Mara
Welcome to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. I’m one of the hosts, Mora Shorr. I am a partner in a medical practice management company. Yes, Shorr Solutions. Who’s the other host, you may ask? Easy answer. That would be my father, our founding partner, Jay Shorr. Together we now have an amazing team and clients across the country. Listen, as we chat, converse, strategize and commiserate over life and the aesthetic medical industry.
It’s time for you to listen, learn, and be inspired as we help you kick-start your practice. Because who doesn’t want a little more help? Welcome to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast.
Welcome. Welcome, everybody, to another… Whether you’re listening to this as another episode of Shorr Solutions, the webinar in the future, for those of you that are watching live here with us.
Thank you so much for joining this is a very special, collaborative webinar. So not just Shorr Solutions: The Webinar, but we are welcoming one of our friends over here at Liine as well. Joining us as a father-daughter team today, we have invited Charlie Winn into the mix today. Charlie is with us from Liine. Charlie., do you want to say hello and give a glorious intro?
I know you sent me some bullets, but I think you could probably do yourself justice and make sure to mention your very brief acting career as well.
Charlie
Sure. I’m pulling out the bullets now, so don’t forget anything. So my name is Charlie from Liine we’ve got some of our customers on here. So you guys know what we do. But if you haven’t heard of us, we have a call recording and automation platform that uses speech analytics, A.I. to analyze all of your new patient calls.
Pull out really interesting insights about what’s happening on the phone in your patient acquisition process. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today are some of the learnings from that. I think Mara’s referring to in the fifth grade, I was the lead role in my school play when in The Willows, I was Mr. Toad. That was the peak.
That was my peak. So it’s been downhill from there. I began my sales career in college. I sold educational books door to door for four summers. So I knocked on over 15,000 doors and learned a lot about the psychology of sales and how to work a process to get people to the next step. Co-founder at Liine. I’ve trained over a thousand staff members in practice on handling phone calls and I’ve personally analyzed over 10,000 new patient calls myself. And my guilty pleasure is trashy reality TV shows on Bravo.
Mara
That explains the Bravo references prior to hopping. Oh, I share the same guilty pleasures so it actually makes me feel better that I’m not the only one on this call who also not only loves Bravo but peaked in middle school. Because as I was sharing with Charlie, and I will show everybody here, I have the Indian Valley Middle School blue ribbon for milk carton balancing in seventh grade. So you really have a team of experts here. And we’ve invited Jay along to share some of his knowledge. So, with that, we are going to go ahead and get started with the content you actually came to hear about today. So as we talked about, we are going to be reviewing why your leads aren’t converting to sales and how the heck you are able to fix that.
And we have been really fortunate to work with the folks at Liine for a number of years, collaborating with some of our clients, and sharing ideas and concepts. And so when we were speaking a few months ago, we were talking about the conversion. And so we want to go ahead today and get started talking to you. I also master control over here. So when you see me looking over, I am the one that is in charge of making sure we get these screens up and running. So with that, let’s get started.
Mara
We want to talk and kick things off with the value of aesthetic patients. Jay, this is a number and a concept that is near and dear to your heart. Why don’t you kick us off with the conversation of the value of an aesthetic patience?
Jay
Well, there is many different concepts of what the value of an aesthetic patient is. And what we have to realize is that the current value of a procedure or is it the value of a lifetime of procedures, and then the value of a procedure from a particular patient in line with their referrals and the snowball rolls downhill. So, you know, all kinds of studies take place and what they value over $2,000 and then it becomes what is the cost of a patient acquisition.
Now I am a numbers guy. I’m also a Shark Tank guy. I’ve never been on the Shark Tank, but I have never missed one episode. I’ve seen every episode maybe more than once. And the one thing that Kevin always asks, Mr. Wonderful, is what is your cost of client/our world, patient acquisition? What does it cost to produce all in?
What do you sell it for? What are your margins? Since I’m a numbers guy, we look at what is the value of an anesthetic patient. Now, depending upon surgical nonsurgical, it could range anywhere between $500 for simple procedures up to $25,000-50,000 for our more elite surgeons who do mommy makeovers and everything like that. However, on an average, if we’re going to say $2,000, that is on an initial.
So I want you to understand and and we’re going to have Charlie elaborate on this is what is the missed opportunity of not picking up that phone or whatever that reason may be of the missed opportunity. So let me now turn it around and say, Charlie, when we talk about the value of a patient, let’s talk about different opportunities because I’m more concerned about the missed opportunity than I am much the opportunity, because once I have that patient or prospective patient in the door, the magic is mine, all right.
Or that of my staff. But when I’ve missed it, that value now potentially goes to my competitor so why don’t we go, Charlie.
Jay
And why don’t we speak about how we come up with the strategies of our marketing and we’ll get into speaking about a conversion cascade and a little bit for sure.
Charlie
And want one thing to reiterate about that is when when when groups that we work with, we show the metrics of how many leads they’re generating, what their conversion rates are. When you’re looking at any type of data around your patient acquisition process, the process you go through of turning new patient leads into patients that those numbers are dollars.
They’re not just number of leads, they’re not just we’ll look at, you know, people that get to voicemail and miss calls, do that math. And as Jay mentioned, the 2000 is really just thinking about the first patient visit. So if you start thinking about lifetime value of the services that you all offer in your practices, that number is really, really large because when people go to your practice to get one thing done, I mean, most people I imagine are coming back over and over again to continue being a patient.
So it’s important to remember the information that we’re talking about is directly tied to revenue and has a real impact. Speaking of that process, patient acquisition process, we think of it as a really simple funnel. Everybody’s pretty much familiar with this. But just to kind of have some context of some of the lessons that we’re going to talk about I wanted to go through this really quick.
So top of the funnel, the marketing strategies that you utilize or maybe a lot of you work with a third party professional group that helps you with this online digital strategies, everything from your website and SEO to paid channels. Some people do TV ads or other offline strategies to drive interest, but you’re in making investments. You have people know that you exist and reach out to you either for the most part, people are going to call you.
Mara
I’m going to point out to everybody a word that you just use is investments we don’t like to think of these as costs or expenses per se, but we really like to think of them as investments because you want to see the return on that investment, the money that you’re putting into those marketing channels in the future. So that’s a really I always love that phrasing.
I think that’s perfect for sure.
Charlie
For sure. And so those investments, right? Are bringing in the interest and the leads. And some of you may have, you know, chat features and online booking as well. So, there could be some opportunities for people to do that. But what we want to focus on in this conversation and where the lessons are related to the inbound calls that you get from new patients as well.
As forms or web leads. When people go on your website and fill one of those out. When that happens, you want to make sure that your staff and your practice is connecting with or having conversations with as many of those patients as possible. And then once they are having those conversations, the goal, of course, is to schedule that initial consult.
As Jay mentioned, when people show up in the practice, I can’t remember the exact phrase, but that’s where the magic is yours or the magic happens most practices that we work with feel really confident once someone steps in their doors that there’s going to be a positive outcome so the main issue that that we found is it’s extremely rare that a practice would have visibility into what’s happening in those critical steps that I just went through.
So as a result, most people are sort of flying blind and don’t know how many new leads are reaching out if they’re missing the opportunity to speak with any of those leads and their conversion rate, they know how many people are booking, but they don’t know how many people are not booking and why they’re not booking. So we’re going to dig more into that here in a few minutes.
Mara
Absolutely. And as we as we dig into that, I want to remind everybody that the joy of those of you that are watching this live and joining us live is that and this doesn’t go for those of you that are listening to this later or watching us later, but please go ahead. Any questions you have, please feel free to put them in the chat.
Mara
And we will get to them as we’re moving along. We will get to them at the end, but we want to absolutely make sure to make time for any questions you have. So please go ahead and pop those in the chat as well. So now that I added that little housekeeping item, I’m nothing if not a good moderator if I don’t add in the housekeeping, I want to toss this back to, back to Jay. So the next slide and we’re going to talk about are some of the lessons that he was actually referencing earlier.
Right. So we want to talk now about the fact that a significant number of new leads and calls could A potentially go unanswered for a variety of reasons that we see. We work with address solutions. We work with clients, like we said, across the across the continent, honestly. And we’re finding that there are some opportunities for improvement, if you will.
So, Jay, I know that all of these are pet peeves of yours. And we work with our clients on all of these items. Do you want to go through some of your pet peeves here, Jay, now that we laid them out in a in a slide for you?
Jay
Let me retract for a little bit and we can speak about that funnel for a second. And when we looked at all of the marketing channels, remember, every marketing channel, even organic marketing, which we commonly will call SEO, you may not think of it as the social media and paid marketing like Facebook and Instagram and Google and PPC, but when you have organic marketing that you’re paying your website vendor a thousand 1500 $2,000 a month just to keep your keywords going, that’s still your investment.
They are all your marketing channels whether it’s on radio, TV, in print, for those of you who do any of the extraneous ones, and that’s your marketing channel. And the whole idea is to get the phone to ring a significant number of patient calls that go unanswered. Now I’m going to say the new patient calls to me are called prospects, and they aren’t considered a patient until you are able to get them into the door and convert that, so you spend a significant amount of money to market to get that phone to ring.
Getting the phone to ring brings, you know, money. Now, the purpose of that phone call ringing is to get you to get the prospective patient scheduled once you got them scheduled for the consult. It’s now up to us once again to do our magic to convert them. That lead to a sale. And look, I don’t want to go through the whole speech that I normally give, but ladies and gentlemen, we have to treat our business like the business it is because it is a business, and you have to treat it like a business, or you will go out of business, okay?
Now, when you’re doing that and you’re converting these, the conversion leads to revenue. The bottom end of that funnel all right. And the revenue leads to treatments and re treatments. However, the sad thing that I have found as a former practice owner of a very large practice is here in South Florida, multi-location is that many times and I’m get I’m working through this pain with clients right now that they can’t get their staff to upsell the upsell whether it’s skin care retail over the counter product or one syringe to two syringes because they’re afraid.
Now I’m not sharing that we should push products and services that the patient doesn’t need or use. I would rather refrain from doing a procedure if I don’t feel that that one syringe can do a justice on the patient because.
Mara
You bring up a really, really good point is that in looking at these three axes, right, these three bullets here, it breaks it down into a couple of different issues, two of which can be solved with technology. And that’s where Charlie can speak to the how Liine is able to use, without it being a sales pitch for line.
But the fact that there is technology to solve this because there’s other things that technology cannot solve, i.e., good customer and patient service.
Mara
So what I would actually love is to break it down and have Charlie to talk for a quick moment about how when we have the significant number of new patients that are going on, new prospects right now with very good, poignant new prospective patients and then practices that are slow to respond, I would love to look at that.
But then also I want to look at the customer service component of that. So, Charlie, can you talk through how line helps from a tech perspective? And then, Jay, you can talk about what if they’re not focused on scheduling from a human perspective?
Charlie
Yeah, one thing for sure, one thing to note the lessons on the on the slide before what we’re going to dig into what I mentioned, what our business does by we analyze the phone calls with new patients. And so today across a couple of hundred practice groups, I think the latest number is 1.3 million new patient calls that our technologies analyzed.
And so what’s cool about that is we have a really big sample size of what truly happens on the phone and really in the whole process that practices have of trying to to to convert the prospects to patients. As Jay mentioned, I also totally agree with what Jay saying about mindset, right? If you’re not thinking about your practice as being a business, then you’re going to you’re going to miss out on insights you’re going to have the wrong mentality that’s going to trickle down to your staff.
And we’ll talk about that here in a few minutes. So first main lesson, pretty wild and surprises most people for the average esthetics of practice, esthetics practice in this country, they miss. 14% of the new prospect calls they get while they are open. So I’ll say that in a different way. The average esthetic practice during business hours doesn’t answer the phone.
14% of the time when a new prospective patient calls them. And what we’ve learned is most those people don’t leave a voicemail. They have the Internet typically. And so they go back to the Internet and they find another option because a lot of these people have questions, what is this cost? Or they don’t know a whole lot about the treatment or procedure they’re interested in, which is part of why they’re reaching out.
So they wouldn’t even really know what to say, you know, on a on a voicemail. So if you think back to the beginning, $2,000 on average for the first visit for anesthetics, patient on average. 14% of the time the phone’s not answered. Like that’s low hanging fruit. So making sure that that’s not occurring in your practice is a huge, huge element of how you can capture more of the leads that are already reaching out.
Jay, have anything to add to that part.
Jay
Yeah, that’s great because I’m a numbers guy and 14 from a hundred is 86. I don’t care how you slice it. And I sit and we’d like to get to an 80% conversion rate of our calls, right? At least to get them in the door. But if you’re starting out at 86 before you even start, then if you’re going to get 80% of 86, all right, then you’re already missing, you’re going to be in your sixties at best before they even come in the door to convert at 60% of that.
Now you’re at a 48%. The wheels just turn in my head when it comes to numbers.
Mara
For those of you that have not met Jay in person or seen Jay on a webinar or heard him on the podcast, I always, always tell this to people if numbers are another language Jay is fluent and so I always know, right? And this is because again, we’re a father daughter team. We’ve been working together for more than a decade, but I’ve known him for close to four decades at this point.
And I know that Jay’s having an off day when he has to actually bring out a calculator. That’s always a little concerning to me because as you see, the numbers just fly out so when we say that every decision should truly be made by the numbers, every decision to truly be made by the numbers. So this is this is a absolutely wonderful point, Jay.
Jay
Don’t forget who taught you to add one plus one. Yeah. So that’s an important thing because when you’re getting your marketing spend top of the funnel, then the call and Charlie said, we’re missing it. We’re starting out at 86 out of the hundred. The call to conversion, do a consult, can consult conversion to a treatment, treatment, conversion to revenue, revenue too divided by our total spend will yield you a ratio.
And just because you brought $1,000 in and you spent $1,000 does not mean you broke even. It means you lost money because you’re not taking into consideration all your fixed and variable costs that it takes to run your business. Remember, it’s a business, so therefore we depend.
Mara
No air, no air quotes. It is a business.
Jay
It’s a business. We have to keep our staff in line. OK, in line, because if they don’t know what they say.
Mara
With that pun intended.
Jay
It was it was absolutely an intent.
Mara
I like it. I like the pun, Jay.
Jay
But we’ve got to continually drive that home. Ladies and gentlemen, the only way it can be done is through clear concise and consistent training. If you don’t drive it home, it’s a one hit wonder and nobody likes one hit one. That’s like a few one hit wonders, great songs. However, it’s like that rolling snowball. So, Charlie, you know how do we train the people to get that phone to answer?
But there was a question and somebody when I said something about training the staff to upsell the upsell, somebody asked, well, how do you get staff? I don’t want to laugh. Go, yuck, yuck, yuck. There’s no good staff out there. That’s a whole other lecture and a webinar. Go on our website. You’ll see a dozen webinars and podcasts that we do on good employee retention.
And the answer to your question, whoever asked that does that pertain to providers as well? Yes, it does, because the person, the director of first impressions, commonly known as your receptionist but they are truly your direct, truly your director of first impressions because they give the first impression to that patient prospect when they call and or walk in the door now it’s up to the provider, whether it’s a physician extender, whether it’s a P.A., whether it’s a nurse practitioner or whether it’s a dietitian.
Even the medical assistant that in the room with a patient, instead of leaving them in that cold room with a gown on or they’re unclothed, waiting that 15 or 20 minute for the doctor or provider to walk in the room, why not tell them all the wonderful services that we have to assist and aid in the conversion of services that they may not even know exist in your practice.
Jay
So Charlie, tell us what Liine does to aid us in that.
Charlie
Great question. So the I’ll answer that with what we’ve noticed is happening on the phone. So if you want to pull that slide back up more for the second the second kind of lesson, good transition here is the staff are really focused on scheduling, which might sound odd because that’s the goal of the call, but it’s usually not what’s happening on the phone because if you think about what’s going on, the prospective patient is the same as a consumer in any other market.
And that these are elective services, right? So they might spend hard earned money out of their pocket on something that typically they don’t have to have so what are they going to be thinking about? What is this cost? You know, is it going to be effective? Are people getting the results that they want? Who’s going to be doing this to me?
And like, how good are they at this? All those types of normal consumer questions. So the most common thing that happens is the person answering the phone says, hello, thanks for calling, how can I help you? And then the prospective patient asks a question. So instead of trying to make sure that that call is focused on scheduling an initial consult, which is really the best way for that staff member and for your business to help that person, what most people do who answer the phone is they answer that first question.
And oftentimes it turns into a really short call like this one. This is an actual call from a group that we work with, and all this person’s asking is, “Hey, do you do a consult the same day as this procedure? Or What’s the deal?” And the person answering the phone just says, “We require a consult.” Well, thank you.
Hey, no problem. And so, the takeaway here is like this person answering the phone is not thinking about or focused on trying to schedule an appointment. So in terms of training and the things that Jay was talking about, here’s the good news. The training is really simple. I’m not saying it’s easy to do, but it’s not complicated in the beginning of this conversation is what is most important to focus on where you don’t want your staff just thinking about answering questions and being nice.
They should certainly be nice. They should really understand that their job, when they answer the phone, is to help people schedule actually focus on that and then change the way they start the conversation so that it’s not this short. OK, thanks. Bye. Or sometimes even worse, it can become like a consult over the phone. Right? Someone’s on there for 12 or 15 minutes answering all these questions.
Meanwhile, somebody else is on hold and then that person’s like, Hey, let me give you a call back later. And so I want to hear what you have to say about this in a second, Jay. But more that other slide that has the three most common might be the one right before this one. Me there’s the three the three most common reasons people are not booking a consult.
The first one is what we just saw. Caller Procrastination is by far the top reason that esthetics prospective patients don’t schedule on that first call. And so what that what that means is that there’s not really a specific next step and it’s like, you know, OK, thanks bye. Or let me think about it or I’ll call you back later something unstructed like that.
And the reason it’s the most common is because so many calls aren’t focused on scheduling is as we mentioned. The second one is, left message/answering service. It really refers to whoever answered the phone, heard a question that they felt like they might not know all the answers to and so they said, I’m not sure. Let me take a message and I’m going to have so and so call you back.
The reason that’s common is most practices put too much emphasis on all of the details of their procedures. And if their front desk person doesn’t know all those, then the default is like, “hey, take a message and have you Mark call them back because she’s the expert.” Well, really, that should happen inside of the consult, right? So at least the phone was answered.
But now you’ve got a patient who was interested enough to reach out, who’s waiting for someone to call them back, who also has access to the Internet. So you really want to make sure that you help your team understand this isn’t consult by phone. This is us trying to help people schedule an initial appointment. That is where they’re going to get the information that they need.
And then the third one is scheduling issue.
Mara
Keep in mind that, like Charlie is saying, that if they have access to the Internet, right where he’s really going with us is that quite honestly, that means they’re going to call your competitor in the time that it takes you to call them back. And what I actually see and I’m going to go ahead and pull up because it leaves some room to go over the concept of one of our favorite topics being analytics and numbers but with Liine is that not only are you able to pull information for the calls through, you know, through date and time collecting phone numbers, but looking at new leads verses returning patients, you can pull the analysis by team member as well. So when we look at, oh, this means that whether it is Nathalie or Jay or Mara or Charlie, who is answering the bulk of the calls what are some of the opportunities for improvement? So in other words, are the majority of Natalee’s calls booking or not booking? And what is that reason that Natalee’s calls are or are not booking?
So, you know, does Natalee need more training? And if your name is Natalee, well, this is your lucky day. But maybe Natalee needs more training on if we see look, what she’s not booking is body contouring. And so if we see that issue again and again, well, maybe Natalee needs to witness a few treatments. Now that somebody needs to sit Natalee down, we need to give Natalee some bullet points.
Because if that seems to be the issue. But she is just closing those neurotoxin calls. Right. So that’s why having the data is really going to help your team improve, in addition to being able to take you know, take a look and say, are they properly greeting your or your prospective patient? Are they giving their name? So when somebody comes in, they can say, oh, Natalee, either.
Or I talked with Natalee on the phone, and she is a gem to speak to. Right. Are they asking for Natalee? And when we want to look Jay we talked about this yesterday. Admittedly, guys, we always do a dry run the day before. So, Jay, before we close out this particular slide, and we could go on and on and on and as far as all the opportunities for improvement.
But do you want to give your one pet peeve in this very last sentence? From this agent here where they say, yeah, no problem. Do you want to talk about your pet peeve here?
Jay
A number one pet peeve when somebody says, no problem, my answer is I don’t have a problem. Instead of saying no problem, how would it sound to the other person on the other end? If you do the typical Ritz for seasons and say, it’s my pleasure when people say it’s my pleasure to me, I know they’ve been properly trained no problem.
Doesn’t mean that they meant anything negatively by it is just a different class level answer. But let me go back to something for a second, because in my experience of working with literally hundreds of practices, thousands of people in my own ownership of a practice, what I’ve found is that the reason people do what Natalee did is potentially they’ve been ill or not trained properly at all.
Jay
That receptionist/director or first impression should know the back, front and back of your website, back and forth for every procedure that you provide and many times it’s very important that the reason that a receptionist director of first impressions will get off of the phone is that there’s nothing in it for them to book the appointment. It’s a business, ladies and gentlemen.And many times the quicker they can get the person off of the phone, the quicker that they can get to the next caller, the quicker they can get to the patient in front of them, knocking on the window in the front saying Hello, hello. I’ve been here for 15 minutes. Hello. I’m an hour late. You’re an hour late. Hello.
I can give you all of these stories and it’s very frustrating for that poor young lady, young man, older man, older woman that is, they’re taking the abuse. However, they’re not incentivized or properly trained to handle the call. The benefit of lying and the benefit of working with third party people is to listen to these and provide Shorr Solutions.
Mara
One of the and one of the questions that we got is what should Natalee be saying? And so, we know that the proper greeting is going to be of the utmost importance. So “good morning. Good afternoon. And my name is Natalee with Shorr Solutions, I can help you”. And so, the person then the patient perspective patient comes in, “hi, I’m so-and-so.”
If maybe they don’t even give their name, “what is the price of this procedure? I want more information about this procedure.” Sometimes they were going to give you their entire life story and sometimes they will ask it in 10 seconds, “how much is this?” And that’s it. So we always want to make sure we are confirming contact information so we can call them back in case the call the call gets disconnected.
So we always want to make sure we have that. We want to make sure that we’re able to properly answer any questions about the procedure or and while when I say any questions, these would be questions that would appear, as Jane mentioned, on your website. So these are your basic frequently asked questions. This is not what is going to happen with me personally with the procedure, because those are questions that should be answered by a medical provider.
So and we’re going to go into some of those the specific wording and phrasing in just a moment. So we want to make sure that that is addressed. And just like again, like Charlie said and Jay-Z, that we want to make sure they’re equipped with those frequently asked questions. I suggest bullet points, quick short bullet points about how long the procedure, the the effects will last et cetera.
Some of those frequently asked questions because if you try to give three, four or five paragraphs, it’s going to be too much when someone’s already on the phone trying to make that schedule. So when we’re focusing on scheduling, close the appointment with the question. So in other words, if you’re interested or not, even if since I know that you are interested and we’ve we’ve answered all of your questions, “we have an opening tomorrow at 2 p.m. or Thursday at 3 p.m., which would you prefer?”
And it’s not “are you ready to make an appointment?” It’s “I’m going to give you those two choices of the two next appointments.” I always recommend picking a morning appointment and an afternoon appointment two different days and then play what I like to call the scheduling game where it’s well, “I have this on this day, but I could do this morning, next week,” et cetera.
But giving them those options about which day works best for you, it puts it psychologically in their mind that they are going to book the appointment. It becomes when, not if.
Jay
Let me phrase it another way, having had personal experience with this I personally will rearrange my schedule for other lesser priorities. If you ask me when I can come in, I’m going to arrange it around what openings I have versus if you tell me that you have these specific times, I may personally rearrange the other things that I already have because I’m more interested in this.
But you hope you gave me an open-ended question. When would you like to? Versus a closed ended comment is this is when you have available. There’s another reason why we want to do this. We want to fill our schedules as tightly as possible without leaving gaps and then use the excess to fill the gaps that we have.
Otherwise, you’re going to have gaps every day. And those are much harder to fill than blocks of time when you have an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon today and tomorrow versus punching everything. Now you’re doing the same thing tomorrow and you’re packing your schedule within reason, not only singlehandedly is it important to credential the provider and how everybody loves the provider.
And even I have had this procedure done by the provider, but credential the procedure German people don’t do that. Person calls in questioning about a procedure, but when somebody credentials the procedure you’ve just sold me, why do I want this device over this device? Why do I want this filler over another filler? Why do I want this neural modulator over another?
And it’s not always price. All right. It could be duration of how long it lasts. It could be how long the treatment takes, and it could be my expected result differently than what I had in my own mind. I love to be convinced because I’m always right before I go in. I’m not always right in my own mind.
By the time I’ve been led to the promised land by a professional yes.
Mara
We are going to take a slight break, a slight intermission, because what kind of business freebie if we didn’t tell you about our own services, I want to take a minute and talk to you about the Conversion Cascade Course and all that it has to offer. We want you to be trained to acquire loyal patients and boost your revenue and your aesthetic practice.
Now, with our Conversion Cascade Online Course, you and your team will be able to master two key things important to growing your asset in practice and becoming successful acquiring patients and retaining new patients. So let’s talk about a couple of things as a step by step. Sales, funnel, training, the courses designed specifically to help you and your team attract more patients, convert more calls to consults, convert consults to treatments and procedures, and to keep your patients coming back for more.
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Mara
Now Jay and I have created and smoothed out and fine-tuned these. These are what we call our magical closing questions. And I’ll tell you that these are truly it’s exploratory. So you know what is important to your patients when they are on that call? Or when they are either the prospective patient on the phone or when they are your prospective patient in the office. So magical closing questions number one, when are you looking to book the consult?
Now, this sounds silly because they’re calling you. So while we might assume that they are looking for next week or tomorrow, it could be that they say, well, I’m still in the research phase at this point in time, and quite honestly, I’m going to be traveling and out of town for the next three weeks. So really, I’m looking to book a consult such and such a date.
I have to make sure that my family member is with me, et cetera.
Jay
Those answers always the truth, what the patient is telling you.
Mara
Well, that’s where we have to we have to dissect it. So the one that I find is truthful, Jay, is when you ask how does the thought of this procedure make you feel? Right. It’s we’re talking now about feelings. We’re not talking about facts. We’re talking about about feelings. And what you will see is either you will hear or see when this person is in your office and you’re looking to to get this booked, their smile, they will light up.
The thought of having this procedure makes me so excited. I was looking at a photo. I was out with a friend texted a friend. This is true. A friend texted me last week and she sent me a photo of herself, and she said I was out with my boyfriend. And, you know, we’re sitting here, and I look at this photo and I zoom in and I say, who is this old lady?
And she looks in the mirror and doesn’t quite recognize herself like she has before. Now. She’s had a lot other things going on. But this is this is true. She says, what is it that I can do about this? Or that directed her to one of my favorite local providers here in town. Give her a few options and she is very excited.
The thought is going to make her excited that when she looks in the mirror, she sees a fresher version of herself. We’ve heard or patients are getting ready for their mommy makeover. They’re talking about a mommy makeover. They are so excited to be wearing a bathing suit and be comfortable in it over spring break with their kids. Right?
As trendy as a dad bod may be, maybe the dad doesn’t want the dad bod at the moment anymore. Right. So we want to think about how does this procedure make you feel now? We know for a fact Jake has told me many times he is not interested in a hair transplant and so that if you ask how would a hair transplant make you feel?
He’s not going to get excited about it.
Jay
It would be hot.
Mara
He’s going to give me one of one of two answers or one. So they are let’s see. He’s going to they’re going to let me know that grass does not grow on a busy street or he’s going to say, if I get a hair transplant, my wife is.
Jay
Going to leave me for a bald guy.
Mara
There we go. So we want to make sure that we know what the patient’s goals are. Now, how soon are you looking to have the procedure that’s different than how soon you’re looking to have the consult? Because this is really important. If you try and put somebody in ASAP but for example, they are a teacher. And I use this as a profession in an example, often because teachers have very specific schedules, they are very specific amounts of downtime and very immobile places.
Right. Spring break is when spring break is. Summer break is when summer break is so that is something that you need to find out and then ask them what’s stopping you from booking today. Don’t be afraid to ask that question. Because the answer may surprise you and they may be open and honest about it and they may not.
So you also want to ask ahead of time is there anyone that you would like to join you for the consult? Is there anyone else that’s going to be involved in helping you make that decision today? If not, we completely understand. We welcome you to come in but know that we are always happy to have you bring anyone else that you would like to come with you so that it leaves the door open for a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child if they are, you know, if you have an adult child.
So that could be it. We always like to be proactive and recommend our PR practices, asking their patients, “Can I give you more information on our patient financing programs?” This prevents them from feeling embarrassed and having to ask about it later. So that is something that you want to proactively ask. And finally, if there is a medical question, just as Charlie was referencing earlier, these phone calls should not be 20 minute phone call, a phone consult.
If you’re doing a virtual consult, that counts as the consult. But we’re talking about scheduling and so that is when you say that is an excellent question to ask the doctor as dietician, your injection, your injector your laser tech. Right. That is an excellent question to ask them when they when you come in for the consult. So with that, we want to make sure that you are utilizing these magical consult closing questions because what good is it if you don’t utilize it?
Right. And so I’m going to give you a few more statistics. And actually, if we’re being honest, I’m going to toss it over to Charlie, and Charlie is going to give you a few statistics.
Charlie
So this is the going back to those three main reasons people aren’t booking, not answering the phone. So 14% of those new prospective patient calls aren’t being answered during business hours to staff not focused on scheduling. Those are great examples of closing questions to help staff focus on scheduling when they’re answering the phone. And three practices are extremely slow, and most practices are extremely slow and not really good at following up with web leads.
So when I say web late, I mean a patient goes to your website or a landing page fills out a form, and we find the most common system, if you want to call it that, that practices have is they’ll get an alert or a notification in the email, an email inbox, usually a shared email inbox between the staff that’s handling all this.
And we call it the graveyard because it’s where leads go to rest in peace. It’s really difficult for a team of front staff with everything else that they’re doing to monitor that during the day and quickly get back to a lead. So Harvard Business Review did a did a study on the lifespan of Web leads, and they found a couple interesting things.
One, the average lifespan is 5 minutes. That means that after someone submits an online form, if if they’re not contacted within 5 minutes of actually clicking submit, the chances that they even answer the phone or respond to any type of communication is really, really low because people are just fast paced now with technology. They’ve already moved on to the next thing.
And so if you’re able to follow up with an especially with a phone call, if you’re able to call a web lead within 5 minutes of that web form submission, you are 900% more likely to talk to them to have them answer the phone call. So just by finding a way to do that, think about what that does to your connection rate, to your conversion rate.
One of the things we help practices with is we have this auto call feature that enables them to call patients within a minute. And Jay mentioned Ritz-Carlton. Actually, I think there’s a little bit of Chick-Fil-A in your example with my pleasure earlier, but I know what you meant. People are impressed. If you call somebody in 5 minutes, they’re like, “Man, if these guys are this on top of just getting back to me, that’s impressive.”
And they’re there. They’re going to be excited about coming in. And then the third stat that was on there is a lot of these patients, prospective patients are filling out more than one contact form because they’re trying to figure out, you know, who’s got what pricing. And I don’t know much about this and I’m trying to learn the practice that gets back to them first is going to schedule that patient 78% of the time.
So the takeaway there is most practices aren’t doing that because they just have notifications going to an email inbox and they don’t have any formal structure or process around that follow up. And and as a result, probably the majority of those web leads are simply falling through the cracks. You want to add anything to that, Jay?
Jay
No, I really don’t. Those web leads, I’m going to give you a perfect example, and I want to give you an example of me personally. I’m sitting home on a Sunday morning waiting for the 1:00 football game to start because I watched the game. If I’m not attending it every Sunday and I’m looking at I wanted to buy a new Harley Davidson motorcycle and my wife said, “I will not go on a two will bike with you anymore because I had recently had surgery on my hand.”
She says the bike’s too heavy for you like I’m an old guy now, right? I said, “Well, what about a trike” and she said, “Okay.” So I went online, I looked and there was like a bike trader, but I wanted a beautiful bike and I filled it out and it was went to a local Harley-Davidson dealer. In about 6 minutes after I submitted it, I get a phone call and he says to me, “What are you doing today?”
And I said, I’m watching the football game this afternoon. Now, once again, I said earlier, that I can rearrange my schedule. All right, if you give me a reason to. He said, I have the perfect bike for you. Of course you do. Right? Even if you don’t, you want me to get in? And I said, OK, says, why don’t you come in and take it for a test drive?
Well, going in and taking it test drive is like taking a puppy home for the weekend. All right. I went in, took a test drive and bought the motorcycle. Now, I’m a very hard sell, but what I wanted was very specialized, and it really was there. Had he not called me, it would have given me the opportunity, honest to goodness, to check three or four other Harley-Davidson dealers.
All right. In the neighborhood maybe on Monday or Tuesday, I went because I really didn’t expect to go look at it on Sunday. I already had plans. The guys were coming over to watch the football game. I went to the ball game and after halftime. All right. But my example is that was a quick lead that got the sale.
Charlie
I love that. Mara, where are you going to say some? I’m sorry.
Mara
Now, I was going to say now that we are starting to near the end of our time together, there is there’s one question we’ll get to after we talk about this particular item. We really want to we always like to sum up right, though, the bulk of what it is that we’ve been talking about so that we can give you the key takeaways other than magical closing questions.
And I would like you all to picture for just a split second Jay on the Harley trike, if you would like me to email you a photo of this wonder, I can do that and I’ll give you our contact information and just a second just so you can have that photo. So with that, we want to talk about how to use practice data to improve the practices operation so we always want to make sure we don’t collect data just for the sake of collecting data so you can just let it hang out.
That’s pointless, right? It really, really is. It’s pointless so we want to make sure that we’re utilizing data because we also don’t want to be making decisions that are not based on data. So we want to look over and see we want to track missed calls. So what are those missed calls opportunities? When you’re looking at am I ready to either invest in additional team members, i.t staff where they’re looking to invest in additional technology, whether you’re looking to invest in consulting and training, but looking at what are where is it that you are running into these issues?
So are you missing calls? Why are you missing calls? Do you have proper staff coverage? Is there are there enough team members or is there are there enough of the correct team members? Are you dealing with it from an h.r. Standpoint where there their calls are too long. You need to have training on how to maybe condense the calls you want to train your team, your staff, you want to record the calls and incentivize that by performance.
Now you want to make sure you’re doing it without any sort of anti kickback violations. And but you are able to record calls. Most phone software now allows you to do that. So you want to make sure that you are recording and then looking again, look at the data. So finally we’re talking about we’ve talked about utilizing technology and really implementing protocols.
So once that patient calls, once your team member is on the phone, I then really recommend that in your your EMR, your system fields that, you know, you want that information to be captured, make those mandatory. So if it’s mandatory that you need to ask, how did they hear about us? Then make that part of the mandatory script, implement that that fun little asterisk.
So we want to make sure that we are going over that training again and again and on a regular basis. I honestly even love the concept of having your team members listen to their own calls and evaluate their own data as well so that they can see this isn’t the boss coming down on them. Nobody’s making this up.
But listen, to those calls. And quite honestly, when we all first start listening to our own voice, we all think it’s a little cringeworthy at first. So we’ll let that one that one go one of the questions I had was about how to hire new staff. I will say that in the days of the great resignation you want to first make sure that your existing team members are properly incentivized.
You have a strong bonus plan in place for skin care sales for procedural, and even if we’re looking at capturing reviews online as well. So how are you incentivizing your current team members? We also then want to look at what is it that we’re looking for when we’re hiring team members, especially when we’re talking about front desk. As you’re reviewing resumes, keep an eye out for a keen amount of typos.
Keep an eye out for a pleasant personality and a smile. It goes a long way. Is that person making eye contact because not only will this person be answering your phone, but they will be there likely in person unless it’s a call center position. So are they making eye contact? Are they a pleasure to work with? How do they follow instructions, find all of this out, even giving them maybe a working interview in the process?
So we also always encourage ask your current team members that you love if they know of somebody that is also looking for a position as well.
Mara
Charlie is one of the co-founders and chief revenue officers at Liine. Also you know, he played Toad. So we’re clearly getting-
Charlie
It’s Mr. Toad to, you.
I’m sorry, Mr. Toad, you are able to reach him at cwinn@liine.com or www.liine.com on the social @liinetech. We’re going to put all of this information in in the show notes, so you’ll have that and remember that Liine is spelled with two eyes Charlie was there a reason for that.
I feel like I asked you at one point and you had it-
Charlie
Early when you’re when you’re a disruptive tech company you have to misspell a word as you’re as your name.
Mara
We also had Jay answer that as well. If you’re supposed to respond within 5 minutes of an online lead, do you dedicate staff only to that and how do you staff for after hours and weekends? Jay responded with, “It’s a great solution if you can afford it.” As far as staffing for evenings and weekends, what I will say is that with Liine’s software, when they fill out that online form, it automatically shoots it to the phone for the phone to ring.
And so that you don’t necessarily have to wait around for somebody to check the online lead, it automatically shoots it to the phone and you get a message with that I’m assuming fairly cheery voice on the phone, but that’s how that’s how Liine works. So it’s really a great solution. If you if you see that you have that need and you aren’t able to necessarily dedicate a a person during the day.
Charlie
I would add, if you can dedicate somebody, then you’re going to be more likely to be able to get back to them quickly. But that’s hard, right? And a lot of a lot of practices don’t have the staff to do that. And so we do have a tool and audio call that helps with it. At the very least, I would assign responsibility.
So in terms of during business hours, if you don’t have a dedicated person like people could have days like Monday’s Charlie’s Day, Tuesday’s Mara’s Day. And so you’re an individual person knows that they need to be looking out for it. And then the after hours one, you know, Jay brought up a good point. It’s if you can afford to have people, it’s a good solution.
But my answer to that would be worry about business hours first and tackle that and then you can worry about the after hours.
Jay
There’s always a theory and Mara and I politely disagree on occasion about this and if my theory was if somebody is writing to me after hours on a weekend, I personally old school field compelled to respond. If they were writing to me after hours, why not respond after hours? Now, Mara’s way of thinking good way of thinking says in her dialog with people just because they responded after hours didn’t mean that their expectation, was for you to respond back to them after hours.
However, I feel that if they wrote, they must be available therefore, when it comes time for the normal door hours, they may not be available. And I don’t want to play the voicemail email game therefore, in my former practice and even today in our business, I will respond seven days a week 365 days a year. If somebody responds to me in query, I will respond. That’s just the old school.
Mara
What I will say is if you’re able to automate, there’s an option C, right to everything that we have talked about as well, which is if you are able to automate scheduling, but also, you know, within scheduling and appointments, that’s also a great option. However, we have found that as much as that is for and I’m not I’m not talking about within short solutions or solutions makes it and I think blind does as well that you can schedule a consult with either one of us fairly, fairly automatically but what I will say is that within your practice, we’ve seen it mixed about any sort of conflicts when you can schedule automatically with a provider depends on the EMR system that you have, et cetera. So and I do I always recommend ask your patients how they wish to be responded to, how do they wish to communicate it is a it’s a funny world out there. There’s people like Jay that want to talk on the phone. They want to have that conversation. There’s people, sometimes like me, where I would rather text with you, please, please don’t call me and make me talk to you.
If I don’t if I don’t have to, if I email you, email me back. If I text you, text me back. It’s just from a customer service standpoint, it can be very generational.
Jay
One last question that I will answer.
Charlie
I’ve got I’ve got an answer to the one that just came up. You go first and then I’ll.
Jay
It says, “In our practice, our main problem is that most of the leads were leaving messages and how can we get the patient to answer or return our call?” You know what is important to your patient or prospective patient? They will answer if it’s important to them. I think Mara just answered that. She is a text/email type of a person. I personally am. I want to talk to you. I’m the touchy-feely kind of guy in the past.
Mara
I remember that.
Jay
Yeah. I used to love to go to the store and touch the item. I want to buy covet converted me. I then realized, all right.
Mara
Amazon converted me.
Jay
I can go online buy something, never leave the house and it’s at my door in the morning or the next day. So Mara, to even convert me even further, bought me an Amazon prime membership. It made it worse. Now I don’t ever want to go shopping because when I look outside and I see the box outside, it makes me feel like somebody dropped off a gift, even if I bought it.
Now, the idea is you just have to keep reaching out. You have to keep responding and don’t let up just because they didn’t respond back to you. Don’t let up because that convert that email, that text is worth $2,000 at a minimum. Go ahead, Charlie. Let’s finish.
Charlie
What’s so? Amanda. Hey, I know. I know who you are. Amanda is one of our works with one of our practices. I’m looking in your dashboard right now, you guys. If you answer the auto call more often, you will you will get to people more often. So if you guys can find a way as a team to make sure that when that auto call happens during business hours, you’re answering the phone, that means you’re going to be calling people within 5 minutes. Your connection rate is going to go up like that. So that’s the first thing you should focus on. And then everything Jay said, I totally agree with that.
Jay
Aren’t you aren’t you sorry you asked?
Charlie
I didn’t say what the percentage was. I’m just saying there’s an opportunity, man. I’m looking at it. Let me know, man. If you if you don’t know where that is, let me know.
Mara
And it definitely gave us an LOL. So, I think Amanda appreciated that. And Amanda, you are welcome to contact Charlie afterwards. So, with that, with that, everybody we must wrap up today. Unfortunately, we could keep talking all day. However, we are, we’re all hoping to be in one place at the same time at some point this year now that life seems to be able to allow it again.
So with that, I am your moderator, Mara Shorr, one of the partners here at Shorr Solutions. Thank you so much. Jay founding partner and my dad. It’s always fun to have you on this, Charlie. It was wonderful. They got to hang out with you again. And here’s to us all being able to do it in person soon.
Mara
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