they're on paper. It's extremely challenging even if we get them on spreadsheets. And then you know, you've got to go in and tease out that data. So this is you know the number one leverage point in my belief and in my experience that I've seen that any practice could do right now. Is if you take something like KPIs and software that can easily show you this, not only just on a daily basis but even almost in real time, and see how people are doing with your leads, that can easily double your business right there because you don't have to spend any more on marketing. You don't have to do anything different in terms of your ads, your social media following. Nothing. All you have to do is tweak the conversion process on the incoming lead and you can find out exactly where the problem is. Is it from when they called and book but didn't show up? Is it when they showed up and we didn't sell? Or is it because we didn't follow up afterwards and we didn't make sure that they come into the business and that they pay? So all of these numbers in my experience, I find that most practices are flying blind or and I think this is just as bad, they compartmentalize Them more accounting has their set of eyes on the books, on expenses, the salespeople have their set of eyes on the convergence, and the marketing person is sort of isolated on the fringes and they don't know what's happening with the expenses or with the leads or with the sales. And they're just you know, shrugging their shoulders and saying 'Well, I got you leads'. And none of that stuff works because it's an integrated organism, and you think that more physicians will understand that, but I find that they're just so busy and they don't have the time to really tie these pieces together. So that's another very very good aspect of KPIs. So guys, let me ask you this. What are the most important KPI that you're seeing in the most successful businesses? If someone asks you what are the top three things that all of the successful businesses are doing? And they can be unusual ones. They can be things that you may not think is so prevalent that nobody pays attention to. But what are the top 1 2 or 3 KPIs that you feel should be there for all successful practices?

Randy: [00:31:10] I would say... Wow, top 3. There's probably a handful and they're all related to ROI. Return on investment. You're looking for profitability by provider, profitability by procedure, you're looking at conversion rate by channel, you're looking at patient acquisition costs. And at the end of the day, you're looking at your expense ratio up against your budget. I would say if you had to take just a select few, those will be it.

Izhak: [00:31:41] And if you want one that recently is making a great light into some area of the business is the ratio between how many new patients you see versus your established lines in percent. And I think that's a key one that I see recently that a lot of people is in kind of shock. And I think that they're making so much new business and don't put enough attention on their existing when the ratio is shut. And sometimes completely different of what they had in mind. The same goes for the conversion rates. We noticed that a lot of people think that the conversion rate is completely different than the reality say. Because it's a lot more convenient to remember the good consultations and then put on those retention. And that's the question about those. So most people think that the conversion rate is much much higher and once you start to break it down based from the different procedure and the base from different providers, that give them a huge insight into the real performance conversions and how well do they deal with everything.

Nick: [00:32:40] I completely agree. Randy and I had this conversation when we first spoke. One of the first things I asked doctors when we engage with them is what your conversion rate. And then they give me a number and I will tell them 'OK. Well, is that on referrals or call traffic? And they all kind of have this deer in the headlights look because they don't know. And you know, if you can't get a conversion from someone that's been sent to you by your mother in law, you're probably doing something drastically wrong vs. your conversion rate is going to be a lot tougher on someone that's just coming in from the internet who's maybe you only had one or two touch points with your business. And I find that across the board, I've maybe met you know, in the 20 years that I've been doing this, maybe one or two plastic surgeons that I can recall that actually knew the distinction between that. Everybody else had it in aggregate. And the scary thing is is that even the business consultants from Alregan were teaching them that. They were just doing an aggregate conversion rate on the incoming patients that were coming in blank. So you know, it's something that nobody is really paying attention to in my experience. All right, guys. So let me ask you this, on a slightly more fun side, what is the most unusual KPI you've been asked to integrate?

Izhak: [00:33:47] Well, I don't think it was unusual. I think the results were unusual. And Randy was laughing a lot when we opened up revenue by customer gender and there was four different categories. I think that was a very different result. So that was a new one as well.

Randy: [00:34:04] Well, you know. Plastic surgeons are there to not only assist people in making them feel better about their caring bodies but potentially giving them new bodies. And on a somewhat serious note, they are there to help people transition into these new bodies. And so just as I had an unexpectedly realized that in this graph that traditionally I was ready for only two different colors, there were more than two colors. And I thought that that was an error on our side and it turned out to just be my own mental error without giving fair consideration to what plastic surgeons are doing to help patients become more of the real them. But from a funny KPI side of things. I would have to say the funniest one is and we do not do this. We did have a physician ask us to track the number of cups of coffee that were distributed throughout the day in relation to the number of patients that they saw because they feared that it was their staff that was taking advantage of their Nespresso. That was something that they laugh out loud but it turned out that doctor was totally serious.

Nick: [00:35:28] That is funny. Well, I mean that just shows the power of these types of dashboards that you can actually track coffee usage. I think that's fantastic. Yeah, the level of detail. On a more serious note on what you said with the genders, I think that that's a fantastic story because it shows that when you're tracking something, you will get insights that you didn't know existed. You will have your assumptions destroyed and you will get real data and start operating your practice using facts, not fiction. And I think that that's something that people don't realize is that you're going to get these insights that you may not have known. And what happens when you get those insights is that you've got a secret advantage over all the competitors. You've got something that they're not paying attention to and they wouldn't think to pay attention to. And then you've got this nice tidy little profitable niche that you can start targeting and doing things with. And they will most times just blow it off. That's what I find happens the competitors. Look at them, they go 'There's no money in that.' In the meantime, the clients making several million dollars a year just using that one little niche that he's discovered. So that's a great story. I love that.

Randy: [00:36:28] I'll add to it that it also helps to save and protect the practices from making investments that probably won't pan out. And what I mean by that is once you're looking at a simple KPI as what is the gender that you are catering to the most, it allows you to invest in the right tools that you will need to assist that gender. And what I mean by that is there is a new product that's in the market. It's a hair transplantation product, not a laser machine that will help you the hair transplantation more efficiently for the practice and without having the doctor need to do it which would make it a very very profitable procedure. Not having to pay the doctors hourly rate. But let me ask a question as I would to the physician, if you're looking at your dashboard and you see that less than 10 percent of your customer base are men, why would you think to reinvest without growth potential? Why would you think to invest in 150000 dollar machine that a sales rep will tell you 'Oh, all you need to do is three procedures a month to pay for it within six months.' Well, if you don't have that number of patients who are male. Who are going to be interested in that, you will not see that return on investment. And if you do, it certainly won't be in six months. And so somewhere between a capacity KPI and a gender KPI, it assists these practices in making good financial decisions about investing in new technology.

Izhak: [00:38:10] Right. And just want to add to that, and some of my ads will be almost like a tip based on what we've seen and experienced. If we talking already on opportunities and ability to intensify opportunities, we've noticed that a game changer to many is when they get the realization that meds are a completely different type of business with a different business processes that can be measured differently from their clinical practice. That will be one. And the second one will be to really-- a lot of practices are not focusing enough on man and a trend that we've seen that grow especially as I see in two years of data, you can see the demand sector for surgeries, the ones that's focusing on them and serving them in market to that area, there is a lot of money to generate from that area. And practices that do not do it are just leaving money aside.

Nick: [00:39:02] Awesome. So guys, is there anybody who would this KPIs are not a good fit for or your dashboard would not be a good fit for?

Randy: [00:39:10] Sure. Anybody who is not interested in growing.

Nick: [00:39:16] What about size wise? Do you guys find that a size of practice matters or is this a good fit sort of everywhere?

Izhak: [00:39:20] I think if a small want to grow to be big, you have to start somewhere. I think that the smaller ones are working harder. Which means that they have less time to run the practice in the right way. So that's the main reason why they need that. The big ones have too many moving pieces and that's why they need that. So the need is shifting within it and the growth can continue when that dashboard will be dynamic enough to adjust itself. To have multiple providers or one provider, it's really giving them enough availability to fit to what they need. So it's really not about the size, it's about how to utilize it right. The same big operation will not operate on the same scale as the smaller one. With a smaller onem you don't need so many in order to do so much better. In order to grow. So it's really just the utilation of that but I think the size really doesn't matter. People need to know their data and data needs to drive the decisions of the business. That's how simple it is.

Randy: [00:40:14] And I'll add to that. It makes total sense. I mean, if you're doing 10 million dollars a year business and you fluctuate 10 to 20 percent, okay, we're talking about millions, right? But if you're doing 2 million dollars a year, that same 10-20 percent swing is going to be much more impactful to your business. So while some could say a larger company could benefit more from this because they have a lot more moving parts to keep organized, the Ying to that Yang is it's the smaller practices that have or feel a greater impact from these numbers changing. And so you know, it could also mean the difference between life and death for a smaller practice. Now that's going a little over the top but you know, if you have ten million dollars you can afford to lose a million. If you have a million dollars, you know and you afford to lose 10 percent, a hundred thousand, I don't know about that.

Nick: [00:41:12] Yeah that's a very good point. I think people are not thinking about that at all. As it's all about the profitability and how much you can really weather the bad times. And 10 percent on 10 million, even though it's a larger amount, is a lot safer than 10 percent on one million which is a huge huge part of the business because there isn't anywhere to draw additional revenue from. I think that's absolutely important. Guys, before we wrap up this show, I want to ask you guys to give me a story of someone that's used your software. Someone that didn't have this in place. And give me the specifics about what happened in that situation. How they used it. How they made more money specifically and what life looks like for them after they implemented it.

Izhak: [00:41:56] I'm going to use my father in law. He was our first customer, obviously. We did that almost on demand for him. One of the main game changer I think within his practice was when we got to the point that he just had the realization of the data that he had never seen before and they just started to make sense to him and he took a couple of weeks for them to practice again on the charts and ask the question to understand exactly how did they race coming together and what is it exactly represent and why should they care about that. If it goes up or goes down and once we went through that phase and he started to ask the right questions, we started to create the network to the staff members. And I think that that was a huge game changer within his practice. The moment the revenue providers within his practice. So the nurses doing the injections or the patients to do all the different services, started to have their own bit of dashboard with their own performance to show quantities and even show the revenue and compare it automatically to how they perform over a quarter, we were able to develop for them a bonus plan. This bonus plan came into place when we set up to target. The target is sending them notifications to their phone, letting them know on the progress them in themselves. Receiving a simplification that shows the progress. With that, he was able actually to-- we're about a little over a year of using it, year over year, the goal growth that he was planning on is now coming into place. When everybody is pushing together when they know that they're going to their bonuses, they see the light of the care as how people like to see it. They see it on their phone. They understand their own performance. They know how to ask what services they can push more. Which services they need to practice more. Or if somebody else from their same team know how to serve it better. So they can operate with more money in those areas so they can get their bonuses. That was one thing and then the second one, they usey to operate with a team bonus as well for the general performance. And this is something that we always encourage. Since we proved it a 100 percent of the time. Even if it's something small, people want to be part of the success. And for the small pie of the success, they will give a lot. And there was another bonus plan for the entire team. The problem is that until the end of the month, nobody had the insight to see where do they stand. If they should push more or push less. We took it and we created within the dashboard a slideshow feature that is made for big screens. So we put a big screen in the coffee area in the kitchen where they all go and eat lunch and make themselves a coffee during the day. And we put a large screen. And every time there is a rotating different type of chart of the different areas where they need to improve. If it's to spend more calls scouting or some more botoxes or generating more opportunities from a specific source. And those were key problems ailing. And within a month, we were able to see a huge change in their attitude. In their motivation. Everybody were focused. Everybody, when they talk in the lunch break, they were talking about the screens and are talking about what did they do yesterday or on Friday. So that I think is one of the best case studies that we have a chance to observe from the site and see how just the features and the data and the ability to get the data available for you and for everybody. The power of that effort can really do miracles to the business. I'll put one day probably on the podcast and let them tell the story and they could put the numbers in and the percentages. And I think it's going to work even better when he say it on his side. I suggest that to everybody. If you're going to use a bonus plan, start the bonus plan. Give your people the insight to their own data. You don't have to see everything but they need to see what they do and the area that they control. Hold them accountable for it and reward them if they have outstanding performance. That's the recipe for success.

Nick: [00:45:43] I love that story. I hadn't even actually considered that. Like we could do a whole show and employee motivation. And the fact that you guys are able to do that with the data is you know, I'm going to admit, that I hadn't even seen that angle to it. I was always thinking on sort of the marketing and our wide side of it but motivating staffs, one of the biggest challenges you can have in a practice. And the fact that you are giving them this data. And it's something that would seem kind of cold but at the heart of it, it's really human motivation. And you are using data to let people pull in the same direction. Let everybody actually work as a team. Instead of all the pettiness and bickering and infighting, they can see how each one's performance affects the group as a whole and their individual performance. And I hadn't even thought of doing that so I appreciate your sharing that. That actually is a very powerful insight for people.

Randy: [00:46:32] Well, if I may a give mine as well to give you some more food for thought. The focus was a little bit different for this practice. There were two topics. One was they could not tell the difference between their most popular lead source and their most profitable lead source. And the second thing that we really opened their eyes to was the time that it was taking to perform some of the procedures and how there was a difference in time between the providers. And so from the start of the marketing side of things, this was a practice that was spending as many practices do in a variety of different marketing channels but came to find that at the end of the day, the thousands of dollars they were spending on Google AdWords were totally unnecessary. Because not only were those potential patients not more or less strong than other lead sources, but they simply weren't getting the business from that channel. And in cutting out Google AdWords and going organic, they were able to save themselves thousands of dollars. And then working from an efficiency standpoint at the amount of time procedures we're taking, we went procedure by procedure and found that partners in this practice, there were varying types between breast augmentations or Brazilian butt lifts or even facelifts. And simply by delegating the correct procedure to the correct physician so that they could actually kind of hone in on the exact amount of time it was taking, they were cutting half hours off of these procedures making them more profitable. And so if a certain procedure came in, it was deligated to position number one. For a different type of procedure was requested, it would go with position number two. And again, not by bringing on any overhead additional staff, not by making really any large changes, they were able to increase procedural profitability just by understanding which doctor needed to take which procedure.

Nick: [00:48:43] That's fantastic. And I got to tell you that I've had sort of red faced arguments with physicians about cutting Google AdWords and you know, this has been a struggle for me for a long time. When we used to do the primary acquisition through SEO and not ad buys. And the challenging part of it is that you don't know if you're making the right decisions and what I'm hearing from what you just said is that this practice could cut those AdWords costs but then also look back ongoing and keep getting that data to see if they had actually made the right decision so it justifies the decision making. And consequently, if they made the wrong decision, they could very easily turn those AdWords back on but at least they know whether it worked or not and they're not just guessing at it. So that is also a very very strong point. All right, guys. I'm going to ask you the second last question of the interview. So is there anything that I didn't touch on that you feel is a burning topic that physicians should know about today?

Randy: [00:49:42] Wow. A burning topic. I guess-- You know what, there is help. Help is available for any medical professional that realizes that they have to balance being a doctor and being a business owner. There is help and it's not help in the sense of a better office manager or other staff. But there is help in the sense of giving them a higher level of control. Right. Giving them an increase peace in mind. And for any physician who has children that we'll be going to college or physicians that are planning their retirements, nobody wants to get to the end of their goal and realize they fell short. Nobody wants to set an end of year goal and then realize coming in on November that they're just not going to get there. So for anybody who feels that it's overwhelming, there is something that can be done. There is a way to balance health care and that business role. They just have to be open to having that conversation.

Izhak: [00:50:47] And moreover, I think that one of the first rejection we always get is about the changing. And changing is not necessary in order to do better. When people think about 'Oh, I need to change my next step or I need to change those EMR or the system that I'm already using, my methods.' We always correct them and we always take some time to explain that now technology doesn't make you replace things. You can just keep walking as you do and just get so much more advanced than what you already do without changing anything. So I think that's another point. So with the help, the fear of change does not need to come into being for doing better. It doesn't have to be replacement of existing processes or existing systems.

Nick: [00:51:36] That's great. Full disclosure here for anybody that's listening. I've got two passions that are very very powerful in my life. One of them is eliminating busywork with technology. I love technology and what it can do for humanity. And the other one is business growth. And I just want to give full disclosure that we're not being compensated here. ThinkBasis as an agency is not getting anything from this. I am just very passionate about this software. And having said that, now that you understand that we are not a part of Atlas KPI in any way, I want to give Izhak and Randy the opportunity to let you guys know where to get in touch with them and I'm going to put a guarantee on it right now. And even though I'm not part of the company, I'm just going to take some latitude. And this is going to be the software that has the father in law proof guarantee. So Izhak and Randy, tell everybody how they can get in touch with you.

Randy: [00:52:28] Yes, happy to have a conversation with doctors and family members. Our web site for anybody looking to do some research and not feel roped into anything. It's www.atlaskpi.com. Atlas being the Greek God who held up the globe. KPI, ofcourse, standing for key performance indicator. And if they like what they see and they'd like to reach out to us, they can reach me at [email protected]. Or of couse, [email protected]. Or you can call us directly at 1 800 9 0 5 2 9 8 9. They should feel very comfortable speaking with Izhak or myself. Again, we're happy to answer any question and if they feel we're the right fit, we can even show them a demonstration whether they're here in our native Florida or anywhere around the globe.

Nick: [00:53:26] Excellent. Guys, look. I want to thank you both for your time. I think this was very insightful. You guys dropped a couple of very big knowledge bombs here. One of them obviously was the one with the staff and being able to make decisions and verify your decisions and your business. If people get nothing else from this interview, I think those are two very very powerful insights of how to use these KPIs to grow their practices. So thank you both for joining me. I appreciate you and I appreciate the time that you've put in and sharing your knowledge with everyone.

Izhak and Randy: [00:53:54] Thank you for having us. Thank you for the opportunity. Yes, thank you very much.

Outro: [00:53:58] Thanks for listening to Practice Perfect. I hope this episode has given you a lot to think about. I hope you've got actionable ideas that you can take back to your practice and go back and make changes, make improvements and take it to the next level. If you want show notes and additional help and advice and articles on how to grow your practice, visit us at thinkbasis.com where we hold the podcast. That's t h i n k b a s i s dot com or just google the practice perfect podcast and you should be able to find our podcasting page. Have a great day. Have a wonderful week and I wish you all the best with your practice. Go out there. Make a change. And make it happen.

The post How To Create KPI Dashboards That Motivate Staff And Drive Results – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #9 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"That's the biggest problem I see facing professional practices. They do not stand out at all. Worse, they don't understand the principles to stand out."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now your host, Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:25] Welcome back to another episode of Practice Perfect. The podcast for medical professionals and anybody dealing with a professional services firm as opposed to a bricks and mortar business. On today's episode, I've got a treat for you guys. I've got Corey Vanderberg here from Clixsy. Clixsy is an agency that helps lawyers market and fight against large law firms with TV budgets. The title of this podcast is going to be how to fight large competitors with large budgets using digital marketing. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Now if you're not in the legal space, if you're operating some sort of practice that's in the medical space, if you're a coach, if you are doing anything other than legal, I still want you to pay close attention to what Corey has to say. One of the things that I teach my clients is to synthesize information and when you synthesize information what I mean by that is that you're taking something from one industry and you're applying it to another. A classic example of that is the drive through. Drive through for fast food actually came from the banking industry and somebody at some point was looking at this concept. That the bank said 'Hey, you know what? This would work really well at my drive thru' and then they applied it to fast food. And since then we've had fast food drive throughs. And I want you to take that same type of thinking. And as you're listening to Corey talk about how they take down some of the large competitors in their space, I want you to think about how you can apply this to your medical practice. Your professional practice if you're a coach consultant or doctor. I've known Corey for years. He's someone that I trust and respect. I know that what he's going to share is going to be extremely valuable. I want you to pay close attention to everything that he's going to talk about. Corey has been working with lawyers and he is probably the foremost authority on legal marketing in my opinion that I've seen. I don't know anybody that can answer questions about the legal space and how to market for lawyers then Corey Vanderberg. Now I have to preface that with the fact that the legal profession is not an easy profession to get into in terms of marketing. You are dealing with people that are incidental. And what I mean by that is that they have maybe just had an accident. They're going through some sort of life trauma or a divorce. It's very hard to predict when those people will take action and that's the hardest type of marketing to do. It's not dissimilar from cosmetic surgery marketing because when somebody is going to have a breast augmentation, they make a decision. It's not based on, you know, a predictable thing like age or a life event like having had a baby. Right. That you can sort of see this search patterns as they're going on. Legal marketing is exactly the same you cannot predict when somebody has had a car accident. Today, they may be perfectly healthy going to work. Tomorrow, they are in a car accident and now they're already in need of legal help, legal assistance because somebody is taking advantage of them and they're not able to get compensation for themselves and their families. And that type of marketing is the most difficult marketing to engage. So I consider Corey to be an expert in that field. And he has spent the past several years doing this for lawyers and working primarily through search engine optimization, SEO, and conversion optimization on legal websites to do this. So I think this is a real treat and I'm looking forward to learning from him myself. I really want to find out what he's got to say so I'm being a little bit selfish here and saying that while you guys are going to get a great episode, I'm also going to take advantage of Corrie's knowledge and ask him all sorts of questions. So Corey, welcome to the show.

Corey: [00:04:00] Thank you sir, I appreciate that introduction. That was very thorough and undeserved.

Nick: [00:04:05] That is what they all say about it. All right. So Corey, I want to start off by getting everybody to know you a little bit. So I'd like you to tell me how you guys got started. I know you and your partner had a history of helping lawyers and you kind of fell into it. Right. It was something that you guys designed to do. So tell me a little bit about how you got started.

Corey: [00:04:26] Yeah, it seems like the best stories tend to start that way. Right. Like it did is it sort of fell in our lap. So the way Will and I initially met is he was running a program to help individuals improve their credit scores so that they could get a mortgage. And this was really a clever way of manufacturing his own purchasers for properties that he was fixing up and selling. And as you mentioned earlier that idea of synthesising from one industry to another. I love that and I've always regarded that as an extremely important business skill and so when I encounter individuals who already think this way, whether it's intentional or just intuitive, I take note of it and I pay attention to them. So we started hanging out and talking more and pretty soon it evolved into buying some properties together and my business at the time was somewhat similar except the approach I was getting to build my audience was I was working with people who were distressed borrowers. And my approach was I already had an interested party in the people who already live in their own home. They're just in danger of losing it. And so what I would do is I would go to the banks and I would restructure and renegotiate the underlying debt. And then give it back to them on more favorable terms. So one of the classic examples I use all the time is I had this family that owed. They were approaching 200000 and they were upside down. The house was really only worth 160000 and we were able to go and purchase the second mortgage which was eighty thousand dollars. We got it for I think it was like 6 grand. And so the second mortgage was like 'Yeah, we're out. We'll take six.' So we wrote them a check. Well then we went back to the homeowners. And remember they owed 80 grand on this note. We went ahead and told them that they could stay in their home and that we were going to give them that same mortgage that was 80 grand. We were going to give it to him for forty thousand dollars at zero percent interest. So every dollar they paid was paying down that note. Now we had gone in and purchased that underlying debt for six grand. Now one of the reasons we did it this way was because we would then go and find somebody like William who knows how to improve their credit scores and we would have them in five years. They would be able to refinance using FHA and we would realize the gain on that note that we had purchased. So that was somewhat of a long way of explaining that we were both heavily involved in financial instruments that brought us in close proximity to lawyers all the time. We were dealing with people on the closings. We were dealing with lawyers that had to do with bankruptcy. We were dealing with the banks' lawyers renegotiating those notes. And we had a lot of people whose you know. We had a certain ethic when we would help these homeowners and it was that nobody ever loses their home because of us. And so when we did that, one of the things we would always tell them is 'Look, your absolute worst case scenario is you know, a lot of the bankruptcy attorneys in town, and there are ways that you can save your home utilizing the bankruptcy courts as a backstop.'

Corey: [00:08:38] I would say it's probably somewhat experiential and somewhat self-interest. OK. The experiential side of it is I was the one sitting down with these families. And I remember one incident in particular. This one haunts me to this day. This family came in to see me and at the time, I had a home office. So they would they would actually come to my home and sit in my home office with me. And I remember this mother. In fact, I still remember her last name was Valentine because that's my mother's maiden name. She told me about how they had gotten into this position to where they were about to lose their home. And it was because they had had a whole bunch of turmoil in their family that all sort of spiraled out of control around the time that one of their toddlers drowned in the bathtub. And I just like I remember sitting there taking in the gravity of the situation and realizing that there was two grieving parents. There was grieving siblings. And the last thing they needed was to also have to pack up and leave their home in duress during all this grief. And to top all that off, they had been approached by hard money lenders and now I don't want to cast aspersions on the whole industry because there are really good reasons sometimes to utilize a hard money lender. I know that often they're sort of looked at as loansharks but I think there's valid reasons to use them at times. But the ones that they had come in contact were absolutely vultures and low lifes. And you know they were in danger of losing their home because of it. So it was situations like that and I could tell you a hundred more stories. Maybe not as heart wrenching but just as meaningful to them. Right. And so it became real to me and that might seem a little cliched but it's nevertheless it's true. And then on the self-interest side, it's funny. I've just found that industries are a small world. You know, within the legal space. Within a medical or dental or whatever niche you choose. It's a small world and word travels quickly. Especially when someone gets burned. And so I would say that the self-interest side of me has jealously guarded our reputation. And so when I look at devising sort of an ethical standard like that, it's both because I don't want to have to try and sleep at night knowing that I was involved with somebody losing their home or somebodies business not working. I don't want it to be my fault. You know there's plenty of people who aren't good at running their business but it can't be my fault. And then the flip side of that coin is I want a sterling reputation because you know, one of the things that's very surprising to people when they find out is that Clixsy is entirely referral based right now. We do zero marketing of our own. We don't run ads. We don't rank for things. We don't spend any time ranking our own website which I know. You know. Some people say 'Well geez, you know you, it's the cobbler's kid has no shoe.' But we're so focused on taking care of the clientele we have and delivering the result for them that 100 percent of our client base has come from those same clients saying 'Man, I got to introduce you to somebody.

Nick: [00:12:33] You know, I completely respect that because a lot of my history in marketing is exactly the same. I find that in general, you've got two types of people that are helping services business. Some of them are really good at marketing themselves and some of them are good at marketing the client and it's the ones that are great at marketing the client that don't really waste time on trying to market themselves. They don't go to a lot of the trade shows. They don't have booths. And that's because they just do a great job so they don't need to. And I think that oftentimes service providers that are looking for a vendor like Clixsy don't take that into account and they fall for the flash. In the presentations and the slide shows but they don't look at the the results that that agency is getting and where we're going to get into that in a moment. What I'd like to hear from you next is how did you go from walking the fine line between ethics and profit in a tough space like mortgages and then divide that in to your words. Like who is the first lawyer you helped? How did you meet her?

Corey: [00:13:31] It's Interesting. So back to the mortgage world. So this was about just pre mortgage crisis. You know, end of 2006. And I want to say it was maybe early 2007 when Google launched this little thing called Google Maps and Google places. It was the first time that they showed local results mixed in to the universal search. And I had this friend of mine who was today what we would call him as a Youtuber. But back then, there was no reward for that. He just was a guy who made videos all the time and posted them. And he said 'Dude, watch this.' And he went into Google Places and he made a listing and he's stuffed the listing full of keywords. It said something like Salt Lake City Mortgage, something or other. And heput it up and in 10 minutes he was number one on Google. And the next day he showed me that he got three phone calls for people who were looking for mortgages because he had keywords stuffed this listing. And at that point, I was fascinated and I was hooked. Right. So we started doing different tactics marketing ourselves and trying to figure out how we could drive deals to ourselves. How we could find homes. How we could find buyers and mortgages and just all the different things that we were doing. And that period of experimentation lasted from about 06 to maybe 2009 where that's what we were doing was marketing ourselves. And I got a phone call from a friend who I went to high school with who had been practicing bankruptcy law in San Diego and as I mentioned, we were extremely familiar with the space because of our experience with distressed borrowers. And she says 'Hey I've been seeing all that stuff that you guys do online. Do you think, you know, I'm moving back to Utah. I don't have anything. I'm literally just picking up and leaving. I will be starting over from scratch. Do you think some of that stuff could help me get a new start and get some bankruptcy clients?' And I thought gee, I mean, it was so easy to do stuff some keywords and get the phone ranging for mortgages, gosh, I can't see why not. And since she had no established practice, it was one of those things where I was like. 'Carl, what could it hurt?' You know, again, my ethics came into play and I was like if any other business owner approached me and said 'Hey, can you do this for me? I'll pay you.' I would have been really concerned like I don't know. I mean I'm fine doing it myself but I would not have felt comfortable taking someone's money at that point. But she was starting over. And so I thought 'Sure, why not. What could it hurt.' She was going to share office space with us too. To try and keep the overhead low. And so away we went and we started utilizing some of the strategies that I learned from that friend who did YouTube. And we started. We produced like, I'm not exaggerating. Like a hundred FAQ videos on bankruptcy. And some of them were her/ and some of them, I actually got on camera. And we would put disclaimers all over the video saying, 'Hey, I'm not an attorney. This is not legal advice' and stuff like that. But I would talk about the logistics of bankruptcy law and I would come at it from the perspective of what I had been doing to help homeowners. And I would talk to them about when bankruptcy is an option and when you should consider alternative means and all that different advice that I had been giving at that point for going to close to 10 years. So it was really natural fit for me. It was just a slight tweak to my positioning. You know, whereas in the past I was always talking to these homeowners to try and help them either save or sell their home. And now I was talking to them from the perspective of if you need a lawyer. If these are your circumstances, this is when you ought to try getting a free consultation and this is when you should talk to a lawyer. And you know I kind of developed a little bit of a reputation at that time for being kind of a one take wonder. Like who's really good off the cuff. I could just turn on the camera. Talk about a topic. And so we started producing all these these videos and then it happened. Where she grew from nothing to in about six months, we had her filing between 15 and 20 bankruptcy's a month. Now that is a decent sized bankruptcy practice for a solo attorney. I mean, it's certainly not like nobody's going to become Bill Gates off that. But you can make a living off 10 filings a month. Right. So 15 to 20, she was happy. Let's say that. So she started to refer clients our way and we started getting clients. We had another bankruptcy lawyer in a different area who didn't compete with her said 'Hey, can you do what you did for her?' And we repeated it. We did it again. And that's kind of how it started to snowball. And then as most entrepreneurs do, we got a little bit off the beaten path for just a minute. Where because of the notoriety we were getting, I'd say that we had started doing this agency gig for about two and half three years. And another opportunities fell in our lap where we got to do some book launches for Dr. Stephen Covey. And that was so different than anything that we'd been doing but we were really being seen as pioneers and innovators. Because even though by today's standards, what we were doing was relatively basic, it was so forward thinking at the time. Right. And in the internet days as we say sometimes, we were really on the forefront. Like we introduced Franklin Covey to auto responders. Very progressive. Right. And that sort of took us on a journey for a few years until about 2013. And that's that's when everything really started to shift back to a heavy legal emphasis for us.

Nick: [00:20:34] That's really cool. And I think the important part to note about that story is the fact that you guys have always been innovators as far as I've known you guys. You've innovated. What you're doing today is definitely very different than starting with sort of a zero budget with a lawyer out of the gate. But the spirit of what you do is no different. Even though I know right now it takes about 50000 to 100000 dollars to engage with you guys. I think that those budgets are all relative. And the theme of this show is how to compete with the big boys having the budget that you have. And sometimes, in the example of the lawyer that you gave, she had literally almost no budget to competing with guys that have got hundreds of millions. Right. So when we're talking about 50 to 100000, it's nothing compared to the guy that's spending, you know, 100 million dollars on Google ads and TV ads a year. Right. So the TV budgets are very different. So what I want to ask you now is, let's move from the past into the present into what you guys are doing now. And I'd like to ask you why is it that lawyers have such a hard time competing with these big firms? You know, a guy that maybe is making a few million dollars a year as a lawyer. He's doing all right. It's not like he's hurting. He's got the 50 hundred grand. But why does he still feel like he can't compete with the big players? What's Holding them back?

Corey: [00:21:55] Well, I would say that probably the number one reason, and there's a lot of different factors and probably we could deliberate on each individual situation like what's more of a factor in your case vs. your neighbors case. But what I see the most frequently is everybody-- Well, I'm going to paint with a broad brush here. Most of the law firms and really professional practices in general that I see are doing what I call copying off the dumbest kid in class. And what I mean by that is that they watch each other. Especially lawyers. I mean, when I was dealing primarily with bankruptcy lawyers, I would weekly have conversations where they would show me the filings for the previous week. They're sitting there keeping score. Like 'Look at this yeah who, he filed 20 cases last week. What the hell is he doing?' And they want me to figure it out. Like what's he doing. And so they're very hyper competitive. And if they see someone getting more cases or showing any outward signs of success, they immediately assume that whatever they observe them doing is what's actually working. 'Well, look at his website. He's getting a lot of cases. Look at what his website says. Oh, he's doing YouTube videos. He's getting a lot of cases. He's running TV. That must be it.' And the reality is when you're on the other side observing what's working and what's not, it's hilarious to know that on the outside they think they know what's working. And most of the time, when we're working with these law firms, the most energy is spent trying to figure out what's working. Like it's hilarious to see how that the perspectives when they shift. But I think that when I say that they're copying off the dumbest kid in class, what I mean is is that they assume that that's what's causing them to have more cases. And so then they go do it. So then you have this homogenous industry where everybody's websites are essentially the same. They're all just replications of one another. And they may have different colors or different bells and whistles or this is here and that's there instead of the other way around. But in the end it's all the same thing. Right. The majority of our clients are injury lawyers. We all know if you had 50 injury law websites and you went to them, how much difference is there going to be between them? They're all going to be heroes shots of the lawyers. They're all gonna say some variation of no fee or we fight for you or we're aggressive or we're going to stick it to them. You know. Like, that's it. There's no differentiation. Everybody's the same. And like that little kid in Incredibles. What does he say to his mom? When everybody's special, Nobody is. And that's the biggest problem I see facing professional practices is they do not stand out at all. Worse, they don't understand the principles to stand out. Because the cool thing is, there is a very formulaic way to do it. You don't have to be Steve Jobs or you know, Johnny Ives at Apple to manufacture what it takes to stand out. There's a formulaic way to do it.

Nick: [00:25:24] One thing I want to touch on that point is the fact that it's not really the lawyer's fault that that's happening. And I did actually a previous episode on this topic on web design. And in my experience, I didn't really look into the legal space but it sounds like the legal space is exactly the same as the plastic surgery space in that these design firms that contact the lawyers, they sell to the ego. And it's very easy for them to make money by plastering lawyers or the doctors face on the home page and stroking their ego very carefully and gently and thoroughly and telling them that people are looking for them when that's not the case at all. And the reason that I see a lot of these websites designed this way is solely for the fact that these design firms care more about their own profitability than how well they do for their clients or they're so inept. So it's either ineptitude or negligence but it's one of the two where they either don't care or they care about only themselves and they don't really put the work and the effort and the care needed to make sure that the clients actually making money instead of just them. Because it's very easy to call someone pretty and then tell them that you want to take their portrait. Right. And that's what they're doing to these lawyers.

Corey: [00:26:35] There's no question. I 100 percent agree with you that there is. You know, it's one of those things like, I don't like generalization and stigma because--.

Nick: [00:26:45] That's okay. I love it so just go for it.

Corey: [00:26:47] No. Right. Well, what I was going to say is that oftentimes, there's a reason stereotypes develop. And it's because there's grains of truth in there. And I think that those reputations that the creative industry, agencies, ad agencies, webdesign, it's not undeserved. Those types of stereotypes, they've absolutely come about. And what I see most frequently is there are a lot of people out there who are what I call button pushers. And what I mean when I say button pushers is they know how to get in front of Adobe Photoshop. Or they know on the advertising side, they know how to get in front of Google AdWords. And they know how to push the buttons and pull the levers. But that does not make you a marketer. That does not make you persuasive. Right. And in the end, whether it's a website or an ad or a video or a press release or whatever it is. Whatever piece of marketing you're trying to produce, there is a fine line between simply producing the thing and producing one that's persuasive.

Nick: [00:28:06] So what you guys are doing now is essentially, we've spoken about this in the past but you've pivoted away from your history of doing primarily search engine optimization and I understand that's still a big component of it obviously. I mean, it's kind of like a given. They have to rank because who is going to go to a website that they can't find. So it doesn't matter how pretty or persuasive it is. So I know that's a big part of your business. I don't want to touch on that right now. I want to find out about what you're doing with these brand transformations. What is it? Why do lawyers need it? Talk to me about how you guys got into it and why you feel that it's important for lawyers.

Corey: [00:28:41] Well, I feel like there is this trend over the last two or three years where artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prevalent in the marketing space. You see it with search on the part of Google. You see it with Facebook. They're developing an A.I. related to both their ad platform as well as their messenger platform. You see it with Apple and Siri and Amazon and Alexa. There's so much development going on around artificial intelligence. And what we've started to do is just take stock of what are the implications of artificial intelligence being involved and when it comes to search, what I'm finding is that you used to be able to have a really clear delineation between this guy who does SEO and those guys who do paper click. And those guys those are the design people. Right. And what's happening is if you imagine those different roles in sort of like a venn diagram, the middle is getting a lot bigger and the overlap is increasing between all of those things. Because when you really look at the Big Four. Right. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook. When you really look at it, the core essence of all of their business models is to give the user what they wanted. To reward the searcher with exactly the right result at exactly the right time. And the thing is like when you're searching for something on Google, it's not like there's a suggestion box or some obvious way that you can tell Google 'Hey, by the way, good job on that last search for pizza. That was exactly what I was looking for.' There is nothing like that built into the system. So they have to extrapolate from your behavior. 'Oh, you went to ten websites before you check it out. That must not have been a very efficient process.' So then they start baking that into the algorithm. Right. And the end result is that all of those different disciplines are now starting to become all part of the process. SEO used to be a very very technical thing that just merely dealt with links and keywords. And it started to become more and more complex. And advertising running digital ads used to be just about keywords and bibs and a landing page and it's become more and more complex. And design was merely moving things around in design software and producing something that everybody agreed upon was aesthetically pleasing. But now with A.I., it's able to calculate millions, billions, maybe trillions. I don't know. Probably trillions of different variables in a very very short period of time. In fact Google's new A.I., if you heard some of the stories about what they've been teaching it to do with this Chinese game called Go. It's both fascinating and frightening at the same time to imagine how rapidly this thing learns. And so then when you take that and put that same lens on a searcher who's looking for an injury lawyer or a bankruptcy lawyer or a divorce attorney, it's sitting there analyzing their behavior and seeing when they searched, when they went to your website, when they clicked off your website back to Google and clicked on your competitors website, and then went to your competitors contact page and hit click to call. They see all that. And their A.I. is processing all of that. And don't you really think that if Google's sole focus is ensuring that the user got what they were looking for. That they're going to factor that into SEO? Of course they are. And if that's the case, you know the other day I had had one of our clients. They went to a seminar and I hate when clients go to seminars because they always hear some some sound bite out of context and then they call you in a panic and they're like 'Hey I just heard Forest Green makes you rank higher. Are we doing Forest Green?' You know, some of the craziest things. Well anyways, they called me to talk about mobile site speed and how that's the new thing that Google's baking into their algorithm. And had to clear up for them that A. That's ship sailed. That's already part of the process and B. Kind of, you know, help them understand what it is we were doing. But the funny thing that they said to me and this is the lesson for what we're talking about here. They said 'You know, this mobile site speed thing. Google says it's going to be important in July. I really think that's more important than the SEO right now. We should drop the SEO for a minute and just focus on this.'And I was like 'Guys, the site's speed is SEO. Designing your site to convert visitors into prospects which convert into client is SEO now. It's all part of it.

Nick: [00:34:28] Yeah, it's part and parcel. I have to agree with you 100 percent. The lines are not blurred. They've been actually eliminated and a lot of people don't understand that. And for anyone listening that's not very technical, Google Analytics is a way for you to measure events on your website and Google gives away this tool for free for anyone that's not a corporation and doesn't need real time data. And it's by far I would say the primary mechanism for people to measure website engagement and visibility on their site and the behavior of people on their site. Well, Google has access to all that data. So if you're wondering about how are they going to know if someone click the call, they know all of that stuff. If you go into Google Analytics you can actually pull up an overview of your website and see which elements on your page get the most clicks in terms of links to other pages on your site. And that's just the sort of the basic stuff that they provide to us. What Corey is talking about is the fact that they are now aggregating all of this data. They are using it in their decision making process to make sure that their algorithms aren't being fooled by, you know, on page trickery. Some of the old school stuff where both Corey and I are probably very guilty of which is like white text on a white background and stuffing in a bunch of keywords. And everyone started out that way back in the day when it used to work. But you know, they are eliminating all of those factors so that it's the user that's telling them what's right now. So they have essentially outsourced and crowdsourced their algorithm to real humans and they're watching that behavior. And because the artificial intelligence is able to keep up with it in real time, their search results are a lot more accurate. So with these brand transformations, what Corey and Clixsy are doing is they've taken that learning and the elimination of those lines and started to look at it as a holistic process. So you know, I think you've touched a little bit on why a lawyer needs this. Obviously, they need to rank better. How does it affect their business when they do a brand transformation?

Corey: [00:36:27] Well, you know, one of the interesting things that sort of led up to us going in this direction was I started to have the same conversation with different clients in a period of like a month. They all came to me and said something similar. And it went sort of like this: 'Hey, I talked to so-and-so who normally sends me clients and I found out that someone didn't choose us because of our website.' In one case, it was a neurosurgeon who had a big brain injury case and he was going to refer a case over. And he was like 'Oh, those guys are just car accident guys.' Another instance was they had done a little bit of a focus group survey and asked some of their clientele and they said 'We really hate your website. It's awful.' And in another case, it was a client coming to me and saying 'We just aren't getting big cases anymore. All we're getting is these little small soft tissue minimal damage to the vehicle, you know, a lot of people calling with no injuries at all. Like where are the big cases?' And you know, that homogenisation that I talked about earlier, in a lot of times, we're inheriting these websites. And we're not only inheriting the site but we're inheriting the client who has a lot of preconceived notions because this is just what you do. Right. It's like the old story of the mom and the daughter cooking a pot roast and she wants to know why they cut the ends off. And so they finally get back like four generations and they find out that great great great grandma's stove was too small so they had to cut the ends of the pot roast off. And I feel like that's exactly what's happened with with websites is they've just become accustomed to that, well, I'll just come right out and say negligence that you talked about earlier. And they think that's how things ought to be done. And so we started saying if there's this convergence of Google changing and there's also this feedback of we hate your website or we didn't refer you a case because of your site then that was sort of like okay, the stars are aligning. And you know. The writings on the wall as they say. Right. We just got to do this. This has got to be a problem we have to solve. And you know, we were coming at it from a unique perspective in that you know, we've always been primarily focused on getting the law firm visibility. Whether it was from organic SEO or paid digital ads, we were the ones getting people to the site. And then of course working on conversion. But we hadn't traditionally been. We we would do design or redesigns of websites if necessary. Was kind of our policy. You know, we would do it if we had to or if there was a reason to or the client requested it. And they were like 'No, no, we don't want to go anywhere else. We really want you to do it.' We'd like okay fine, we'll do a website for you. But you know it wasn't something we were actively out soliciting. And so we have this one client who they've been with us now for five years and they've just over time, we've developed that trust and that rapport where they'll kind of let us take flyers on harebrained ideas. If we say 'Hey, we want to try this.' They'll go 'OK, try it.' Because we've earned that trust with them. And so we said 'Okay, here's what we want to propose. Not just a website but we want to actually propose repositioning you in your market place and trying to come at it from a completely different angle.' And so I went and brought somebody onto our team who I've worked with in the past. He was actually the guy that we did the Franklin Covey book launches with. And he is very very well-known here in the state of Utah amongst branding people. People who were in the branding and design world. And the reason he's so well-known is because there was a famous case study here in Utah of a company called Maverick. They're a convenience store chain and Maverick at the time was, and I don't remember the precise numbers so I may be screwing these up but I want to say they were a fairly large company. But they certainly weren't on anyone's radar like 7-Eleven. Maverick, at the time, their brand image was one of sort of like western culture and I'm even just gonna venture off a ledge here and say that it was hickish. Right. Their stories were sort of known for being dirty. And I remember in high school, I remember a rumor being passed around that you shouldn't go to Maverick and get gas. Because they water it down and that you'll get water in your engine and it'll ruin your car. Like I literally remember that being a rumor passing around in high school. But this was their brand. Like your brand is the image people have in their mind about you. The feeling they get. Right. And that's what it felt like. It was dirty and not trustworthy. And I remembered Tim, this individual I'm working with, telling me that when they first were engaged for this brand transformation, he went in and he's like 'I didn't feel safe.' And they sat there for several hours in the parking lot and noticed that it was about 80 percent men who went to Maverick stores. Well, they went to work on this concept of transforming the brand. Today, Maverick is an absolute behemoth in the convenience store industry. They've expanded outside of Utah. They're now up into like Idaho and Wyoming. And I believe they've even gone into Colorado but they're expanding outside the state. And again, the numbers are my Achilles heel here. But I want to say at one point, I heard that they had become a billion dollar company since this brand transformation. And the difference was that they changed it from those perceptions that they had to an image and a feeling that everybody wants to be associated with. I know people and I'm one of them. I will drive out of my way. I will avoid four other gas stations to go to a Maverick. That sounds so weird. It's just a gas station. But they're so nice and they're so exactly me. I identify with them. It's like buying an Apple phone. How you buy Apple because you identify with the brand and that's how much difference the brand transformation made. Is that it just absolutely vaulted this company into superstardom in the convenience store industry. And we wanted to bring that to the legal space. And so that's the pivot that we've made is where we're actively bringing a new voice to the legal industry. Where we transform brands to have powerful messages that speak to the audience that you serve instead of merely being an ego boost or a brochure.

Nick: [00:44:35] Very nice. So on that note with the websites, I know one of the concepts I cover in my book is that activity doesn't equal progress. And I know that that's something that we're touching on here. And the fact of the matter is that up to this point, I would say that our industry has been broken because we've all been siloed and we've siloed ourselves. I mean us as service providers, web designers, web developers, SEO people. We are guilty of it as well because traditionally in the past, we've had to go in and say 'Hey, this is our area of expertise. Let us do this for you and get someone else to do that other component for you.' But you know, what you're touching on now is that the industry needs to be fixed where we need to have a big picture view of everything and you know, don't plant that tomato underneath the tree and have your back to the tree because it will never get sun and you'll never get a tomato off that vine because you're just focused on that one little plant and not seeing that you're actually trying to plant in a forest where it will never work. So on that note and with this concept of activity, I know that you guys, just like us, you do things a little bit differently where you actually keep yourselves accountable for results. So tell me a little bit about the philosophy around that and why you started to do that. Because I think that it's important for doctors, lawyers, service professionals to understand this concept of activity. Not equaling progress. You do not make progress because your service providers ticking off boxes on what they promise to do. So tell me about why you do that and how you guys do that.

Corey: [00:46:04] I hate that. That's one of the biggest things that drives me nuts in this industry. Especially when we're talking to a new prospect who's being referred to us. And the premise is 'Gosh, you did such a great job for so and so. Let's talk.' And then they want to sit down and look at the 500 point bullet list of things that their previous provider were doing for them. And I'm like 'You're leaving them. You're talking to me about leaving them and you really want to sit and talk about what it was they were doing?' To me, that's kind of an absurd concept. And that's really where we've hung our hat and built our reputation. I have a good friend Kurt Marley and he always talks about this thing called Intention Behavior Result. IBR. And what he means by that is 'You tell me what the outcome is that you want.' That's the intention. I will decide which behaviors specifically will lead to that and then we will both work together on getting the result. Right. Because I'm the expert here. I'm the one who has done this. You know, I'm never going to come in and tell you how to litigate a truck accident case ever. Or how to do a breast augmentation or rhinoplasty or a root canal. I will not do it and I expect that same level of deference when I tell you what your home page should look like. You know. And I think that that part of the-- it's funny. You talked about how we've siloed ourselves and we've pigeonholed ourselves. And since we're talking to professional service providers, let me couch this in terms that you understand. Prescribing something without a diagnosis is malpractice. So when some agency hands you a 500 point list of deliverables and says 'Todd, let me slap this on your desk. This is what we do.' You can know already, they're planning malpractice. Because that's what they're proposing to do. They've got some cookie cutter solution that they've drawn up on their whiteboard and they know precisely how much it costs and they know exactly the dates that they're going to be able to do those things by. How? How can you possibly know with all the variables involved? Now I'm not saying that we don't also hold ourselves accountable but we have to start talking about the level of discernment that it requires to make these decisions about conversion, what your site looks like, where to get traffic, where to advertise, how much to spend. All of those things require that same level of discernment and you can't draw those up on a whiteboard and expect that they're going to fit every circumstance.

Nick: [00:49:24] I think that's all very well put. Corey, I made the mistake of not booking enough time for this. I thought we would be done in an hour. I should have known better. You've got a lot of wisdom to share. I think we're going to have to start wrapping this up and I want to deliver a little bit on the promise of the show. Which is how to tackle larger companies with larger budgets. So for some parting thoughts, I'm going to ask you two questions. The first one is going to be if you are a lawyer. Think about a lawyer that is struggling against big players that has competitors in his marketplace. That is one of those guys that's always following instead of leading and thinking 'Hey, how are these guys getting those 20 cases?' What's the one or two pieces of advice that you would impart to that lawyer to help them along? What would you tell him to do if you weren't there and he needed to do something on his own? What could you do?

Corey: [00:50:14] Who's the guy-- I don't mean to assume genders here but who's the person that you go to who is most helpful in a hotel when you're in a new city? You're unfamiliar with the place, you've just gotten to the hotel and you're like 'Boy, I'd sure like to know if Nick: [00:56:16] any places around here that are recommended or maybe I want to find a good spa or a good restaurant or a good clothier where I can go get a suit tailored or whatever it is.' Who do you go to in the hotel?

Nick: [00:50:47] I'm going to say the concierge.

Corey: [00:50:48] That's exactly right. If I was a solo or a small firm and staring down the barrel of one of these big agencies with massive budgets, my two pieces of advice would be 1, you need to look at how you can serve the client in a way that satisfies all of or as many of the needs that they have that go beyond merely what it is you do. OK? One of my clients does this thing that they call medical management of their cases. And what that means is they go beyond what most firms do which is simply saying 'Oh, make sure you go to the doctor and get treated.' No. They've got protocols. They guide you. They hold you by the hand. 'Hey, here's three doctors that all do that and we've evaluated them and here's the recommendations that we get back from clients that have seen them.' You know, they put in just a little bit more effort to hold the client's hand through the experience of being injured. There are concierge for injured people. That right there is something that the big boys often are not willing to do. Because they're so worried about doing it at scale that they won't even consider it. And they'll laugh at you when they hear that that's what you're doing. And you will absolutely destroy them because that's exactly what we've done. And you know, you talked at the very beginning of this conversation about being able to take something from one industry and apply it to your own. And you know, we've got these big advertising agencies. I call them the Madison Avenues. The guys that they do all the TV and the billboard work and they've got big big budgets and they wine and dine and take you in limousines and front row seats games and stuff like that. And you know what? I've taken clients away from these guys. Big clients. One of my favorite stories is when I was first getting started, I had this mentor who I really trusted and he started laughing when I told him that we were gonna start doing this. And he's like 'Dude, you can never compete with SEO.com. That's who he was with at the time. Yeah, well we took Franklin Cubby away from SEO.com. And I've been told the same thing about these big Madison Avenue agecies. Right? That you're not going be able to compete with so and so. But we've landed clients this year from those big Madison Avenue agencies and it's because we're a concierge. It's because if they talk to me about site speed or they talk to me about conversion or ads or text messaging, I take the time. And here's lesson number two. Be the concierge was lesson number one. The second thing is as I take time to perfect my craft. I sit down and I read and I explore. And I call people and I talk to them about new emerging concepts. When I hear about some new thing, I don't go 'Oh, that's interesting.' I go 'Oh, man. In six months, my clients are going to want to know about that.' And I start digging. And I hone my craft so that I'm ahead of them. And it's like Larry Bird talking about how he knew there was some person on the opposite side of the country who was up an hour earlier than him and shot 500 more free throws than him. Take more time to work on your craft. Don't spend all of it just executing the work. And you combine those two things and man, you will get on your big competitors' radars fast.

Nick: [00:54:43] I think that those are two huge points. If you're listening and you can take note of that, go back and listen to exactly what Corey said there. Is that you've got a unique advantage no matter the size of your business and understand that what's gotten you here isn't going to get you there. And it's the same for the big firms. Don't try to copy your big competitors because what's going to get you there isn't what got them there and it's not going to work for you as it is for them. So think about how you can be advantageous and separate and different. So Corey, in three minutes or less, can you tell me anything that I may have forgotten to ask you that you would like to share with lawyers and service providers that are listening to this episode?

Corey: [00:55:23] I don't think from a topical standpoint and I'm a little wordy as it is. I don't think I'd be able to broach anything in three minutes. But I did want to add one quick clarification earlier when we were talking about the brand transformation and new website packages. I did want to just clarify that we do still have retainers in the range that's affordable to solos and small firms. I didn't want to give the impression that you know, that we're now one of the Madison Avenues and that we only take on clients who can afford 50 to 100 grand. We certainly have done those projects and we bring it. But I think that it's a matter of pride for us that we haven't forgotten our roots and where we came from and that we bring something to bear for the upstarts and the smaller firms as well.

Nick: [00:56:16] Well, like I said at the beginning you guys, are nothing if not ethical and it does not surprise me that you are willing to help people that are coming up and that they are willing to work for what they want to get. So that's fantastic. Corey, what can people do to get in touch with you? Where they can find you? What's your website address? What are your contact details?

Corey: [00:56:35] Yes. So clixsy.com is our website and that's spelled C L I X S Y. There is a watch manufacturer that doesn't have the S so they sometimes get some of our calls in. And we, them. But yes, so clixsy.com. And you can just e-mail me. I'm actually pretty accessible and it's just [email protected].

Nick: [00:56:59] Awesome. Corey, thank you very much for your time. I will make sure to book a lot more time next time so that we can go even deeper. That's not a slight to you at all. It's just that you've got a lot to share and a lot of wisdom and experience. And I've got another meeting book. Otherwise, I would keep this going for everybody. But I think, you know, it's nice to have a digestible episode as well for everybody so that they can listen and really start to implement some of the concepts that you've talked about. And if you're a listener and if you have taken on board what Corey has said here, I want you to go and take action. I'm a big believer in taking action on what you hear. So if anything has resonated, if you've gotten any ideas, if you've synthesized any of this information for your own business, go out there. Start transforming your brand. Get in touch with Corey if you've got additional questions about that. If you're in the legal space, definitely get in touch with Corey and make things happen. All right Corey, I want to thank you. I want thank everyone for listening. Looking forward for having you back.

Outro: [00:57:56] Thanks for listening to Practice Perfect. I hope this episode has given you a lot to think about. I hope you've got actionable ideas that you can take back to your practice and go back and make changes. Make improvements. And take it to the next level. If you want show notes and additional help and advice and articles on how to grow your practice, Visit us at thinkbasis.com where we hold the podcast. That's T H I N K B A S I S dot com or just google the Practice Perfect Podcast and you should be able to find our podcasting page. Have a great day. Have a wonderful week. And I wish you all the best with your practice. Go out there. Make a change and make it happen.

The post How to Fight Large Competitors with Large Budgets Using Digital Marketing – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #8 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"You have to think about PR as a funnel, right? Initially, you want to make sure that, a, your name is getting out there as much as possible in the right way and so you start off with a really big opening of the funnel, but then over time you can distill that down into what your particular area of expertise is."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now, your host, Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:31] Welcome back to another episode of Practice Perfect. The show for medical professionals, plastic surgeons, and anybody running a professional services practice as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. This is episode number 7. And today we're going to talk about how to keep patients coming back to your practice. We are of course talking today about attrition. It's sometimes referred to as churn rate. And I'd like to talk to you about why it's important.

Nick: [00:00:58] The first thing that we need to understand is that plastic surgery practices will lose about 80 percent of their patients over a four year period if they do nothing. What that means is that of the people coming into your practice, 80 percent or more will not come back after a four year period. So they may stick with you for a year or two. Year one you might lose 20 percent, 30 percent. Year two, you'll lose another percentage of the ones that stayed. And by year four you can pretty much bet that the majority of them are gone. And I would say that in the practices that I've seen it's even higher than 80 percent. I'd say the vast majority probably approaching about 95 percent based on the numbers that we've seen don't ever come back if you don't do anything about it. So why does that matter. Let's get into that. If in your practice you add about 100 new patients a month and you lose 80 of them, 80 of them never come back. It will be very very hard for you to grow your practice. It means that you're fighting for new patients every single month because you don't have the advantage of a predictable income and having them come back to your practice. Now factor in the fact that it can cost as much as a thousand dollars to land and sell a high quality high ticket surgical patient. I'm talking about someone that may be spending multiple of thousands of dollars for things like a breast augmentation or a facelift. Right. When you getting into the tens of thousands, it can cost a good deal of money because those patients are doing the research. You are paying for leads depending on your close rate and the cost per lead. It can cost you about a thousand dollars to bring them into your practice. Now if you're losing 80 of them every single month you're basically throwing away about 80000 dollars a month. Now yes, they did have surgery with you. They did pay once and it was profitable. But to reacquire someone of that quality and have them do additional things in your practice can cost you an additional thousand dollars. These are people that care about their looks. They're people that are willing to spend money with you. They've had a relationship with you. They've built one through the surgery, through the experience that they've got. And for you to get another high quality patients like that, it would cost you an additional thousand dollars if they don't come back. When it would be a lot cheaper for you to just try to keep the patients that you're already getting. Now let's assume that you recover just 20 of those patients. 20 out of the 80. You're not only saving that 20 thousand dollars in new patient acquisition costs but you're also getting additional funds from those patients. If the lifetime value of that patient is, you know, an additional 5000 dollars and cosmetic services such as Botox, juv a germ, dermal fillers, cool sculpting, cool tech, whatever it is that you've got in your practice. Lasers. Those 20 people spend an additional 5000 dollars with you. That's a lot of money that you can use to acquire new patients. To give your staff bonuses. To acquire better staff. Right. And it doesn't cost you anything extra. It doesn't have to cost you anything to keep them there. So I want you to understand that that's why attrition is important. Understanding your attrition rate is important. In my experience most doctors have no clue what their attrition rate is. They have never calculated attrition. They've never looked at their churn rate. They've never checked to see how many patients never bothered to come back. And they sit there and they are just perplexed as to why they're having a hard time growing when the competitors are not. And attrition rate is one of these topics that's kind of boring on the surface but it's the secret sort of underlying foundation that allows people to grow. It's what makes the biggest difference but it isn't flashy it's not exciting. It's not, you know, as fun as a new advertising campaign that just brought you in another three or 400 leads that month. It is not sexy, to put it plain, but this is the salt of the earth the stuff that really really matters to your practice. The stuff that's going to catapult you to the next level. So let's keep going. If you managed to keep those 20 additional patients what happens is that you start to get compounding revenue. Right. You've got the revenue coming in from new patients and then you've got the returning revenue. And the same as it would in a bank like compounding interest, you get more the year after the year that you've collected the interest. It's the same with this. You add 100 patients, let's say you keep 50, next month you've got 150 patients. And it keeps compounding and compounding. Those hundred that came in, you keep 50 of those, now you've got hundred. Plus another 100. Now you've got 200 patients and your income starts to stabilize. Now stability is the foundation for growth because it lets you advertise more and let you hire better people and it lets you make calm rational decisions because you're not scrambling every month to get new ads up and get new business and you're still going to do that. You're still going to advertise, you're still going to get new business but it's not going to be from a place of unnecessary stress. Because you've got that foundation there. And you know, it can slowly build up over time. Like if you've got to practice you've been at it for 15, 18, 20 years. You will notice some of that stability. Some people will be coming back. And I said you lose about 80 to 90 percent. 95. 92. Depending on what it is. But every year you're still keeping five to 10 percent of your patients. So in an older practice, you will still have a little bit of that base. But it's going to be just a sliver of what you could have had if you really pay attention to it.

Nick: [00:06:41] On this episode we're going to get into some practical advice. Some things that you can go back and implement. And I'm going to tell you a few stories that I think you'll find very interesting. We'll get to that in a minute. But before we do that what I want to do is get into some statistics. And I want you to understand the number one factor that contributes to a bad attrition rate. And that is not doing a good job. So first and foremost, do a great job servicing the clients that you get. But you can only do so much. You can only go so far yourself. And it's very important that you've got a team around you that understands the importance of this and that they look at the big picture and they're in it for the long run. I'm going to throw some statistics out at you. 89 percent of consumers in the U.S. start doing business with competitors after having a poor customer experience. Right. So if your staff is making mistakes, if your staff is not treating people right, that is probably one of the biggest reasons why people will go to your competitor. There's more and I'll get into that in a bit. There's actually an even bigger factor but 89 percent of consumers that get a bad experience, and if you're not managing that right, if someone is doing a poor job, so if you've got a bad apple,if you've got somebody that's consistently not taking care of the patient, what's going to happen is that 89 percent of the patients that they deal with will just go to your competitor. Plain and simple. So staffing is a big issue that is not an easy topic to tackle but it's something that you need to pay attention to and it's something that your office manager has to be on top of. And you yourself have to make sure that your office manager's top notch that she really understands what's going on in the practice and the importance of this churn rate.

Nick: [00:08:30] So talking about the industry as a whole. The economy as a whole. In the United States, an estimated 83 billion is lost each year due to poor customer experience and customer attrition. So this is a big problem across multiple businesses. Which is why if you can take care of this you will have an unfair advantage over your competitors. So what I'm talking to you about now is I'm shedding light on something that's a little bit of a secret in a lot of practices. It's something that people simply don't pay attention to. And if you can just start paying attention to it and recover those patients and pay attention to the compounding nature of your revenue, you can get much further ahead than any competitor in your area. Because you will plain and simply have more money to work with. And whoever can afford to spend more on advertising, whoever can afford to treat the clients better because they've got a better profitability as a result of these, that customer experience and that ability to advertise will make you the leader in your area. Right. So understand that it's not a trivial matter. Sixty percent of customers end their relationships with companies when they perceive indifference on the part of sales people or staff. So again, it's not just about doing the basics. It's not about going through the motions. If your staff is there with a solemn look on their face and indifferent attitude to what's happening, even though they're going through the mechanics of delivering the service, it's all about managing those perceptions. And notice I said 'when they perceive indifference'. And if the client perceives indifference, if you or your staff makes them feel like you don't care whether they stay or go, they're just going to go. People don't want to be where they're not wanted. Plain and simple. Now 80 percent of churn customers identify themselves as being satisfied or very satisfied just before leaving. Now again, the importance of customer service there is it doesn't matter if you did a great job for the past two or three years. If that person has a bad experience, they could have been very happy up to that point. You could make a bad hire and that person doesn't come back. Which is why it's crucially important that you track when people come and go in your practice and when they should be coming back and that you've got a mechanism for dealing with that. You've got to identify them and you've got to reach out to them either by email, phone, text message, or whatever it might be, you've got to reach out to them personally. If they were a great client and then they left and didn't come back when they were supposed, to it's on you to contact them. Because when people are unhappy they tend not to speak up if they've got alternatives. Or if they're characters such where they just don't like to complain. And it's not on them to contact you and complain. It's really up to you and your staff and your responsibility to get in touch with them, value their business, and find out why they didn't come back.

Nick: [00:11:30] Now customer satisfaction is a really big deal and we'll touch on it in another episode. I don't want to get too deep into that because there's a lot of practical stuff that you can do and there's an even bigger reason why people don't come back and I'm going to get into that in just a second. So for this episode we're going to get into those practical matters and here's the bottom line. The fact of the matter is that most people leave because they just get distracted. Right. That's the biggest reason why people don't come back. Life gets in the way. Because you may be in a cosmetic practice and dealing primarily with women, you have to understand that women tend to put themselves last. And they put their family first. Right now, there is of course exceptions to every rule. I'm sure plenty of examples where women are putting themselves first. But as a general rule, women will tend to put their family first. Right. So they will take care of the kids, they'll take care of their husband, they'll take care of the job, they'll take care of their business, before they take care of themselves. And you have to understand that if you are not engaging with that woman, if you're not bringing her back into your practice, if you're not giving her a reason to understand that you value her, she will attend to the things that are most important at that time. Child gets a scraped knee or gets a fever. That's it. That becomes a priority. Life gets in the way. And she doesn't show up for her Botox appointment. Or she forgets to book her next one. And then she may be online and sees a competitor's ad. It's been 12 months maybe? She's put herself last for 12 months. Now she decides that it's time for her and she happens to be on social media. She could be on Google. Just googling around. Or on a website she sees a banner. clicks on that, takes the offer, goes to your competitor, you've lost that patient and that revenue forever. Because at the end of the day, people do what's good for them not what's good for you. And it doesn't matter how you treated them. Don't expect loyalty. Don't think that they owe you anything because they don't. Life doesn't owe you anything and that patient owes you nothing. It's up to you to go after her and get that business. So now the question becomes what do you do. How do you go about getting that business. Before we get into that I want to tell you a little story.

Nick: [00:13:52] I want to teach you about something called the Zeigarnik effect. And what a Zeigarnik effect is, there's a mechanism in the brain that keeps you from burning the house down. And I'll get into that in just a little bit. Before I do that I want you to know where the term came from. And if you're Russian, I apologize if I butchered this name but I'm going to do my best. Now the name of the scientist that came up with this is a Russian female scientist, her name is Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik. And I apologize if I butchered that in any way. But in marketing, it's known as there's a Zeigarnik effect. And the story goes something like this. I'm going to paraphrase it to keep it short but basically it's this. Doctor Zeigarnik went to lunch with her professor and other colleagues. And her professor noted something. They were at this restaurant and they were having a great meal. And there was a large table of students and doctors. Professors. And they had a phenomenal waiter. This waiter would take their orders. He wouldn't write anything down. He'd go to the kitchen, put in the order, come back, and place the plate in front of everyone expertly. He would never make a mistake. He'd get everyone's order right and place everyone's individual meal in front of them without any faults. So the professor noted that you know he's doing a great job. So they decided to just engage with him a little bit and ask him some questions. And after he took the orders he came to back with one or two plates and they stopped and they said 'Hey, can you tell us what everybody ordered?'. And he looked at them and one by one, rattled off everyone's order perfectly like an expert. They were extremely impressed and said 'Wow, this guy must be the best waiter in the world. He's doing such a phenomenal job.' He then completed the orders and after he cleared the table, and brought the check, they asked him again and said 'Can you tell us what everyone ate?' And he looked at them and just drew a complete blank. He couldn't remember anybody's order once he had delivered it. Once he completed the task, he didn't know what happened. He just looked around and was just baffled and they were shocked. 'Oh my god, what happened?' Like this guy was doing so well and all of a sudden he forgot everything. So Doctor Zeigarnik devised a series of experiments to identify what this phenomenon was. And you have experienced this phenomena over and over. And I'll tell you why I say that it keeps you from burning the house down. It's because if you put something on the boil, if you've got something cooking in the kitchen, and you get a phone call, and you get distracted, gave you ever felt that nagging feeling that you've left the stove on? Or have you left your house and thought 'Oh, did I leave the light on? Did I forget to lock the door?' If you felt that feeling at all ever, what you've experienced is the Zeigarnik effect. It's a mechanism in the brain that helps you to recall unfinished tasks. So if you turn on the stove and you walk away, you could be doing something else, be completely engaged, and then all of a sudden you get the feeling that you need to go and check the stove because you forgot the stove on. That kind of loop, it just loops around over and over when you haven't completed the task and it keeps us safe. All right. So that is the reason for that mechanism in the brain. Whether you want to believe that it's evolution as I do or creationism. That's up to you. I don't get into that debate. But understand that your brain, for whatever reason, is wired in that way and it keeps you safe. And it's there to make sure that you remember what you've forgotten.

Nick: [00:17:24] And in marketing we take advantage of that effect. So let's talk about some real world examples. One of the simplest ones I can tell you is a quick little story. I take my daughter to get ice cream from time to time. And the ice cream shop gives us one of those little loyalty cards. I had a little stamp cards. You buy an ice cream, you get a stamp. They want you to come back. You finish all 10 or 20 or however many are on that stamp card, and you get a free ice cream cone. Now if you want to engage the Zeigarnik effect, right, that loyalty card, that little loyalty card is fantastic. But if you want to really engage the Zeigarnik effect, what you would do is stamp the first or second or third. Like one two three. And then you start people on that process. And if the ice cream shop does that, they'll be much more likely to get people to come back over and over because people will remember that they've got this unfinished task. They got this loyalty card. It started them on a journey and it never finished. And they will, every once in a while, the brain will kick in and you're like 'Oh yeah, the ice cream place. Well, maybe we should get some ice cream.' It is very subtle but it's always there. Another example if you're a little bit older and this may not be remembered by some but when I was younger, they were always ads on television for these little model cars, and I forget the exact company that had the ads at the moment, but I remember you could get a car. This little replica car. And you would get a free case with it. Right. So that was the sales pitch. They would give you this perfect replica for this unbelievable price and you get a free display case. And what it was is the car came in and the case came in. But the case had maybe 10 or 15 spots for the other cars in the collection. And if you wanted to finish that, right, if you wanted to stop that looping cycle, you would of course, sign up for this subscription and get a new car every month to finish up your case. So that you can easily afford it. But you would finish up your case. Now that was proven to increase sales for that company and they did very very well by taking advantage of the Zeigarnik effect. So what can you do in your business? Very simply, you could copy the ice cream shop. You could set up some sort of loyalty program that when people have gotten their Botox, or a certain number of juvy derms syringes, or laser treatments, cool sculpting cycles. Whatever it might be, you can take advantage of the Zeigarnik effect by putting people on a journey. Such as a little card or a membership program or letting them earn points toward something and moving them along to a pre-determined goal. You have to show them where they're going to go and put them on this path to completing that journey. If you can do that, if you can start implementing those kinds of programs in your practice, you will immediately improve your churn rate. You will reduce the number of people that go to competitors because the competitors won't have what you have. If somebody is 50 percent of the way, 80 percent of the way. You know even 70, 60, 30. Doesn't really matter. But if they're halfway to getting something for free, right, 20, 30, 50 units of Botox. Whatever it might be. An extra laser treatment. Skin tightening session. If they're earning points towards something and you remind them of that and they've got that very clearly outlined, there's no reason for them to jump ship. There's no reason for them to go to the competitor. There's no reason for them to leave your practice. So that's one practical thing. I promised you something practical. That's one practical element. one practical program. That you can implement in your practice this week. You can do it with something as simple as a stamp card or a loyalty card. Get something nice. Print it out. Work out something with the staff. Where they sign it or whatever. And keep track of how many the person's got. And for not a lot of money you could implement that. Then you can get fancier and get a points program in. You can get full blown software and plastic cards. And get that all implemented in your practice and then start keeping a loyalty program for them. But you don't have to go that extreme. You can try it immediately. This is something that I want you to take back to your staff and look at ways to implement it immediately. Because it doesn't take a lot to trigger the Zeigarnik effect and the benefits are exponential.

Nick: [00:21:49] The next thing I want to talk to you about is the second bit of practicality that you can implement. I want to start talking to you about reactivation. Now remember earlier in the episode I told you that the number one reason that most people don't come back over time is that they just forget. They get distracted. Life gets in the way and they move on to other things. I want to tell you a little story about a doctor that I spoke with that didn't understand this. And I want you to get this. By the end of this, I want you to really understand what the important notes are from that story and what you should do about it. So I sat down with this doctor. I went to meet him and I sat across from his desk. He had a large mahogany desk between him and me which we will get into in another show in terms of creating trust between you and the patient and maybe that may not be the best way to do it. But I was speaking to him and he was just beside himself because he had a patient that he had just seen. And he was conveying the story to me. And he said that he was talking to this patient who came in and she wanted to have breast augmentation. And he asked her if she'd had surgery before. Now this woman told him that she actually had surgery before. She had a tummy tuck before. Maybe about 10 years previous to that. And he asked her who the doctor was to which she said 'I don't remember.' And as he was telling me this story, he was getting more and more worked up. He's saying 'How could she not remember who she had surgery with? She did surgery with these guy and doesn't even remember his name.' And I just sat back in my chair and I just smiled because I knew that that doctor would never really get it. And I did explain it to him and I'm going to explain it to you. But I can tell you that his practice was floundering. He was not getting the leads that he wanted. He was doing OK. He had family money so it's not like he was hurting or anything. But his actual practice, even though it was located in a great area, was doing very poorly in terms of revenue. I mean he did a great job. He was a good doctor technically. But in terms of business and marketing, and at the end of the day, that's why I'm here. I'm here to help you understand how to grow your practice in terms of business and marketing, he did not do very well. And the point that he didn't understand, and the point that I want you to understand, is that it's not up to the patient to remember you. It's not up to the patient to stay in touch with you. A patient doesn't owe you anything. A patient came in, she paid you, you rendered a service, and she moved on. So you have to understand that in that example that I was given. That Doctor was blaming the patient for not remembering her physician from before. Right. Her past physician that did the tummy tuck. In my mind, I blame that physician for not keeping in touch with this patient because that's the real crime. He lost that patient. Right. One plastic surgeon. He did a job. He was still in practice. He didn't keep in touch with his patient. And that patient went to the physician that I was speaking with. So his attrition rate went up for the simple fact that he just couldn't be bothered to send out one e-mail or a phone call periodically, maybe once a month, so that that female would remember who he was. His patient that he operated on, he couldn't be bothered to stay in touch with her. He had so much contempt for his craft and his practice that he just didn't care to send out an e-mail. Let that sink in a little bit. If you're in the same position, if you're so negligent that you're letting your patients go to your competitors, you've only got yourself to blame for your practice failing. And that's some tough love. I'm trying to purposely tell you the truth here because there's no way to sugarcoat that. If you've got people telling you that it's the market or competitors or the economy, it's not. It's you. If you're letting 80 to 90 percent of your patients leave over four years, you've only got yourself to blame. In this day and age. There's e-mail that's very inexpensive. Text messaging that cost less than a penny to send. If You're not taking advantage of those technologies, if you're letting your competitors do a better job than you, look in the mirror because you're the one that has to make a change there. No, not to quote Michael Jackson accidentally, but that's where you need to start. Because here's the good news. The upside is that this technology is easy to access. You can automate these processes. You can train your staff to use these tools. E-mail sequences. Text blasts. Automated Voicemails. All these things exist today and you can take advantage of them. There's software that helps you call out and leave a voicemail automatically. There's all sorts of tools that are extremely affordable. And if you're not doing anything about it, if your marketing manager isn't doing it, if your office manager isn't looking into that, after you're done blaming yourself and you're done crying in the corner a little bit. It's all right. It will be OK for you to do that. I wouldn't blame you. No judgments here. But after you're done doing that, get back to work. Get into the office and jump on all this stuff because you've got a lot of opportunities there. So reactivation is crucially important. Once you start tracking, right, tracking is the number one. Start tracking your patients, see when they come back, look for the patterns, identify the ones that haven't, and send out reactivation sequences. So this is the next practical item that I want you to take advantage of. Identify the people that haven't been there for 6, 8, 12, 24 months and reach out to them. Either by phone individually. Get your staff to call five or 10 a day. If that's too much for them, they're too lazy. Whatever the case may be, a quote unquote busy, which you know, I've got a little bit of a tender spot about that because I just find that a lot of people could be doing a lot more than they are and they like to use the word busy as an excuse for not doing it. But if they for whatever reason refuse or cannot do that, take advantage of your e-mails. Set up a sequence. Not one e-mail. Right. You don't reactivate with one. Because only about 15 to 20. If you're lucky, you'll get up to 40 as we do at some of our e-mail blasts will penetrate the inbox so you can't assume every e-mail is getting through. So you have to have a sequence. Right. So set up a reactivation sequence. If the calls and the e-mails and the text blast didn't do the job but you know that that patient still happy, right. so you know that no one's treated them badly and they're still in the market, you can also try good old snail mail. So we've done reactivation with mail. Just putting it in the post. And we've seen people come back after not having been to the practice for two, three, and even four years, that you know, they've just forgotten or life's gotten in the way or the e-mail kept going to spam. Right. So you can't assume that any one medium is going to get through. You have to have multiple channels. But those people came back and that is just free money. E-mail doesn't cost a lot to set up and send. It's negligible. It cost you to keep your database. Most practices have small databases of under 5000 people. That kind of cost you're looking at maybe ninety dollars, 30 dollars a month depending on the service that you're using. So all of this opportunity is available to you if you can just take advantage of it and actually get up. Get off your hands and get your staff to do the work and start contacting the people that haven't been back. Because it doesn't cost you a thousand dollars per head to bring that individual back. Right. If you can bring back 10, 20, 30, 40 people that haven't been there for the past 12 months. And if you can do that ongoing and then reduce your attrition rate, increase your reactivation rate of the ones you lost anyway. You can't keep everybody. Like I said, life gets in the way so some people you'll just lose. But they may be ready to come back after 12 to 24 months. If you can bring those people back, you're adding a thousand dollars every single time. You're basically finding money in what you've already got and there's nothing better than that for a business. If you can take care of this seemingly very boring topic, that can exponentially increase the growth of your business. And that stability, and that free money that keeps coming back, will let you advertise more aggressively and put your competitors where they belong which is in your rear view mirror.

Nick: [00:30:24] I'm Nick Dimitru. This has been episode number seven. I will see you on the next episode. What I want you to do now is go out and take some action. Make a change in your business. And I will see you next time.

Outro: [00:30:38] Thanks for listening to Practice Perfect. I hope this episode's given you a lot to think about. I hope you've got actionable ideas that you can take back to your practice and go back and make changes, make improvements, and take it to the next level. If you want show notes and additional help and advice and articles on how to grow your practice, visit us at thinkbasis.com Where we hold the podcast. That's t h i n k b a s i s dot com. Or just google the Practice Perfect podcast and you should be able to find our podcasting page. Have a great day. Have a wonderful week. And I wish you all the best with your practice. Go out there make a change and make it happen.

The post How to Keep Patients Coming Back To Your Practice – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #7 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"The amygdala is pure survival instinct and you can leverage this instinct to get people to take action in your practice and to increase your overall sales in an ethical manner. But in a way that gets people to take the action that they want to take, that, they should take but have not had a reason to take."

Nick: [00:00:32] Welcome back to another episode of Practice Perfect. The podcast for medical professionals doctors and anybody running a professional services business as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. On today's episode, we're going to discuss how to get buyers to take action now. One of the hardest things to do in a practice, in any kind of professional services business, is to get buyers to take action. In the absence of a reason to move, people tend to stay still.

Nick: [00:01:01] So we're going to discuss a very important principle today. On Episode number one, we discussed scarcity and using it to get people to take action. I had several questions about it so we're going to go deeper into it today and find out what it is and why it works. Before we discuss scarcity, we first have to understand what's known as the lizard brain or what's medically termed the amygdala. The term amygdala is a Latin term which comes from the Greek amygdale or almond or tonsil. Sometimes it's called that because that's the shape of the brain.

Nick: [00:01:39] I'm not going to pretend to be a doctor here but I will give anybody who is not familiar with it a quick refresher before we move forward. So the amygdala is an almond shaped section of the nervous tissue located in the temporal or side lobe of the brain. It's really close to the brain stem located deep inside your cranium. There are usually two per person on each side of the brain and they are thought to be part of the limbic system which is responsible for emotions, survival instincts and memory. Now like I said, I'm not a doctor so there is debate around that whether that's actually the case and if it is actually part of the limbic system. I'm a marketer and, in marketing, what we know about the amygdala is what it does. And the amygdala causes people to take action because it's a deep rooted survival mechanism of the brain. It's responsible for perception of emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, as well as controlling aggression. So when people say that they lose it or have lost it, that's typically what happens. It's the lower functions of the brain that take over the higher cognitive functions get suppressed and the survival instincts take over and then people quote unquote 'lose it'. Another function of the amygdala is to store memories for future use. And they store it in emotions. That's the interesting thing about the amygdala is that it's not responsible for cognition. It doesn't think. It only feels. And it does that because we tend to feel before we act. Before we think. And that's because we survived based on what we feel. If we got scared and ran, we survived. We passed on our genes. If we stopped and looked at the boulder coming down the mountain and thought 'well, I wonder how fast that's going or what's going to happen if it hits me?' Squash. That person is gone. So whatever your belief system, I think we can all agree that emotion plays an important part in moving our species forward and getting our species to take action.

Nick: [00:03:43] So where am I going with this in terms of marketing and what it means for your practice? Well, once you have an understanding of the amygdala, and once you understand its function and its role in our past, in our evolution, you'll understand the amygdala is responsible for getting people to move. From getting people to go from point A to point B. From getting them to get angry and get greedy based on their own survival. It's the number one driver of action in the human brain. Far more than anything else we could do from a reasoning standpoint. Far more than anything we could do from an enticement standpoint. The amygdala is pure survival instinct. And you can leverage this instinct to get people to take action in your practice and to increase your overall sales in an ethical manner — but in a way that gets people to take the action that they want to take, that they should take but have not had a reason to take. This is sometimes known as FoMO, the Fear of Missing Out. And the reason that we have this is because we are conditioned, we've been conditioned over time through our survival and things like shortages and famines, which if you look up the word famine is literally described as an extreme scarcity of food. Scarcity is ingrained in us. When food is scarce, we die. Plain and simple. For the amygdala, it's literally that simple. The amygdala doesn't reason, it doesn't judge, and it doesn't rationalize. it just acts to preserve life. And when in the past we've had famines, we've had a shortage of food. Rats got into our food supply. There was a disease. Anything that caused the shortage of any kind. It can be water. It can be food. Typically lead to death. So we are deadly afraid of dying from a lack of things. Now you don't have to take my word for it. You don't even have to google it. You don't have to verify this in any way. If you have access to children. If you've got access to children, you can see this for yourself and you can prove this for yourself.

Nick: [00:05:45] What I want you to do is find that young child and put a bowl of marbles in front of them. Make all the marbles one color. Don't pick their favorite color right. You're going to handicap yourself. Pick colors that they're not particularly interested or disinterested in. Average colors. Have that ball full of the same type of marble. The same color, the same texture, the same material. And in that ball on top or amongst them, place another marble that's visible of a distinctly different variety. Something of a different color or anything that makes it a little bit unique but nothing overly special. Ask the child to pick a marble out of the bowl. Tell them they can only have one and see which one they take. Then want I want you to do is reverse that process. Take that color marble that they picked, fill the bowl with those and make only one of the other colors the singular marble in the bowl. And then repeat that. What you'll find most times is that the child will pick the singular marble because it's scarce. There's no other reason. Children aren't thinking about it. They're not out to deceive you they're acting purely on emotion and the amygdala and that's showing them that this particular item is scarce therefore you should hold on to it. It's so ingrained in us that it's built in at a genetic level and you can use that in your practice to move people to action and to make more money.

Nick: [00:07:00] So let's dive into how you can create scarcity to move buyers forward. We're going to discuss a few types of scarcity now. When talking about scarcity they all really fall into a couple of basic groups and we're going to talk about those three today. There is more if you want to break it down and really analyze it. But for the sake of simplicity and for something that you can take action on today, you could literally go to your practice and start implementing these items today. We're going to just segregate them into a few buckets. Those buckets are time scarcity, availability and quantity, and exclusivity.

Nick: [00:07:37] And let's get into each one of them now. So let's start with time scarcity. Time scarcity is used when you've got a deadline of some sort. So let's say that you've got a Black Friday sale or a Christmas sale or you've got a special "Get into spring" event or a summer madness. Anything that's got a reason for you to end it. Especially if it's a holiday or special date or it's your businesses anniversary and you're celebrating it or you've got an open house - one day only. Anything that you can terminate by time can create time scarcity. So if you've got a special on fillers or CoolSculpting or any other kind of cream or product and you want to offer a two for one or you want to offer a discount or you want to offer a bonus of some sort and then you add scarcity to it. It tends to get people to take action more than if you just offer the product and the service and the discount on its own. Time scarcity is something that you can leverage on an ongoing basis and that you can plan for ahead of time and you can start thinking about ways to get people to take action on the date or before that date. And the interesting thing about time scarcity is that the closer the deadline comes, the more people take action. So let's say you've got a sale that you start promoting for a week. You've got seven days. On day one of the sale you'll have some sales. Day two three four or five, it will start to pick up a bit. Day six and seven. And the last day - day seven, when it's going to end today at 5 o'clock or midnight. If you promote throughout that process, and make sure that you promote on the last day, you will have the highest number of sales on the last day. Every single time we see it over and over again in the work that we do. So time scarcity is the first form of scarcity. Very powerful. I want you to think about ways that you can go back to your practice and start applying time scarcity in your offers and adding deadlines to things that you're doing. Including appointment bookings. Including surgical dates. Start thinking about how you can add scarcity to your entire business.

Nick: [00:09:39] The next form of scarcity we're going to talk about is availability and quantity. So you have seen these these are things like a clearance sale, oversupply. I bought too many of this, only got five left. This can be used for gift bags. This can be used for items that you may be overstocking. This can be used for pretty much anything that you have in limited supply and you can claim that you've had a run on or you can have a legitimate shortage of and start using that availability and quantity scarcity in your marketing. For example, let's say that you've got a special on fillers so if you come in and you buy two syringes of filler, you will get a special 600 dollars worth of creams and products and services at your medical practice if you take advantage of this by a certain date. So what I did there is I combine two forms of scarcity. I combined quantity and I combined times scarcity. So what I would do in that case is I would take the gift bags and say that we've got a limited supply because our vendors have given us free gifts for our patients but they've only given us a limited number available to the first 20 or 50 or however many people you want to limit to, are based on what you're able to get. The first 20 people get the gift bag bonus on top of this. Call us right away, this ends tonight at midnight. So you can combine scarcity. That's the powerful thing about it. You can start to create it in more than one way and that's just a quick little example that you can take back to your practice and apply right away if you want and start moving and using those two forms of scarcity.

Nick: [00:11:16] The last from a scarcity I want to talk to you about today is exclusivity. So how do we create scarcity with exclusivity? You've seen this happen before. For example, with original works of art. Limited prints. Something that is available only to a certain number of people. VIP products. VIP memberships. Fame is a form of exclusivity. Let's say that you are going to produce a new TV commercial and you're looking for three outstanding patients. Anybody that books their CoolSculpting and gets great results in the next week. I know it takes time to get those results. I'm using it just as an example. Anyone that books within the next week and gets great results will be featured on our television commercial moving forward or will accompany Dr. Smith on Good Morning America in July. Anything where you can appeal to fame and add scarcity on the back of that with exclusivity, you can do that. It's more typically used with VIP clubs. Right. So if you think about a nightclub and you've got the VIP area, people want in to that area but it's only available to very exclusive people. Therefore people actually want it more. So it's a form of scarcity where only a limited amount of people can get in there. And if you do the right things, jump through the right hoops, know the right people, pay the right amount of money, wear a short enough skirt, you can get into that group. And you can do this in your practice as well. You can have VIP memberships for people that buy more. For people that refer more. For people that are more valuable to your practice. And you can get people to work towards that exclusivity. Get them to work their way into it and wanted more. Because generally speaking, the less that we can have something the more that we want it. The less access we have to something, the more we want that thing. It doesn't matter what we have. There's a reason why the saying 'The grass is greener on the other side of the fence' was invented. Because the grass is always greener on the other side. Because people are always looking outward and comparing and if they can't have it, they want it. And you can use that mindset. You can use the amygdala to your advantage. You can use that psychology. That base human drive to move towards or away from something to your advantage. So I want you to start thinking about your offers. I want you to start thinking about your newsletters. I want you to start thinking about the advertising that you're putting out. If you're not using scarcity in any of them, not only are you missing out but you've got a huge opportunity to start doing better, to start getting them to perform better, to start getting more people to take action and take advantage of your products and services. Beyond the promotion, I want you to start thinking about how else you can use scarcity.

Nick: [00:14:01] There's an additional form of scarcity. There's an additional way to use it that a lot of practices don't take advantage of because they tend to hire good natured employees who try to serve the client as best as possible. And in doing so they may be giving the client a way to not take action on something that they really wanted and something that would change their life and improve their life forever. I'm talking of course about the reception area. Receptionists are notorious for trying to be overly helpful when people call. They will offer you any number of spots. 'Yes, sure you can come in Friday, you can come in Tuesday. We have time Monday, we have time Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon, wednesday morning. Tuesday afternoon, tuesday morning. Thursday afternoon, Friday. Every day of the week.' They will try to accommodate that person because they're not taking advantage of the psychology. They are trying to please when they should be trying to motivate. So that's another training opportunity that you have for your staff. To start teaching them about the power of scarcity. To start teaching them about why people take action. And when they offer a time, offer a limited time. 'I have time. Wednesday morning at 10:00. Does that work for you?' The client says no. Then ask 'What would work for you? Morning or Afternoon?' Based on the reply, she can then offer another single time. For anybody that doesn't fit into those time slots, and if she can't work this to her advantage or if she had to book a person further out, start a waiting list. Tell them that you have the occasional cancellation. 'The doctor is very busy but you may be able to squeeze them in. Can we put you on a waiting list?' So you're using scarcity multiple ways without actually offering anything. So this is a way to use scarcity and use that psychology to your advantage without having to do any kind of promotion or sale or advertisement. I want you to start thinking about scarcity in more ways than just promotion. Now scarcity may sound like the next best thing. It may sound like it's something that you should be using right away and it's something that's really advantageous, and you want to apply it immediately, and I hope you do. But before you do I don't want you to stop listening to the podcast before you understand the dark side of scarcity.

Nick: [00:16:12] If you don't use scarcity correctly you can actually harm your practice more than you help it. The first thing you have to keep in mind is that you never want to create false scarcity. If people understand that your scarcity is an illusion or they feel like it's an illusion, it can come off as trickery. You can come off seeming dishonest. Like you're just out for the money, and they won't take action anyway, and it'll hurt your reputation at the same time. So if you're going to create scarcity, I want you to create real scarcity. I want you to reach out to your suppliers and I want you to get things for your gift bags. And when you have those gift bags, they will genuinely be of a limited supply.

Nick: [00:16:48] Now on future podcasts we'll discuss how to handle what happens when you run out and how to deal with the overflow but we'll save that for another time. I also want you to start thinking long term. Your practice is a marathon. It's not a sprint. If you have a deadline, you have to stick to the deadline. Don't keep your sales and your special promotions open past the deadline. If it's a Black Friday, it ends on Black Friday. Doesn't matter how much the person calls and whines and moans and complains. You have to be firm because you're thinking long term. You have to think long term. And thinking long term means training your mailing list. Training your client base to take action when you've got an offer. Because if they get the impression that they can always call after the fact and still get it, get their raincheck, just get anything anyway. The next time that you have a promotion, it won't work. So what you have to do is you have to start thinking that what you're doing is more than just running a single promotion. You're running a promotion so that you can run future promotions long term. Get people to take action. Cut off your deadline. The next time that you run your promotion, it'll be even more effective. Because people will know that if they miss out this time, they really will have missed out. So that's the second warning. I want you to be very very careful that you're not short sighted and you don't just go for the immediate grab of cash. You want to make sure that you're strategic with your scarcity and you employ it so that you can use it long term.

Nick: [00:18:17] The other thing you don't want to do with scarcity is use it too often. Understand that if you're running weekly promotions or constant ongoing specials, then you're training your client to only buy when there's an offer on the table. When there's a discount. Now there's two sides to that coin because that is a valid strategy. You can use discounting as a strategy to grow your practice but that has to be a strategic decision. Don't fall into that discount mentality because you started using scarcity. If you're going to use scarcity and you've got a plan to do it weekly or monthly or ongoing, you want to make sure that that's a strategic decision that fits into your marketing plan and that you're applying that consistently and that you understand what happens with scarcity offers that you have this feast and famine cycle. Which is perfectly fine because you can do really well on holidays. You can do really well when you're running your promotions. And you can get people to take action. But you have to understand that the dips will be there and you will tend to have slower periods during those cycles. Between those cycles of promotions. So if you don't want that, make Sure that you run your scarcity offers only when they're valid. Run them planned periodically. And when you run them, make sure people understand that it ends and they won't come again for quite a while.

Nick: [00:19:36] I hope that was helpful. I hope that you start to use time availability exclusivity in your practice. I hope that you go back to your practice and start brainstorming with your staff and start thinking of new promotions and new ways to start using scarcity. I hope that you evaluate your promotions that you're doing now online. Your Facebook ads. Your Google ads. Everything that you're doing. You can now start to employ some form of scarcity, including your reception area. Including your surgical dates. Including the closing process in your practice when people are deciding whether to take action or not after they've seen you for a consultation. I want you to go back to your practice. I want you to start using these techniques. I want you to report back. Come onto the podcasts website. Let us know how things are going. Comment on iTunes. Comment on Google if you're listening on Android and let us know how things are going. I wish you all the best and I will see you on the next episode. Thank you and good day.

The post How to Get Buyers to Take Action Now – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #6 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"Staff at medical practices feel that their job is to inform the patient, inform the caller, how well you do at informing the customer, is not going to translate to sales, because their number one job is to get the booking. Nothing else really matters on incoming calls."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now, your host, Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:31] Welcome to Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals and anybody running a professional services business as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. Thanks for joining me again. On today's episode we're going to talk about how to handle incoming phone calls. This is a recurring topic that we see in our own business when we work with clients. It's one of the areas where you can lose the most amount of money out of anything that you do. And I'm going to explain why in just a second.

Nick: [00:01:03] Phone calls are usually the first point of contact between a prospective patient and your staff. Phone calls are what people remember. Phone calls are what they use to make a decision about coming in and phone calls are also handled by some of the lowest paid staff in your practice. And I've always argued that that can be a big issue. You have to treat that phone call like gold. You have to staff it with some of the best people, the friendliest people that you can hire, and compensate them enough so that they care and make sure that you build a culture around them so that they do a great job on the incoming calls and they build that rapport with people. The way that I explain phone calls to our clients is this: you think about your marketing. You spend a lot of money on advertising. You spend a lot of money on building a website. You've spent a lot of money on maybe radio ads or print ads, online ads, wherever you're putting that ad spend, you're spending considerable cash trying to generate this wave of traffic. So I want you to picture it like a wave. It's a wave that builds. The swell builds up. It comes in. You're looking forward to all of this new business that you're going to get. You've paid to get this. You've paid to generate this momentum, this wave coming into your practice. And as soon as it gets there, bang, it just hits a wall. And that wall typically is reception. It wastes everything that you've done up to that point. It takes all of the money that you've spent and flushes it down the toilet. So the first thing I want to talk to you about is, even before we get into the phone handling, I need to ask you if you're recording your incoming calls. The answer to this typically is no. And if your answer is no that's OK. Point of leverage, you've got something to work on. Fantastic. You could pause this podcast right now. Go get to work. Come back to it later. You'll make more money guaranteed.

Nick: [00:03:00] The reason why I advise recording calls is that if you're not recording, you don't really know what's happening. You don't know what's going on in your practice. You're a physician. You're out there doing medical work. You may be in surgery most of the day. Some days you're not in the office. If you don't have somebody monitoring that communication, and even before the communication, monitoring if the phones are even being picked up and after how many rings, flat out you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's happening in your own practice and until you know that it's very hard to implement everything else that you're going to learn on this podcast because there's going to be no accountability and there's going to be no way for you to track and understand if things are working. So point number one, before we get into phone handling, is make sure that you put something in place for recording calls. If you've got paid ads, there are services out there you can check out CallRail.com. It's one service that we use with our clients. There's a ton of other services if you Google them, that will record incoming phone calls. Use one of them. Put out a tracking number. Start slow if you have to. If you can't, put it into your full practice to record incoming and outgoing. Just start with a simple online service like that. Put it on your online ads. Put it on your print ads. Put it in your radio ads. Let people call a direct phone number that you then can monitor and access. And I guarantee you in addition to the accountability and to the understanding that you'll get from recording, you will get a wealth of information. I learned how to do a lot of what I do not just by testing and trial and error but also by listening to thousands of incoming phone calls from our client. So I know how the patients speak and you need to know what the patients say. You need to understand their hopes, their desires, their fears, their dreams. And if you start recording those calls, even if you start listening in the evening, on the way to work, load them up onto your phone, blow them up in the car and just listen to them. And try to listen for the language, but also for your staff. Pick out what matters to people. Pick out the phrases that they're using. Start using those things in your advertising and you'll start doing better. If something's prohibiting you from recording the calls, if you have a law that you need to comply with in your state or province or country or if you just feel that it is prohibitive technologically, your staff is afraid, they're fundamentally opposed to it, the first thing I'd say is get new staff because you're paying people to help you. You're not there to run a charity. You need them to do what you need them to do. And that's for them to be accountable for their actions. But if you've got any kind of barrier to that I want to eliminate those excuses. And what I would suggest you do is get a mystery shopper.

Nick: [00:05:48] You can hire a professional service. You can hire somebody you know that your staff is not familiar with and you should really do this anyway whether you record calls or don't record calls because it'll really help in the overall understanding of what your practice is doing and how you're doing and if things are being adhered to. But even if you just do it for calls, it will help tremendously. Have a checklist of what the staff is supposed to do. Make sure that your mystery caller understands what they need to go over, what they need to ask, and what they need to look for and get a report of how your staff did and do this more than one time. Don't just do it once. If it came out well, you know, you figure well, they're doing a great job. It must be something else, right? A lot of times it's not. A lot of times, what I find is that staff can be on and off. They have moods like everybody else. And if they're not treating the situation professionally they will allow themselves to get into whatever mindset they happen to be in that morning. If something went wrong for them at breakfast, they carry that into the office. So you want to run multiple mystery shopping sessions.

Nick: [00:06:52] All Right. I had to get that off my chest. I had to let you guys understand what it means. I had to let you know that if you're not recording you're not really getting the information that you need to make a decision. So let's get to the meat of it and we're going to start talking about how to handle your incoming phone calls. The best practices that you can do to help convert more patients and help you bring more people to your consultations and help them ultimately become paying clients in your practice.

Nick: [00:07:20] The first step in handling incoming calls is understanding what your receptionist's real job is and having her understand what her job is. Oftentimes when I speak to staff at medical practices they feel that their job is to inform the patient, inform the caller and give them all the information that they need so that they can make the decision. Unfortunately, for them that is not a metric that matters. How well you do at informing the customer is not going to translate to sales. So I'll tell you the two primary jobs of anyone that picks up the phone in your practice to handle an incoming inquiry call from a prospective patient or incoming booking request from a prospective patient that's not someone that's been at your practice before. Their number one job, I want you to note this down, is their number one job is to get the booking. Nothing else really matters on the call. Their job is to book that patient. We're going to get into how to do that in a second. But it's a real mindset shift when you understand that their job is not to inform. It's to book. If they haven't booked that procedure consultation they've failed at that particular call. That call wasn't done. They can give people information for an hour. If they haven't booked the consultation request it was for nothing. So the primary objective on any call is to book it. Book the consultation. And there's a secondary objective when that's not possible. There are times when the reception can do their best and they can do everything right but they have a hard time with the person on the other line or they're somewhere where they can't talk. For example some people will pick up at work or call in from work and then a co-worker walks in and then they get all quiet. So there are situations where they may not be able to book directly on the phone and say everything that they want and they may want to try to get off. So we have a backup objective and we teach this to everybody that we deal with. And I want you to take this back to your practice and teach them these two objectives. The backup objective is to get an e-mail address, a phone number and the full name so that you can put them into your follow up sequence. It's very important that they understand that. If they hang up that phone having given the information that the person asked for, and only the information and they got nothing back in return, they didn't get the consultation booking, they didn't get a phone number that they can use to follow up in a couple of days to see if the person has any questions, you no longer have options. You are at the mercy of that person that called you. You're at the mercy of life in general, of the world. You're at the mercy of happenstance. You're no longer in control of your practice, your processes or your advertising. So your staff has to understand that they need to take control of that call. They need to get you the information that you need so that when you need to follow up you can follow up you can send a thank you e-mail for calling with additional information. You can follow that person up and ask them follow up questions and see if they're ready to book their consultation. You can call them, leave a voicemail, talk to them directly, ask them if they have any other questions in a couple of days and then again after that and again then the week after that. And I want you to see the difference in that. I'm hoping that you are recognizing what the differences between having zero control and having full control with this simple process. By just changing the mindset of collecting the information it puts the control back in your hands. It lets you direct the flow of your business and you're not at the mercy of the weather or if the person's child walked into the room and they had to go take care of them and they had to hang up the phone. You're not at the mercy of the world. You're making things happen. Things are not happening to you. And I call these kinds of insights key leverage points. This is the kind of insight and leverage that can completely turn around everything that you're doing. Because the best way to grow your practice without spending a single dime is to just get more out of what you've got. You've already got the phone ringing to some degree, whether you're happy with that or not it doesn't matter. If 10 phone calls come in over a period of time and your receptionist was handling eight of them poorly and two of them booked, all she has to do is book two more and you're doubling the incoming lead flow to your practice. The incoming number of patients that are coming to see you. That's just going from two to four out of 10 calls. And by them understanding that their job is to collect information gives you the key leverage that you need to start changing the practice and I don't want you to take this lightly. This is the type of thing that can really make a difference. It's the type of thing that I've seen be the difference between a practice that is flourishing and successful and one that is floundering by doing absolutely nothing else in the practice. All right so that's your first key takeaway.

Nick: [00:12:01] So let's say you've started to record those incoming calls. You know that the phone is being picked up when it rings, you know it only takes a couple of rings to pick up. Everything's ideal in that situation. Your staff understands what their objectives are and they're doing that well. Where do we go from here? Let's start talking about exactly how to handle that incoming call.

Nick: [00:12:20] Understand that when a patient calls your practice, they're in a vulnerable state. They're in a state of uncertainty. They're in a state of having dealt with their problem for years and not knowing what to do about it. And they're in a state of finally being hopeful that they have recourse. That they have somewhere to turn for help and that place will be you. One of the key things that your staff has to understand is that they need to show empathy. They need to show sympathy empathy and understanding. And there's only one real way to do that and that's to let the person talk by asking them the right questions. When you're creating the script, and I use the word script very loosely here, we have talking points is how we do things. So I want you to develop the talking points that they have, the questions that they need to ask. We make sure that we don't ask yes or no questions. When you ask just yes or no questions, there is no opportunity for dialogue. There's no opportunity to take the person deeper into their own psyche, deeper into their own emotions and have them come out the other side feeling good about having chosen you for their surgery. When you ask your questions it's crucial that you let the person talk. There are a lot of people that have a habit of waiting for their turn to talk. I've seen this happen with receptionists. I've seen this happen in regular conversations that you may be having with people. I've seen it all over the place. People rarely listen these days. They don't truly listen and try to hear what's being told of them. All they're doing is waiting for their chance to talk and for their chance to speak in the conversation. If you want the person to start building a bond with your staff, you have to make sure that your staff shuts up. There's no other way to say that. They asked the question, they closed their mouth and they let the person talk until they're done talking. And only after they're done talking do they reply with something that shows empathy. Something that shows that they have feeling for what that person is going through and that they'll be able to help and reassurance when they respond to. Great idea to have them echo what they've heard. So if the person says, you know I'm not happy with my breast size. The left one's always been smaller in the right. I'm really worried about the asymmetry. I'm not sure if this is something that can be corrected. Before the person goes right into the spiel about how it can be corrected, she should first show that she understood. OK. What I'm hearing is that you're not happy with the breast size. We can certainly help you with that. And then you've got some asymmetry issues. And I got to let you know that we handle those all the time. You don't have to worry, it's absolutely correctable. May I have your permission to tell you a little bit more about that. OK? So she's echoed what the person has said and understands that the information that's going to be coming at her is going to be information that she asked for she's been heard. That immediately will build rapport on your phone calls. .

Nick: [00:15:15] The next thing that your staff should be trained in is credentialing. And we credential in three primary areas. You want to have them credential the physician. You want to have them credential the practice facilities and you want to have them credential the procedure itself. We don't do this by just spewing information at them. So there's an old saying in sales that goes like this. It says, when some people come to present they show up and throw up. What that means is that they come to the presentation and I'm sure you've seen reps come and present to you whether it be a laser machine or some new kind of surgical equipment or a new type of filter. They come up, and rather than asking you about your practice and figuring out what you actually need, they come up, they spew their presentation at you. They're basically throwing up the information at you. Everything that you maybe don't even need to hear and then they hope for a sale. Your staff should be intimately familiar with your credentialing points. What makes you different. What makes you special and what makes you advantageous over your competitors. But they shouldn't treat that as something that they're forcing down that prospect's throat. It has to be given at the right time and in the right sequence and you have to ask for permission to ask these questions and to tell them these questions and give them the answers that they're looking for. So I'll give you a quick example.

Nick: [00:16:37] Let's say that part of my mandated reception is to credential you as a physician. I'm going to say that your name is Dr. Jones. We work our way towards giving out that information once the patient has asked for it. So I would say something like, have you seen Dr. Jones before? And the person will say no. If they say yes then they are an existing patient. We don't need to handle that case. So they say no. No I haven't. Oh may I tell you a little bit about them before we go on? And the person, of course, because you were polite and we tend to not want to disappoint people, we tend to want to please people, we will most likely let the reception stock. So the person will answer yes sure. And at that point you've gotten their permission and they're now asking for the information. You're not ramming it down their throat because you think it's something that will help you sell. It comes across very very differently from a psychological standpoint. At that point, I would start telling her about Dr. Jones and I would say OK great. Well, Dr. Jones has been in practice for 22 years. He's performed over 5000 breast augmentation surgeries. He's absolutely an expert at this. I can't tell you the number of happy patients that we have. You're going to see a lot of before and afters when you come in. You're going to see a lot of testimonials when you come in and you're going to just absolutely love your consultation with him. He has a very special technique for breast augmentation. It creates better results. He'll go over it with you when he comes in. But you've definitely made the right choice. .

Nick: [00:18:01] So what I've done there is I've fully credentialed that physician, the fictitious Dr. Jones. I would have gone into further detail if this were an actual case and dug up particulars about what would make Dr. Jones special and advantageous, double board accreditation, whatever it might be and then also explain that to the patient because not everyone knows what that means. And I would have done all of this with the patient's permission and understanding and she would listen to the whole thing without it sounding like a sales pitch because it was done in a natural way. So when you're teaching your staff to do this make sure that they understand that they have to get permission from the patient for anything that they want to put forth.

Nick: [00:18:40] The next thing that you can do is credential either the practice or the procedure, depending on how that comes across in the conversation. If you've got your own surgical state of the art facility you can certainly work that in. And definitely if you have anything that you do that's advantageous in the procedure you want to put that forth. I'll give you one example. We worked with a doctor in Toronto and he had a different technique than what a lot of people were doing at the time. He was cauterizing every blood vessel before putting in the implant and when interviewing him he made a sound. He said, well I asked them, how do people do this surgery normally, because I thought everyone did it like this. He said, "no no no. Usually people will put this instrument in and they'll go in and [tearing sound] they'll put a pocket in and then they put in the implant. I don't do it like that." As soon as I heard that sound I knew that was gold. We were on to something. His procedure was unique because the rest of the market wasn't doing it with a cauterization technique. There were a few doctors doing that but we were the first to mention it. And we were able to position it as a bloodless breast augmentation so that there's no blood before the implant goes in and we position that as reducing capsular contractures, that's what he believed based on the research that he did in his own practice. And we went to market with that and did quite well. He was booked eight months out by the time we were finished working there and he was making a ton of money and doing the kinds of surgeries that he wanted to do and it was done because we were able to credential this procedure. We were able to make it advantageous and unique in the market and we trained the staff to say that on the phone calls, as well as obviously in ads and in the website.

Nick: [00:20:19] So let's recap quickly where we've been. You're recording calls. Your staff is showing empathy, letting the caller talk. They're showing them that they understood by echoing back what they heard from the patient. They're credentialing everything along the way as they go in natural conversation without sounding like a greasy salesman. It's all very naturally based, as the issues come up with the patient. But there's one last thing that I want to talk to you about.

Nick: [00:20:45] So far we've done really well but there's one other job that they have to do in addition to what I said the primary objectives are and we'll get to that one in a second. But the next thing you wanted them to do is make sure that they have qualifying questions so that they're not wasting your time with patients that may not be ready for surgery. How this rolls out in your practice is, of course, going to be up to you. You need to understand what you're doing there and what you want to do and what your objectives are. I'll give you a few simple questions and guidelines to start you thinking in the right direction. One of the first questions we always ask is Have you had this procedure before? This eliminates people that may be trying to get in because they need a revision or they're not happy with their current doctor, problematic patients. If you handle those kinds of cases, if you're happy to get that potential backlash and dissatisfaction from people (some physicians we've worked with are extremely good at fixing other people's problems and then they get very happy patients — if you're that type of doctor you don't necessarily need to ask this question) but most times what we find is that they don't want to handle other people's problems and you may not want to handle other people's problems. And this is a great way for your staff to eliminate that kind of inquiry immediately and filter that out on the phone.

Nick: [00:21:59] The next question is, when are you thinking of having surgery? What this question does is it gets the person to admit whether they are very close to buying. So if you've got a wait list you don't want to be spending your time with people that want to have surgery in six months or three months or four months. You want to spend your time with people that are a few weeks to one or two months out at the most. And then you want to book the people that want to have that surgery sooner upfront and if you've got consistent lead flow as you should have with proper advertising, that you're getting leads every single day for your procedures, you can afford to be this selective. And what you want to do is prioritize the now buyers. The people that are going to go through surgery within the next couple of weeks to a month month and a half before the people that are six months out. So those people that are six months out, you start to push off. You just tell them that, OK well we have an appointment and then you do it a couple of months before their surgery. When you're not busy, if you happen to be in that unfortunate situation and you haven't got your lead flow going yet and things are not rocking and rolling with the incoming calls and e-mails, you can certainly afford to spend time with them. Then you have to have an aggressive follow up sequence for the next six months to make sure that they don't forget about you because they are most likely shopping around to four or five other doctors potentially. So you have to have that in place and of course see that patient. But if you are doing things right and if you've got the patient flow coming in, then you want to make sure that you're prioritizing those people.

Nick: [00:23:28] The next question that we put in there and like I said you're going to have several questions. You can start credentialling for a BMI or whatever it is that you have hanging belly fat or is it internal, is your stomach hard. You know you get it. Those are of course the medical prequalified questions. But the next one that we want to go after is the one that everyone feels uncomfortable with and that is the price. Does that patient have money? Are they ready to go and can they afford to pay? You obviously can't ask it outright. You know it would be, it would be an interesting conversation if you said, well do you have money? It probably wouldn't go very well for that receptionist. But we tackle that in a very gentle way. And we say would you like to hear about financing options. And that opens a conversation. If they say no, you don't push any further. If they say yes, then you start to go into the talk about the financing and then it's very easy because you've already opened up that discussion and the patient has given you permission to talk about money, to ask, you know, will you be needing the full financing? Do you have a deposit? What's the situation currently? And that becomes a much nicer and gentler way of easing into it that doesn't make the patient feel uncomfortable. But it also allows your staff to qualify people and maybe book them during downtimes or if they feel that that person probably won't be able to afford it and book them further out and give them more time to save up and what not.

Nick: [00:24:49] Now those are the primary areas where you can go and get leverage immediately in your practice. There's nuances there's the minutiae of how to handle this in particular. You can certainly brainstorm that with your staff. You can figure out the questions that you need to ask. You can do some trial and error of course and get that going. But there's one other thing I want to say before we finish this particular episode and that's to reiterate the number one objective.

Nick: [00:25:17] We Went through a lot of things here. They all were great. They all were great. Showing empathy. Letting the caller talk. Qualifying them. Credentialling you. All of those things are fantastic. But the number one thing that the receptionist has to do at the end of the day and at the end of that call is ask for the booking. If she doesn't ask for the booking it may never come. And don't assume that the patient knows to ask. It's not their job to figure that out. They are going through your process. You're not going through their process. Remember, you want to be in control of the process not the other way around. You don't want the world controlling your practice. You want to control what the world serves to you. What you've made happen in the world. The advertising that you've created, that swell, that wave, when it comes in you, want to be able to receive it. You want to be able to channel that power and instead of it hitting a barrier, you want to take that energy and flow it through the generators. You want to get them to create power in your practice and to be able to do that. You have to take control and to take control, your receptionist has to ask for the booking. She has to ask for those secondary objectives and you can do that right up front. You know, may I have your name and email address and phone number in case we get disconnected so that I can call you back if anything happens. There's a nice gentle way to ask for it. Very few people will say no. But now the receptionist is doing data gathering, data capture. She can do that up front and on the back she has to go for her primary objective right she's landed on the beach. Now she has to take the beach head. She has to move things forward and to win, she has to get the booking. And that is her number one job and she has to understand that if she hasn't done that she hasn't done her job plain and simple. There's no way to sugarcoat it or be nice about it. Her job is to book consultations so that you're not wasting your day sitting around twiddling your thumbs or meeting the wrong kind of people.

Nick: [00:27:10] I Hope that's been helpful. That wraps up this episode. I hope you take this information and you immediately go and implement in your practice. I hope you take it and make a ton of money with it. I hope you found this extremely helpful and useful and the best way that I can think of to appreciate information like this is to take action on it. Good luck with your calls and good luck with the staff and I hope that you implement this immediately. I'm Nick Dumitru. I will see you on the next podcast.

The post How To Handle Incoming Phone Calls – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #5 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"The more you tell the more you sell and that's what you should be thinking about. And that's true for any industry that you're in. The more you tell the more you sell."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now your host Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:24] Welcome to another episode of Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals and anybody running a professional services practice as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. Today we're going to talk about how to design a cosmetic surgery website. We're talking about this today because there are a lot of myths and misconceptions and misinformation that you'll find on the internet, and from consultants and web designers web developers. Everybody's got an idea about how to design a cosmetic surgery website but very few of them are really in the business of dealing with cosmetic surgery. They're not in the business of making you money. And that's what it really boils down to at the end of the day. Your website has to produce for you. It has to get you the results that you need. It has to convert your prospects to contacts and it has to reassure them that you are the right person for the job. On this episode we're going to tackle some of the common myths and I hope to dispel some of them for you. If you've got additional questions about that I'd love to engage with you. Just send us a note and let me know what other questions you have. I love to hear from the listeners and we will tackle those answers on other programs. Let's get right into it. .

Nick: [00:01:43] The First concept that I want you to understand is that your website has to talk to the patient. It's not about you. We're going to get deeper into that. But that concept is key. The website is not about you. I know that may sound counter-intuitive. It may sound in opposition to what you may have been told by, even consultants from companies like Allergan. They have their business consultants and they're usually advised that the patient is looking for the doctor. And I'm here to tell you that that's simply not true. The patient is looking for her own concerns. She's concerned about herself. She doesn't care about your practice. You're not famous. You're not a movie star. It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that as a plastic surgeon, everybody knows you. I've seen this happen where ego takes over more than one time and I'd like you to have the advantage of not having that ego in place. I'd like you to have the advantage of understanding that the customer journey is about them. Your patient is the hero in her own story. You're not the hero. You're just there to help to get her to where she needs to be. I want you to understand that concept very clearly it's a key point. I'm going to keep stressing it because I want it to sink in. Your patient is the hero in her own story. She is grappling with issues. She is the one that has to get over her hangups, she's the one that has to change, she's the one that has to go through the surgery. You're performing the surgery. You're going to guide her and help her get to where she needs to be. But at the end of the day it's her journey. She has to travel that road and she has to be the hero of her story. So your website has to treat that concept with respect. And what I mean by that is that when your patient lands on your homepage, and yes I understand if she's coming in from search engines she may be landing on the inner pages, but in general as a concept, when I say homepage I'm just referring to any landing page on your site. When she gets to your website it shouldn't be about you. There shouldn't be a huge photo of you. There shouldn't be information about just you and your staff. And I'm going to get into that in a little bit as to why, but you need to understand that when she's there she's there to get information for herself and that information has to be comprehensive. So before we get into the why and how of designing the menu and the structure and the pages, I'd first like to start with the content. The most important thing on your website is going to be the legibility of the content on the website. .

Nick: [00:04:18] Content Is king no matter what industry you're in and being able to read and engage that content is very very important. That means keeping the white text on coloured backgrounds to a minimum. Legible text is still black on white. The same as it's been for hundreds of years. It's black text on white paper, light colored paper, that's always been the most legible form of text and that still is the case today. Most news websites you will not see them with colored backgrounds. It's very hard for the eye to read and to follow the words when it's reversed. So make sure that if someone's giving you a dark colored website with white text on a dark background, you want to try to avoid that as much as possible because it makes engaging with your content that much harder. And if they can't engage with your content, they can't buy and they can't convert. And when you're creating this content it has to be enough that it positions you as the authority on the subject, and what I mean by that is that you don't have thin content. You have enough meat on the bones that when the viewer sees your content, she understands that you understand the topic and what she's going through. It shows empathy and engages her and takes her into the decision making process. Which brings us to our first myth.

Nick: [00:05:33] You may have heard that people don't read. This as a common thing that's told by all sorts of consultants and web designers. And I'm here to tell you that is flat out not true. They can argue it until it's blue in the face but I'm going to take you through some reasoning here and by the end of it I think you'll understand that that's not the case. .

Nick: [00:05:52] The First thing I'm going to tell you is that the number one selling book category is the young adult section. So young people are still reading. These are the people that everybody is vilifying saying they don't read anymore. Nobody reads online. They just scan scan scan scan. Well, they're buying young adult topic books and they're reading those books. Another statistic I want to give you is that 60 percent of e-book readers are younger than 45. 55 percent of print book readers are younger than 45. Now when you take into account that the baby boomers are older than that and they make up the majority of the population, 60 percent of e-book readers are still below 45, which is well outside of the range of the oldest demographic that we have which we presumably would assume that are the readers. And that's just not the case. The majority are younger. So people are still reading. They're reading books, they're reading web pages, they're reading articles and they're reading ebooks. What they don't read is boring content, self aggrandizing content. Remember your patient isn't there for you. She's there for herself. If you're just writing about yourself it's not going to engage her. If you're not telling her things that she's concerned about it's not going to engage her. If you just tell her about your facility and your experience and that you've done more in surgeries than anybody else — all good points but it's boring and unengaging content. It's not going to convert her from the start because she's not there to learn about you primarily at first. You have to understand that everybody that comes into your funnel into your website is at a different point of their buying journey. Some people are at the early research stage. Some people are at the finished-just-before-I'm-going-to-buy stage. Your content has to address all of that because they will go to different sections of your website, take different action and act very differently. And if you're not engaging them throughout that full journey that they're on, right from the initial inquiry down through ready-to-make-a-decision when they're just trying to satisfy their curiosity at first, and then they make up their mind to do it, then they want to find out about the procedure, then they want to find out if it can get them what they want. If you don't have that kind of content, if your content is thin, if your content is just talking about yourself, if your content is not engaging interesting and informative, she's simply going to go to another website because it's not engaging the psychology that you need to engage to have them make a decision. And I want to try to prove this to you. I promised that I would give you some reasoning to prove it to you. Here's how I know people read. .

Nick: [00:08:26] I want you to start thinking about the last large purchase that you made. It has to be an involved purchase: a car, a house, a new bathroom, a long vacation, an expensive hotel, that watch you've wanted forever and you can finally afford to get. I want you to think about your hobbies. It could be a dog that you bought. It could be a boat. Whatever it is that you last made a major decision on I want you to start thinking about your process and think about your spouse. It could be your spouse maybe looking at redoing the house. It could be a new article of clothing. I want you to think about what you did prior to that purchase and I'm willing to wager that you, like me, like everybody else, did your research first. And there are plenty of statistics on this from Google and from other places. I'm not going to get into those. I want you to think about your own life. When you're ready to make a purchase when you're interested in a topic you will do in-depth research. You will watch YouTube videos. You'll read everything there is to read about it. If it's a hobby, especially if it's hunting, fishing, boating, bicycling, whatever it might be. You are into that topic and you will read and you will read tens of thousands of words because it's pertinent to you at that time. Now I want you to think about when you made the purchase. The item or the trip or whatever it was that you wanted and you were so intensely interested in. You bought and then what happened? You didn't care about it anymore. You got it. You're engaging with it. It's yours now. You don't care about researching about it anymore. You're still into the topic, you're still into whatever it is you purchased but you're no longer doing your research and that's the way focus works. And when a patient is interested in changing her body, changing her look, dealing with issues that she may have been struggling with from childhood: ears sticking out, breasts not the right size, belly hanging out — whatever it is that's been bugging her, that's been tormenting her for what could have been decades, is going to be intently interesting to her. And to say that she doesn't read, is not only doing that individual a disservice by not providing them the information they need, but you are essentially screwing yourself out of a sale and letting her go to somebody else because you listen to a consultant that told you the wrong information. When it comes to sales, when it comes to your website, generally speaking, there's a saying that we use in marketing: the more you tell, the more you sell. And that's what you should be thinking about. And that's true for any industry that you're in. The more you tell the more you sell. Because just like you when you are into your hobby, into purchasing your boat, your fishing rod, your hunting knife, your new pair of shoes, that sports watch, that luxury watch, that new sports car, you are intently interested in it and you would do anything to get more information about. I know when I bought my last car I was watching Youtube videos, I was watching comparisons — how does it compare against that BMW, a Mercedes, a Porsche. I was watching all of that stuff and I watched all that stuff before buying the car. After that I didn't watch another video because I had the car. And that's the way it works with breast augmentation. The way it works with rhinoplasty, the way it works with liposuction, tummy tucks, veneers if you're a dentist. It works the exact same way. People are trying to inform themselves and make a decision where they feel safe and confident in their decision. And the more you can educate that patient the better you will do. .

Nick: [00:12:00] So What you need to do is ask yourself and ask your consultant this: if people aren't reading online, if those people are reading, do you really want to market to somebody that's fundamentally disinterested in your topic and your service? Do you want to market to flakes? Or do you want to market to someone that's serious about making a decision, putting down some money and going through with their surgery? And that's how you have to think about content. That's how I want you to think about your web design and your web content moving forward. And if any consultant tells you that people don't read, you can immediately disqualify them from having any sort of expertise because they clearly have done no testing and they have no idea about what's converting online or what to do with a cosmetic practice. And I'm speaking here from our own tests and going up in some of the toughest markets in North America. And I can tell you fundamentally that you should leave that decision up to the patient. Let them decide how far they want to read get to your point. Provide in-depth information because you can not guess at what point in the buying cycle that visitor is at. And you want to have information there that caters to everybody from the decision maker, right up to the I'm-about-a-year-out-from-making-a-decision-but-I-really-need-some-information. And you want to start engaging with them from that point on and have that information there for them be comprehensive and be the authority in your market. Because if she's going to other websites and all they have is thin content, you can bet that you will look like the expert in your field and you'll stand out from the pack. Let's get into a tactical element next which still pertains to content. .

Nick: [00:13:39] When we're talking about content, people follow what's called a dual readership path. Now, while people will read and people that are intensely interested in the topic we'll read everything, there are people that are already have some of the information. So I spoke to you about that buying path. The decision making path to buying journey. It's called by many names but essentially it starts at the point of inception, where somebody is just getting an inkling that I should do something about this, I'm not happy with my breasts, my eyes, my wrinkles. I should do something about it. What are my options? They started Googling. They get informed. They may have been to two, three websites. Those websites were incomplete. So then you have more questions. They start Googling again. Now they start to engage with your content and they come across your site. Your site is comprehensive but they've gotten information previously so they're fairly sure that they know that they want, you know, what the differences between silicone versus saline implants and what they want to do moving forward. Kind of what kind of incision they would like. They've gotten all this information already. So what they'll do at that point is that they'll follow the second readership path and what that means is that they're not reading word for word anymore. Now they start to jump from headline and visual element to headline and visual element. So when you're laying out your page, headlines, sub headlines and graphics are very important because it allows them to take that dual path and engage with the paragraph that they're interested in. So they may gloss over the, you know, silicone versus saline. They may gloss over the incision types and they go to, oh, what's this, this is something new and different. It caught my eye as the headline, read the sub headline, it was intriguing, now I'm getting into the paragraph going to read from here on. So you've got those two types of readership. You've got the one that's going word for word top to bottom. There are intently interested in everything. You've got the second one that's doing some scanning and then reading. They're picking out the content that is of interest to them at that time. And again if you have short content that process cannot happen. If you don't have content that's long enough and informative enough and with enough elements that they can pick through, there's no way that they can engage with anything on that page and they'll just bounce and find another website that's answering their questions. Now as you're building your web page, scanability, visual hierarchy, which is how we refer to this, which is making sure that the headline stands out from the headline and from the body copy and the graphics. Things take priority visually. That's where we have bold and regular. That's a way of displaying visual hierarchy with type. I'm not going to bore you by getting into too much of that detail. But what I want you to pay attention to is also the thought process when somebody is reading, I noticed some of these new design trends. They tend to start to break up the page into big sections and they don't allow enough flow of content when somebody is reading. It's almost like as if you're engaged in a book and then your kid is constantly coming up to you and asking you for something. It keeps interrupting your thought. You're, what they would call in movies, the suspension of disbelief. When you're engaged with a piece of content and the person has a psychological track that they're on, you don't want to break that track up until you're done with your point. So that's another thing you have to be very very careful with chunks of text. So when you're making a point, before your call to action, you want to make sure that that point is complete and unbroken. So that's another visual element that you can now go back and evaluate your own content and your own website and think about your decision making process as you read. Is that being interrupted or is it allowed to come to its natural conclusion? So to sum up that very quickly. Make sure you've got enough content. People still read. Be careful of the dual readership path. Be careful of breaking up trains of thought. If you can do all of that, you'll be head and shoulders ahead of your competitors. .

Nick: [00:17:39] Myth number two: you shouldn't show your price. This is a point of debate between marketers. I can only speak to what I've experienced and I can tell you right now that our philosophy and our design philosophy and our marketing philosophy is one that says that the patient isn't stupid. She knows what things cost. She doesn't need to contact you just to find out the price. And also if she does, that's kind of a low quality lead anyway. There's also the perception that you're dishonest when you don't show your price. Imagine if you went to a store or a restaurant or even an auto dealership and they had no prices on their vehicles, no prices on the menu for the food. And then they wanted your business. What would happen at that point? What would you think of that dealership? If you went to an auto dealership, you were going to buy a car and none of the cars had any prices and nobody talked to you until you went and wanted to ask for the price. You couldn't get any information. Their website had no prices, you couldn't find what this car costs anywhere. A few things will happen there. The first is that you lose trust for that company because they look like they're hiding something. Why are they hiding it? I'll tell you what goes through people's minds because we have surveyed this and we've tested this. And what goes through their minds is that the doctor's making up the price. This person gets one price. The other person gets another price. He's just making it up as he goes. He might charge me $5000 or $8000 or $10000. I don't know because he's not disclosing the price. The moment that you make something public, it's perceived as honest. It's perceived as it's disclosed and set in stone and I'm going to get treated right and everybody's getting this price. That is the perception that the consumer has. It also helps you when they come in because you've displayed your price. They know what the price is and when it comes time to negotiate payment they don't have to try to lowball you. And you can always say, well, those are the prices we have and then we charge everybody the exact same thing. So it's a tool that you can use. So our personal philosophy is to always show the price on a website because not only is it more honest but it binds the consumer to you. It makes them trust you much much more. So where's the data to back this up? Let's get into that. .

Nick: [00:19:47] I'll tell you the three most visited pages on any cosmetic website. It's going to be the before and after page, and I'm talking about pages other than the home page. The home page obviously gets a lot of traffic. Other than the home page, where people go to reset. That that's a reset mechanism so they could come into any page and then go back to the home page, so that's why typically that'll get the bulk of the traffic. But other than the home page here are the three most visited pages: the before and after page, the pricing page and the testimonials page. Those are the three things that people are looking for more than anything else on your website right now. So even if you pause this podcast right now, have a look at your website and see if you've got those things prominent and if they're comprehensive and if they treat the subject matter the way that it should be treated and comprehensively.

Nick: [00:20:35] So if you don't have your pricing on your website, what are you doing to yourself? If somebody has advised you to not put prices on your website because they will, quote, unquote, increase the number of leads, tirekickers, coming to your practice. What are you doing to yourself? You're eliminating one of the top three pages that consumers are looking for. You are forcing them to go to somebody else to find out what the pricing is and what happens when they're there. That person could be more savvy then. They could be more savvy than your marketing company than your consultant. And they could be using that page to capture the lead. They could be using that page to entice them with payment plans to show them that there are other options other than going to someone else's website to find the price. So again you're harming yourself by taking bad advice and not having pricing on your website because in the event that you don't have it there, that person is forced to go and satisfy that need to scratch that itch on somebody else's web property. So you are making them go back to Google by not having the information that they want. All right. So that is a big myth that I like to try to dispel. Don't worry about being too expensive or not having the right price. People will self select. You don't need the people that won't pay anyway. And we'll get into this topic another time in terms of how to position yourself and how to not be a commodity in the market and have to go and lowball to the lowest price. We'll do an episode on that coming up. But for now we're talking about your website and you should be showing prices.

Nick: [00:22:12] The next element that I want to tackle is the navigation for the website. And I have a rule of thumb. If I go to any plastic surgeon's website when they contact us and they asked me to have a look at the site, if I have a look at it and it starts with About Us, I know that that plastic surgeon doesn't get it yet. I know that whoever's built that website doesn't understand the importance of the consumer's journey and why she's there primarily. Now I'll tell you why she's there in a second, and the way that you should order your menu. For now I just want to remind you that the patient isn't there for you. She's there for herself. She's there to get what she needs from your website. She's not there to be informed about you. There is a time when you want to inform her about you and I'll get into that right now.

Nick: [00:23:00] Whenever a patient comes to your site, they'll generally think like this, and this is the order that you want to have your menu: can you do what I need? That's the first question. They come to your website and they don't know anything about you yet. So the first question isn't who are you (the About Us). It's can you do what I need (your Services). Can you do a tummy tuck or are you a rhinoplasty surgeon? Did I come to the wrong website. Can you do what I need? Can You augment my breasts or are you just a liposuction specialist? Can you do what I need? What are your services? What do you have to offer? That's the first item that should be in your menu. Go, look at your own website. If it's About Us, your web team has got that wrong and you've got the opportunity now to change it. .

Nick: [00:23:47] The next thing that she's going to want to know is, do you do good work? Again, not about you, don't care about you. Can you do the good work? Can you perform this procedure in a way that I will get a satisfactory result? That I'll get a superior result? Menu item that correlates to that obviously is the before and after section. And the testimonials section. She's looking for proof that other people have done it. If it's not legal to have testimonials in your state or your province, wherever you're located, you want to make sure that you've got a very strong before and after section. If you don't have that, you want to make sure that you're fostering those reviews online and you're pointing people to those reviews off of your website because there's nothing that any governing body can really do about that. But you want to show her that you can do good work. This is what she's after. So number one, again, can you do what I need? Oh you can. All right. Do you do good work. Prove it to me where's the proof. So the proof elements have to be there. .

Nick: [00:24:43] Once you've satisfied those two primary things then you can start talking about yourself. Then it's the About Us and the Contact Us. And I want you to think about that. It's a logical psychological progression. She has to satisfy her own curiosities first and that has nothing to do with you. This actually gets me worked up a little bit because this is how webdesign firms sell websites. They'll go to a doctor and they'll do an ego play. They'll put your photo on the home page, they'll plaster you and your staff and your big face up top there and they will sell you that product, because your ego wants to buy that. Because your ego is not concerned with your business. Your ego is concerned with self gratification. It's narcissistic. It works against business. It works against you. But that's how they make their money. This is how web design firms are taught to sell. They sell on ego. They'll put your logo and your face on it and then they'll sell you that and tell you that's what people want and that's simply not the case. People are there to satisfy their own needs. We are selfish creatures. Us humans, humanity in general. We want to survive. We want to eat more. We want to get more for ourselves then our family and our children. That is our main concern. Nobody cares about you. You don't care about me. If I were up here telling you about my day and you know what I had for breakfast with my daughter, you wouldn't care about that information. You're here for you. You're here to improve your practice and you're here to get that information. And the faster you understand that and really let that sink in, the faster you can make better decisions, not only for your website but for your business in general. .

Nick: [00:26:29] So let's recap that. Can you do what I need, the Services, whatever way you want to tackle that in the menu. It's not the About section. Do you do good work? Before and afters, testimonials, videos, proof that you can do the procedure. Once we've tackled that, who are you. Do I know you? Do I like you? Should I like you? Let me watch your videos. Let me read about you. What are your hobbies? In previous episodes we discuss that. We discussed about the knowing, the liking, and the trust. I think it was maybe episode 1 or 2. You can go back and listen to those if you haven't already. .

Nick: [00:27:03] So Now I want you to look at your own website. Pull up your website right now. Pause this podcast if you have to or try to remember what you've got on there and look at it. When you go to your home page, are you the primary focus of that site or is it your patient? Are you making the patients the hero or are you making yourself the hero? When you look at your menu does it start with the About section? Is it backwards? Imagine going on a date and all you did was talk about yourself. How interested would they be? Would they care about you? No. They would find you very uninteresting because they want to talk about themselves more than they care about what you have to say about yourself. They have to give you permission to talk about yourself and you get that permission virtually digitally by convincing them that this is the right way to do it and you get that permission digitally by showing them that you understand them first. Showing them the proof of what you can do and then they will give you mental permission to tell them about you. And then they can make their decision. .

Nick: [00:28:05] Now telling them about you brings me very nicely into the next topic which is the photography that you use on the site and I'm talking primarily about the photos of yourself. Your bio pictures, your pictures of you and your staff. I'll go over some of the typical mistakes that I see online. And this I see on a lot of websites. I see this on a lot of doctors' websites. I've spoken about this in Paris trying to educate people about it. Basically this is what you need to know. A photo has a dozen unseen cues, unspoken words. It's a visual language that we use to make decisions. What you wear, your haircut, your body position, your facial composition, all of those things send a message to the patient. You know this is true because you have made snap decisions about people. You've walked somewhere, you've walked into a place and...I just don't like that guy. There's something about him. He looks like an asshole. Whatever it might be, we pick up visual cues from what people are wearing, how they're groomed, how they walk, how they sit, how they speak, the tone in their voice, the intonation, their vocabulary, the vernacular that they use — all of those are cues and clues which have nothing to do with what people say. .

Nick: [00:29:19] So The number one mistake that I see on websites is misclassifying who you are. And doctors do this by wearing suits. As a physician you're given an extreme amount of power with your medical degree. You get people to get naked in front of you just by wearing a white lab coat. And I see this over and over, where doctors, in an attempt to look, quote unquote, professional, will wear a suit instead of a lab coat on their website. Or scrubs. Even those are better than a suit. Because in society we operate on uniforms. If you see a police officer and he steps into the street and puts out his hand, what happens to the traffic? The traffic stops immediately. If you walk into traffic and put up your hand what happens? You get a very good chance of getting run over. So that is the power of uniforms. The military has them. Police have them. Firefighters have them. Doctors have them. Nurses have them. And it embodies them with a certain sense of authority. And when you put on a suit you're wearing a false identity because you are not a businessman. And here's the worst part of that: the patient isn't there to deal with a businessman. She's not there to deal with a greasy car salesman in a nice suit. She's there to have her body examined by a doctor and have a medical procedure done that improves her life. And if you're wearing a suit on your website, you're immediately sending out the wrong information to her.

Nick: [00:30:50] The second mistake that I see is body language. If you're selling to women, men also, but primarily to women, you want to make sure that you've got an open and vulnerable body language. And the number one pose that I see on most plastic surgeons' website, whether they're wearing a suit or scrubs or a white coat, is they have their arms crossed. If you've ever been on a date, what does it mean if the other party crosses their arms and crosses their legs? If you know anything about body language, you know immediately that that is a barrier. That means that they're not interested and they're putting up a physical barrier between you and them. And if you've got your arms crossed on your website, looking smug, you are repelling individuals because you're putting a physical barrier between them and you on a visual level. These are the unspoken cues. So go and take a look at your website. What are you wearing? How's your body position? Is it accepting? Is it accommodating? Is it inviting? If you don't answer yes to all of those things, then your photographer didn't really understand anything about cosmetic surgery sales and that's fine. I mean a lot of photographers do not specialize in this and they just try to get a good photo and I'll tell you from experience, that art directing some of these shoots, a lot of doctors are not comfortable in front of the camera which always boggles my mind, because the first thing I look at them and I say, really? You cut people open for a living and this makes you nervous? But that may be the case with you. However you can change. You can change that picture. You can wear the right outfit. These are simple. I want to give you a few tactical things and this is one thing that you can do right away. When the person's starting to make a decision, they're finally at the About Us section and they want to learn about you as a person, as an individual, that on your website, you're not repelling them with body language and you're not repelling them by wearing the suit of a Wall Street broker or typical salesman that's just out to get their money because that is what the suit tells you. That is the unspoken message of a suit. It's going to deal with money. And if I've got a nice suit on, you know what? I make a lot of money and I take it from people like you. And there's a place for that kind of messaging right. Success attracts people but they are looking for a doctor. They're not looking for a salesman and they're not looking for a business person.

Nick: [00:33:08] We've gone through a few of the technical things. You know what kind of images to put of yourself. You know how to organize your menu. You know what kind of content to put on your website. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about a few things that are a little bit more technical but still very important for you to know when you're making a decision on your web design.

Nick: [00:33:28] The next element that I'm going to discuss is eye flow. What I mean by ice flow is that a person is attracted to certain elements on a web page and that will be anything from a headline, to a color, to a photo, to a graphic. Things on that page will draw the eye around the page and how you deal with the flow will either increase your conversion rate or decrease your conversion rate and you can modify and test this. But if the person is not engaging with the content, they've got no chance of engaging with your business because it's the content that triggers the psychology which gets them to make a decision. So if the images are pulling you around the page and they're not taking you to the content so that they can be engaged with, you're missing out on a big opportunity and you can increase your conversion rate just by doing that. I spoke about this in Paris and I redid the presentation that I did there on our YouTube channel. If you just go to Google and just search for either ThinkBasis YouTube, and go and find the video there or Google ThinkBasis plastic surgery market domination YouTube, that should bring up the video for you. And I've got visuals there. It's very hard to describe this concept on a podcast without visuals, but if you go and check out those videos they'll more than adequately show you what I'm talking about there. And everyone that's watched those has told me that it was very informative. So I encourage you to do that if you want to learn more about that topic.

Nick: [00:34:59] The next thing we're going to discuss is myth number three. And myth number three says that your website should be mobile first. So what does that mean? So mobile first is a design philosophy that was coined a few years back and it states that people most people visit your website from the mobile device these days. Desktop traffic is less than mobile and you should sacrifice some sort of design elements to be mobile first because that is primarily how people will engage with their website. So a couple of things with that is that desktop traffic has actually decreased. It's just that mobile traffic has increased so there's still a ton of people that are at work and they're surfing on a desktop device right a computer or a tablet for a larger screen but primarily a physical laptop or computer. So what's my take on that? What is our take as a team at ThinkBasis? And this is something that again it gets me a little bit worked up because I feel that everybody's got this wrong in stating mobile first because you should not sacrifice any elements. What you'll see in mobile first design is that people will sacrifice an easy to click menu, for one of those little what's called the hamburger menu. You've seen that three little lines and they've gone and done that because they say well it's a mobile first design. Mobile first is garbage. It should be mobile friendly but not mobile first. The phrase that we use is device first because whatever device that person is on, should be served a hundred percent for the user at that time. So we don't sacrifice anything on the desktop because we want to make something great on a mobile device. You've got to think device first. It's got to be the best user experience on mobile and the best user experience on the desktop. No sacrifices no compromises. Period. Each of those devices is being used by that person at that time and you have to treat that device with the respect that it needs and the usability factors that it needs so that it converts into business for your practice. Not mobile first. Not desktop first. It's not either,or — we don't have an option here. It's device first. Be the best you can be on the device that the person is on, at the time that they're viewing your website because nothing else matters. So what does that mean? It means having clear calls to action which are appropriate for that device. Click here for desktop, touch here or press here for mobile and tablet. The user interface has to adjust to the user. The usability of those devices has to be appropriate for the device. It should be easy to scroll and touch on mobile devices. It should be easy to scroll with a mouse and interact with a mouse on a desktop or trackpad if they're on a laptop. With that I want to talk about what's called Tolerance Capital. So usability means removing friction and you want to remove as much friction as you can unless there's a reason for it. There are situations where you actually want to increase the friction. You want to raise the bar if you've got some sort of exclusive high end program that you want to let people in or a VIP application or something like that for your practice. But generally speaking, in usability, you want to eliminate friction and not use up what's called Tolerance Capital. And Tolerance. Capital is the amount of crap people are willing to put up with before they leave your site. If they're filling out a form and the autofill is off and it's hard and small on mobile and they can't see the letters, how many times will they click and touch and type before they get frustrated and leave? That's Tolerance Capital. You want to use up as little of that Tolerance Capital as possible and eliminate as much friction as possible for the device that the person is on. I'm not going to get into search factors and Google ranking and things like that but usability is a factor in that. And part of usability is speed. You want to have a fast loading website. We always shoot for under 2 seconds. If we can, under a second, depending on what the pages is. I'm not going to get into the technicality of at all but part of usability, part of a good experience, is speed and the faster your site works, the more chance that you have that that person will contact you because they will be using very little Tolerance Capital. They have a frictionless experience and they can engage with your site and contact you. .

Nick: [00:39:34] The other thing is not to auto play any videos or sounds. A lot of the web browsers have eliminated auto play video but some web designers will still try to get cute and putting little sounds at play or something on the website. They try to make the website the experience as opposed to the message that it needs to be. Now, we've tested auto play videos in the past and I'll tell you it can drastically reduce the amount of people that are on your site and increase the bounce rate by up to 70 percent of what it was. Why is that happening? You know, we've never really surveyed that but, and we haven't surveyed that because we left it on for just a few days because it just decimated the website conversions and we know the only change we made was the auto play video and the sound. And the reason that we figure that happened was that a lot of people were surfing at work. And if they went to their website and they have speakers and, boom, it started playing some doctor videos, very embarrassing and they quickly hit the back button so that their co-workers couldn't see what they're up to or hear what they're up to. So be very mindful of that. That's something that's a little bit of a gotcha type situation which is hard to know unless someone tells you about that. But again think about the situation that the user is in. During the day they're most likely at their workplace. So they're either at lunch, on their cell phone, viewing your website and doing some research or they're at their desk killing time and doing their own stuff in terms of finding a physician. So you have to think about the situation that they're in and make the website fit that situation. Don't make them have to try to adapt to you and quickly hit the mute button or, you know, throw their speakers under the desk to not have their co-workers hear that they want to have a labiaplasty or something. .

Nick: [00:41:17] The Other thing I want you to take away from this is to have a culture of not assuming. And as I try to teach my child, when you assume you make an ass out of you and me, old joke still good. What I want you to do is test everything. Don't even listen to me on this podcast. Even though this is all tested materials I still want you to start testing. I want you to find out for yourself. Take what I said make those changes and let the data speak. Make sure your analytics are set up correctly. Make sure your split testing software is set up correctly. And run those tests and find out for yourself what works and doesn't work. Don't make any assumptions when it comes to your business. You want to let the data speak you want the facts to speak. That's how we do things. That's how I want you to do things and get a culture of split testing and get a culture of analytics and practice so that you can find out for yourself what you have to do.

Nick: [00:42:09] The last point I want to leave you with, is that the medium is not the message. The message is the message and it's the message that converts your prospects to clients. What I mean by that is if you are building a beautiful website that impresses everyone and gets you all sorts of complements, but doesn't get you sales, that's a useless website. It's great for winning your designer awards. It's great for stroking your ego, but at the end of the day the bank doesn't accept ego points. It only takes cash. So think about your website in that way. It's not about what people tell you. It's not about the compliments that you get. It's about the bums in seats and the people that you get to your practice and the people that choose you over your competitors because you did a better job online. And you can.

Nick: [00:42:56] Take this information. Go back. Make the changes you need and take over your area. Be the leader and show everybody how it's done.

Nick: [00:43:05] I hope this was informative. You'll find us at ThinkBasis.com. Leave us a message. Let me know what you thought of the program. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, I'm Nick Dumitru. I'll see you then.

The post How To Design A Winning Cosmetic Surgery Website – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #4 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"You have to have the mindset that you need to win the business out of the market. You don't deserve the business. You have to take it. You have to win it. You have to be better than the competition."

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Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now your host Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:22] Welcome to Practice Perfect episode number three. In this episode we're going to discuss how to create a fantastic patient experience. The reason I want to talk about this topic is because the patient experience can make a big difference in how well your practice does. The patient experience is the difference between getting more of those prospects to turn to clients and getting more of those clients to turn to referrals and send other happy patients YOUR WAY. More patients like them that had a great experience, more patients like them that will send other happy patients because they will have the same experience. What I'm talking about of course is patient flow. So what is it?

Nick: [00:01:05] If you're not familiar with the term patient flow refers to the process of how operation moves through your clinic, from when they get into the door to when they leave. I like to expand that definition and also include everything from the point of initial contact, the first phone number or email, right through to the follow up sequences that you have after they visited you even after they've had their surgery. To do this, what I'd like to do is take you on a journey of a cosmetic patient that's walking through a clinic and as I'm doing this I'd like you to just pause and picture that situation picture that scenario and contrast that with every stage of that journey and how your practice is handling it. I think that you'll find a lot of opportunities for change, for growth, for improvement and we'll discuss the specifics of what you can do after this story. So let's get into it.

Nick: [00:02:02] I'm going to tell you about Joanna. Joanna is a fictional patient. Joanna is going to be the one going through this journey with us. I want you to picture Joanna as your ideal patient. She is female. She is in her mid to late 30s. She wants to have a procedure done. I want you to picture the procedure being one that you perform, one that you're excellent at, one that you can do better than your colleagues, one that your patients tell you you do a great job at. Joanna picks up the phone after seeing your advertisement, after coming to your website and she calls your clinic, calls the office and the phone picks up in two rings. Pleasant receptionist is on the other end. She answers all of her questions with empathy. She gives her the information that she needs. She asks all the qualifying questions to make her feel like she knows what she's doing. She offers to book the consultation. That goes well, they find a great time. She gives over her information, her email, her phone number, her name. Everything's going very smoothly. Joanna feels confident that this is the right clinic because the receptionist has told her about you. She's credentialed you. She's credentialed the procedure. She's told Joanna why it's advantageous and why she'll be happy. And she's selling her the appointment the whole step of the way. Getting her excited about her change, getting her excited to meet you and to come into the office. The call wraps up and Joanna puts down the phone and no more than two or three minutes later she gets an email from the office. She picks up her phone has a look. It's the same receptionist that she spoke with detailing the time of her appointment, confirming the details of the procedure and at the top of that email is a video. She clicks on the video. It's a video of the reception staff and the doctor welcoming her, telling her about the appointment and how exciting it will be, telling her about where the office is located, giving her a quick introduction to the office, a quick walk through so that she can see where she's going and what it's going to be like when she gets there, telling her that she's made a great decision and thanking her for booking her appointment. Joanna puts down the phone after watching the video, and she starts to feel excited. She starts to feel like she's made the right decision. She stops looking at other places online even though she's booked a couple of other appointments (they didn't get back to her). So she really feels that your practice is the place to be. She thinks that you're doing a great job and that you'll be able to perform her surgery really really well.

Nick: [00:04:25] The day of the appointment arrives she comes on time. She pulls up to the office from the outside. It's a nice well-kept building. Parking was easy. She knew exactly where to park because the video told her so. And the day before she got a confirmation e-mail. That e-mail told her exactly where the parking would be, how to get up to the office and what to expect. Joanna had absolutely no hiccups because she knew exactly what was going to happen. She opens the door and walks into the reception. The first thing that she notices is that the office has a very pleasant smell. It's a floral fragrance, not overpowering, not synthetic. It doesn't cause issues with her allergies. It doesn't make her feel weird but she does notice that smell and that's a smell that she's going to note on her other visits because it's the same every time she comes in. The sounds that she hears are some soft music, not your typical radio with a gaggle of advertisements, but a carefully curated set of songs that drown out any kind of noise in the background, that drown out any procedures happening in the office, that drown out any discussions that the receptionists are having with other patients, that staff are having with themselves in the back. Not too loud, just enough to provide some background noise and cover any kind of wandering noise around the office. She feels very comfortable because she knows her information is protected. People aren't going to overhear. She steps up to reception. She says her name. The receptionist greets her with a friendly smile, takes her information, asks her to sit in the waiting area. So Joanna goes and sits down the waiting areas comfortable. She looks around. There's a large screen TV playing some videos of happy patients. Before she has a chance to get bored, somebody comes up to her and brings her a drink and a snack: a coffee as well as a water. It's her choice which one she wants to have. And a little snack on the side so that she can stay busy while she's waiting. She's also given the forms that she needs to fill out. These come on an iPad. It's very simple for her to fill it in. It comes prefilled with part of her data that the receptionist's already collected so she doesn't have to do extra work. She finishes the form and submits it and enjoys her snack. Then she's brought into the consultation room. The staff take her over. She sits down. She notes how clean and tidy it is. She notes how hygenic everything is, how everything is put in its proper place. She speaks to the doctor. He's friendly. He listens, he doesn't rush her. He takes the time to listen. He answers her questions. He asks questions of his own. As she is preparing to have the physical exam, she looks around the office and notices that there are diplomas there. Thank you cards. There's photos of the Doctor and his family. She feels very comfortable that he's a respectable individual, that he's very qualified. He has the education that he needs to do the job. She sees the thank you cards. She knows that other people have trusted him and continue to trust him. She thinks that once she gets her a great result she'll do the same thing and give him a nice thank you card and maybe a small gift.

[00:07:28] The physical exam goes well. She doesn't feel embarrassed or violated. The physician was very professional. He treated her with courtesy. He was sympathetic to her plight. He didn't belittle her in any way. He didn't make light of her situation even though she feels maybe it's not such a big deal but it's a big deal to her. And he iterated that to her as well. She puts everything back on. The doctor thanks her. He asks her if she has any last questions and then walks her out to the staff. The staff take her in a separate private room. She sits down. The staff discuss her options with her, booking times, costs, fees. Everything is really good, but Joanna says that she needs to speak to her husband, just wants to tell him that she's made a decision and just get his approval. The staff isn't pushy, they understand. They ask Joanna for her permission to contact her. Joanna of course says yes. Joanna goes home. She talks to her husband the very next morning she gets a call from the office. It's the same reception that she spoke with, the same one that she met when she walked into the office, the one that she hit it off with, the one that she laughed with on the way out. She is very impressed by the fact that somebody called her the very next day. The receptionist asks her if she's ready to move forward and if she has any other questions. Joanna says that she is. She's ready to go. So she puts down her deposit and she books her surgical day and gets ready to have her procedure.

Nick: [00:08:53] Between the time of booking and the time of her procedure she gets two e-mails from the office with additional information and videos from the doctor telling her about the procedure and how easy it's going to be and how great she's going to look, what to expect on the day that she comes in, what to remember to bring, what to do the night before. All the information she needs, she receives in a timely manner by e-mail or by text message. She confirms her appointment by text message and she goes to her surgery the day of the surgery.

Nick: [00:09:23] The staff is there to welcome her. She's brought into the office. Everyone treats her extremely well. She's very happy. The procedure goes well. Post procedure care is excellent. Nobody ever leaves her alone. She was promised that before and they delivered. Someone is with her every step of the way. She's never left alone after the procedure. She recovers. They give her a custom bag to take home with everything she's going to need. She doesn't have to worry. Everything is spelled out very clearly. Everything is outlined for her in simple steps that she can follow even if she's groggy, even if she's in pain. She takes that home. That evening, she gets a call from the office asking how she's doing. Asking if she's ok. Joanna can't believe the level of care, how good everything's going. In addition to the phone call she also gets a video from the doctor explaining what to expect. Explaining what's normal what's not normal, her mind is set at ease. She feels good about what's going to happen. She knows that as long as it's within what was explained that nothing's wrong. She has a nice comfortable recovery. The staff follows up with her the whole way. She feels cared for and that she wasn't discarded after the surgery after the procedure was done and the money was taken. She feels like part of the family. She feels like everyone was a professional. Everybody took care of her and they actually cared about her well-being. Once she's fully recovered Joanna goes back to the office. Everything looks great. Her after photos are taken. She's asked to give a testimonial and she gladly does it. She couldn't have been happier with how things went. Everything from start to back went absolutely smoothly for her. When she had a concern, she knew who to call. Everything was in her post follow a package. The staff followed up with her before she needed to, before she needed to even book her appointment, they were calling to book it for her, for her follow ups, for her final follow up. Any aftercare that was needed was provided. Joanna had a fantastic experience and anytime somebody talks about having a cosmetic procedure she jumps at the opportunity to refer.

Nick: [00:11:25] Okay, I want you to come back from this story. I want you to come back to the way things are now in your office in your practice and ask yourself if you can give that level of care. If you're doing the things that I mentioned. If your patients know that you're better than everybody else, if they know that you are providing better service, better care, more information and a higher standard than your colleagues — that they made the right decision to go with you. If you're not even sending out an email or a custom video or getting the patient excited about her procedure and her choice in her appointment, even the consultation appointment, there's a lot of room for improvement. You should be happy that there's room for improvement. You should also be a little annoyed that it's not happening yet, but knowing that you can make changes. And the reason that I wanted to take you through that story first is because, through story, we can identify situations. We can, in our mind, walk through our own practice. We can walk through an ideal situation and see how they match up. The way the patient flows in and out of your practice is one of the key components to raising your bottom line, raising your conversion rates and making the most out of your advertising and marketing. .

Nick: [00:12:37] So Let's talk about some of the key areas that we discussed in this story. One of the most crucial areas of any practice is the front desk, the reception area and the waiting area. The reason that these are so important is because this patient doesn't know yet. She doesn't know your staff. She doesn't know what to expect. She's possibly a little bit nervous and that first impression that she has when she comes in can carry right through to when you ask for the deposit for surgery. If she walks in and things are disheveled, if things are not in order, if the receptionist is rude or uncaring or takes too long to acknowledge her, she'll carry that perception through to her consultation with you and she'll carry that perception all the way through to when she needs to make a decision and put down her deposit for surgery. And if the initial expectation is negative, she'll be very hesitant to go through with surgery, no matter how the rest of the experience goes because she'll always have that nagging doubt. So you're opening the door for your competitors to steal that case away because remember all the associations and all the governing bodies educate patients to see more than one physician. So just because she's come to you doesn't mean that she's going to pick you. She could be seeing 2, 3, 4 other plastic surgeons at the same time and you have to have the mindset that you need to win the business out of the market. You don't deserve the business. You have to take it. You have to win it. You have to be better than the competition. You can't have a sense of entitlement. I've seen this more than one time where doctors will go to school and they'll come out to build a practice or they may have been in practice for 20 years and they get a sense of entitlement and then they wonder why the market has moved past them when their website looks like crap. When the receptionist doesn't pick up the phone, when his receptionist isn't friendly because she came from a hospital environment possibly and she's just treating everyone like a sick person rather than a cosmetic patient. And if you're in that situation, if you've got a sense of entitlement, I'm going to just give you a little bit of tough love and tell you that you've got to stop it right now. The world is moving forward. You have to win the business. It's a competitive environment and you have to do better in the competition and the good news is that with technology you can. .

Nick: [00:14:42] There Are automated e-mail sequences, automated text messages, automated chat and Facebook. You can raise the standard with technology and you can train your staff to do the right thing. But what you can't have is a feeling of entitlement and that the world owes you something just because you went to school or just because you've been in practice for a long time and people respect you. The fact of the matter is that money doesn't care, doesn't care about what you feel you're owed. Money flows to those that make the effort, to those that make the change and to those that hustle and get the business out of the market. And that's how you have to start thinking. You've got to move beyond what you're currently doing and be better, not just better than what you're doing now but better than everybody else. And it's possible, it's very possible, but not if you don't have the focus right. What you focus on is what changes and if you're not focusing on the patient flow and the patient experience, that experience is going to suffer. You can't leave it up to your staff alone. You have to monitor it. You have to monitor the incoming calls and you have to verify that everybody's doing the right thing. And one more thing I want to mention about that is that it has to be consistent.

Nick: [00:15:49] If you do something great one time and badly the other time it won't matter how well you did the first time because the patient will feel robbed even if she is not entitled to what she got. I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're going to get a haircut. You go into your haircutting place and you sit down. You're brought in ice coffee and a snack, no charge for them. They ask you if you'd like a glass of wine. They are legally licensed to serve and they do this. It's a high end haircutting place. You say sure, I wouldn't mind a nice red wine. You sip on your wine while you wait for your appointment. You go in. You get that extra special treatment. You get a shampoo which you didn't ask for. You just wanted a quick cut, but they give you a quick scalp massage and a shampoo. You go, you have a fantastic haircut. When you leave, they hand you a little chocolate and a thank you card and a glass of water for your ride home. You feel fantastic. You look great. You feel great. You feel like you get treated well. And you didn't have to pay any more than when you were going to pay for the haircut. Everything was included. Everything was free. They told you that everything that you got was a bonus for being a special client. Now you went in the same situation happened. It was great. Three months later you go in again, time for another haircut. But this time the manager isn't there. He's on vacation. So the staff decides to just take it easy. You know we don't need to do the coffee and wine thing. We're going to give them a great haircut. Everything's fine. You sit in reception. Nobody offered you coffee. You're feeling a little awkward. No one ever offered you wine. You know it's free so you don't feel right asking for it or demanding it because it wasn't something that you're paying for. It was a bonus from them to you. It Was a special gift. And all of a sudden even though you weren't entitled to any of that, you feel like your experience is diminished even though they have no obligation, absolutely no obligation. They're going to do everything else that you paid for. You'll get a great haircut. They're friendly they're nice they smile. But you didn't get your wine. And you know what? You also didn't get that bottle of water for the ride home. Again nothing that you were entitled to. These are all special bonuses that that manager was giving away because he wanted you to have a fantastic experience. And even though he didn't pay any more. And even though you weren't entitled to anything you feel like you got less. And why is that? For one simple reason. It was a simple lack of consistency. So that's the danger with implementing these processes: is that you want to make sure that your staff is consistent with them. Don't start and stop something because it will reflect negatively on you even though nobody's owed anything. They're going to say that that place just, you know, wasn't as good as I remember. I felt like they used to do a better job. I don't think they care so much anymore. Even though they weren't entitled to what you give them. Giving them nothing and doing nothing is not an option because then you lose the business to the guy that is. But being inconsistent is just as dangerous and you can lose business. Over time You lose referrals you lose loyalty by a lack of consistency. .

Nick: [00:18:44] So That's the first concept I want you to keep in mind. I want you to take notes to be consistent, and if you're going to improve an area in your practice I want you to improve two areas for now that I want you to focus heavily on.

Nick: [00:18:56] The first is the reception area and the most important thing in the reception area is influence and managing boredom. By influence I mean making sure that the things in the lobby, the things in the waiting area, are things which will help the patient make a decision. Before and after photos, thank you cards, testimonial videos of patients. Don't put out magazines, fashion magazines, things that have absolutely nothing to do with your practice. Also don't be boring. I'm not advocating that you do as self promotion and pamphlets of Botox, which is the other thing that drives me nuts when doctors will take generic materials and just put them in the lobby, put them in the waiting area and think that they're going to pick up additional business or that it's doing something for them. You have to stay focused on what matters, and what matters is getting that patient to know, like, and trust you. If you listen to the previous podcast you'll understand what that means. So when you're crafting your materials tell stories. Tell stories of your patients if you want to put something there. Make your own magazine where you discuss different topics. Put in the effort. It's a one time investment to design a magazine or you can have one every month if you've got a non-surgical business doing CoolSculpting, Botox, people that are coming in on a regular basis. You could even take that magazine and get them to subscribe to it. You can be interesting and self promoting at the same time, and that's how you have to think. So you have to try to influence the patient. You have to give her perception that you are the place that's unlike any other. Let the other guys advertise fashion magazines and things to do around the city. The worst I've seen was in our local market here there's a magazine called Elevate and it's a magazine about cosmetic surgery. And they will offer it to plastic surgeon offices for free. I walked into one of our clients office and I saw a Elevate there. The whole back of that magazine is filled with advertisements for other doctors and I asked them why do you have this here? And they didn't know, it was just knee jerk. I said get this off the table because you don't want your patients sitting there, browsing your competitors before they go to see you. That's just not the right thing to do. Seeing their before and after photos, it's all spreads and a magazine of before and after photos. You want to control the medium, you want to control the message, you want to be interesting and you want to be influential.

Nick: [00:21:20] The other thing you have to do is manage the perception of wait, the perception of boredom. And why I call it a perception is this. I'll tell you a quick story about where this comes from. It's a story that circulates around in marketing circles. It's a story that's been posted before but I find a lot of doctors and you may be in that same situation. But a lot of doctors don't know about this. Before I tell you this story, I want to point out one thing: is that time doesn't exist. Time exists only in our mind. Time can be short or it can be long. When you're having a great time, when you're doing your favorite hobby, when you're on a fantastic date, when you're connecting with colleagues at a conference discussing an interesting medical topic, a couple of hours seems like a couple of minutes and you're sad when the evening's over. When you're stuck somewhere bored, your phone battery died, you're waiting for your car to be fixed. They told you it would be ready now, it's two hours later and you're still there, that time can seem like a week. You've got nothing to do. You're just waiting and waiting. And that same two hours will seem exponentially longer than when you were having a great time. So time is only perceived in the mind and it can be perceived as long or it can be perceived as short and we have the ability to influence that. And I'll give you the example now. I'll tell you that story I promised I would. .

Nick: [00:22:40] There was a high rise in New York City and they had elevators. And these were some of the newest elevators in production when elevators just started to get popular when people started to trust them. They all went to the fair and saw the demo of the guy that invented the elevator. You cut the cable, there are special breaks that made elevators safer. It was around that time when people started to use them and it allowed for the construction of high rises. But what this building manager had to contend with was a lot of complaints. There were people complaining about the long wait for the elevator. I can't believe how long it takes. So he brought in engineers to study the problem. They looked at it. They timed it and they said, you know, it's only a few minutes. It's not really that long and the technology is what it is. We can't really make it any faster. It's a tall building and we have to bring everyone up and down. So this is where we're going to have to deal with here. You'll just have to deal with the complaints. The building manager was desperate. He didn't want to get these complaints. He wanted to do a great job. He didn't want to deal with irate tenants and angry visitors. So he called in a consultant and he asked the consultant what can we do? The consultant looked at the problem and he thought, strange, they're not waiting very long are they? They said, no, but they're still complaining, they think it's a long time. It's New York City, you know how it is. Yeah, I get it, so the consultant evaluated the problem and decided that you know they're really just they're bored. Boredom is what the issue is, so how can we manage the boredom? And he suggested that they add elevators into the lobby, into the waiting area, the elevator waiting area, she goes just add mirrors there. So, the building manager added the mirrors and all the complaints vanish. Why? Because people had something to do for those couple of minutes, that was more interesting than just staring at a wall. They could look at themselves, they could look at other people, they could sit there being annoyed by the person next to them in the mirror without glaring at them so they can avoid any kind of social awkwardness. And that problem was solved and since they did that, you'll notice that mirrors are commonplace in hotel lobbies, in large buildings. They've become very common, either on the elevator or at the elevator waiting area or both. .

Nick: [00:24:50] So This concept of managing time and managing the perception of time is very important because if you're leaving your patients in the waiting room, simply waiting, right, so in the story I explained how Joanna was brought a snack, how Joanna was brought a drink, how she was bribed forms to fill in, all of those activities are designed to shorten the perception of time. It breaks up the monotony. It breaks up the person just sitting there browsing through the one or two magazines that they're bored with and starting to get irritated and having a negative experience. It's that perception and the wait and the experience and the influence that I want you to focus on first. If you can fix your reception, generally the rest of the process goes a lot smoother. I'm not saying it's the only thing you have to focus on but it is one of the primary things.

Nick: [00:25:41] The second area I want you to focus on is where the patient has the consultation. Most of the practices that we work with, I find that the doctor and the receptionist have never sat in the chair where the patient sits. So the first thing I want you to do after listening to this, you may be listening to it in the car, you may be listening to this at the gym. The next time you're in the office what I want you to do is sit down where that patient sits. It could be an examination table. It could be a chair in the office. It could be both if you move them from room to room. Some places will have the consultation in our office and the exam is a separate exam room. But I want you to go and sit as a patient and look around. Look around your office. If you're not in the office, close your eyes and just try to remember what's there. You may not be able to so I want you to take this podcast, go back and just listen to this. Listen to this while you're sitting there. Look around the room. What's there? What does the patient look at? Can she see diplomas? Are diplomas in the line of sight or are they behind her? Can she see photos of you in social situations? You with family you holding a baby whatever it might be that softens you up a little bit. Can she see examples of gratitude from other patients? What is it that she's looking at? And more importantly, and here's something that most people don't consider, is what is the person that came with her, it could be her husband, her boyfriend, her best friend, her mother — what are they looking at? Because they're not there to engage with you. The patient is and the patient may be engaging with you but that other person is looking around the room. What are they seeing? What are they seeing that is influencing them to guide your patient to choosing you? Don't discount this at all. The reason why I'm mentioning this is that it can take your closing rate from 25, 50, 60 percent above 70, 80 percent. And I'm not talking about referral patients. Everyone goes, I have a higher closing rate. OK are they new patients or are they referral patients? It they're referral patients and you're not closing them you've got big big problems. So we don't talk about the referral patients because those are gimmes. Those are things that you should be closing anyway. Right and if you're screwing that up then you've got to really take a deep dive into what you're doing because something's off there. I'm talking about the cold patients, scalable ones that you're getting with advertising. If you can start closing more of those, what would it mean to your business? If you manage the perception in the reception area and you increase the conversion on your consultations, what would that mean to your bottom line? What would it mean if you got your consultation percentage up by 10, 20, 30 percent? How much more money would you make? How much better off would you be? If you can see a brighter future, I want you to go back and start making these changes. I want you to get your staff together and explain what you've just heard. Let them listen to it if they have to and start making a change. Start winning the business out of the market because the world doesn't owe you anything. You owe your patients. You owe yourself. You owe your family. You owe your staff and you owe it to your future to do something about it. Creating a fantastic patient flow is going to be the key to unlocking your practice and unlocking prosperity.

Nick: [00:28:48] I hope this was helpful. I hope you go and you take some action. If you have any questions. By all means visit us and ThinkBasis.com where we hold the podcasts or just google Practice Perfect podcast. You can also reach me on LinkedIn. Just look for my name, Nick Dumitru. Just Google me on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. I'll be happy to answer questions if you've got them. I always love to hear from listeners. So I'm going to wrap it up. I hope that you'll go out there, you'll make change. You'll do well. I'll catch on the next podcast and have a good day.

The post How To Create A Great Patient Experience – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #3 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"Your brand isn't the foundation of your business. Your business is the foundation of your brand."

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Nick: [00:00:19] Welcome to Practice Perfect, episode number two. On this episode we're going to talk about a subject that is probably going to piss off your marketing company. It may anger your advertising firm, but it's a subject that is crucially important to your practice and your understanding of this and rejecting common beliefs and misconceptions is what's going to take you to the next level. I'm talking about branding and I'm going to talk to you about how to create a brand when you can't afford branding. The reality is that most cosmetic practices, most medical practices, most medispas, can't truly afford the cost of branding. It's a buzzword. It's something that is pushed by all of the big advertising firms because they're dealing with corporations with enormous budget and those corporations can afford to spend that money, waste that money, use that money, to create something out of nothing.

Nick: [00:01:19] The biggest lie you've been told about branding is this: that you need branding. The fact of the matter is that you don't. I'm going to tell you about that a little later on in the program. Before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about what a brand is. Don't confuse a brand with corporate identity, and by that I mean, that your practice needs a logo. Your practice needs to look professional, your practice needs to have a beautiful presence online and in print. When you give your materials out, that's not a brand. That is just your identity. It is your face to the world. I want you to think of a brand as an individual. I want you to think of a brand as a person with all of that person's component parts. And if you see a person just standing there, you make certain assumptions about them. So you look at their identity. Are they wearing a suit? Are they a woman? Are they wearing an evening gown? Are they wearing a business suit? Are they wearing jogging pants? Are they looking disheveled? Do they look well put together? The identity for that person is what you gather when you first look at them. It's what you take in visually and then you use your pre-programmed conceptions to come to a conclusion about that individual. And now corporate identity is the exact same way. It's no different than putting on a nice suit or a nice dress to go out for the evening. It's no different than dressing appropriately for the part. Policeman wears a policeman's uniform. A doctor wears a white coat and we instantly identify them as what they are. That's corporate identity. That's not a brand. The brand is the connection. It's the interaction. It's everything that puts your patient in touch with your practice and the experience that they have. It's the personality of your practice. It's, if we go back to the analogy of the person, it's what happens when you walk up to them and you say hello. Do they say hello back? Are they friendly? Do they smile at you? Are they angry when they look at you? What a courteous to you were they polite? Did they make you feel good on the inside? Do you wanna talk to that person again? That is the essence of what a brand is. But that can't be created. If you think about all of the work that goes into creating a human being, an adult human being, it's the full sum of their experience, their education, the food that they were given, the interaction from the parents. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars at the minimum and more likely millions when you factor everything together over time. That's how I want you to think about your practice as well. You're growing into the market. You're at the infant stage and if you want to bring that to fruition, you've got two options: you can try to manufacture that through forced methods, such as mass advertising, billboards, television ads, radio ads. You can try to do all of that to get the name out and try to tell people that you are an individual or you can invest money into the interaction, into the quality of the development of your people, into the quality of the development of your brand, as it matures and is not fabricated. So it sounds a little esoteric. It's a little you know high level right now. We're going to get into what that means in just a second.

Nick: [00:04:41] What it boils down to is that the brand is really nothing more than doing good business consistently. Period. That's it. If you want to build your brand you start to do good business. And that emotional connection, the connection between your customer and your practice and the business that you do together, that will foster a brand in the marketplace. That connection can only come from interaction. It can only come from actually engaging with your practice and doing business with your practice. If you see a person you cannot build a relationship that makes you want more of that interaction by not engaging with the individual. If you saw someone that you wanted to talk to and you wanted to be friends with, could you do that by just standing around? Definitely not. You'd have to go up to that person, you'd have to engage them in conversation, spark a connection, do activities together. The deeper the activity, the closer the connection. If you ever go camping with someone you grow closer. If you travel with somebody, if you go backpacking with them. If you've gone to school with them and you've been tight the whole time. Those shared experiences are what build that connection and that's the foundation of starting to build a brand. So if you want to build a brand, do good business. That's the first point that I want you to understand.

Nick: [00:06:01] The other thing I want you to get is that doing forced branding the way that the large corporations do, takes a significant amount of money. And I'm talking millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars. It takes repeated exposure. It takes consistent exposure, so every newspaper ad, if you're paying 6000 or 10000 for a full page spread to get the name out, quote unquote, has a lot of advertising agencies and marketing agencies are fond of doing, that takes cash. Plain and simple. If you've got a wad of cash, by all means you can certainly go and attempt to build a brand. But here's the reality: the hard truth is that 90 percent of products, product launches in general, fail. I'm not talking about the small companies. I'm talking about large corporations here, Pepsi, Coke, Nike, Chrysler, Ford. All big companies have had failed product launches in spite of their large budgets, in spite of them having a war chest to go to market with. So that's the other thing about branding. It's not something that's guaranteed. Anyone that tells you that they know exactly how to brand and how to grow exposure and you know they're going to get you some sort of notoriety in the market is just fooling themselves for the most part. As a small cosmetic practice, one physician, two physicians, three physicians, if you're not bringing in nine figures a year, you don't really have the war chest to do this. You may be doing well, but you're definitely not, you know, the size of IBM or Apple or any other large corporation that's doing great business.

Nick: [00:07:34] The other reality I want you to understand is that for the most part, if you're a surgeon, what you have is a transactional relationship with your patients. They come in for their surgery and then they probably don't want to hear from you for the next 10 years. They've gotten their breasts or their tummy tuck or their facelift and they really don't want to talk to you further. They are not branded to your practice. You can't force them to like you because this is not a an ongoing relationship, for the most part. I'm talking in generalities, yes. You can bring them back for Botox. You can bring them back for non-surgical services, for CoolSculpting, and you should, but that connection didn't come from you creating a brand and then being attracted to a brand and then them wanting to come back to your practice because your brand is so prolific and magnificent and in the market. They want to come back to you because they had a great experience. They had a great result. It had nothing to do with the brand. That relationship grew and then they came to like your brand. It wasn't the other way around.

Nick: [00:08:41] The other thing you have to understand is that the brands in our industry are owned by large corporations. You don't own Botox. You don't own CoolSculpting. You don't own whatever the current hot technology or injectable or cream. You may have your own cream line. Yes, they can be popular in the local market. If you've gone national then you can say that you've built yourself a brand through that. It's very rare. Very few physicians that I've met have done this. And the more likely scenario is that you don't have a brand. You don't own the brand. But the good news is that you own the experience and the experience is your brand. The experience is why they come back and you can afford to do that. That's the good news. It doesn't matter, you don't have to own the brand. You have to be the brand. So it's a very key distinction when now you're thinking about your marketing.

Nick: [00:09:35] I want you to jot down this line: a brand becomes as a byproduct a business. It isn't made. You don't make a brand and definitely not at your level of spend. And jot this down as well: your brand isn't the foundation of your business. Your business is the foundation of your brand. It's a very different way of thinking. You don't want to focus on your brand. You don't want to spend your money on your brand, waste your money on ads that don't work. Put out TV advertisement and then not understand why you didn't get a return because you just had your name out there. Your business is to do business. Your mission, your goal, your duty to your staff and to yourself and to your family, is to do good business. Not to build a brand. And now, that's the part that gets a lot of people frankly a little bit angry, especially if they're in the advertising business. They like to think that branding, because it's a buzz word, because it is something that has been beaten to death in the marketing world, and has become almost expected, is the way to do business and I'm telling you that it's not. I'm telling you this from experience. I'm telling you this from having done it for the past 20 years. Brands become as a byproduct of good business, not the other way around. There's no guarantee in building your brand. So you have to focus on building your practice instead. The one way I put it to people is a little bit harsh but brand marketing is tantamount to urinating on your cash and flushing it down the toilet. I mean that sincerely. I've seen people do this over and over again at the smaller business level. So if you want to brand, if you feel that you've bought into the brand mentality, you're more than welcome to put that cash in there and start flushing because unless you've got enough to plug that hole, it's always just going to flush down the drain along with your hopes and dreams. You need a large amount of money if you're going to focus on your brand instead of your business. But the good news is that you don't have to. You can focus on your business and you can get paid. And we're going to get into that right now.

Nick: [00:11:41] What I want you to do with the money that you've saved from your branding efforts is spend that money on building interaction. Hire the right people for your front desk, to pick up the phone, to respond to e-mails. Hire based on personality, not skill. If you've got staff that's maybe not ideal for your practice, get rid of them and look at replacing them. That's a better use of your time, it's a better use of your money. You're better off spending a little bit more on staff that are quality and are great and will actually do follow up calls who will actually pick up the phone when people call, who will call leads more than one time. That's a classic situation I've been dealing with for decades is that people call you practice, they may get a voice mail or they send in an e-mail, the receptionist calls out, but it's typically one call. And then she says I couldn't get a hold of him. I don't know what's going on. We're not able to get these people in. Well you're never going to be able to do that, if you don't have the right attitude. So foster that attitude, use the money to hire the right people, to put the right people in place.

Nick: [00:12:43] You can further fund your brand evolution by investing in your social media interaction, the quality of your videos, write content for your website, creating an authority around your practice and convincing people to come in and do business with you. And the way to do that is not with brand marketing it's with what's called direct response marketing. In a very quick explanation, the difference between direct response marketing and branding is this: in branding, the goal is to get name recognition, to get people to know your brand and keep your brand top of mind. All great things, but I'm going to tell you that that happens anyway. If you've got enough money to run direct response ads and then you use the money from the sales to run more ads. That's how you self fund. When you can't afford the brand, you use your marketing to fund your branding. And by direct response marketing, what I mean is that you've got a very direct relationship between the advertisement and the sales conversion. So if you are running an ad, you are tracking that individual to the surgical sale and the whole goal of that ad isn't to brand your practice. It's to get that person to take action. That's the key difference between branding style ads, which are there for exposure, and direct response ads and methodologies which are there to get the individual to take action and that can be something as simple as a phone call or an email to book a consultation through to a direct sale if you've got specials on Botox, Juvederm, CoolSculpting — anything else that that individual could purchase directly from you at that time. So the whole way to do that is to think about that is that if your ad isn't asking for an action it's probably a wasted ad. If that ad action isn't trackable, then you are not sure where your ad spend is going and it's going to be very very hard for you to spend more because you don't know what you're making at the end of the day. So put out an offer, get the person to take action, track that action through to the sale, find out what your return is and then plow that money back into advertising. This way you start to get the same kind of budgets that large corporations have to work with, but you get it through the customers finding you, through the clients, through the patients coming to your practice paying you money that you can then use to grow your practice. It's a very very different way of thinking of it, if what you're used to is brand speak. So I want to go back to your practice and evaluate everything that you're doing, all your business practices, all of your advertising practices. Take a look at your ads. Take a look at your landing pages, the page where the click goes once they click the ad, and ask yourself if the ad is asking the person to click to get something. Is the landing page the website asking the person to take action so that they can get something? Are you then tracking that action and do you know how much money that whole sequence has made you? If you don't have that in place you've got a lot of leverage. If you have it in place already then you need to go back and ask yourself what could I do better. How could I get more people to click on this site? How could I get my marketing agency or my advertising agency to really maximize this? Are you split testing landing pages? Are you using different wording? Are you testing different wording and images? There's always upside and optimisation to this process. Unlike brand advertising, this kind of advertising can be measured, it can be adjusted and it can be improved. So if you don't have all of this in place you should be extremely happy right now. I know the reaction is that you've got to be sad because, oh no, it's not there, what have I been doing all this time. No. Keep a positive mindset. Understand that whenever you find a fault, you find opportunity and in opportunity there's growth, because opportunity gives you the chance to change. And with that change you can move to the next level. So that's how I want to look at that. Whenever you hear me speak on these podcasts about something that's not working in your practice I don't want you to feel bad about it. I want you to feel joyful. I want you to feel like you have got a new breath of new life because you've got somewhere to move forward. Right.

Nick: [00:16:57] The worst thing that I see with physicians is when they feel like they're stuck. There's nothing else, like I've tried everything, I've heard that so many times, just because you've tried something it doesn't mean that you've tried it the right way. If someone comes to you and says, you know what, liposuction doesn't work. I tried it. It didn't work. Well, did it not work or was it done the wrong way? Advertising and marketing is no different. Just because you've tried something the wrong way, it doesn't mean that that doesn't work. Other people in your market are doing it. Others are able to advertise and get business and grow their practice and so can you.

Nick: [00:17:32] So what's my parting thought for you. It's this: if you want a brand, don't worry about the brand. Do good business. Truly serve your patients and do it over and over and over and you won't ever have to worry about your brand. Your brand will dominate the market without any help from the outside. I want you to think about that and think about your practice and think about what you can do and then go out there make it happen.

Nick: [00:18:00] Thanks for listening to Practice Perfect. I hope this episode has given you a lot to think about. I hope you've got actionable ideas that you can take back to your practice and go back and make changes, make improvements and take it to the next level. If you want show notes and additional help and advice and articles on how to grow your practice, visit us at ThinkBasis.com where we hold the podcast. That's T H I N K B A S I S dot com, or just google the Practice Perfect podcast and you should be able to find our podcasting page. Have a great day. Have a wonderful week and I wish you all the best with your practice. Go out there. Make a change and make it happen.

The post How To Create A Brand When You Can’t Afford Branding – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #2 appeared first on Think Basis.

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"Understand and trust comes from authority and authority and expertise is what gets people to trust you. And it's not the actual expertise. You could be a great physician. But if that's not well communicated, it becomes completely irrelevant."

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now your host, Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:27] Welcome to the first episode of Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals and anyone that's running a professional services business as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. I want to thank you for joining me today. Before we get into it, today's topic is going to be all about the number one problems that most cosmetic and medical practices face but that you may be facing and not even be aware that you have. I'm going to get into that in just one second. Before I do, I wanted to talk to you about why I started this podcast. When you're listening to marketing information, when you're listening to business advice, it's often coming from individuals that are used to working with businesses whether that B2B or B2C. It doesn't matter but the tactics and the strategies that they use are often not applicable to a medical practice. I'll give you one simple example. In many states in the U.S., provinces in Canada and in many countries, Western countries, around the world. We have laws and regulations around fee splitting, where you are not allowed to share your income from a patient with any other third party. Now this differs from state to state and the severity of it and how much is policed tends to differ. But generally speaking if someone comes into your practice and offers for you to do a referral arrangement in lieu of a kickback, that can put your practice in jeopardy.

Nick: [00:01:51] The other thing you might see is outrageous discounts or crazy tactics that can leave you feeling embarrassed. You've still got to go to the annual meetings and meet your colleagues and you don't want to be that guy or that woman, you know the one I'm talking about — the one that everyone snickers about behind their back. The one that nobody truly respects. Even though they may be doing OK they have lost the respect of their peers and they've lost what they worked so hard for over the years all for the sake of trying to make a buck in their practice and over the Internet. So the reason that I started this is to have a discussion to have a platform to talk about tactics and techniques that can get you more patients, get you more business, get through the lifestyle that you want, but still leave your dignity intact. You don't have to sacrifice who you are, who you've become, what you've worked for to be successful in your medical practice. So that's the reasoning behind it and that's why we're here today. That's why I'm going to be bringing you information that works, information from the field, information that we use with our own clients, things that we're actually doing, not just theory not, just something that sounds good on paper but hasn't ever been proven or tested. We're going to be talking about tactics and techniques that have made seven and eight figure businesses out of six figure businesses six figure practices. So let's get into it.

Nick: [00:03:13] As a doctor I know that it's hard. It's not easy to not have somebody to confide in and that's the situation you're probably in. That's the situation most of our clients are in. When you talk to people at the meetings when you meet your colleagues you know it's very acceptable to speak about cases. It's acceptable to speak about difficulties you may have had in surgery or when an implant didn't work or whatever other medical mishap may have happened. You're probably comfortable to talk about that but you're not comfortable talking about this. You're not comfortable talking about the downfall the struggles that you're having. There's also a sense of competitiveness sometimes. It's an interesting dichotomy because there is competitiveness but there's also the collegial attitude because you're still fellows. So there are a lot of things that are keeping you from getting the support system that a regular business person would have. They would have someone to talk to without feeling embarrassed, without feeling like they're disclosing secrets, without feeling that they will be judged or that others will talk about them and, let's face it, the medical community is a pretty tight knit group. It's a pretty small community in terms of doctors at the end of the day and it's hard for anyone to keep anything truly secret. And for that reason I find a lot of doctors, and you may be one of them, are feeling left lonely and with no place to go or turn to and that's what I hope that this podcast will be for you. It'll be a place for you to turn when you're out of options, when you're not sure what to do next and when you're not sure where to turn to get answers. And I will try to bring you the highest quality information possible. All right down to business.

Nick: [00:04:50] What I'm going to talk about today is the number one problem facing most practices and it's not getting more leads, it's not getting more inquiries to the practice. This is something I've seen happen frequently and I'm seeing it more and more these days with the clients that we take on. And, that said, even though they're getting a flood of leads, a flood of inquiries to the practice, they are not able to convert them. And the number one problem facing most businesses is not a traffic issue to their website and it's not leads, not inquiries. It's taking those inquiries and turning them into paying patients. And there's a lot that goes into that and I'm gonna discuss a few of those things with you today. So let me know if this sounds like you when you're listening to this. When someone calls your practice are you absolutely certain that your staff is picking up the phone? When someone e-mails are you absolutely certain that 100 percent of those e-mails get answered in a timely manner preferably within 5 to 10 minutes that the bare minimum within an hour or in some of the worst case scenarios I've seen is over a day sometimes three days before someone gets back to them? Are you sure your staff is doing everything possible to treat that incoming lead with the value and the care that they deserve? If you can honestly say yes, then fantastic.

Nick: [00:06:05] I find that most people even when they answer yes, when you do a little digging, they don't record the phone calls so they don't truly know what's happening. If they do record the calls, no one's vetting those calls no one's checking them to see that the staff is doing a good job. No one's auditing the e-mail logs. No one is even checking the spam folder in most practices. Most people that we deal with we ask them you know how often do you check the spam folder. Do you go in there two to three times a day just to make sure that nothing got stuck in there that there's not a patient waiting for a reply? That there's not somebody that inadvertently went in there because your spam filtering software put them there by mistake? And the typical answer is that they don't know. They, they just don't know. And when you dig into it usually no one's checked the spam folder for quite a long time. Definitely not daily. So those are just a few little things that we see. And if you can honestly say that you're doing that for everything that's fantastic. I would wager to bet that that's not the case which is not bad news. Right. So if you're listening to this and you're feeling a little bit down about it if you're feeling that oh crap. How could we have missed such obvious thing? It's fine. Look at it as a positive anything that you learn anything that you hear and anything that will be going through today. That's new information and that you can act on is great news for you because you have an upside you are no longer stuck. If you can fix something, if you can do something about anything that you hear, that means that you're moving your practice forward. You're moving yourself forward and you're getting more out of what you've already got. And that's the goal.

Nick: [00:07:37] The first part of tackling a conversion rate problem is tracking. What I mean by tracking is when somebody calls, e-mails, texts your practice that you log that inquiry, and then you track that inquiry through its full lifecycle and find out what happened. Now, we'll usually go with 30 to 90 day life cycle with most of our clients because anything beyond that is a bonus. There are people that will take six to 12 months to 24 36 months to make a decision to have surgery, but at the end of the day you can't optimize based on a 36 month lead. You want to try to optimize and maximize that three to six month window because that will put money in the bank and that will give you the stability in the cash flow that you need. And then we look at all of the rest of it as kind of a bonus and we can go back retroactively and see what that real number was after 12 months. But when you want to make a difference you want to track over the initial period so that you can adjust and spot any problems in your business. Now, if you don't have software in place to do this I don't want you to feel despair. If you can get it great. There's great tools out there like Sales Force and HubSpot cloud based tools that you can put in. There's software dedicated to cosmetic practices cosmetic dental practices whatever particular field that you're in. There's usually software that can do that. It's oftentimes expensive and you may not want to invest in it just yet and I'm here to tell you that it's fine. You can do this with just a spreadsheet, for now as long as you're doing something. The danger only comes when you do nothing. And that's where I don't want you to be. I don't want to be not tracking absolutely anything moving forward. So that's your first action step: are you tracking these leads? Are you tracking them from the inquiry to the booking? That's the first number that you want to have. And are you tracking the booking to the show?. How many people booked versus how many people actually came in? That's another important number. Are you tracking them from the show to the close? How many actually booked surgery and then actually had surgery after that? Right. Another important thing people do cancel from time to time, but if you have all these numbers in place at least you know what's happening. And another number I want you to track is the average sale. The average sales amount. This is important because sometimes you can have your staff giving out discounts which takes you into the negative depending on what you paid for your leads. So you want to make sure that you've got all these numbers tracked on a spreadsheet through the lifecycle of the patient and spot any errors.

Nick: [00:10:01] Now I will from time to time speak to people that are claiming to be doing this. They say that they have their numbers tracked and that they know exactly what their closing rate is. So I will ask a doctor sometimes, you know, what's your close rate on the leads that come in on the patients that come into your office? And they'll tell me anywhere from 25 percent to 80 or 90 percent. But there is a danger in that. And the danger that most people are not tracking cold versus warm leads. So was this patient referral or were they someone that came in from an advertisement online with no previous knowledge? Because if you are having problems closing a referral you've probably got bigger problems than just tracking, right. Like that's a big big issue. There should be a pretty much a gimme. He still has to work that case. But you should be able to close a high percentage of people that are referred to you from other patients that have spoken highly of you.

Nick: [00:10:52] Now cold prospects, people that are coming in from your marketing efforts, that's the important number because while you can do things to help your patients refer, you're really at their mercy. You don't have control over that, right? You can try to incentivize, you can try to keep in touch with them, make sure that they know about you all the time and then they will refer when they come across someone that is refferable. But that is extremely hard to scale. That is not something that you can go to your marketing company and say, hey spend another 10 20 30 40 50 60 thousand dollars on ads this month and get me more business because we can handle more. You just can't do that with referrals. It would be extremely difficult to motivate someone to randomly and spontaneously refer people to you if that person is not ready, especially with something like plastic surgery. I'm not saying it's impossible or that we haven't done it but it's not where you want to start in your practice.

Nick: [00:11:45] So the cold leads. And when I say lead, I'm referring to a patient that is inquiring about a medical cosmetic procedure or a medical procedure of any kind that you perform and you're doing it as a service to get paid. I'm not talking about a list of individuals for example that may have been scraped online or bought from a database. I'm talking about a patient that has selected you as a person to contact as a doctor potentially for them and that has a chance of moving forward. OK. I just wanted to clarify what a lead was when I say lead. Now the advantage to that call leads like I said is scaling and being able to grow your business in a predictable manner. And I want you to start tracking those people separately, because they need to be treated much differently than someone that comes in as a cold referral. For the most part it will take a little bit more work and that's the number that matters to your practice. The referral number is great but as I said you should be doing a good job. You really want to try to scale and grow and get the lifestyle that you want out of your practice and the way to do that is to advertise, bring in those people, move those people from a prospect to a patient, to a person that's had a procedure with you and has paid.

Nick: [00:12:54] So let's talk about how to do that. It's all well and good knowing that you have to do that, that you have to track. But how do you get someone from being a prospect to a patient. The important thing to know about that process is that, and this doesn't matter what field you're in. The important thing is that they do three things. They have to know who you are. They have to like who you are and they have to trust what you can do and that you're an expert. Alright? So I'm going to go through those three things again because they're crucial. They need to know you. Right. And I'm not talking about your medical credentials only. I'm talking about you as a person. What are your hobbies? Are you a family man? Are you a mother? Do you have brothers and sisters? How do you spend your holidays? We do this through social media. We do this inside the practice with the photos that are displayed in the consultation room in the doctor's office. The Thank You cards That are displayed. Stories newspaper articles, anything that you've got that can get them prospect to like you or to know you will go a long way to them closing into a patient because people want to buy from people that they know and they don't want to buy from strangers. Were hard wired, you know stranger danger from when we're kids. Don't talk to strangers, right. It's beaten into us. We then turn around and teach our kids the same thing because we know that strangers are not safe and they can take advantage of us and they can do things to us that we may not like. They can rip us off. Right. So if we don't know the person that we're buying from our guard is very high, right. That patient's guard is very high and she's very critical and she's trying to find reasons that she wants to buy from you but that you're legit and that you're not ripping her off. So getting them to know you is a critical part of the process and it's one that I find that it's overlooked on most plastic surgeons' websites and it's overlooked on a lot of websites in general where they will treat it as a cold interaction very businesslike, completely unfriendly. Social media is very cold, it's all about business, and this is not just for you what I'm speaking about. That's your entire staff. They are interacting with the staff. You have to get them to know your staff. You have to post your office parties online. You have to post birthday celebrations that you're having at the office online. You have to post what's going on there. Do little videos. Before the person even hits the floor in your practice, you want to make sure that they know as much as possible on that they are engaged with you and with your team. Now the next part of that the knowing can become a positive or a negative. But they have to like you. They have to build a bond with you in such a way that they start to trust you. They want to be part of what's happening there right. So your staff has to be friendly on the videos. They have to be approachable, they have to be kind, they have to be empathetic, sympathetic and knowledgeable, all at the same time. And you have to be the same way. So if you're not good on camera, stick to pictures and words. If you maybe have a voice that's not agreeable and you've been told that before. Don't put your disadvantages forward. It's OK to acknowledge the faults and to work around them.

Nick: [00:16:11] Now the last thing that I mentioned is that they have to trust you. Trust at the end of the day comes down to authority. I tell our clients this story. I'm a man obviously. Typically I dress and work attire, Either a business suit or casual business wear. If I went up to a female and I told her take off your shirt let me see your breasts. What do you think would happen to me. If your answer is some sort of violent act and possibly imprisonment, that's exactly correct. But think about yourself now. As a physician you wear the cloak of authority and you are looking at people's bodies every single day with no objection and no consequence. And what's the difference between you and I. What makes you different from me is that you have a medical degree and you can wear a white lab coat and then you can behave as a physician and do things that the rest of society and the populace couldn't do and it's very important that you understand that. It's very important that you acknowledge the power that you have with that and understand that it has nothing to do with your years of medical school. It has nothing to do with how much work you've put in. It has everything to do with societal conditioning to doctors. And I'll prove that you. A conmen, and there are cases, where a conman has put on a physician's outfit and acted as a doctor. There are cases where that's gone on for years and that person has behaved and acted with the same rights and privileges as a physician without any of the schooling. So now you can understand the schooling didn't matter to that person. So he never went to medical school. He does not have a degree, but he used the conditioning that the physician is trusted and has gone to school and has a degree and has specialized knowledge and has put on the uniform of a doctor and acted as one. So understand that trust comes from authority and authority and expertise is what gets people to trust you. And it's not the actual expertise. You could be a great physician. But if that's not well communicated it becomes completely irrelevant. So how do we gain trust? Trust is built by demonstrating knowledge and in the absence of that individual being able to sit next to you during a surgery and observe how great you are and how skilled you are and how well you manipulate the instruments and with what dexterity you're able to perform, you have to start doing that communicated through your website. Your online videos, your YouTube channel, your social media. And I'm not talking about filming your surgeries I'm talking about displaying specialized knowledge that is different from your competitors. The number one thing that you have to do as a physician, if you want to market your practice, is differentiate from everybody else. You don't want to be a "me-too" in the market. You have to communicate what you do that's different, and you have to show them that it's better, and through that process they get to trust you. And that's in addition to the authoritative items like your diploma, your schooling history, all the other great things you know the associations that you belong to, those are given. But above and beyond that, you have to demonstrate a specialized level of skill that's advantageous above and beyond all of your competitors.

Nick: [00:19:32] So let's say that you've done all that. The patients come to your practice. They've engaged with you beforehand. They know who you are. You know about your family your dog, Boo-Boo, and everybody in the practice, they know them by the first name. They think it's a fantastic environment. You're an expert, they can trust you they walk through your office, they see or diplomas but they still don't buy. And they go home. And they don't call back. And that's the case that I see in a lot of practices. And when I asked them why that is, it's usually just blank stares. We don't know. We don't know what happened. We did everything right. And I'll tell you that the number one thing that's missing is a reason for the person to move forward with their surgery. And there can be a lot more things, but for the purpose of keeping this podcast to a reasonable length, You know please come see us at ThinkBasis.com And get the show notes there. Feel free to engage with us there. Ask any follow up questions that you have and I'll be happy to reply to your emails when they come in and go through any kind of specific questions that you have.

Nick: [00:20:36] But right now I want to talk about the principle of scarcity and the act of taking action. In the absence of a reason to take action, most people won't. So understand that you're not only competing with other physicians, with medispas, with other choices like going to the gym if it's liposuction, for example, and maybe trying to lose that weight in other ways or a diet program with the weight loss doctors. You've got all of these competitors but in addition to those competitors you've also got the option of doing nothing. The person doesn't have to do anything. They can stay comfortable, not risk pain, not risk discomfort, maintain the status quo and keep going with the thing that was keeping them unhappy in the first place. In the absence of pain or motivation, the status quo is just fine for most of the population. So you need to start thinking in your practice what can I do to motivate that person to buy. So the principle of scarcity means that people will go after that which they perceive to be in short supply. So if your time is in short supply, if your surgical availabilty is in short supply, that can often be enough to motivate them forward. So one critical mistake I'll see a lot of practices make is when they're talking to their patient, they will say something like, yeah sure we can get you in next week or the week after that or next month or in January or in June July. They just give the patient all sorts of options. It's almost as if the patient shouldn't make a decision right now because she could do it at any point. Instead of that even if you have unlimited availability, start by giving the patient one maybe two choices. We could do your surgery next month or in two weeks at 8:00 a.m. or I've got an opening two months from now at 3:00 p.m. Which works for you? Oh I'm sorry, neither of those works. Oh, okay, I'm going to have to try to work around something. When would be a good day free? I'll try to shift something around. See, rather than trying to serve them, you're managing their expectations and you're managing their perceptions of what you're offering and how busy your practice is. We make all of these thousand subconscious and unconscious decisions about the situation that we're in. Our brains are hardwired to keep us safe. They are hard hardwired to get us food, to get us resources so that we can survive. And if the resources are plentiful we don't need to feel a sense of urgency. Everyone's heard the story of the grasshopper in the end. And if you haven't, look it up, it's a nice little children's story I'm sure you're familiar with it. But basically the ant was working all summer preparing for the winter and the grasshopper was just playing in the field and doing nothing because he had no sense of urgency. And when winter came obviously he was in trouble while the ant had plenty.That same conditioning and that same ancient mechanism in the brain keeps that patient from taking action when you present abundance and availability so you have to try to remove that from the situation. You have to remove it from their mind and start to move them along the buying path. So the other thing that that mechanism does, is it takes them from considering whether to do it or not, to when to do it. So you see in the mind that's a critical step forward. I'm not just thinking about should I do it or not do it right. The choice is not should or should not. It's when. And that's a step closer to them having the surgery as opposed to getting stuck in the should I should I not I could do it any time let me call you back. You want to move beyond all of that. So scarcity is a powerful motivator and it can be applied.

Nick: [00:24:22] So I used availability, right, so that is limited surgical time as scarcity. You can use time as scarcity. Let's say that you happen to be going away for a month. Oh, Dr. Jones is going away for a month. He's got conferences. If we don't book it now I'm not sure when things fill up as he's gone because he's not here. People choose their dates and it could fill up. I'm using time scarcity now, time pressure due to an event. I'm not asking you to lie, it should be a legitimate event if you're planning to travel have that as a trigger for your staff to start using it to try to increase your closing rate. But that's a different kind of scarcity. It's a time deadline type of scarcity. If appropriate you could try price scarcity. If you've got a reason why, let's say you know you're going to be raising your rates, or you want to reward people that take action and you can do that in an ethical manner, then what you can do is offer some sort of price bonus if they book their date on the spot. You know that's not my favorite kind of tactic but it's another kind of scarcity, so you've got two days, one day right now to make a decision, if you would like to get this FREE BONUS OF 500 or a thousand dollars towards your surgery, whatever it might be that you decide to implement: an extra 10 units of Botox or an extra syringe of Juvederm with your surgery — whatever it is that you feel you can give away. To move them to take action. Look at it. Talk to your staff, brainstorm internally and try to apply.

Nick: [00:25:53] The other thing I want to talk about when it comes to conversion is the fact that a majority of patients will not make a decision on the spot. You cannot necessarily close everybody that comes in, especially if they're very far upfront and they're buying cycle, they're not ready to make a decision within the next couple of months. They're maybe going to see two other doctors or they've seen a couple and they want to see a couple more. So how do you gain the sale when you're not even there?

Nick: [00:26:20] And what I'm seeing more and more and that's happening is that physicians are not paying attention to the other decision makers in that patient's life. When she leaves your office she should never leave empty handed and she should not leave with generic materials and photocopied pieces of paper that look unprofessional and that reek of a lack of caring. When that patient goes home she should be going home with a carefully crafted package that illustrates everything about you, why you're a great physician and a great humanitarian, a great human being, why your staff is so friendly, and your specialized knowledge and authority on the surgery, as well as the results that can be achieved if she moves forward. And you want to send her home with that because, oftentimes it's not the patient's decision alone and it's not because I'm not saying that her husband may have something to say in it and that's not right because she should be independent. It has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with independence or a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body or external pressures. It's simple human nature. We want to get a second opinion. We want to get the people in our lives to approve of what we're doing because we're afraid of them saying I told you so if something goes wrong. We don't want them to say well see I told you so. That's what everyone's afraid of more than bad results more than thinking that it's not the right doctor for them. They're really worried about their husband, their friend, their mother, their girlfriend, their daughter, their wife (if it's a man having surgery), telling them I told you so you should have gone their wedding. Trust me. They want it to be a joint decision. They want the other person's approval and they want that sense of safety that, yes, another human being also recognizes that this is the right place to go and I'm going to go with it. So I call it toilet material mostly because I always picture the wife going home, the husband grabbing the package going on the toilet and reading it over and making up his mind about what happened. It is how we communicate that very easily because I think that a lot of sales are lost on the toilet. You know that's just a metaphor for when the person gets home and has a private moment to read over the materials their significant other or mother or a trusted adviser is looking over the material and making a decision about you without you being in the room to defend yourself. So if you're not putting in the effort on that front on what goes home with the patient, you're letting yourself down. You're basically screwing over your own practice by not making the effort to send that patient home with materials that will fight for you and fight for that person to go to the right place, which is your practice, to get the right kind of procedure as opposed to going to a doctor that is inferior in skill, knowledge and expertise. And if you're sending them home with that kind of weak material that's not fighting for the patient or for you, you really have no one else to blame but yourself. And that may be a little bit harsh and I'm not trying to be harsh, I'm trying to get through to you and make you understand that you've got upside. You've got potential you've still got options. To improve your practice. It can still move forward.

Nick: [00:29:46] So I hope that's been eye opening. I hope that it's given you something to think about and more importantly, I hope that it's given you something to take action on because taking action is the only way to move your practice forward. I'm happy that you're listening to this. I'm happy that you've joined me here for the past while and I hope that you've gotten value out of that. But what would make me happy is if you went and took action on the advice that you've received today. If anything has resonated with you if you've gotten any aha moments, or I should do that, take a note right now. If you're driving, pull over. If you're jogging stop and write yourself an e-mail on your phone or take a note on your phone. If you can't do any of that call someone and tell them to take a note for you. But I want you to write down the ideas that have come from listening to this and I want you to turn them into a to do list and I want you to either get your staff to help you implement it or go back to your practice and start working on it and move your practice forward.

Nick: [00:30:47] I'll keep bringing you this information. I'm going to keep joining you. This is our first episode together. If you are one of the people that have gone back to episode one or if you're just joining me at episode one I want to thank you. I think that all the information that we put out is going to be valuable and I want to try to bring you the very best advice that I can. I'm going to answer any questions that come in. I want to visit ThinkBasis.com. That's T H I N K B A S I S dot com and check out the podcast section. We'll put show notes there. Engage there. Leave us an email or a live chat message with any questions or anything to clarify and I will bring answers for you on the next episode. So thank you. I will speak to you next time. All the best for your practice. Thanks for joining me.

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