#83: One Move To Take To Increase The New Patient Conversion Rate For Your Clinic

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Patient Coordinator: Do you have any more questions?

Patient: Nope, Not for the time being

Patient Coordinator: Ok great, here is our clinic’s brochure, please have a read and let me know when you are ready to book in a consultation?

NOOO, you’ve lost a potential patient right there

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

Last week, we had the opportunity to be one of the sponsors of the 43rd annual ASAPS conference, which is the Australasia Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons conference I myself managed to attend all the presentations and training regarding practices to improve the new patient conversion rate and to my surprise everyone was talking about the importance of patient coordinator.

Having a great reputation in your field, and having solid digital marketing campaigns that draw all these enquiries to the clinic, won't matter if your staff are not well trained to deal with these enquiries, and it’s like having a hole at the bottom of your bucket of all potential patients that you could have.

So, if you feel like you are getting a consistent number of enquiries coming through, but the number of consultation bookings is not so high, then that is definitely something that you should be working on. Some clinics that we work with have managed to convert up to 90% of the enquiries they received, so let's use this as motivation for room for improvement.

So, the one move you can take right now after listening to this episode is to audit the new patient enquiry taking process from taking a call to responding to enquiries over the phone or in person. Everything should be recorded for further analysis.

If you are selling a high-value procedure or treatment, or even if you're not, you need to have proper training in dealing with enquiries. Remember, every single new enquiry that the patient coordinator is dealing with, depending on what is the value of your procedure or treatment, is a potential additional $10K revenue to your clinic. You need to have a proven process in place.

There is a lot to cover if I want to talk about every single step of the sales process for medical practices, that’s why my team and I wrote a guide called 7 Figure Samurai Sales Guide For Clinics that shows you everything you need to have a proper sales process in place and help you improve your new patient conversion rate immediately.

Now, essentially this is how it works. Your Patient Perceived Value about your clinic, equals

Patient Received Benefit minus Treatment Cost So when a patient asks “How much does it cost?  reply immediately over the email or phone call, or you will lose the opportunity to build up the Patient Perceived Benefit, and all they can see from their end is the Treatment cost and therefore you will have a negative Patient Perceived Value, meaning that you will be losing this prospective patient.

“How much does it cost?

I got to deal with this question a lot over my career from both running my own digital marketing agency and also from other clinics that we work with.

For example, price is always a factor in prospect’s objections, you will want to think about the prices you charge and how can you build value around the price point that you're asking for because a transaction only occurs when value exceeds the price.

In your pitch to a prospect, you want to be building the value for your services or procedures; thereby addressing the price point objection before it is even raised. 

Once you do this, you will minimize the main objections that come up about pricing.  While I’m pretty sure that you will still get these inquiries, however, they will come up much less frequently in your sales process.

So in this episode, I’d like to point out 4 areas that you need to work on mainly with your patient coordinator to improve the new patient conversion rate.

Now, the first thing is to

Pre-screening prospects and building rapport with them

So In your initial conversation with prospects, it is all about identifying 4 critical N.B.A.T elements from prospects. By knowing these elements well, you will know if they are a good fit and ready for the consultation or not.

N – stands for Needs – what are their needs? How important is it for them to have it now?  Why now?

B – stands for Budget – have they got savings for that? Would they need financial assistance?

A – stands for Authority – are they the person who makes the decision or do they need to discuss with their spouse?

T – stands for Timing – when do they want to have it done? Is it now or 6 months or 1 year down the road? Have they seen other doctors before? What do they think?

Other information that can be collected such as

• Current meds
• Health history
• BMI
• Breastfeedingstatus
• Do they have young children, who would take care of them when the patient is having the surgery, do they need help with transportation, and childcare?

Build up the reputation and experience of the surgeon and doctor and clinic before the consultation

This is a very important part of building up the Patient Perceived Benefit so that the value of your procedure will exceed the price. The patient coordinator’s job is to increase the prospects’ perceived value of the doctor or surgeon and the clinic’s before and post-surgery experience.

What you need to do is to position the doctor or surgeon as the best one in the field by creating a bio page highlighting all the relevant experience and qualifications in the area that the prospect is interested in.

For example, you can see on the screen the graph outlining the number of years of training, media mentions, qualifications, and doing hundreds or thousands of similar procedures.

With the statement like less than 5% of all surgeons out there in the area can match the skills of the surgeon, so he is in the top 5.

You can guarantee some interest here.

Things to send prospects before pre-consultation call

Now, the third thing is that you need to prepare some things to send before the pre-consultation call.

There are multiple ways medical practices can entice their prospects.

What I would suggest is to offer a free 30 min consultation with the patient coordinator where he or she will be able to answer all the common questions that the prospect has.

After clicking on the Book a Free Consultation button on the webpage, you can take them to a page like this where we feature a calendar booking page for prospects to book in a time to speak to a patient coordinator.

When we can be upfront and tell prospects that this will help clarify a lot of questions they may have before seeing the doctor for the medical examination which usually incurs some fee.

The way this call will go is we will discuss your situation, what you are looking to achieve and how we may be able to help.

It is just about helping you get to that next step, whether that is pointing you to an article or scheduling a more in-depth consultation with the doctor, this will all be discussed on the call.

And at the end of the call, if you believe we can help then we schedule a more in-depth examination with the doctor and we’ll walk you through a plan on what we would do to help you achieve the results. This is something that you can write on the webpage.

In this discovery call which can be conducted via an online meeting tool such as Zoom where patient coordinators can see the prospective patient and show them similar work examples to the prospect’s case.

After the prospect makes an enquiry, you should be sending them a, what we call, Shock and Awe welcome email (skincare samples, book, media mentions, past patient experience reviews, what to expect at the consultation), as you don’t want to send them back to the internet for searching.

In this email, you should mention the following elements;

• Time: make sure they allocate at least 30 to 45 min for this consultation without distractions
• Have their calendar ready so we can book in for the next appointment with the doctor if they are ready
• Have the credit card with them if they want to book in a medical consultation with the doctor, which usually involves a fee.
• Current financial situation and if they need help in financing for the procedure
• Having their partner or family member that needs to be with them to help make decision
• And a link to Pre-Consultation Online Learning Centre which is a web page where they can learn everything about the procedure such as FAQs, Planning For Surgery, Post Surgery Care, Financing Options…etc

If you really want to step up your game, the patient coordinator can email or text them a personalised intro welcome email.

Alternatively, if you really want to stand out, you can get the surgeon to record this welcome video. I am pretty sure that you are going to make a very good impression with prospects and differentiate yourself from other clinics.

Lower your initial consultation fee

When I look at a lot of medical clinic websites, they tend to feature an average price of $250 to $300 for an initial consultation. I know that's there to pay for the doctors time.

However, I believe that the patient coordinator should be able to do 70% of the selling job and do all the necessary pre-screening the prospects to make sure they are the right candidates to see the doctor for the medical consultation. So, the doctors only need to engage these prospects for the final call.

This call will allow the prospect to identify whether they like the doctor’s mannerisms and wish for them to carry out the procedure or not. So, to further enhance your new patient conversion rate, we need to lower the barrier to entry and make it accessible to prospects so they can enter your sales funnels. This can be done by reducing the consultation fee. I’ve actually seen some of the busiest clinics lowering their consultation to $75, or $90, or even offer Free Consultation.

Remember you don’t make money off the consultation, think about the value of the procedure, and other ongoing non-surgical treatments and other referrals these prospects can generate for your clinic, it could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

We’ve talked a lot in our previous episodes, I’ll 1eave the link under the show note so you can check them out later.

To recap, you need to be rigorous in your process of converting new patient enquiries.  Ask questions that come from all different types of angles, and unearth those silent objections.

Because, unless it is addressed, they will not be going ahead with you.

By implementing the 4 things that I mentioned about you will see the new patient conversion rate improve immediately. I’ll leave the list of online appointment booking and email automation tools in the show note so you can check them out after this video.

If you want us to help you improve new patient conversion rate for your clinics using the above steps, 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 if we can help you. Thank you very much for listening and hope to talk to you soon in our discovery call.

Bye for now.