MSD Insider 0:00
Welcome to med shark insider with Bill Fukui, your expert host on all things medical, marketing, and SEO.

Bill Fukui 0:08
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of med shark Insider. Looking forward to sharing a lot of good information today. And really the guests that I have today is one of my longtime friends. But really, he’s a colleague that I respect so much of what he does. Because as a marketer, I’ve always struggled with, you know, whether we were doing TV advertising or radio or now the internet, we were generating a lot of leads to practices, but yet we were getting blamed when they weren’t, you know, they were poor quality, or whatever the reasons were, they were not getting business from it. So today I’ve got Dylan, Clemmer plevna. With optical, and he is one of the he’s been in this business in this space for a long time. I’ve known him for a number of years, and they do specialize in medical intake. So, Dylan, welcome to the show today.

Dylan Kemna 1:14
Well, thanks for having me, though. It’s an honor to be here.

Bill Fukui 1:17
Yeah, well do me a little favor. I would like for you to kind of give a little bit of background on who you are kind of what you’ve done over the past number of years. And kind of, you know why what you do is of value to some of our clients.

Dylan Kemna 1:34
Absolutely. So I, we’ve known each other since 2008. I asked the marketing company myself that use that because I got to know them pretty well. And perhaps the CEO or our CEO, Phil Mercier about how I got to grow the company. So because specializes in converting elective medical leads into consultations. So originally, the core service was around handling all calls that come through, we’ve got a variety of different packages now where we’ve got overflow extended hours of coverage, now we’re seeing trends where more digital leads are coming through. So right web leads have got a new program kind of catered just to that we call captured. So really, it’s all about just creating exceptional experience from that first point of contact when you’re talking about elected leads versus like an insurance based Yeah, I think different. Yeah, people have choices. And it’s, I’d say, with like, insurance based general ophthalmology practice, they can kind of get away with minimum levels of service where people will go to the closest provider that takes their insurance in a lot of cases. So I can about a procedure that’s worth several 1000s of dollars, your expectations are a lot higher. So we really try to create awareness with practices on what that initial experience is like, and just some good takeaways on what you can do to provide consistency and maximize that first step.

Bill Fukui 3:08
You know, Dylan, you talked about, you know, the, the insurance, and not what I would call non elective types of, you know, treatments and whether that’s ophthalmology and general ophthalmology, or, you know, reconstructive plastic surgery, or just general dentistry, I mean, just in general, a lot of them are insurance driven, they’re really not spending a lot of marketing dollars to get the phone during, so it’s just kind of, they never really see the value, or the really the cost, I guess, maybe the not maybe not the value, but the cost of what it takes to generate a phone call from an elective cash paying patient. And, and because they’ve just been a lot of the times they have, like an RN, or somebody that’s been on the clinical side, who has been managing, you know, their telephone intake thinking, man, they are the best person, you know, the best thing since sliced bread. What is it that you see, you know, with practices that have, you know, that either are in the process of transitioning to more elective or they’re not maybe fully elective? They’re still doing a lot of insurance based stuff. What do you see as the most common mistakes or misses where conversions are being missed? What do you see in that?

Dylan Kemna 4:40
Well, I feel like a lot of practices don’t really have good systems to measure so they don’t go out of sight out of mind. When you think about a busy practice. The doctors, the administrators, they’re dealing with new technology, they’re dealing with customers, they’re dealing with staff, their own personal lives. So some of those phone calls especially are out of sight out of mind. So until we do our free lead conversion assessment with place recording calls with practices consent, it just get a barometer of what that experience is like. And we encourage practices to do that on a regular basis, not only on your own staff, but on your competitors as well. We’re doing something similar with web forms as well, now that that’s where things are going. So we’ll place contact forms, or we’ve got our own information that we use, and we document when we submit the form, and we’re looking for speed to lead and consistency. And find like even the same staff member might call one time, leave a voicemail, the next time, the response time could be like two hours, one time could be two days, the next time and then we also find forms that are not even responded to. So it’s a real eye opener for the practice.

Bill Fukui 5:56
You know, it amazes me today still amazes me today. Because every once in a while when I do an assessment of a practice, one of the things I do is if we generate leads who’s going to be handling these and, and I will Secret Shop them without the practice even knowing or even the doctor knowing. And when I do the assessment and show them what’s kind of what the status of their online marketing part of that is, is intake. And amazing how many goose eggs when it came to how frequently I got a response. And when we’re talking a week, a week out, and I haven’t gotten anything from that practice. Amazing.

Dylan Kemna 6:41
And that’s a great point. I know I’ve mentioned this to you before, we call it fumbling the ball in the goal line. So you’re spending, you’re gonna be spending a couple $100 per lead just to get that phone to ring or that forum to come in, it’s really important to have good systems in place. And then the people that are often tasked with handling these responses or the initial intake, they’re multitasking, they haven’t always had the best training, they might have people in front of them they’re checking in, they might be expected to be on the consultation or even the procedure itself. So it it’s pretty high expectation. So just just going through the process and creating awareness that you’re going to get some good takeaways in terms of how to take control that phone call because most people in the medical space feel like they’re doing their job, but they’re answering questions on a phone call, where it’s a little more involved, where it is a bit of a sales process, and that people are shocked to be around. And it’s important to maximize those opportunities. So if somebody just calls and asks about the price for CoolSculpting, or LASIK, we find a lot of people that handle that initial intake there, they’re letting the callers steer that call where it’s important to be able to take control, engage the caller Oh, I can definitely help you with that is this your first time contacting us? Great, make it your name and number in case we get disconnected and not go overboard in like information capture mode, but the whole idea is that you’re creating experience, because I don’t think people necessarily want the cheapest way to procedures, I think they just want to know that they call the right place and they’re gonna get a good value.

Bill Fukui 8:19
You know, you’re talking about developing a rapport or a connection, kind of a relationship, this level of trust. I even say that when we’re developing websites, we’ve got to start even when they visit the site, they’ll determine whether or not there is a sense of, you know, like a likeability or there’s something about this practice that I like, and you you know, you use the word, you know, the description of fumbling it at the goal line. So after appropriate when, when my Denver Broncos are just really sucking wind this year. They’re fumbling all the time. In fact, they never even have a quarterback. But, but know the the intake process. So for example, one of the things that practices haven’t really come to really understand is that the average cost per lead, especially with digital is going up. The cost to generate a lead digitally has gone up. I mean, we’ve been doing internet marketing, you know, websites and SEO for even before Google was out of its beta stage 20 years ago. And at that time, we were also doing TV and radio. And, you know, I would tell my TV advertising clients, it’s going to cost you anywhere from 100 Maybe $150 to generate one lead when you’re doing mass media. years ago, years ago in digital because, you know, digital was so easy to do. There was less competition. And you know, even with optimization, you just did a few things and man, you are on the first page, you are way up there for most for everything. And so clients were saying, Oh, I’m getting all these leads, and we were tracking that email forms, it was coming out to about $15 cost per lead. Okay, back then, granted, we weren’t charging a whole lot for it. But the cost per lead for digital is, is definitely going up, I’ve seen some of them as high as you know, 100 $150 cost per lead, even on digital. Not to mention, if you’re doing Pay Per Click advertising, you know, the cost to actually generate a lead is really expensive. So to quote fumble at the goal line, man, there’s nothing more frustrating from a marketer, because we’re held accountable for that, you know, we’re held to how much revenue did the practice what is our ROI and all those things, you know, get calculated into their, quote, marketing. But it ends up, you know, at the phone call, or when a form is being responded to. So when you’re saying, you know, speed to lead? What, what kind of timeframe? Are you talking about? What are the expectations of, you know, following up on, say, email or chat leads that may come in digitally?

Dylan Kemna 11:20
Great question. So, we use the theory, the John Smith theory about in order to buy what John Smith buys, you have to see the world through John’s besides, so, if you’re a consumer and you’re shopping around, it’s kind of like, what are your expectations, like, I recently was calling, like pest control for a backyard and left some voicemails and the first person they call me back ended up getting the business, you know, you look at, you kind of use your own process. Nowadays, you go to Google, you use a combination of what their reviews are, how many reviews are getting, usually start in that organic section. So it’s all about what your expectations are, there was a study done by MIT a few years back about lead response. And there’s actually a lot of studies out there, but the common thread among all of them is about the faster you get these leads, the more likely you are to convert. So in that study, I think it says if you don’t respond within 60 minutes, your likelihood of converting those leads decreases by half. And naturally, the faster you get to them, the greater the likelihood of converting them. So for us, we’re trying to create a scalable solution. So if we had zero gap in our response time, like if everybody’s responded to within 30 seconds, then we actually might be overstaffed for our team. So we’d set goals for our team, and we’re usually within 15 minutes on that, on that initial response, 10 minutes,

Bill Fukui 12:48
I think is, wow, that’s more than reasonable. If we can

Dylan Kemna 12:54
promise that necessarily. It’s just no urgency that might get an influx of a bunch of leads coming in at once or,

Bill Fukui 13:03
you know, one of the and I’ve seen that statistic in terms of, you know, how quickly leads grow cold, I think was the title of it is that digital leaves grow cold, you know, very quickly, you know, they don’t, they don’t stay hot for very long. And I’ve, I’ve read similar kinds of things. One of the things that we’ve, I found as a salesperson, and I try to put myself, like you said, the John Smith thing, well, I’m a sales guy too. And I know when leads come in, you know, here’s my train of thought is, if I get a lead, and somebody sent me an email, guess what, they’re free, when I’m trying to get in touch with, you know, a hard to reach person, like a surgeon or a dentist or an attorney, whatever they are, these are very busy people. And that’s no different than the average consumer. We’re all busy. Okay. But when the leads come in, what does that tell me? That tells me, I’m either on my phone, or I’m at my desk, and I’ve got some free time to call talk to somebody. Okay. It’s a window of jobs that I have, you know, so it’s, it’s, the sooner you can get somebody while that topic is top of mind and they’re motivated to pick up the phone and call. I think this kind of goes back to your experience and the expectations that consumers have, like, what would John Smith expect or what I expect? It is, you know, very similar to what you’re saying. I may visit five, six a dozen different websites. And there may be something in one or two or however many I feel like I need to call but there’s something in them that made me feel like I kind of do like these people, and your expectation of them is that you’re going to carry that quality or that perception of that you’re good to the phone call. And when you don’t get back to them on the phone call, or you don’t respond to them, or do it in a timely manner, or manage it in the right way. All of a sudden, they’re left disappointed. It’s not what I expected. Even after visiting six or seven different websites, or whatever, and I chose you have one of the two. And yet, wow, that wasn’t as good as I was kind of expecting, I was maybe expecting a little more

Dylan Kemna 15:37
Google, in terms of what you’re saying, Google calls it a micro moment, which is that I love that when somebody is emotionally compelled to pick up the phone or fill out a contact form. So things can change. So quickly, you may reach out on Friday company, maybe you bought a car for the weekend, your mindset,

Bill Fukui 15:57
no more disposable income there.

Dylan Kemna 15:59
And somebody’s perception is their reality. So it kind of starts with their perception of your website, your reviews, your social media, how, what kind of vibe are they getting, and then that initial phone call that initial response from a web lead really kind of sets the tone. So you may have this idea that you have this great internal reality, or inside perception of your practice, or whatever you call it inside reality, but are you turning that into your outside perception? So creating that experience from that first point of contact is probably a deciding factor on whether somebody chooses to come into your practice or somebody else?

Bill Fukui 16:41
Do you have any different statistics? I know, I mean, for years, we’ve always used the, you know, the email form submissions and such. Now you’re starting to get a lot of these digital almost instant communication, like live chat, and text messaging, where I think the expectations of you know, the visitors are very different. Do you have experience with, you know, with practices that engage with, say, a live chat agent, you know, services that actually have live people managing the chats versus say, companies that use like bots, like some automation, you know, they’re almost anticipating what the questions are, and then they feed up the, you know, generic kinds of stuff. Do you have any? How do you guys manage those?

Dylan Kemna 17:32
Yeah, so we have clients that have different services. And I feel like they, they all kind of have their place and a sense that it’s increased communication. It’s kind of an evaluation of like, where’s your practice? How much do you want to spend on this? I look at the chat as kind of like an online concierge that one more tool to help with that consumer experience. It’s not always just leads coming through. It could be existing patients, it could be, yeah, we’ve seen stuff like, you know, if you’re seeing halos or something where like, medical issues, so there’s that too, I think it’s just a matter of communicating with customers on their terms. Texting is huge. We’ve got a texting in our web Response Program. We got some interesting stats from an article that we did recently, just looking for, as far as the likelihood so 95% of text messages are open and responded to within three minutes of being delivered compared. Compare that to emails, which is typically 15 to 20%. And you think about like your own routine that I don’t know, if everybody thinks like me, but a text message, you got to see it, you kind of get a vibe for if it’s it’s like, it’s somebody reaching out to you, if it looks a little too automated, homeless things kind of factor in like where it’s from and how personalized it is. Yeah, texting has been a great tool. A lot of millennials are using it. A lot of Next Gen Xers and baby boomers, I think everybody is where it’s at. We’re using a combination of all those methods. With our web response. When we do the assessment, we show practices, like very few are emailing and leaving voicemails, where if it were my practice, I would kind of what the process that we use a combination of phone call, email and text, kind of whatever it takes to get them over the top because we’re all working hard to get these leads. Mixed, right? It’s mostly,

Bill Fukui 19:44
you know, one of the things that you know that in terms of the quality or maybe the expectation of the leads when they come in, whether you know, through the channel, you know, kind of dictate somewhat of the quality or the expectation of the visitor. It’s like Um, well, I use my own personal experience. My wife, when she used to email me something to the office or something or forwarded an email, if I didn’t get to it until I got home from work, no big deal. But when she texts messages me, man, if I don’t get back to her right away, I get another text message. You busy or you know, what’s up, you know, kind of stuff. The expectation is very different. With text messaging, you’re expecting something like, I expect you to get back to me. Okay. Whereas emails, if I, you know, if I don’t talk to her about it until I get home, hey, not a big deal. I mean, I think that applies to, you know, like, you’re talking about the millennial generation, and that they prefer that over a telephone call half the time, you know, I even get some practices that say, you know, I would always push the phone calls, I’m always a big proponent of phone calls are always the highest quality for two reasons. Number one, it takes somebody at a different, a more motivated level to engage, you know, and kind of expose themselves with a phone call, as opposed to voyeuristically texting something digitally, or sending an email or something like that. I’m still kind of, it’s not like what we’re doing right now. That’s different. Okay. So I always say that phone calls are always the highest quality, but also, because you’re usually staff are better at handling telephone calls than they are following up with emails, they’ve never really been trained or taught. What do I put in there? Or how do I turn this digital communication actually into a phone call, where I’m talking to somebody, which is the goal, you know, with a lot of those, very few people are going to I mean, it’s, they’re not going to book a surgery, having not spoken to somebody in the practice, okay, or a consultation, they almost have to talk to somebody, when they’re ready to go to the next day, you know, stage. So, in terms of when you’re dealing with practices, and you’re saying, you know, the questions when they’re talking about price or maybe triaging, you know, post operative, you know, experience, some of those leads or engagements are going to be existing patients, what do you say to the, to the practice, or to the surgeon that says, even with those, or even, you know, questions about the practice about a particular procedure or whatnot, what do you tell the search, and this is, you know, unless they’re in my practice, I don’t want anybody talking, you know, to my patients, or I don’t want anybody talking to leads that I’m spending a lot of money for, how do you how do you deal with those kinds of practices, in terms of recognizing they’re missing opportunities?

Dylan Kemna 23:15
Let’s get points. So we like to start with an assessment so we can identify the opportunities for improvement within the practice. I’ll show them our process, we’ve developed our own folks scripting software, it’s pretty sophisticated dynamic scripting, where we’re able to provide consistency with a service mindset. We call it logical progression. So every call follows the same flow, a proper introduction, exploration, education and closing. Usually, when they see the demo, they see their conviction is going up that these guys actually know what they’re doing. They’re not just an answering service offshore. These guys actually specialize in the space where, okay, yeah, it’s just showing them. And then we also have the stats, like when you were talking about the difference between a phone lead and a web lead, we put out our medical marketing outlook annually, we convert over 75% on inbound phone calls to consultations among our clients. And that was pretty good. Your specialties we work with web lead response, that’s a newer area within the past couple of years, we’re finding that our conversions are closer to 35%. Sounds low. But if practices actually go through and track how many web forms are completed, every

Bill Fukui 24:32
thing that comes in Yeah,

Dylan Kemna 24:34
so that’s the difference between a phone lead and a web lead with with these photo assessments. They don’t know what they don’t know. So I would say probably 90% of the time they result in loss leads. No name or phone number is ever gathered. Okay? They’re not asking for the appointment. So there’s no way to follow up with those. So typically, unless they have recorded calls at the practice, there’s no record of those and even if they have recorded calls. That’s true. You’re not accessing those, unless something’s in question. Because they’re busy, the waveforms are a little more transparent that you can actually go back and track that. So we have like a revenue calculator, where it kind of comes down to the numbers in terms of me to get to promotional what we do. But it’s a very educational process, we’ll look, I’ll ask him questions like, you know, how many phone leads you get each month? Do you know how many web leads you get? And those are kind of hot buttons, too, because most of the time, they don’t know. So we’ll kind of work backwards. So how many procedures you’re doing? And what’s the average revenue per procedure? What do you think your no show rate is? And what do you think your conversion from consultation procedure is and we come up with, it’s a little arbitrary, but we come up with some realistic projections of what typical monthly revenue is like for the practice, and I do it separate for phone calls, and web leads, because we’re finding the difference in the conversions. And then we just kind of go through the numbers, we’re typically with a five 10% increase on just lead to consultation conversions, when you’re talking about procedures, that could be worth several 1000s of dollars, maybe even three $4,000, it doesn’t take much to move the needle, where we get a few more patients in the door, maybe the ideal situation for us is that we’re going to be providing a better patient experience, freeing up time for the staff to focus on the customers in the practice, and providing a good ROI. So nice. So for us, it all has to kind of make sense, because we don’t want to bring somebody on that’s not the right fit. If they don’t have enough volume or revenue per patient.

Bill Fukui 26:46
So knowing that, okay, so at some particular point, it may make sense to have some assistance, managing or helping manage leads, I’ve got some clients. You know, I’ve got one practice when I was working with was generating, you know, close to 900 leads a month. Okay. 100 leads a month, pretty high volume, you know, practice. And I’ve got other ones that are, you know, five 600. With you add in, you know, phone calls, emails, chats, you know, five 600 leads a month, I know that they’re there, they’re not converting a high percentage, it’s all you know, for them, it’s up, they almost get addicted to the numbers. Yeah, they just get addicted to the numbers. Because at the end of the day, there’s only so many surgeries one surgeon can do. And, but even so, at what point do you think it makes sense for a practice to either get, do you guys do like overflow? Like, if they’re not able to get to it? Do they? Or do you do at certain hours of the day? You know, I don’t have somebody handling? You know, I don’t expect staff and I usually don’t recommend staff, take the phone home with them. And you know, you know, take calls over the weekend and stuff like that, although some practices do have, you know, patient care counselors and stuff like that, to do that. At what point do you think it does make what kind of numbers are we looking at in order for it to, to make sense for a practice to invest in some support for some of these, you know, leads? Well, that’s,

Dylan Kemna 28:41
that’s a great question. So when it comes to overflow, extended hours of coverage, and the answer your question, we’re not 24/7 optie calls 8:30am to 10pm. Eastern Monday through Friday, okay, six on Saturdays and Sundays, we just found from 18 years of experience that that’s what’s most cost effective for us and our clients. So when we started we originally started with LASIK surgery. And then we’ve gone into other areas of electric medical, but kind of a rule of thumb and LASIK. Patients are typically worth around $4,000. So if that’s the number, overflow, extended hours of coverage, my rule of thumb is if we can book five additional additional consultations when their staff is busy during the day, or with our extended hours, if half of those convert into patients, that’s about 10,000 in revenue 2.5 and $4,000 of surgery patient that’s enough to cover their investment in off the call and cover their own costs and provide a better experience. So like anything in addition to that would be a bonus so so those numbers will change as like the revenue per patient goes down or up. So we might be a little more if the average revenue is $2,000 are usually our minimum for our service to be cost effective patients should be worth at least $1,000, ideally, more towards 2000. Sometimes we come across practices where they don’t generate enough revenue per patient, and we’re maybe not the right fit. But we can give them a lot of good takeaways in terms of the process, the process is irrelevant for any procedure, it’s just in terms of is our service going to be cost effective for where we want to set people up for success on webforms. I usually say around 30. Like if they’re getting 30 or more, that’s, that’s where we can make an impact on saving them money, saving them, saving them time, and increasing conversions, where they’re getting good ROI, freeing up time for the staff and that just that peace of mind. So practice, I call it elegant organization and that you’re getting booked consults from from our team, on a weekend, you get a confirmation email on a Saturday, or maybe when your offices close. So that’s cool. And it just gives you peace of mind knowing that you’re working hard on the marketing side to generate these leads, knowing that you’ve got a team behind you, where the overflow extended hours of coverage is just a good way to kind of walk before we run to earn credibility with a practice, a lot of times the biggest competition is the staff itself. They’re like use this outside company. So that’s a good way to start. Because then they know we’re there to support them and kind of backing them up in the beginning. And once they get a feel for our process, they might feel more comfortable transitioning potentially all the leads over to us.

Bill Fukui 31:41
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, I’m gonna go back, I’m gonna regress a little bit. You talked about, you know, kind of secret shopping, competitors, secret shopping your own practice. And I do think that that that isn’t done enough, in most practices, they almost take their people for granted. And I as a salesperson, I know, in fact, I’m a much better consultant and sales person when I’m accountable to somebody. So working with met shark, I actually work with a gentleman, Seth, who is I mean, he is probably the most high energy. Just always thinking, but he’s very, you know, he holds people accountable. And, and just working with him, I find that I’m much more accountable. How often do you would you say a practice really needs to be keeping their own tabs have their own performance? How often should that be? And the second part of that is, what is it that you’re looking for? Is it just the speed to lead? Or is it you know, when you’re secret shopping? What is it that you’re looking for? So those two things? Yes,

Dylan Kemna 33:00
I would, if it were my business, I probably want to do that quarterly, I think it’s relative to the goals of the practice and what area they’re trying to grow, at least annually. Kind of need that checkup. That’s, that’s our call to action. It’s our loss leader for opti call, we do it for practices to create awareness, because without that, if they see our process, they’re like, oh, yeah, we do all those things. So as far as like, what we’re looking for, is proper greeting. Do they ask for the caller’s name and number upfront to kind of build rapport and capture the lead? Are they asked me how they heard about the practice? Exploratory questions are nice things like, you know what area you’re interested in having treated? Have you ever been in for a consultation? For a procedure like this week? We don’t want to go into full console over the phone just enough to build some rapport? And are they mentioning the consultation? Or are they actually painting a picture of what happens? So that’s another takeaway from doing these assessments is kind of the under promise over deliver, don’t just mention the ever consultation, talk to them about what happens? How long are they going to be there any before and after pictures?

Bill Fukui 34:14
And yeah, I can’t tell you how many times even on on email form submissions. Everybody’s asking for, you know, schedule, a consultation book, a consultation schedule, a free consultation, and yet they’re making this huge leap of being on a website, reading some information, maybe even seeing some before and afters or testimonials or reviews, that kind of stuff. And now I’m ready to book a consultation. Okay. I think they’re making a leap. I don’t think that the vast majority of people, like you’re saying they’re asking for the consultation, what they’re asking her questions that may lead into a consultation and maybe subliminally they’re they’re ultimately ready to schedule But that’s not what they first asked. They don’t ask, Can I schedule a consultation? is the first question that came out of their mouth? It’s usually do you offer this and maybe somewhat details about that, and then cost you okay? They’re asking those kinds of things long before they just say, okay, but book me a consultation. So I agree with you in terms of setting the table and making the consultation of value, your selling the consultation, creating some value in it, and what they’re gonna get out of it. You can’t know whether or not a particular treatment surgery technology is right for you. Unless you go through this you can talk about it and you know, read all about it and stuff. But until you have a doctor look at you, or a dentist’s look at you, there’s no way to know that that’s number one, the right course of action, the right technology, that your problem is the most adequately serviced by that particular procedure or treatment. I’ve actually had, you know, cataract patients who I know they have cataract asking so I’m gonna go call about, you know, having LASIK done. I’m like, on you know that, but that’s, that’s their at. And so I think part of it is, is never assuming that the consumer knows enough to make a decision. That’s true. You know,

Dylan Kemna 36:32
we’re in regards to price, which we sometimes say it’s almost an artificial question sometimes, because a lot of people starting their journey don’t exactly know how to distinguish one practice from the next. So we really encourage that first part of creating that experience is important that I mean, it’s it’s kind of a balancing act of some practices don’t want to share price at all, some list pricing on their website, my personal take is like, have something prepared. So you’re ready, and you know how your team is going to answer that. I would encourage you to at least have a range. Because if you don’t share something with them, they’re going to feel like you’re hiding the information. Yeah. And you have such a small window to build trust, I think we had some stats that like, people will decide if they trust you usually like within 15 seconds. So if you’re telling them that they need to come in, and you can’t give them pricing over the phone, well, a lot of times that comes from the top down. So I personally try to enlighten the physicians, we work with the administrators in terms of if you don’t do those things, it can have an impact on your conversions and whether people are going to move forward with your practice or not.

Bill Fukui 37:46
Yeah, and I do think you’re you’re absolutely right, is is preparing and training people to deal with the price question. We know there’s never a time when I talked to an intake person for practice. And I if I asked them, what’s the most common question you get from everybody, regardless of the procedure? What’s the most common question they ask? Is it pain? Is it gonna hurt? What’s the recovery time? They’re like, Oh, no, no, it’s cost. Cost is always number one. And absolutely, if you aren’t prepared to deal with the cost question, if your people are uncomfortable dealing with quote shoppers and pricing kinds of stuff, then I generally tend to say you probably have the wrong person answering the phone because gotta be comfortable dealing with price gonna be

Dylan Kemna 38:40
mentioned the Broncos quarterback situation earlier, it kind of made me laugh, because it makes me think about these practices that might be short handed, where maybe calls start getting routed to like the billing department or somebody that’s not really not surprising. So a question that often comes up for us is how two calls getting routed to optical would work with a practice. And this is something I recommend, too. I know there’s like different schools of thought of a lot of practices say well, what differentiates us is that we answer every call with a live person, which is great. In terms of scalability. This is our recommendation that article from our experiences have a two step recording, not necessarily this long poetry. Please listen closely as our options have changed with 10 different options. Just something simple that says something like thank you for calling Jones Laser Clinic. If you’re a first time caller interested in one of our procedures or scheduling consultation, press two. If you’re an existing patient or all it costs press one. And then make sure that you have your a team on that line too. And it’s not that you don’t want everybody to have a great experience. It’s just making sure that those calls are getting routed to the right people. I might actually say you might be better off having him go to a voice malware somebody has to follow up and going to the wrong person, I get that case, and I generally tend to

Bill Fukui 40:05
agree with you, because you only got one shot, sometimes, okay. And if you give it to somebody, man, if they’re not ready, and half the time, they don’t even know that the call is coming. So I may be a billing and I get a call, I don’t know who it is I answer it. And now I’m getting hit on the back of the head with a prospective, you know, patient, I’m just not, you know, it kind of came out of the blue. I’d rather that go into voicemail then and have somebody who’s really qualified follow up with it.

Dylan Kemna 40:38
Right, versus somebody that’s just confirming directions or something. Yeah,

Bill Fukui 40:43
I mean, that’s, that’s a whole different, you know, I’m gonna I’m gonna waste calls in that case.

Dylan Kemna 40:48
With that, with that auto recording that that’s how we would handle overflow. So okay, when you set up a triage like that, we’ll typically set it up during business hours, where we go to that option for scheduling, after three rings a rolls over to our team. So that’s kind of how we’re a kind of backup of practice, and create value with that kind of relationship. Yeah, I

Bill Fukui 41:11
think that I’d rather have that by far by far. So kind of on just the kind of couple of things I’d like to get from you. Before we end in this webcast. If I’ve got a practice, that is not say they’re not doing great. It converting what would be your one? You know, I typically say my silver bullet is in terms of generating leads, it is cost. You mentioned putting, you know, some people put pricing on the website, some people don’t or whatever, I’m never a proponent of putting pricing. Right on the website. It eliminates the one reason why some people are a question that some people can ask you, you know, now you’re taking the reason to call you away. That’s probably the biggest reason for somebody to call you is to get a price. Okay. In fact, I think you should turn it around. It should be the call to action, which should be say, you know, got got questions. need details. Need a price question mark? Absolutely. We’re here to answer those questions. Okay. Say it’s okay to ask for price. Okay, say, you know, I invite people to ask the price question. Because if I’ve got really good people, we’re going to slam dunk those those prospects, five times fold better than our competitors, if that’s the attitude that we have, that we’re going to deal and we train our people to handle those. So my question to you is, how do you deal with the price question? You know, what would you your recommendation to dealing with pricing? Especially if I’m not the cheapest guy in town, if I know my price is going to be may scare some people off? Okay. What would your number one recommendation for dealing with telephone calls when they’re asking for price? How do you deal with that when you’re one of the premium practices in the market,

Dylan Kemna 43:26
it’s about delivering exceptional experience. So by having a process in place, whether you use off the call, or you follow the pattern, whatever you think works for you. I mentioned logical progression. So it’s introduction and exploration, education and closing, addressing price, I wouldn’t focus on it too much. Just make sure that you can validate your price and why it is. So people feel like they call the right place,

Bill Fukui 43:53
right. So the second side of that is when they call ask price, and you go through the sequence, not everybody is ready to book them, their Thank you, blah, blah, blah, even if you get their contact information, you get their phone, you get their email, or whatever. How frequently should a practice, you know, think about following up because I get as much as bad as the initial intake is for most practices. The follow up is by folds worse, and they get no follow up after that initial phone call. What’s your recommendation for practices that have the personnel to be able to do this? How frequently should they be following up? You don’t want to be a nuisance, but at the same time, I know they’re not converting in that first call.

Dylan Kemna 44:46
You might be surprised with my answer here that you also made me think of something with what you said about like you get through the call. Another great takeaway is make sure you guys have an informational offer to people that are ready to schedule that’s above for hopefully a good collateral material that helps you stand out. But that’s a way to get the rest of the information. That’s an area that a lot of practices miss. They if somebody’s not raised schedule, they might defer to the website. So have a have some kind of offer, even if it’s generic, to maximize those opportunities. As far as how many times to follow up with our, with our capture program, we do to personalize outreaches. So that’s a combination of phone call text and email two times over best case scenario, we get them on the line, we book them, if they’re not ready to book, we offer the information, we include a couple of drip emails and a couple drip text messages. So the ongoing nurturing campaigns awesome, like, I mean, probably, I mean, you don’t want to drown them to where it’s too much, but maybe monthly, if not bi weekly. I mean, that’s kind of your discretion and how good your content is, as far as like, How many times do you follow up on these prospects? I know different companies have different opinions. Some of the big pharma companies might say you need to reach out to them six times. Right? For us, the drop off from the second personalized outreach to the third is so extreme that it’s not cost effective for us. So who is it really, for us? It’s my attitudes comes from the Sandler sales training of try to qualify more prospects and stop chasing suspects that if they were, I mean, there’s got to be a balance and realistic expectations on your team. Because it’s one thing if you’ve got people that are free, not doing anything, it doesn’t hurt to hit the phones and incentivize them to get some people in the door, especially maybe like a past Botox patient that’s due for do to come in if you’re running some kind of special, but I’m more of a fan of maximizing on the front end, and then having more of those automated methods and putting out good content that yeah, and building a following? That’s my personal opinion, because? Well, I think it kind of comes down to the 8020 rule of how much time and resources it takes to follow up on old leads, right? We have a lot of practices that say we might have like 1000s of leads from the past, that the conversions are like, usually in the single digits on that kind of follow up.

Bill Fukui 47:27
Yeah. No, I think that’s I, I’m surprised that it would be that big of a drop off from from two to three. I’ve actually heard from some consultants that say it’s after the third one that they they kind of drop off, but I think that two to three, and that number there, I think is probably realistic in terms of that 8020 rule. Now, what is 80% of the highest quality stuff, it’s going to be there, I def definitely see see a a huge number of of conversions happening. After that first call. With a lot of our practices, I see that

Dylan Kemna 48:13
I was gonna say 80% of the results come from the initial outreach. Yeah, what we’re seeing on a CAPTCHA that we have seen by adding the additional touchpoints the emails, the text, the additional drip campaigns, that conversions have gone up 20%. So I don’t mean like from 30% to 50%, but like, if they were at 30%, maybe up to 36%. Right, and, and for what goes into that, like it’s worthwhile long term to build those systems to make sure that you’re creating great experiences, and just with that collateral material, you never know where that’s going to end up that they might refer friends and family.

Bill Fukui 48:53
Yeah, I think I think you’re, you’re, you’re right on and this kind of goes, you know, speaks to what we do. It is about content. It’s about quality information, quality resources, that are a value to your target audience. And somebody that’s inquiring about stuff that, you know, I generally tend to say, if we’re adding content to our website, we should be talking to our intake people and say what resources would be helpful for if you’re following up with a lead or sending them an email? Maybe a it’s amazing how many practices still don’t have a what to expect during your breast augmentation or your lasik consultation. Okay, having a page on that easy way of getting good information or maybe even converting it and adding video to it. So you’re explaining it, you know, and you’re walking somebody through it. I think those kinds of resources pages would be great for sales follow up. Mainly because especially video I think video is great for sales follow up because now I’m actually Oh, I just got off the phone with with Susan. Now I know what she looks like, you know, and I can see this progression of a relationship and this confidence and trust that happens, I think those are things that practices should be, you know, looking into, as opposed to just SEO and adding content for SEO, I think arming you and your team and salespeople with better resources to help turn these people into consultations and give them more of what they need and want, I think is really what the website really should be as much as it is to generate the lead, it should be there to help you close it.

Dylan Kemna 50:43
And if you’re using different means, like virtual consults, I’d recommend practices, do some kind of recording archive, just another tool to keep in their back pocket, I mean, you’re gonna have a better chance of converting people face to face in the office. With today’s new era, we’re seeing more virtual consults, that’s, that’s another tool to just get more reach and more efficiency, where maybe if they don’t respond to that, to actually have a recorded consultation,

Bill Fukui 51:14
you know, there’s a there’s a accompany, I forget the name of it, I’ll post it in, in another post. But what they did is part of their virtual consultations, it was all recorded, and they would send out the recording. And this was actually a high end dental practice. I mean, his average patient was probably a $25,000 patient, because it’s usually full mouth restoration, multiple teeth, that kind of stuff. He would do the record and his here’s the thing, he would do a recording. And, and he would, people would actually submit pictures online, of their teeth, take pictures of their smile and stuff. And I don’t like this, I don’t like that he would take those, do a virtual consultation, actually pull up their photos, he would pull in cases that he’s done and explain what he would be doing to them, send this to them in a video recording. And he found that case, acceptance, people that are willing to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars, his conversion actually went up with the recording more than just having them come into the office, if they just came into the office to consult, he was only seeing about 20, maybe 25% conversions to treatment, because of the price being so high. Just educated. Yeah. So when he would, when he would send the video though, when they would finally come in after getting the virtual and getting the video, his conversions went up to like 60%, he saw more than 100% increase in his conversion of case acceptance, because of the video. Because it was the follow up information that they got. And it wasn’t just to them, the thing was, now that person was able to share their consultation experience with their husband, with their grandparents with whoever was going to help in making this decision. They were able to hear they can build momentum, the sales momentum, not just me. But other people are saying oh yeah, do this, that would make a huge difference. Or that was really cool, you know, kind of stuff. I think that kind of, you know, follow up material. Invaluable, invaluable.

Dylan Kemna 53:45
Great, even webinars, when you think some people might not be ready to come in face to face because they might feel pressured or not comfortable. Whereas the more educated they are, the more likely you’re going to be able to Yeah, and I

Bill Fukui 53:59
think even with all this pandemic, and all this other, you know, social distancing, even when this is over with and hopefully sooner rather than later, but I am going to say this, this way of communicating virtually online, just like we’re doing, that’s not going away. That is actually a way that our society now is has now become trained to consume information. So I think that kind of stuff in follow up and dealing with patients, how you can you know, deal with them in in your intake and make it more of an experience. I think you’re gonna find while you’re going to convert a lot more because I think today’s audience is not the same audiences like when we first started doing marketing. Great. Yeah. So hey, Dylan, do me a favor, kind of share a little bit of your contact information if somebody has an interest in in doing that assessment that you mentioned, you know, What how can they get ahold of you? What’s the best way to reach out?

Dylan Kemna 55:03
So the website is Aki call opti ca ll.com Just a contact form. You want to email me directly it’s it’s deeper Dylan and last name is Kemna. That’s K E M is a Mary and as a Nancy A’s and apple at opti call optic a. L l.com. I’d be happy to help you. We’d be happy to do this lead conversion assessment, it can take two to three weeks, we’re able to share the results for it. And is there

Bill Fukui 55:35
a comprehensive approach cost for the assessment? Is there a cost for the assessment? The assessment is free.

Dylan Kemna 55:42
Okay.

Bill Fukui 55:44
That sounds great. Yeah. crazy not to take advantage of it. Whether you use your service or not, it’s, it’s there’s huge value. Yeah, we’re

Dylan Kemna 55:53
just happy to connect with the people create the awareness. It’s a small industry so the more people we can connect with and just talk about the opportunities, the better

Bill Fukui 56:02
for everyone. Makes perfect sense. Hey, Dylan, thank you again for all your time and insights today.

Dylan Kemna 56:07
Absolutely. Appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 56:10
Okay, bye bye.

MSD Insider 56:12
Thanks for joining us for the med shark insider with Bill Fukui join us next week for another dive into all things medical marketing. All episodes can be streamed at WWW dot med Shark digital.com/med Shark Dash insider

Transcribed by https://otter.ai