00:00:04:08 – 00:02:32:22
Jay Shorr
Welcome to Shorr Solutions, the podcast, and I’m your host. Jay Shorr. CEO and founder of Shorr Solutions. We are a team of national and award-winning practice management consultants with experience running a multi-million dollar cosmetic, dermatology, and plastic surgery practice. We’re here to share strategies and insights that will help you grow your practice efficiently and profitably. In each episode, we’ll explore the steps and actionable insights to guide you through your journey to increase efficiency, boost revenue, and decrease costs. Tune in and discover how to improve your patient experience and take your esthetic practice to the next level. This episode of Shorr Solutions, a podcast, was originally recorded for Shorr Solutions The webinar. However, we wanted to make sure you, our loyal podcast listeners, did not miss out on these important insights. Please enjoy. Welcome to another episode of Shorr Solutions, the webinar, and I’m your host, Jay Shorr, along with my co-host and featured speaker, Shannon Blake from Podium. So, you know, many of you, if you have heard us do this before, we have 118 podcasts right now or we do webinars. This is a sponsored webinar from Podium. I do want to make a disclaimer and I will make another disclaimer as you’re going to hear me mention the name Podium many times throughout this presentation.For the purpose of transparency, I want to share that I am an ambassador for Podium, which basically means that I’m an advisor. I go through a lot of their products and promotions and share my advice. Sometimes it’s not always the most popular advice, but it is actually for the benefit of everybody who wants to use the products. I am an ambassador because I believe in the product. I’ve been in this industry for many, many years. Many of you have seen me. And today’s topic is about how to attract. And it’s not just attracting folks, anybody they can attract, it’s about retention because it costs so much less as an investment to retain who we have. Then versus going out and trying to recruit new clients, new patients.
00:02:33:02 – 00:07:13:06
Jay Shorr
So once we have them in the door, why not keep them? I call it invertizing versus advertising. So without further ado, I’m going to share, you know, a list of series of slides. But the presentation is not going to be about the slides. The presentation is going to be about Shannon and myself. This is going to be a dialog back and forth between two experienced professionals. However, Podium is what we’re going to be speaking about because it has so many incredible features, which is why I personally decided to be an ambassador for Podium, going through this industry, helping people with their operational administrative, financial, health, and success of their practices. There are so many things in the industry, folks, that we’re all missing. And it really is about the conundrum of a conversion cascade. How do we bring it all to market? How do we attract people? How do we get them into our practice? How do we retain them? How do we keep them coming back for more? And it’s all about what do we do that can help them do that? So let’s talk about the steps of a conversion cascade. Well, first thing we have to do and we’ll step back for a second because in business we have to create an identifiable brand. You know, what’s your special niche and what are you offering everybody? And advertising dynamics have changed over the years. Embarrassingly enough, folks, don’t laugh. When I had my practice and I want to do another disclaimer I am not a physician when I talk about my practice. I was a partner in one of the largest practices here in South Florida up until 2013, when I sold it and took the show on the road to help businesses like yours. But advertising dynamics have drastically changed. And you’ll say, well, Jay, how? Well, don’t laugh. I used to spend $12,000 a month in Yellow Pages. Now think about what it would be if you spent $12,000 a month. That would be just in PPC and social media and SEO. Some people say, oh, I don’t care, and invest $12,000 a month. That’s a lot of money. However, the amount that you get today I was spending on radio, TV, and newspapers. Women, did I hear somebody saying, what’s a newspaper? All right. Well, I used to spend a lot of money and newspaper print advertising and glossy print advertising that now when it hits my office or when it hits my home, it stays on the cocktail table for about one day, and then it goes into the recycle bin. All right. But the fact of what people miss most is not having a plan. Because when you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. I know you’ve heard that a million times, but you have to have a plan and you have to have a budget. We help practices all the time, and it’s a monthly, quarterly, annual plan. You right now should be going into your second quarter plan. Your first quarter 2025 plan should have been done in the third and fourth quarter of last year. Why? Because I have to know what I need to do. Who’s going to do it? When am I going to do it? And what is the investment? I don’t ever want to hear how much is that cost? What does the investment? How much do I need to invest to make it work? Because the difference between an expense and an investment is a cost and expenses. When you get no return. The investment is when you get a return and marketing is done to create a return. But most importantly, folks, how do you measure that impact? Because what gets measured gets managed. So now that we’re going to do that, let’s step into the steps of the conversion cascade. But before we pull up that graphic, you know, I want to ask Shannon a couple of questions here. And the first, when we talk about all of the different marketing things that we’re going to do, for example, awareness, Google reviews. Shannon, let’s talk about awareness and our leads and our consults and our procedures for a second. All right. What do we do? What are we talking about? Awareness.
00:07:13:08 – 00:08:40:15
Shannon Blake
Yeah, I think here at Podium, one of the most important things that we coach our clients to do is have a great online reputation. That is marketing, that is essentially free marketing with a small fee if you’re paying a company to help you collect Google reviews, of course, but it’s the cheapest marketing you’ll ever do, and it’s the most powerful because it’s the voice of the clients that you have served, sharing their experience about their time with you and your aesthetic practice. So having a strategy on an easy way that converts at a high level, and collecting Google reviews so that you get that organic visibility in Google, when somebody is searching for an aesthetic practice near you, near them, right. Whether it’s a med spa near me, a top plastic surgeon near me. Your goal should be top three spots. That’s called the map pack with Google.
And if you’re not in the top three spots, they’re getting 70% of the clicks. So it’s really critical. After this webinar, I want you all to go and do that exercise and just put top, you know, med spa or aesthetic practice near me and or actually do in the city you’re in. Do that because you don’t want your IP address where you’re located for it to influence your results.
But if you’re not in the top three, you should absolutely have a strategy in how you get there. And using a solution like Podium to make it really easy to collect Google reviews through text, because that’s going to get you in 98% open rate versus asking for Google reviews in some other older, antiquated way like email.
00:08:40:17 – 00:09:08:08
Jay Shorr
All right. So as we talk about the steps of the conversion cascade, Shannon and I are going to have a dialog back and forth about each one of the steps. So as we pull up the graphic, the conversion cascade is a cylindrical dialog of the awareness bringing in, how what is the awareness? How do we get our client, our patient, to know who we are? And when we do that, we have to have an incoming lead and from the incoming lead, hopefully we convert it to a consult and we convert the console to a procedure, and then we have to keep the patient retained. We have to cross-sell to upsell the upsell, to keep them coming back for more and then referrals. So Shannon, let’s talk about each one of those steps. Let’s talk about awareness for a second. How do we end up getting our patients and our clients to know who we are and where we are?
00:09:39:12 – 00:09:58:00
Shannon Blake
Yeah. So I mean, a lot goes into that, right? But one of the biggest ways is what I just mentioned is having a very good presence on Google, which is going to come down to a couple of things within the algorithm. How many reviews do you have, how many star ratings, or what is your star rating and how frequently are you getting reviews? And lastly, this one gets missed a lot. How often are you replying to the reviews that were left on Google for your business? Google cares about those four things tremendously. It’s about 35% of their algorithm and where they’re going to rank you in Google search. So that’s like your organic way of driving leads, right? But awareness comes in other ways. And I’d love to hear from you too, Jay, like word of mouth. I’m sure many of you are like, it’s just about my loyal patients having a good experience and then telling their friends and family about it. I would say that’s another really powerful way, but what do you think? Jay.
00:10:33:09 – 00:10:57:15
Jay Shorr
The number one is really on patient referral. All right. Because I always trust if somebody says to me maybe we ought to go here for a restaurant, okay. Have you been there before? Oh, it’s wonderful. And the food is consistent. It’s wonderful. Or I like to go to XYZ med spa. Well, why do I want to go to the med spa? Why do I want to go to this plastic surgeons, dermatologists office? Because the staff is incredible. They’re so friendly. They don’t try to oversell me all these things. So when somebody gives me a lead, a personal lead, I’m much more readily available to go there than not. All right. But let’s talk about incoming leads for a second, because we have web chat and they come in by the phone, lead consolidation. What I’d like to do, Shannon, I’d like to let’s have a little bit of dialog about incoming leads, web chat, and the telephones and lead consolidations as we move on to the other stages.
00:11:40:07 – 00:13:09:09
Shannon Blake
Yeah. So kind of piggybacking on what I initially said about, first and foremost, it’s awareness, right? You’re going to be found on Google if you’ve got a good reputation. Next step is these leads are going to go to your website. On your website I want you all to think about what is the experience for those leads to engage with your business from your website, contact us forms. I’m not shaming them. You can have them for folks that prefer those, but that’s not the most modern way to connect with leads. Do you want to attract this younger generation? You have to have a more modern option. So Jay mentioned webchat. This is not live chat. I want to clarify the difference. If you have a live chat that makes somebody stay on their website until you reply, that is a horrible experience both for you and the pressure of responding right away. But also we all are very, we have a short attention span, let’s say. So if you’re not getting back to me within seconds, I’ve moved on to the next thing and that conversation will die. So having a web chat that’s text-based is going to be critical. And you want the form to be very underwhelming by strategy. So what I mean by that is a simple form that says, hey there, have a question. Text us here. The form is their name, their cell phone number, and their question. They hit submit and boom! A very powerful thing happens. You now have an open, active text conversation with them in their personal cell phone so that and you have their cell phone number now, which is powerful in itself. So now you’re one step closer to converting them to a consult, which is the goal.
00:13:09:09 – 00:13:17:08
Jay Shorr
So let’s talk about the AI-generated web chat that we have. It’s kind of like my favorite now.
00:13:17:10 – 00:13:17:22
Shannon Blake
Yes.
00:13:18:00 – 00:14:06:07
Jay Shorr
And we’ll call her Avery because that’s her name. All right. Let’s talk about how does that work for those people who don’t have the staff. Because one of the things I hear all the time is I don’t have enough staff to be able to get back to the incoming lead in a quick period of time. My answer to you is if you don’t respond within, and everyone’s going to have a different answer, I’m going to go and I’m going to extend it and say, an hour and even that’s long, because don’t be fooled by thinking that you are the only, med spa or doctor’s office that the prospective patient, client is contacting. So let’s talk about how that AI-generated patient coordinator works.
00:14:06:09 – 00:16:04:05
Shannon Blake
Yes. Okay. So I’m sure you all have heard of ChatGPT. It’s a fun tool that I’m sure you all are using, whether in your personal life or in business, but Podium, as soon as OpenAI launched ChatGPT, we quickly got to work on building the premier solution for an AI patient coordinator, because we saw this was a big gap in this industry, is not having enough staff, as Jay mentioned, to be able to answer people within the expected time, which is honestly minutes. So we launched Avery about almost a year ago now. That’s wild to think about. She’s built off the backs of open AI, but what really makes her special is all of the additional aesthetics training we have given her on the back end to be able to speak the language of this industry. But if somebody is using Podium, we actually go a little, even a level deeper of training her on your business. What are your new client specials? Do you have a membership program? What are the benefits of each level? She’s booking. She’s got your scheduling, booking link or can check for availability of times depending on the EMR that you use. She knows your cancellation fee. She knows every treatment you offer, and she knows the way to speak about it in the way you want her speaking about it is you guys get the point, but it’s very granular and trained on your particular med spa. So now you have an employee who can work 24/7. And the reason that’s extremely important is let’s say you’re like, Shannon, I’m so good about getting back to my leads within, 9 to 5 when we’re working. That’s incredible. But over 40% of your leads are likely coming after you’re closed. Because let’s think about who a very common strike zone client is. It’s a working woman who has children, and by the time she gets around to her time at night, you’re closed. So it’s a way for you to have an employee working for you and capturing those leads and even booking consultations while you’re at home with your family or in many cases, asleep.
00:16:04:07 – 00:17:02:21
Jay Shorr
All right, so now let’s say we’ve gotten to the consult. All right. So when we do that consult, because we were good enough to be able to lure that person on either the incoming contact us or whether it was a phone call, even if we weren’t able to answer the phone call or that’s the widget on the website and communicating back. And the one thing I can share is this AI-generated consultant that we’re speaking with does not give generic like Shannon said, answers. I have tested it, I have tried. I even asked her out for dinner and she told me that she was busy. You know, it wasn’t something. It was really cute. Just be very careful what you ask, Avery. All right. Now let’s get to the consult. Now, let’s say we have a consult. We want to do an estimate. And, you know, let’s talk about a text post-consult.
00:17:02:22 – 00:18:06:22
Shannon Blake
Yeah. Jay this is where it gets this is where you can create really elevate the patient experience. Because I’ve been to a console where I’m left with a bunch of papers with different treatments that we discussed with some pen on it writing out like pricing. And I have to hang onto those papers and guess where those went? I have literally no idea. We encourage you if you think about when you do those consults, if you’ve got a line item of maybe a skin care program you talked about, and maybe you’re working on their under-eye dark circles, itemizing those within a text where before they even leave, they’ve got everything. The different price points for each of the things that you discussed. And if they want to pull the trigger, you can even send a text payment link for them to pay the down payment if that’s relevant, depending on the treatment they’re doing. But now, this prospect of years, this lead has something in a text message that they on their phone that they have with them at any given time, and they can just simply text you back if they have any clarifying questions on that estimate. And it makes it really easy for them to be able to reference back and get them one step closer to pulling the trigger.
00:18:06:24 – 00:18:13:07
Jay Shorr
What about when it comes time to the procedure and they can collect the down payment that way as well, right through text?
00:18:13:07 – 00:18:29:16
Shannon Blake
Yep, they can pay with a simple link in the text. If they’re using something like Podium, they can pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay. They can even use affirm and break it up over a six-month program if they want to, or a different timeline. It just gives them a lot of really easy payment options. So that payment is not an issue.
00:18:29:20 – 00:18:46:04
Jay Shorr
Let’s talk about the follow-up after you had the procedure. You’ve talked about the consult. No. The purpose of the consult. Now you’ve sold the consult. Now you had the procedure. All right. One of the steps at our conversion cascade. What do we do. How do we follow up with that? Proceed with that patient for the procedure.
00:18:46:06 – 00:19:47:09
Shannon Blake
So if you’ve got a platform like Podium, there’s a lot of different things you can do. So one of them is if you want to be extremely tailored and there’s some nuance to this particular lead, you could go into a system like Podium and schedule a text to go out, let’s say 48 hours later. And if this client, this lead has not replied to you, this scheduled text message would go out and you can write whatever, you know, fresh out of the appointment that you would want to say in a check-in. And then you can just know that with confidence, that message will go out and check in with that person. If they have not text you back or gotten back to you. But you can also do automations across the board. If you don’t, you’re not worried about it being too tailored. You can write those templates out and say, put this client in or this prospect in a drip campaign. I want for text to go out over four weeks. I want the first text to say this, the second one to say this. So there’s a lot of automations you can do within a platform like Podium that really take the work off your plate in the stress of a lead slipping through the cracks.
00:19:47:11 – 00:20:01:09
Jay Shorr
All right. And then what about the text messaging? If we want to share with a client all the other services that we have, because we don’t want this to be a one-hit wonder, one and done.
00:20:01:11 – 00:20:32:24
Shannon Blake
Yeah. No, I love that. It’s actually really a cool enhancement we’ve made to Avery is the ability. If you’d like her, she can recommend other services or treatments based on the interest of that particular client. Maybe they took a survey and they showed interest in a couple of different areas you can do within Podium tag that word to that persona so that Avery has that information and knows some other things are, interested in, or even if they’re just wanting to work on acne.
00:20:32:24 – 00:20:37:01
Shannon Blake
Avery can recommend various, treatment options for that.
00:20:37:03 – 00:20:43:04
Jay Shorr
Right? Cross-selling. How do we cross-sell?
00:20:43:06 – 00:21:36:03
Shannon Blake
I mean, that personally, our perspective on that in Podium, there’s a couple of things you can do with text marketing to drive awareness to other features that you have. So, for example, you’re bringing in a new laser that you just bought. You’ve got to drive awareness that you even offer that, right? So running some specials or promotions on the first five folks to sign up for a consult or treatment, get, you know, X off or something to that nature. But I think a lot of cross-selling happens in the clinical room when you’re having a conversation with and making a human connection with that lead. It’s understanding all of the areas that maybe there they’re less than ideal for them. And bringing up other, providers that you have that specialize in other areas. So there’s an in-person human element, but then there’s definitely leveraging technology to drive awareness to some of the other treatments that you offer.
00:21:36:05 – 00:21:39:24
Jay Shorr
How do we cross-sell with this program with Podium?
00:21:40:02 – 00:22:41:03
Shannon Blake
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say there’s a couple things I want to mention here. Text marketing for sure. Think about 98% open rate. That’s really powerful. So all of your subscribers that have opted in to receive text promotions, you should be notifying them with the bulk message sending out. And then I would also say, I don’t know how many of you have new clients fill out a survey of areas of interest inside your, aesthetic practice.
But that information, the data from those surveys is so powerful. If you’re not doing anything with that, you are sorely missing out. So taking levels of interest and like I said earlier, putting a persona or a tag for each of those leads so that when you go to text market, you can choose anyone who is tagged to that particular treatment that showed an interest there and send a bulk message out to them about a special or promotion, or just driving awareness that you now offer that. So it’s it’s leveraging text marketing, but in a smart way, in a very tailored.
00:22:41:05 – 00:22:51:21
Jay Shorr
We’re basically segmenting our lists so that we’re not giving overload to people getting messages in bulk, messages that really don’t pertain to them.
00:22:52:02 – 00:22:55:07
Shannon Blake
Exactly. Relevancy matters for sure.
00:32:08:23 – 00:43:16:12
Jay Shorr
I find that many times when a text is coming from somebody that you know, trust and respect my faith, it’s much better and more accessible to be read. When I get an email. My favorite button on my iPhone. It’s not a plug for Apple, but I happen to have an iPhone. My favorite button is the edit button, because then I see all these little circles on the left, and I can swipe and delete 50 messages in a minute.
All right. I have a phony email that is a real email, but it’s phony. So anytime I buy something, you know, outside of Amazon. All right, who comes to my house every day, maybe twice a day? All right. When I do that, I give a dummy email so that you’re going to send me all your stuff.
And this way, I may have a thousand unopened emails now because I know it was unimportant. If it’s something that I really want, I’m going to give you the email that I always look at, but with text, I think you’re more readily accessible to open it up and look at it. And when you do SMS text messaging, a lot of times I’ve done this and I send links inside the text to that article, Shannon, that you referred to, if you want to talk about skincare, when we do our e-blasts, you know, we do exhaustive e-blasting.
But I believe in educating versus selling because I do believe education sells. If you make people aware of something, they’re going to want to buy it, because I don’t really want to buy something I’m not aware of because I go through Instagram and I go through all these different things, and I see a lot of things I love to buy, all right?
If I wasn’t made aware of what it was, I would never buy it. So I would like to see it. It’s the second best thing to feel touch. All right. If I can’t feel and touch those shoes or those sneakers or electronic gadget that I want to buy, at least I want to see it, that’s going to help me to make that decision.
So there are so many different paid advertising and marketing channels. You know, we talked about pay-per-click and SEO and CRM. We talked about print, influencers, radio, TV, and sponsors. So let’s talk about creating a series of content checklists. But before we do that, I want to get over and I want to speak about influencers for a second because it’s a great way to bring in business.
However, what you don’t understand is that don’t get caught up on influencers unless they’re a very, very local influencer and that you’re going to get something bilateral in return because an influencer is going to want to use you for all the wonderful services that you provide and the moment that you no longer, you know, perform that service, they’re gone.
All right. So don’t get an influencer and don’t be so influenced by the fact that they’ve got tens of thousands of followers because those tens of thousands of followers that they’re an influencer for a restaurant or a shoe or a jewelry aren’t coming to your practice. All right. You want to know that somebody that has an influence in your community within a certain mile radius, because, quite frankly, that’s where you’re going to draw from your client base.
All right. So creating a series of content checklists, you have to do it for your social media, for your email marketing, for your in-office marketing, for your SMS text marketing, and your websites. Now, I talked about a plan. If you recall, the plan is like a calendar. So if you’re going to do all of these wonderful types of social media and things like that, have a calendar and have a plan, this way you’re able to say in the first quarter, in the months of January, February, and March.
All right, then, this is what we’re going to do in the month of April, May, and June. This is what we’re going to do. Look, it’s a plan, and a plan is a roadmap. You know, you want to follow it, but if something comes up, you can always alter your plan. It’s kind of like a detour. I have a plan to get to a certain place, and all of a sudden there, it’s a detour. Now that’s what a GPS it. It allows me to get to a not the same area in a different way. And that’s what you’re going to have to do. So I want you to be very conscious in things that you do in your marketing show imagery. But if you do, you must show diversity of your patient base. Do not speak about politics and religion in your marketing strategy, and you’ve got to stay away from isms.
I call them racism, ageism, etc. now I want you to be careful here. We’re going to talk about DEI, you know, now, one of the things that I do notice this is nonpolitical in nature because it gets very ugly when we talk about DEI and politics. I know race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and preference. We have to be very careful because our patient base is every one of them, and we don’t want to be creating any negative ism.
So when you’re doing your marketing things to be very conscious of and some of the places that I will not buy from or recommend to my wife when I go on to these med spots and you’re going to know exactly what I’m talking about, and I see the picture of the woman like this, and I see the picture of the woman like this.
And I go to three and four other websites and guess what? I see that same woman because they bought a stock photo. Now, look, I see nothing wrong with showing an image of a beautiful woman like Shannon. All right? But however, I don’t really believe that you’re supposed to show all these models. And if you do, you really need to show and state in that image that it is a model and it’s not a true patient because the average patient doesn’t look like that. I believe in showing a picture of the average-looking person, a bald-headed, elderly gentleman like me. That’s your buyer instead of the guy with the full head of hair and the big solid rock muscles. Well, guess what? I’m not going to that practice because I’m never going to have a full head of hair, and I’m never going to have muscles like that guy.
All right, but if you show me a picture of the average-looking gentleman and you show pictures of the average-looking woman that are somewhat attractive, people are going to go there. If you show women that are, you know, a little bit on the heavier side, that’s fine, because that’s what our population is built of. And those people have expendable income and therefore they’re not going to turn them off. You’re going is they’re going to think, you know what, I want to go there because they treat people that look like me: race, religion, color, sexual orientation, and preference. There’s a lot of money to be made. I’m not going to promote or not demote, you know, gender affirmation. It is what it is today. We have to learn to accept it and learn to live with it.
I accept everything because that’s the world we live in and we’re not going to change it, so we’re going to spend money. I said earlier there was something about a cost and an investment. A cost is an amount that we pay a price, a loss, a sacrifice, or a penalty. So we have to nix the word cost. It’s called investment. What do I have to invest to do my marketing and what return do I and shall I expect in the end? So the investment is something that we want to spend and utilize for future advantage of our benefit. What does that mean when I invest in marketing, I want to know that if I spend X amount of dollars I’m going to get X amount back in return, what is the amount of the return?
I’m going to say? I’d like to get a three and a half to four times my spend, because if I spend $1,000 marketing something and I get $1,000 back, that I make money and most people are going to say, no, you’re broke even and the answer is you lost money. People say, well, why I got back everything I spent? I said, well, is your rent free? Is your EMR free? Is your or your phones free or your staff free? The answer is no. So you have fixed and variable expenses that you need to know. So when you market something, you’ve got to get a greater return than what it cost you or what your investment was, or you will soon be out of business very quickly.
So what do we want to target on? We target our markets based on three things. Basically one is our location. Two is who the people are and what. Third is what are our procedures. So location is called geographic where we are and who we are is called demographics. Diversity, equity, inclusion of who they are, and the patient interest of procedures, which is very important because why do I not want to market to people that live in my area that look like us, and we’ll be able to use the services that we provide and that we promote what sells most. Basically, before and afters of genders, both male and female have great photography. Folks do not take pictures on cell phones. It works. However, you may end up getting a good fishbowl look because the lenses aren’t set that way. All right, but however, you need to have galleries because people want to see what they’re going to look like by what procedures you offer.
00:43:16:14 – 00:43:27:14
Jay Shorr
All right, but make it easy for patients to come into your practice. So let’s talk about that. Shannon, you know, how does Podium make it easy for somebody to come into our practice?
00:43:27:16 – 000:44:14:19
Shannon Blake
It’s all about offering the communication channels and the speed in which you get back to those leads. And so having a tech stack that allows you to do that. So think about one thing I didn’t mention earlier. I think it’s super relevant. And you’ve caused me to think of something that you said. And that is are you communicating with these leads or your clients from a single phone number? Because that in itself is creating ease for somebody to connect with you and can continue to connect with you. I want you all to think about how many different phone numbers you communicate with your prospects, with your clients. Is your text marketing coming from a five-digit code, not your business phone number? Is your business phone number the same as the text number that they’re getting their appointment?
00:44:14:19 – 00:44:33:21
Jay Shorr
Reminder I’m going to stop you for a second, Shannon, because I’ll ask you personally when you get a phone call or you get a text and you just get a phone number over and over that doesn’t have a trail or a trace, don’t you think Spam?
00:44:33:23 – 00:44:34:19
Shannon Blake
Absolutely.
00:44:34:19 – 00:44:44:20
Jay Shorr
When you get a text or a phone call from somebody that is over and over and over again, do you save that and put a contact name into it?
00:44:44:22 – 00:44:45:15
Shannon Blake
Absolutely.
00:44:45:15 – 00:44:58:06
Jay Shorr
Okay. That’s my point. So now Shannon, let’s let it go. Finish by saying that when you get that text over and over from that same number, then it says that it is from ABC Med Spa, right?
00:44:58:08 – 00:44:58:17
Shannon Blake
Yep.
00:44:58:21 – 00:45:00:05
Jay Shorr
Okay. Now go on.
00:45:00:07 – 00:45:51:10
Shannon Blake
Yeah. I think that’s a really important thing to highlight is that’s something that podium is really good at. Whenever a new lead comes in, if you’re using Podium, the first text they get is thank you for reaching out to X Med Spa. We’ll get back to you in a moment. In the meantime, save us as a contact in your phone. So for ease of communicating with us in the future, it’s an easy contact card for people to save you in their phone. And now you are next to their friends and family in their phone, so it’s easy for them to get back to you. So like just ease of communication and meeting them where they are. Are they communicating with you on Instagram, having your Instagram DMs come straight in the podium so you get notified as soon as you get a message. You can get back to them right away. While they’re hanging out on Instagram, you have to make it easy for them to get in touch with you and be fast at getting back to them. And when I say face, it’s minutes; you’ve got minutes.
00:45:51:12 – 00:45:53:11
Jay Shorr
What happens when we don’t?
00:45:53:13 – 00:45:55:24
Shannon Blake
They’ll go to your competitor.
00:45:56:01 – 00:49:00:07
Jay Shorr
I’m going to share a quick story. Years ago, I was looking for a motorcycle, and it was a Sunday morning. And naturally, nothing disturbs me on a Sunday during football season because if you ask me what I’m doing, I’m gonna say, what time does the game start? And I was looking for a motorcycle and my wife says, no, I’m not. If you buy another motorcycle, that’s two wheels. I’m not going to go in with you ever again because I had just had hand surgery and the bike is like 1,200 pounds. So I’m on the Harley Davidson site and I see the trike, a three-wheeler that is absolutely gorgeous that I want, and I fill out their online form and I submit it, and ten minutes later it was like 11:00 in the morning. This gentleman says, what are you doing today? You know, after we introduced himself, I said, oh no, it’s Sunday and I’m watching the football game. He says, I have the bike you’re looking for, and I’m thinking, of course, you have the bike I’m looking for. You’re going to say that whether you just want me to come in, then you’re going to try and sell me. He says, no, I really do. Why don’t you come in and take it for a test drive? I said, I’m watching the football game, he says. But that’s in a couple of hours. We’re right down the street from you. You can come and take the bike for a ride if you like it. Well, going there and taking the bike out for a test drive is like taking a puppy home for the weekend. All right. Naturally, you know what happened next? I bought the bike. Point of my story is, if he had not called me back right after that ten-minute lead submission, I had already submitted the lead to several different Harley-Davidson dealers. By the time the other people got back to me, I already bought the bike. All right, now, I don’t care if it’s a tummy tuck. A facelift, a Botox, ZM Dysport, whatever. My point is that the early bird catches the worm. All right, so how, who and what? How soon do we respond to each lead? You know, that’s like the magical question. And who on the team is going to be responsible for it? What can be said about what violates Hipa and what sort of customized scripts are needed?
Well, you know, you can actually, with Podium, take away a lot of that guesswork. All right. So really what we need to know is all of these questions is we got to respond to them within that hour or they’re going somewhere else. And who on that team should be responding? Well, if you have that Avery, she could be responding right away. And then if you get that lead then you can confirm it and take over from there. All right. Have a cheat sheet, if you will, for every procedure that you do for your staff that’s there, the level of discomfort, and what’s the investment. Here Avery handles that because what Shannon just said explain it again Shannon, about how the the eye works congruent to your specific practice.
00:49:00:09 – 00:49:27:03
Shannon Blake
Yeah. Part of the onboarding process with Podium is we do a deep dive into all of the nuances and the way that you want Avery speaking about your different, guidelines, procedures, all of the above. And so she, the nice thing about I is you’ve trained them how to speak. This isn’t like a human who can make a mistake, because they didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before, and they forgot what you told them in training, AI is very accurate.
00:49:27:03 – 00:49:46:08
Shannon Blake
It’s got an endless, you know, amount of brain space. And they. It can’t be wrong if you’ve coached them what to say in the frame of which to say it. Jay, I know we’re running short on time and I did see some questions come in. So let’s transition here in just a moment to answering some of the questions that came in.
00:49:46:10 – 00:49:59:07
Jay Shorr
All right. So, one of our participants and I don’t want to mention anybody by name, all right, is how would we send them appointment reminders if they unsubscribe from marketing texts?
00:49:59:09 – 00:50:38:03
Shannon Blake
It’s a really good question and thank you for asking it. So if you’ve got a platform like Podium, we do your general two-way texting with your clients and with any leads, but we also have our text marketing. So how we do it is when you’re sending out a text marketing message, there’s actually a word, please reply, remove, or stop. I forget which word it is that. Ask them out of future text marketing that does not opt them out of receiving your 1 to 1 communication. So appointment reminders are just general back-and-forth texting about different services or treatments that only unsubscribe them from the text marketing. So it’s a really good question.
00:50:38:05 – 00:55:08:17
Jay Shorr
All right. So I want to go real fast in here. And we won’t necessarily pull up these slides. All right. So when you want to close an appointment use collected contact information that is given to you and ask if they have any additional questions or information or have any other questions, and then offer up an appointment slot instead of waiting for them to ask. Because what you don’t want to do is you want to you don’t want them to pick an appointment where you have open time, offer appointment times that fills up your schedule, and if none of those appointment times work, then you can ask them when they would like to come in and then try to fill it up after that, or else you’re going to have so many open spots. And that’s what we want to try to prevent when they come in during the patient visit, start with a pretreatment questionnaire because a patient I explained this earlier that my derm patients didn’t know we did plastic surgery, and our plastic surgeon patients didn’t know we have a derm. Have a questionnaire of all the wonderful procedures that you do to allow them to understand everything that you do, and then let them, click off what they may be interested in, because if they’re only coming in for one thing, but they really understand that you do multiple things, you may be able to what’s called upsell the upsell, because you have to offer a full menu for all of the other treatments that you do, and tell them about all the things that you do. All right. Now, magical consult closing question. This is like one of my favorites. When somebody is in your office, we want to close them. That’s the whole idea of the business. So we want to know how long have you been thinking about having this procedure. Let them think. Next is how does the thought of this procedure make you feel? Oh, makes me feel wonderful. That is your lead. And now you’re halfway home. All right. How soon are you looking to have this procedure? I ask this when people call us about wanting to work with a consultant. How soon are you looking to have the, you know, a consult? Oh, maybe next year. All of a sudden, you’re, like, putting a pin in the balloon and you’re letting the air out because I want you to book now. But if I have a compelling event and I want to find out what your ping points are, and I can hit on those ping points, you’re more accessible to start booking with me sooner rather than later. And then what’s stopping you from booking your procedure today? There’s three major reasons why somebody might not book, and they’re called fears, the fear of pain and the fear of time, downtime and the fear of money. All legitimate fears. So you have to get some of the verbiage out of your vocabulary. There is no such thing as pain. It’s called minor discomfort. There’s no needles they’re injections. People, believe it or not, freak out over certain words. So we want to make them as comfortable as possible. And after the consult, book and before they leave, pick up the phone. After, send them an email, let them know. Offers private-label skin care service. All right. Keep them in your practice for travel. I mean, think about it. Use private label skin care as a way, as a marketing opportunity. And make sure that each patient goes to bed and wakes up with your branding in the morning. We have a graphic here of skincare products that’s called Shorr Solutions. Now we don’t really have a product private label product called Short Solutions. That’s our company. But don’t you think that’s a pretty good name for a skincare product? Shorr Solutions. It means that the product works. If I were selling product that is what I would call it and connect with patients, let them know, put them on, resell, reorder every four, six, eight, ten weeks because it takes the guessing out of the game. Encourage your patients to leave reviews because when they leave a review, people see it. And then lastly, they are the steps of our conversion cascade market to awareness. Get them to get an incoming lead. Let Podium do all the magic with the bulk texting. Let Podium do everything with Avery. She’ll book it almost for you. Bring the incoming lead to a consult. Convert the consult to a procedure, then grab the revenue. Keep the patient in your practice.
00:55:38:09 – 00:56:48:24
Jay Shorr
Buy everything that we’ve shared. Try to cross-sell. Upsell the upsell. Have them get referrals for the patient word of mouth and keep them in your practice. Make sure that you have marketing calendar and you have a plan. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for spending one hour of your day once again. Jay Shorr at Shorr Solutions, [email protected]. Good luck. God bless. Don’t go anywhere just yet. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure to subscribe so you never miss the latest insights. New episodes are released every two weeks. For more valuable information and resources to elevate your practice. Sign up for our newsletter. You’ll get the latest industry updates, expert tips, and exclusive strategy straight to your inbox. Also, don’t forget to follow us on social media at Shorr Solutions. If you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, schedule a free consult with our team today. Thank you for joining us on Shorr Solutions, the podcast.
