Whether you like it or not, sales or new patient generation is a vital part of running a practice, nothing happens until a transaction occurs.

If you notice the busiest practices aren’t necessarily the ones that have more experience or skills than you do, they just know how to market themselves better.

McDonalds is not the one that sells the tastiest burgers but they sell the most, are you with me on this?

I was reading one of the best-selling books in sales called the Ultimate Sales Machine written by Chet Holmes and he had this saying…

“When you sell, you break rapport. When you educate, you build it. Sales is all about building rapport with your prospects.”

This definitely works in medical industry nature when you can’t really apply a lot of the aggressive selling techniques as others, that’s why education through content marketing is a must if you want to generate more patient enquiries without coming across as a sales organisation.

Educating your patients allows you to increase their interest in buying. If the information you give is good and useful, it automatically gets you from seller to expert, relative to your competitors.

Hi there, It’s Huyen here and welcome to OMD TV & Podcast show, the place to be to grow and scale your practice.

You can now see the importance of educating patients and in the previous episode I talked about the 3 Creative Ways To Increase Existing Patient Referrals and one of which is to organise patient seminar.

In this episode, I’m going to show you 5 things dos and don’t when it comes to organising a patient seminar or dinner with doc event.

Now let’s recap abit on the benefits of dinner with doc event or patient seminar…

This is another type of experience you can create for your existing patients and prospects on a regular basis, such as monthly. We believe that your existing patients are the best advocates to promote your practices, you can create a smaller scale, intimate dinner hosting around 30 patients and their friends or family members. At these events, you can feature seminars speaking about most common questions or let the patients learn about the latest treatment or technology.

You might think that it would cost a lot of money to host this sort of event, but it is actually not. Some of our clients have done this on a regular basis and the cost per person for dinner and location is around the $100 mark.

Florida, USA based facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ross A. Clevens who owns Clevens Face and Body Specialists said his cosmetic practice hosts two to three patient seminars a month. Generally, 50 to 80 people attend, for a luncheon or dinner gathering at a local restaurant, hotel, country club, bistro or museum.

It may sound like a mighty big investment, but wait — Dr.  Clevens reports that an average of 40% of the attendees book practice consults, and revenues from the patient seminars are 10 to 15 times what they cost.

Dr. Clevens also mentioned that patient seminars are an ideal avenue for attracting new patients to the practice and reinforcing relationships with existing patients, who often attend.

There are other benefits, according to Dr. Clevens, who has three locations along Florida’s coastline. Among those, patient seminars are an opportunity for guests to have face-to-face experiences with the doctors and staff.

The seminars create a level of comfort and familiarity. People buy relationships,” Dr. Clevens says.

At the end of the presentation and toward the end of lunch or dinner, Dr. Clevens says patient care coordinators walk around the room, speak with every attendee and ask if they would like to book a consult.

To keep in touch with all attendees, including those who don’t book at the event, Dr. Clevens’ staff captures each attendee’s name, address, email and a quick survey of cosmetic procedure interests. Then, soon after the seminar, the staff calls everyone who attended, thanking them and asking if they’d like to book a consult, if they haven’t already.

Finally, everybody is added to the email list for further nurturing.

Now and here are the 5 Dos and Don’t For Patient Seminars

1. Do have a plan. 

One of my favourite quotes from Benjamin Franklin about planning is “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”, and I create a habit over the years is to plan everything I do, and do you notice that even if you plan things very well, something might still pop up unexpectedly.

It’s the same thing for seminar or any patient generation event. You need to have a detailed algorithm for how to run a seminar — from marketing that begins four weeks prior to the event, to a detailed plan for the event, including needed supplies, assigned roles, seating, etc. It doesn’t end there. The plan also needs to address everything from clean-up to follow-up, with a series of ‘touches’ and phone calls to cultivate prospects.

In fact, if your practice runs a lot of seminars, you can develop a template from your best presentation and use it for the next events. In our signature online course called Webinar Sales Funnel, we provide a patient engaging presentation template that is designed to speak to prospective patients’ problems, hopes and dreams and naturally lead them to enquire you for the consult at the end of the presentation. I’ll leave the link to this 5-hour online course in the show note below so you can check it out.

(please feature the webinar online course and the quick promo to show whats included)

2. Do proper marketing for the events to ensure adequate attendance.

You need to market the event through multiple venues, including your own patient database, website traffic, social media and their friend and family and look alike audience.

You can consider reaching out to one of your business partners, affiliate contacts or influencers to ask them to collaborate with these events to increase the attendance.

Make sure to have automated SMS event reminder enabled to remind the attendants and call them a week and a day before the event to confirm their attendance.

3. Don’t hold seminars that compete with other big local or national events.

It’s tough to hold these seminars during the Christmas season when people busy. You might want to hold one, instead, during early December. You don’t want to have an event on Melbourne Cup’s day, on Election Day or any other major events. You can list all events in our community and make sure there isn’t a charitable event going on that day.

4. Don’t cut corners. 

Depending on the lifetime value of a patient and their potential referral, you can consider the budget per guest for this sort of event, it can range from $100 to $300. If you know your cost of new patient acquisition, it will be easier for you to work out the budget for this event.

For example, some cosmetic clinics we know book the events at upscale places.

As for them, they know that they are dealing with a population that has a certain level of expectation. At these practices, they’re dealing with a lot of patients who are having major cosmetic surgery, and so the dining experience must exceed their expectations.

5. Don’t put all your marketing eggs in the seminar basket. 

Earlier in this video episode, we talked about the success of Dr. Cleven’s patient seminar events. As active as Dr. Clevens’ seminar schedule is, patient seminars do not make up the biggest part of his marketing budget. Digital marketing activities, including website management, search engine optimization, pay per click and more, have that distinction.

Each marketing strategy is like a spoke on a wheel, and they work together to drive patients to the practice. The seminars are closely tied to what the practice does on social media, and are promoted on the practice’s websites, Instagram and Facebook and more, he says.  

To recap, you need to have a process in place for your team to organise patient seminar event, you can record the presentations and use it as the lead magnet for your website under webinar format, if you want to learn more about how to set up automated webinar sales funnel, we created 5 hour training course showing you the step by step to set up the webinar and provide you with all the templates you need to set up the ultimate sales machine for your practice.

By implementing the patient seminar or dinner with doc event that I mentioned above you will see the new patient consults and existing patient referral rate improve immediately.

If you want us to help you promote your patient seminar or dinner with doc event through digital marketing channels or create a webinar sales funnel for your practice, we’d like to invite you to take the next step which is to book a 15 min discovery call with us so we can learn more about you and to see how we can help you. 

Thanks for listening and hope to talk to you in our discovery call soon. 

#36: 5 Dos and Don’ts For Patient Events

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