Introduction:
Mara: I am speaking with Kelly Smith, founder of Projected Growth Consulting, and now, Kelly Smith Media. Originally this episode was recorded as a webinar with Kelly leading the conversation. So, this particular podcast episode may sound a little different. Of course, we’ve edited it down for you but we are so excited to repurpose this for you to listen to. Today we’ll be talking about the importance of phone scripts and how to implement an outbound call campaign in your practice. You’ll also hear us talking about some additional goodies for you. You can find the website for those in our podcasts show notes so check those out. Let’s go ahead and get started.
Implementing a Call Campaign:
Kelly: I’m excited that we can talk today to share some secrets that we’ve learned that we know for years really worked but particularly worked really well during this current timeframe with markets opening and closing and the stress that causes for the owners of facilities and for those staff members. Interestingly, during COVID both of us have done a lot of webinars. Traditionally Mara and I get to work together in person at different trade shows across the country for years now and you know what created today was us chatting about what the practices are really facing and where we’ve seen the most results.
One of the things that came up right away between both of us was using outbound call campaigns and how to get your staff to do that. It’s kind of like diet and exercise, most of the people are doing those things on a daily basis, and from my experience when I’ve owned or run a facility you’re making those outbound calls as customer service follow up on closed consultations and even reaching out to people that are viewing in a series of treatments. It’s one of those things that sometimes it’s hard to motivate the staff and give them the confidence and the right scripting is really important to do that and today Mara and I are going to talk about how to motivate your staff, what kind of scripting is the most effective, sharing the experience that we’ve seen across the country with actresses who have embraced this, but most importantly the details on how you really implement a call campaign.
Depending on your market and what state you live in, there’s a lot of different levels of whether you’re open, partially open, and closed. What’s going on in your area depends on the month, the day of the week, the way that the wind blows. Mara is in Florida and I’m in Washington, and we both have clients all over the US. We were talking about that even today, it’s a bit of a moving target but the things that are not a moving target are what really works to move the needle and we specialize in events, over the years we’ve done over 3000 events. One of the things that I know is when we get to a week before the event we’ve already got travel scheduled. Sometimes we find with our clients, they haven’t gotten the RSVPs they need because they haven’t done their emails they haven’t done anything to promote the event at that point. We will always coach them on how do you do an outbound call campaign to invite your VIPs to the event, sometimes they don’t have time to do it and we’ll actually do that for them. We don’t like to do it that way. I know from my own experience, I’ve dialed I’ve done it and we fill events in a day or two so easily. If you’re wondering if all campaigns work, I just share that with you to tell you that we’ve done it dozens of times a day or two before an event to fill an event, and it absolutely works and it is actually seen as a customer service reach out and that’s in the scripting.
Scripting and Strategies:
Kelly: Mara, you’ve got this great COVID pandemic kit and kind of strategies and I was hoping we could maybe start there. When you actually prepare the staff to get started on a call campaign at this time, during the pandemic.
Mara: One thing that that you talked about Kelly was that how it’s just like a diet and exercise maintenance program and look during COVID we all understand that. Maybe we have been a little more indulgent in chocolate and wine and less stringent with salad and this is the time to get your salad and your diet and exercise back so this is where we forget what the successes may not have been, we’re getting ready now with the opportunity for improvement. With that, what you want to make sure is that you have things lined up as a practice, we tell this to our clients all the time and our clients are the cosmetic aesthetic practices across the country, and we say that we want to make sure going into any call campaign you have the basics.
First and foremost, where do they have access to the most current updated form of the schedule which is obvious. We need to make sure that they have a spreadsheet to log their calls because logging your calls is going to really help as where you’re going to keep your data. We all know that in order to analyze data, you need to have data to analyze.
We also want to make sure that everyone on the team understands what is the safety precautions that the practice has taken at this point during COVID so if we were to have this conversation over the summer, right or the spring, it may have felt a little bit different because everyone would go wait a minute so who’s wearing masks, who is not wearing masks what is sanitizing at this point, your team should know these things. They’re the ones that have been spraying the doorknobs for months, so they understand but we want to make sure everyone understands how to communicate that with patients. We want to make sure that if the patient were to ask or seem apprehensive because safety is a real thing, Kelly and I were talking earlier about how different people have different levels of comfort depending on it could be depending on geographics, it could be depending on their health background and their current lifestyle. You want to make sure you have all these things in place and you want to make sure that your team is provided with scripts as well and Kelly and I are going to go over some of those fundamentals, as far as things that you want to include.
You also want to make sure you’re putting the right person on the phone so everybody should be able to make those outbound calls right everyone just like everyone on the team should know how to restock the toilet paper. Everyone should know how to unplug and plug in a computer and access the EMR, but not everybody does on a daily basis. That’s just a few of those basics that you want to make sure going into it you have your basics your one on one so everybody has them and get them to your team and bullet points. Don’t make them memorize, there’s no reason. You also need to make sure that you don’t give paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs that they have to read while they’re on the phone.
Kelly: Exactly. Well, I really enjoyed the story you shared about doing outbound calling and how you tweak that.
Mara: Yes. What we found is so often there are two people in the practice two positions will say that the practice thinks should making calls right off the bat. We found that they say, Oh, I should have my salesperson because they’re great at sales they’re great at closing, they’re great at that follow up so that’s the person. Then they also think the other mistake we’ve seen is all hands on deck, we need to have everybody making calls. What we found is that we had somebody who, quite honestly, is absolutely amazing with their sales but that wasn’t what was needed. Right now, that’s not necessarily what your practice needs your patients want comfort, your patients won’t somebody to check in on that. We found that you shouldn’t come at it from a sales, sales, and strategy point of view. “I’m calling to check-in and see how you’re doing because this is a crazy time, and we’re used to seeing you every couple of months we’re used to seeing you once a month for your facial and we haven’t seen you in six months. I just wanted to check-in and see how you’re doing. Coming at it from that point of view, have somebody on your team that excels with customer service and somebody that is comfortable on the phone. If you try and put the wrong people on the phone it’s going to do more harm than good.
Outbound Customer Service Calls:
Kelly: Right, well I agree and it isn’t a sales call it’s an outbound customer service call and that is how the patients receive it. When you call with the right script and that’s why we’re going to keep saying script because it is so important. You do need those talking points in the guidance for your staff and you need to do a little bit of practice before you start dialing.
I have a client in Canada, they really wanted to throw up their lasers, we were just doing training yesterday and going over how you get started because the team’s afraid of rejection. You don’t want to be perceived as insensitive to the environment by giving them a call you know we’ve had practices throughout this time be afraid to market be afraid to use social media, and what we explained is you have to be socially conscious of what’s going on and you need to sprinkle those things in. It’s still okay to continue to stay in touch with your patient base and those are the ones that are staying successful and have continued to do those things and it’s going to be the right way. What I found with the group I was coaching, I said, start with two or three of your VIPs that you feel like you’ve got a record relationship with so you can get a few successes under your belt, because that’s going to build your confidence.
The other thing I talked about was setting mindful goals, micro-goals with some micro rewards to keep the staff going because not only the owners are beaten down right now and having a little bit of trouble with motivation. The staff is feeling that too. Everyone’s in a precarious situation we’ve started and stopped, there’s a lot of information kind of laid out. What I like to do is work on the script and a team to agree on that everyone pick two or three of their favorite clients and get a little bit of confidence under their belt. That really helps.
The other thing that I do with them is, take five or six days if it’s not going well, let’s read huddle, which is kind of what you were talking about if it’s not working. Get the team back together do a quick Q&A, and talk about why you think it’s not working. You’re smart, you can figure that out, you know sometimes it’s just in the wording or in the approach because you know what they were trying to do. Our clients were trying to get people back in specifically for lasers and first series, and they were kind of short on the injectable staff and they had people waiting to get injections but they didn’t count those other rooms full. What can we do? So setting some mini rewards like $25 gift cards of different shapes and sizes for the conscious of the day.
Mara: One of the things we talked about too was in the break room put that old school whiteboard or just a piece of paper up. Determine what a success is, is it to the call is it a conversion or what does that look like, fill it in.
Kelly: Whenever you measure performance it improves. One of the things we’re going to talk about at the end is how we can help you and part of the kit that we have has the tracking logs. Simple tracking logs, but that thermometer for the team. If it’s number of calls you’re trying to do is, number of appointments you’re trying to set if it’s additional revenue you’re trying to do you know you can even have three thermometers; how many calls, how many bookings how much revenue, because you can have a different reward each day.
The goal is, celebrate the micro successes set short-term immediate goals so we can get moving in the right direction. Just like when you try and start exercise. If you haven’t done so well okay we’ll just do 15 minutes just take a five-minute walk setting small goals and rewarding for the behavior gets you going in the right direction and it does build momentum. When you are making incremental progress towards a goal, everybody feels better and the mindset is huge right now because there are a lot of reasons to feel unbalanced, insecure, confused about what’s going on with the market and COVID and everything else that’s going on.
To get focused on your team and commitment and buy-in it takes an actual plan, not just telling your staff, I don’t want your room empty. I know that everybody on this call has probably bought a laser because it was so fabulous in the sales pitch, and they thought it was just going to start making money in the bathroom by itself. Well, it’s still the lead graveyard right now slowly and the staff doesn’t even know. You can get excited or you can want something done but when you have to get it done through other people there needs to be a bit more of a structure and that’s what we’re here to talk about today.
Mara, you know how you go through in the COVID how to run your list how to divide your list, how to prep for that. Depending on who’s going to do the calls sometimes it is best for the provider to make the call, I know that a lot of my clients and myself included many of them will call their patients. The next day or the same day after they’ve had surgery to check on them. Maybe they did four surgeries that day, it takes them 20 minutes to do a quick check-in. Of course, it’s a good time to call to see how they’re doing but it’s a courtesy call and even my brother that’s been a chiropractor for 25 years he calls every new patient at the end of the day to see how they’re doing. It’s those kinds of small micro habits that build incredible businesses and client loyalty. Having your nurse injector call you, is a good thing and it’s not seen as, why is she calling me she’s desperate for patients. I never feel like that I feel like I was trying to make sure I know it’s safe to come in and she noticed that I didn’t come in for my toxin.
Don’t Be Discouraged:
Mara: It’s seen as that incredible boutique customer service. You want to make sure that you get past that and you want to make sure you get past that. We’ve sometimes heard, it’s not my job, and it becomes the job of the practice to make the patient feel comfortable to bring the patient back so it does become everybody’s job to assist in that. Think about the intimate relationship that the provider has with the patient. You are injecting in their face, you are putting a laser on their bikini area. This is not something that is just you know oh they’re doing some drive-thru pickup for some fries. This is an incredibly intimate relationship and it absolutely makes sense that someone with this incredibly intimate relationship will call and check in on their patients.
Kelly: It’s always well received. I feel like hairdressers and injectors are two of those service providers that you know we don’t like to change and there is that connection, even if it seems like a great friend. Even though it’s business you get a personal report going and the same thing with your laser tech. If the person I go to for laser hair removal checked on me I would think it was really great that she was following up to just make sure I know that it’s okay to come in if I want to if I’m ready to. Once you start with the calls of people who are mid-series, you know they need to keep up on it in order to get their results. Those are the easiest. That’s the lowest hanging fruit is to get them in because when they come in, they’ll tend to do other things at least they’ll buy a product, even if it’s a prepaid. It’s okay. You want to get that activity coming in and you want to keep your rooms busy. Then you move into who’s late on maybe their toxins and then the next place to go is who we consulted with who was on the fence that was thinking about it, that now is a good time to follow up. When we first opened up there was a big surge of business that came in because of pent-up demand. People wanted to get in and get their toxins or their fillers or their HydraFacial. Now we’re back into Top of Mind awareness marketing. That’s done by the rule of seven, is being in the top of their mind they’re seeing you on social media, they’re getting an email, maybe they get in touchpoints so that they’re like oh yeah you know, I was thinking about doing this anti-aging treatment maybe now is a good time. This is an amazing time for people to recover at home. I mean really, you could be recovering from a breast augmentation or a tummy tuck. The biggest problem wasn’t the money, it was always, when do I get to take two weeks off, four weeks off like when can I actually clear my calendar for four weeks to heal. I mean something like that it’s, you can’t hide it in compression garments, you can get away with it even though you don’t feel good. This is a time that actually is convenient for them. I know a lot of people that have done their surgeries during this time so don’t be discouraged and think that that’s not happening. It absolutely is and it happens from virtual consultations and virtual events leading right up to the procedure so the market has embraced virtual consultations virtual events, right into a surgery. I know a lot of doctors don’t believe that that’s possible without that face to face interaction. Mara and I can assure you it absolutely is. The convenience of these virtual things for your patients is not going anywhere. Now, this is like Amazon Prime. Once you have it, then it becomes you cannot live without it.
Mara: This summer, going into the fall but during COVID. Yes, many of us were on face-to-face video meetings but not like we are right now and when you spend this much time on camera you notice more things. If you look at breaking up your market into a couple of different places so obviously there’s surgical, non-surgical but think about your aging face patient, is going to be looking at different things right now than maybe your 20s or 30s patient and so think about what their lifestyle might look like. You think of a whole campaign like, do you not like what you see when you’re looking at your resume or not even the mirror, what you see on zoom? I think that when we look at not only look at marketing but because we were talking today about bringing patients back but it’s about the conversations we’re having. When you have a conversation with a patient and you know that this patient is still working from home because you know maybe you knew what they did at work you know that they have a position they could work from home and you’re able to say to them, quite honestly we have seen so many patients and holy moly they’re spending so much time on zoom and they’re ready to come back in and have some conversations. Are you finding the same thing and they’re either going, most likely going to say yes. If they say no well either they’re not on zoom or they’re lying.
Kelly: There’s not a better builder than what you know other people do. I’ve had success with practices doing outbound specials right now. If you’ve got a really good buy or you want to do an outbound campaign about Botox or toxins where you can say, “Hey, I got a really great special because our organic, and the different companies are creating some really good buys right now for Botox and fillers.” If you want to do a call to your VIPs and say hey I have a special offer it’s really only available to 20 patients we only have enough for 20 patients but if you’re interested in buying in 50 units or 100 units to think I can do that at this price. I can only do it to a few of our VIPs I thought of you, I just wanted to call no pressure, but if you would like me to hold one of those I’m happy to process that for you.
Special Offer:
I really want to share with you what Mara and I came up with that we’ve never offered before because as we’re looking at this, we know that your staff needs coaching, they need scripts, they need measurement tools. What we created is 4 coaching sessions from us which is valued at $1,000. Plus, a whole kit of scripts, 12 different scripts, everything from a filler campaign Botox campaign. We’re reigniting them COVID wise, we’ve got several COVID sensitive. We’ve got events and RSVPs all of that together in one kit for you, plus 4 coaching sessions. We’re doing it for $297. Before we get started if you are interested in that it is going to be a first-time first serve basis. If you want to go to top10profitkillers.com/sales. That is where we’re going to be able to help you.
