MSD Insider 0:00

Welcome to MedShark Insider with Bill Fukui, your expert host on all things medical, marketing, and SEO.

Bill Fukui 0:07

Good afternoon, everybody. I want to welcome you to another episode of MedShark Insider. And today, I really want to talk about one of the most important aspects of digital marketing that I generally tend to found… I have found over the past, gee, 20 to 30 years of doing this thing, that there’s a gap, there’s a gap. And I actually found a provider, we actually have a mutual client that actually uses this service. But I don’t want to necessarily pitch the service, I really want to talk about the process of practices, better managing the intake, the follow up, and how to convert more of those leads that we’re spending so much money generating. So today, I actually have the Chief Revenue Officer for Liine and it’s Charlie Winn. Welcome, Charlie.

Charlie Winn 0:07

Thank you, Bill, excited to join you for a chat today. Thanks for having me.

Bill Fukui 0:09

Thank you. And so I’m going to jump right in. Give me a little bit of your background, just kind of how you got into this digital marketing and a little bit of background on one Line to the, the software.

Charlie Winn 1:23

Yeah, absolutely. The short story of my career is I started my first, my first job was waiting tables. But my next job in college was, for four summers, I sold books door-to-door educational books, which was a phenomenal experience. So I spent a calendar year when you add up the months of my life knocking on doors, actually knocked on doors to find place to live my first summer. And then when I graduated, sales, you know, was my calling. So it’s always been sales, sales management, worked in a variety of industries. Did consulting for a couple of years, and actually started working with a couple of provider groups initially in behavioral health. And so they had this interesting problem where, like, you were just saying spending a bunch of money on investing heavily in marketing to drive leads. The leads for them were very high dollar. And there was a gap or sort of a critical inflection point of that bridge between lead reaching out, and whether or not the initial appointment or consult was scheduled. And typically in a, you know, business outside of health care, specialty practice groups, there’s CRM, right? Salespeople are tracking everything that’s going on there. Some of them are not doing that very well… But that’s the fix in those businesses. And the insight we had was, you know, a lot of times these are clinically trained folks, they’re sort of front desk folks as well. And frankly, they don’t really have time to track information, especially about people that are not booking that appointment. And so we did a project in that consulting engagement, where we manually listened to 100% of the calls that were coming into the practice from new patients. And we kept up with everything that was happening. So thus the management team, for the first time ever, had really good insight and metrics into that bridge between appointments, and I’m sorry, leads and initial appointment. And so the results were phenomenal. And that’s where the idea for Liine came from, which is… This isn’t scalable, mainly listening to all these calls. Is there a technology we could use to deliver the same results, which were tonnes of more scheduled patients and lots of revenue? But but do it in a way that was scalable, so we can help many more practices. So fast forward six years later, Liine is a platform that automatically captures all inbound leads. So online bookings, web form submissions, chat leads, inbound calls as well. And we’re using speech analytics AI to analyze what is happening and all those you know, interactions. And we can automatically tell practices, whatever they want to know about that, about that bridge. And then we can also automate elements of the follow up process. You know, when practices are getting back to people who haven’t booked yet. So, sort of bringing that sales enablement CRM technology into healthcare specialties without asking staff to basically do anything. That is what we strive to do every day.

Bill Fukui 4:42

You know, you touch on a really important, a couple of important aspects when it comes to lead intake and tracking for, for medical. Especially for the you know, you’d mentioned some higher dollar, you know, high dollar value leads. You know, with our plastic surgeon and surgical businesses out there. Those practices, those leads, there’s no question they’re high value, they’re definitely a high value. Big difference between being, you know, converting 5% and converting even 6 or 7%, that adds up to a lot of money adds up, you know, over the course of the year, do the math. You know, even one or 2% can end up to be literally 10s of 1000s of dollars, right, depending on the volume of leads that a practice may get, you know, that could be that could be enormous. So a question on it to the point is: your experience in managing lead, you know, monitoring and helping with practices is, does CRM for this solution type of platform? Is it for just high volume practices that are spending lots of money doing cosmetic? Or is there is there still value for the practices that are, you know, kind of still doing reconstructive as part of the practice and just doing some cosmetic? So they’re not only cosmetic, they’re doing some reconstructing? Is there still value in investing in this type of stuff?

Charlie Winn 6:18

Yeah, great question. I think the short answer is in general, yes. Like, if you don’t know what happens when a new patient reaches out to your practice, that’s, that’s bad. Like, that’s a really important part of just even the patient experience. There’s other things you could do that just frankly, cost less than than Liine, or anything like us, because we’re using AI right to analyse everything, so that your team doesn’t have to track stuff. So in general, I mean, that should be monitored in some way, regardless of specialty or dollar value of a patient. For us, for our platform, what we look for in a good practice group that’d be good to partner with are two main things. One, are… is that practice, proactively trying to grow, meaning getting more new patient leads to reach out and getting them in the door? So if someone is a primary care physician, and is like at capacity in a community where they’re known, and until they retire, their schedule is basically going to be full, probably not the best fit for us, or even for like marketing, right, they don’t really need to invest in that. And so we typically focus on specialties like aesthetics, or oral surgery, or LASIK and ophthalmology, where you’re always needing to get more patients in and grow. And then the second thing is revenue value. So it the higher the revenue value per patient, like the more from a business perspective that you’re really going to care about whether somebody books in an initial appointment, and volume can play into that too, right? So ultimately, it’s, you know, what is the ROI? How much more revenue can you get in, like you said, by increasing the conversion rate, and that’ll either be related to the dollar value being higher per patient. Or if there’s so many leads, then that’s, it ends up being dollars, regardless. So those two things are really focused on growth, meaning they’re investing in marketing, and high volume, but also high dollar per patient as in hundreds of dollars for that first visit. It makes it makes people a better fit for us.

Bill Fukui 8:30

Yeah, you know, and you mentioned AI, and, you know, that is like the buzzword today, you know, AI is all over the place. And it really is yeah, there’s, you know, what we’re trying to wrestle with with AI is, is how can it be best leveraged? You know, so, short story, I had a… I was at a meeting in Sun Valley, Idaho, about two weeks ago. And I was talking with one of the attendees, and I actually had him speak to them to the group because I thought his story was so unique. He actually had a Google review that was really from one of those crazies, right? Every, you know, every practice has them. Yeah, he had a crazy that went out and posted this review. And it really he wasn’t even, the person wasn’t even a client. Right? Didn’t even turn out be a client yet went out and posted this bad review. He actually used, the provider, actually went out because you only have so many chances to challenge a Google review and they tell you you know, this is the final. Whatever happens in this. It’s done it’s over with and you can’t keep challenging it. So he had one last chance. He used AI, he used chatGPT, put together a question and he copied in the review. And he asked it, AI you know chat GPT, to come up with a response to challenge the, you know, the terms of use… Google’s Terms of Use, in terms of this post, and it came back with about a five paragraph response that he made minor changes to. And it got removed within two hours.

Charlie Winn 10:23

It’s pretty… that’s pretty impressive.

Bill Fukui 10:25

Yeah. I heard that. And I said, man, we got to leverage AI. So yeah, tell me how you guys are leveraging AI, as it relates to the tracking, monitoring of lead intake. What you guys do?

Charlie Winn 10:40

Yeah, AI is a buzzword. And when people think of AI, like.. that’s a sexy AI story, right, which is awesome, right? I think I think the sexy stories are probably rarer. Now. Chat GPT is like a phenomenal technology. I’m, to be frank, not I don’t know everything about chat GPT. I’ve just heard stories like that, which is awesome. When we, when we talk about AI, what we’re talking about is, we are transcribing conversations, recording speech to text. And then we’re using what’s called natural language processing to make sense of what was said, right? It’s way more complex than keyword spotting. So you can’t just look at a call and say, “Oh, the word appointment was mentioned. So they booked.” You’re gonna get a ton of false positive. So the proprietary stuff we have is we only focus on healthcare specialties in this appointment scheduling type conversation. So we’ve got almost like a matrix of decision making, where the AI is understanding, okay, you know, there were, there were five things that were said in this call that typically would indicate that this is a new patient lead, but there were seven that would indicate it’s actually not, it’s an existing patient. And so it makes decisions like that. And when we, when we use AI, we’re trying to replace what humans were doing when I did that manual consulting project. So it’s like very intentional, try to allow us to process more and more conversations without needing humans as much we do have human reviewers as well. So if our technology, the AI isn’t certain about anything it’s looking for, it’ll flag that conversation. And we still do have a human that goes in and verifies whatever the tech was inserted about, that happens about 25% of the time. And so it’s very specifically used for that, or there’s other technology elements in our platform that allow us to do many things. But the core of the AI, like machine learning is more more and more often, our technology doesn’t need a human to verify all the things that it’s looking for. And it’s getting that from the transcript.

Bill Fukui 12:58

Okay. Yeah, so kind of taking that for from a practice manager level, right? So if I’m saying we’ve got this technology now, how can I apply that to my practice? Say, for example, I’ve got, you know, a busy practice, you may have 5, 6, 10 different people answering the phone.

Charlie Winn 13:20

Yeah.

Bill Fukui 13:21

And we want to measure the efficiency or the proficiency. How, how effective are my intake people? Obviously, it’s across the board, you’ve got, you know, your intake people that are stellar, they are superstars. They close a high percentage of all the people that call them and on the other end, we have people that are probably less experienced or less competent, you know, how do you use this platform to identify the different, you know, intake specialist? Where there is training needed, etc.

Charlie Winn 14:00

Yeah, the identifying of if who handled the phone is actually pretty straightforward. It’s just the staff saying their name. Sidenote, probably about a quarter of the time, there’s a lot of calls where the staff is not introducing themselves, which is also an insight that’s, you know, interesting to know. But, you know, if I pick up the phone and say, this is Charlie, then it knows that Charlie handled that conversation. In terms of using it for assessing performance and maybe identifying coaching or management opportunities. You know, we know how many of these of these leads each person’s handling, what is their conversion rate, which you mentioned. We’ve recently found, we did a… We looked at the data across all of our practices. We have several 100 practice groups using line across the country today, and the highest performing staff members in the country at converting leads to appointments are at just below 90% conversion, which is like crazy high. And then the lowest are 27%. So what is the takeaway, the gap between the highest and lowest is enormous. So in your practice, if you have more than one human being answering the phones, chances are that there’s a pretty decent spread in their, in their performance. So the first thing is just knowing what is that? What is that gap? And then the next thing that we also do is we identify why people don’t book. So maybe it’s a pricing objection, or for surgical practices, especially the new console fees, maybe somebody objected to that. Maybe it was, you know, scheduling issues where people are asking for dates and times that are unavailable. And that staff member is not is adept at like being flexible and figuring that out. But you can look at by person, you know, when patients aren’t booking, why aren’t they booking with this person? And so that that allows you to know, like, is this individual over indexing on any of those issues? And when you know that now you can go talk to Charlie about specifically consults the objection. And you statistically know that that’s going to be a meaningful conversation, because you can see that in the data. So that would be an example of how a practice manager can zero in on what’s going to have impact.

Bill Fukui 16:29

Right. That is fascinating in the sense that I, as a practice manager, can identify not just performance. But where are they getting hung up on? What are this? What is the gaps in training, that I haven’t gotten them to either mentally overcome and be comfortable talking about? Or they just don’t have the information to do it well. You know, and that that can fall on me, right? So I love the idea that as a training tool, or where there are, quote, gaps, that I don’t have to start from start to finish, because they may be good at everything else other than that one thing! They’re great at everything else. But they just when it comes to that, you know, that’s where that’s where their proficiency drops off a cliff.

Charlie Winn 17:23

That’s right. I mean, when I go get my physical, I get blood work done. And my blood work is different than, you know, a friend of mine, right? So our docs are going to have conversations with us about specific things that we need to do to get those levels to where they need to be. And it wouldn’t make sense for them to not do blood work, and then give us the same advice with no information. Like it just wouldn’t be effective. So similar concept with how the staff is handling these calls.

Bill Fukui 17:52

So another question, especially with the technology, because I’m, I really want practices to do the kinds of best practices that we know, turn into more consultations, more butts in seats, one of those things, it’s lead follow up. So you know, we’ve I get, you know, I secret shop practices, whether they’re clients or whether they’re prospective clients. I want to see where they are in terms of… if I fill out a form submission, I’m interested in two things. Number one, I’m interested in how quickly they respond. But two, I’m also interested in what they’re saying in their response, when putting in your response to help differentiate us. What in our response is different than !everybody else’s, because let’s face it, if I’m sending as a prospective patient, I may send you an email, but I probably am sending almost copy and pasting the same question to maybe five different other websites, you know, and providers. And, you know, when I get emails back, it’s like, wow, I don’t know who you guys are. So I’m trying to differentiate your, you know, your practice, etc. by the emails that I get back.

Charlie Winn 19:15

Yeah.

Bill Fukui 19:16

So, number one, how do you deal with the timing of the follow up of leads? Because timing is, you know, studies have shown the sooner you get back to them and engage with them. You know, the, the numbers are astronomical, when they when you go too long. They just absolutely fall off the table.

Charlie Winn 19:36

Yeah, there’s a lot. This is a whole topic, which I love. The, the first thing I’ll say in response to that is the most impactful and important thing that your practice could do with a web form lead, is to call it immediately using any other technology to text or email that’s all additive. I’m not saying that’s not helpful, but calling a web lead right away, has, by far the biggest impact on conversion rate. And you mentioned studies, Harvard Business Review did one a few years ago. The average lifespan of a web lead someone filling out a form or sending an email, is five minutes. So all as practices all the time, like how fast do you get better? Yeah, “Oh, we get back same day. Oh, for sure, same day,” and I’m just like “Don’t even, don’t even follow up.” Because they’re also filling out multiple forms a lot like you said, Bill. So the other stat is 78% of the time, the practice that calls first gets that appointment. And then we did a look, when I mentioned looking across all our practices, we found that if the average webform conversion rate is 19%. And when you call them within five minutes, it goes up to 55%. Now I’m talking about business hours, right? So if it’s 2am, you’re not gonna call them, right. But that’s it like a straight up 36% increase in actual percentage points of conversion, by calling them so quickly. Why is that it’s just because it’s so hard to get someone on the phone, even 20 minutes later, they’re already at Whole Foods and they don’t even remember half the time. And so that if you can get if you can get your practice to do that. Massive advantage. Plus, because you have more success in that first touch point, over time, your team has to do less overall work in their follow ups. And now your team is more efficient and has more capacity. So I cannot emphasise enough how important and impactful it is to call someone right away compared to anything else that you could do. The way we handle that is we have this auto call. So when a patient submits the form, we actually call the practice right away. So the team answers a ringing phone. And it says you have a new web lead from Bill, you know, press one to call him. So instead of having the staff like monitor an inbox or some other system and decide that they’re going to call, we’re just calling the staff, they’re picking up their pressing one. And then Liine is dialling the patient. So the patient, you know, it’s 30 seconds have passed the patients on your website still. And it says your practice name on their caller ID. So the chances that they answer the phone are way higher. And then people another buzzword is patient experience. Right. But that is a that’s a pretty badass patient experience as well.

Bill Fukui 22:29

Yeah, you know, what I what I find? I’m fascinated to hear that, that that I was wondering how the call, initiating the call was actually executed. So, you know, the practices much more, most staff are much better at answering a phone call than replying to an email.

Charlie Winn 22:52

Yes.

Bill Fukui 22:53

You know, they’re much better at it. They’re more efficient at it. And quite frankly, they convert. There’s no question you convert at a much higher rate than just trying to chase somebody on email. That that that’s futile. In many cases, they get frustrated, staff get frustrated with that. On the… on the topic of you know, phone calls, initiating those phone calls. Do you guys track in terms of the when, when they do those form submissions… Do you track the conversion rate of those form submissions from phone calls?

Charlie Winn 23:40

Yes.

Bill Fukui 23:42

Okay, so what do you typically see, you know, and I hear practices say, “Oh, we always call first, we always call first.” But like you said, they don’t call for hours. If not, maybe a day, I can send an email at nine o’clock in the morning and they don’t call me until four in the afternoon. Yep. And as you said, I’ve moved on. I’ve already gotten responses. I’ve already talked to three other people

Charlie Winn 24:08

Maybe that you may have already had the consult, you know, somewhere else… probably did.

Bill Fukui 24:17

Or at least booked it. So a question then in terms of the the actual telephone calls, when you guys record them and kind of point out do you actually do any insights to help practices in terms of what they’re doing on those calls what they can do better? So I know that AI tracks some of that stuff. We have you know, some consultative support on really those though, how we can improve?

Charlie Winn 24:47

Yeah, good question. So the first insight related to that would be what we call reasons not booked. So we talked a little earlier about was it price objection was it scheduling issue? The number one reason especially in the specialties we’re talking about, number one reason patients don’t book when they’re on the phone is colour procrastination. What does that mean? That means that the patient’s asking questions a lot of the time. And then the staff is just trying to be friendly and helpful. So they’re just answering the questions, but the call never gets focused on scheduling, like, this is how we help you, you come in for a consult, etc. And so it ends in an unstructured way. Like, let me the patient says, “Let me give you guys a call back later, or something to that effect.” And it is by far, the most common reason not booked. So what we’ve done to help combat that is we do have, we don’t, we don’t do like training or consulting ourselves. But we do have some training resources we’ve created just because, you know, we’ve observed so many top performing staff and teams, and they all do the same things really well to make sure those calls are focused on booking people. So we have some videos that are included in our platform, a one pager with kind of basic phone messaging to help, you know, make the takeaways tangible. And then we also partner with a consulting, it’s a consulting group that turned into like a technology platform as well. And some other consultants. So depending on the needs that a practice might have, we have relationships with true professionals, depending on the specialty that somebody’s in, that can really help with that.

Bill Fukui 26:39

Okay, then a kind of what kind of dovetail on what you just said, what I find, with practices that aren’t really good at at asking for the order, you know, book, is they’ve never gotten into a position of controlling the call. They’re not the ones, they’re just deflecting that, you know, like you said. They’re trying to be cordial and social, you know, socially, we’re, we’re service animals, right? We’re trying to have be helpful, and answer in the best way that we can. We never take control of the conversation and ask our own questions. You know, once, once you’re starting to ask the questions, you’re now able to be the authority because they don’t know what half the time they don’t even know what to ask. So that’s why they do ask for price. At the time, they don’t know what else is important to ask for. You know, so good intake, you know, I completely agree with you, the vast majority of opportunities are lost simply because it is they they never create a pathway for the callers to make this a no brainer that the next step is to come in for the consultation.

Charlie Winn 27:57

That was just knowledge right there that you’re dropping into. And very true. And a little a little ends a little teaser on what we what we have heard the top staff that people that are at the you know, at the 90ish percent. It is so simple what they do. What they do is they answer the phone, “Thanks for calling this is so and so how can I help you?” Most of these patients are asking something, what is this cost? Can you give me more information on this? What are your hours, whatever. And so there’s this like magic little phrase that we hear that allows them to do what you said, Bill, which is get control. And so they say no matter what that question is the top people say, “Well, I’d be happy to help you with that. Have you ever been here before?” And just transition into that? And then the patient says yes or no. And they immediately take control. So just a little tip there: “I’d be happy to help you with that. Have you been here before?” Yeah. And then no, “Oh, my gosh, well, How’d you hear about us?” Now? You’re completely in control of the conversation? And that is that is the most common thing that top performers do that other people do not. Yeah. And it’s very straightforward.

Bill Fukui 29:08

Ya, you know, what, and I think once practices, start taking that tact, it feels so much more. They’re less afraid of the phone ringing. You know, you know, there are there are staff members that are almost afraid of, “The Bat Phone” ringing because it’s a, you know, it’s a it’s a lead and they’re they don’t know what to expect, they’re gonna get hit over the back of the head with a question they can’t answer. If you’re controlling the call, you know, what the questions are, you know, what, what they need to know, in most cases, and if you’re giving good information that they didn’t expect, for that nobody else is giving them. You know, all those those loaded questions and stuff that they have. They forgot about them, you know, and they feel good about you know, the engagement that they’re having with you. So they you defuse a lot of problems in in calls when you’re taking, taking the control.

Charlie Winn 30:09

You do and you do. And one other thing I wanted to mention that you got me thinking about, you know, you said the caller a lot of times doesn’t really know what to ask about. And so a rational thing to ask about is cost, right? These are rational players in the in the economic world, and especially if it’s an elective thing, like, everybody’s wondering about that. And so a lot of times I hear people, devaluing those collars, like, oh, it’s price shopping, Baloney, absolute Baloney. Like, it is a super normal thing to say, I wonder how much this costs, and it doesn’t mean just because someone’s asking about it, that like, that’s the only thing they care about, it’s just what you said, Bill, they’re not really sure what to ask, that is the most logical thing to ask about. So for anyone listening, don’t let your staff convinced themselves, that when someone’s asked about pricing, that they’re a, quote, “Price Shopper’ or like, they’re not worth the time because they didn’t call and say, I cannot wait to come in, I don’t care what it costs, and I’m gonna pay. Like, that’s not gonna happen, right. But just understand what’s real, and what you’re going to hear. And don’t assume that those people are not interested.

Bill Fukui 31:25

Yeah, and I will say, caveat, that is, practices that are have not done any marketing and they relies solely on word of mouth. And that’s great practices that can, that can do that, that are more established, maybe they’re a facial plastic surgeon, and they’ve developed, you know, reputation, referrals from other providers, patients, etc. That’s great. And in those cases, they may not worry as much about price, you know, or less so. But if you are spending marketing dollars, make no mistake, even the people with money bags, they’re asking the question, “How much does something cost?” I don’t care how much money they make. I don’t care what it is, they will always ask price, because they just don’t know what it is. And it’s, as you said, it’s the most logical thing for any consumer, to the asking when there’s an unknown. And our goal is to, you know, I would say this, for the practices that really are great at conversions that 80 90%, like you’re talking about, they want the price collars. They want them, because they know they can deal with them better than everybody else. And it’s the elephant in the room, they know they’re going to ask, everybody knows that marketing calls are going to ask doesn’t mean they’re less valuable. You know, at the end of the day, they’re equally as valuable. But it’s the practices that that actually cherish the opportunity to, because I know I’m better at this than everybody else. If I know I’m better at dealing with the price issue, bring it on the hill, I want those calls. I want those calls, because I know I can steal business from everybody up and down.

Charlie Winn 33:13

Huge advantage. huge advantage. I love that.

Bill Fukui 33:17

I love that kind of attitude. So last question. Last question. Well, maybe not the last question. Day parts when you’re talking about, you know, when calls are coming in, or leads are coming in how you’re following up with them? Are you seeing kind of trends in terms of, especially for the elective surgical stuff? Is there a trend in when leads come in? Is it during the week? Is it during the day? Is it on the weekends? Is it at night? What do you typically see, you know, when it comes to follow up and how we can best manage them?

Charlie Winn 33:58

Yeah, that’s a very good question. And there are there’s a lot of variables that can go into the time of day, even within the same specialty with marketing channels and personas that you’re targeting. I would say overall, the vast majority is still during the day. I think we’ll see… I think we’ll see outside of business hours continue to grow. Just because more practices are engaging in more marketing online and and making it easier for people to interact with them whether it’s chat and web forms, or it’s just easier for people to reach out digitally. So I think you’ll see more and more out of hours but I’m not sure it’ll overtake during business hours. And then during business hours, you typically see earlier or midday and later because people are working, right? So it’s kind of like when are they having a few minutes to do this. And that’s another reason it’s so important to call them right away when they’re filling it out during the day, because they could have like a 15 minute window, and they’re doing this and then they go back into a meeting, or they’re on a zoom– which is happening all the time, right, people working from home and are on zooms all day. So I think a lot of times people will have sort of soft coverage and they’re opening midday and closing. And that’s kind of that’s bad, because that’s really when you are getting a lot of these people, you know, coming in. And another thing that I’ve recently seen, that doesn’t have anything to do with our platform, but there’s platforms out there that are making it easier to offer, you know, online booking and E-commerce, even if people are like, I know, I want to schedule, I already know I want to buy this package of stuff, even for existing patients, right. And I think the more that you can offer those technology, or use those technology solutions to offer people to do business with you while you’re closed… Massive advantage. And so, summary there, is during the day is still king. It’s in that early, mid and late. So make sure you’ve got coverage, but we’re seeing more after hours. So you want to think about you know, what opportunities you’re giving leads to engage with or even book with your practice while you’re not closed. Like imagine people booking appointments, and even buying packages while you’re asleep. That sounds awesome. So if you haven’t already looked into that stuff, you really should.

Bill Fukui 36:43

Yeah, no question. When I look at Google Analytics for my clients, I, it pretty much parallels what you’re saying, I typically see a higher concentration of traffic to that website, happening during the middle of the week, typically heavier Monday through Wednesday, then Thursday through Friday. And especially Friday, it’s almost started dropping off to almost weekend levels. Their minds, you know, consumers minds have already… they’re on the weekend. But I do see spikes in traffic, like you said around the lunch hour or early in the morning. Or at actually kind of when there, some people are actually getting home early now people are leaving early. And I have seen that early, or late afternoon, early evening day part as beings, again, another spike in traffic. So, bottom line, I agree with you. And I love the idea of being able to follow up with those people immediately. The idea is if I’m on my lunch break, and I’m filling out a form or chatting with somebody, and I give my contact information, if you can catch them at the time, when number one it’s still top of mind. It’s still, I’m interested in this stuff, I didn’t get interrupted and gone into a meeting and now I’ve forgotten all about it. So that desire is still there, right? You got to strike while the iron is hot. And I already know you’re available. Right? You just took the time to build this out or to chat with me or something, you know, they’re available. You know, that’s the window of time when you know they’re available. So I love the idea of you can get back with them and initiate a phone call between the two of them. At that time, huge value. Huge value that that is probably that’s one thing I learned today that you know, I think I definitely want my clients to take advantage of. And then the other thing would be those after hours. I completely agree as more and more people are doing things and spending more time online after hours looking at different stuff. I think platforms like Clara and other appointment setting, you know booking types of where they can just do it right online right on the website. Huge value.

Charlie Winn 39:22

Yeah, I’m gonna give a shout out to a platform getting to know more and more and working with their team called Repeat MD. I don’t know if you’ve heard that group, Bill. So Repeat MD is more it’s the core of it is like it’s like rewards programmes for your for your patients. And the founders got lots of experience and awards I think initially in the hospitality/restaurant space. But brilliant product and one of the things they recently added, again, more so focused on existing patients, but is offering you know different rewards and things for different packages ecommerce. And I saw a presentation they did at a at an event a couple weeks ago. And it was just phenomenal just to think about, okay, if you don’t have something like that in your practice, then you’re only allowing your patients to buy things from you during your business hours. And then if you use something like that, then you allow your patients to buy something from you 24/7. So as you’re thinking about your growth goals for the year, like you’re going to 10x the hours that people can buy stuff from you, or whatever the math is. And I just think that concept makes so it’s so obvious that it’s like why was I thinking that way before? So look up Repeat MB, there’s a lot I’m butchering their value prop., but it’s a very impressive platform that helps with that concept of reclosed, how can we still do business and grow? They’ve got a great solution for that, amongst other things.

Bill Fukui 41:01

Yeah, no, that’s great. I would love maybe an introduction. If you can be so kind. I’d like to learn more about that, and maybe even do an Insider interview with the value that that you know, because I don’t think that’s always on practices’ radar, when it comes to marketing. They’re just looking at all the outbound, you know, SEO and pay-per-click advertising, social media advertising. They’re not really, you know, they’re not as focused on some of the things that can you know, that statistically show a great return on investment, even beyond what you do in some of this outreach.

Charlie Winn 41:42

100% I’m happy to do that.

Bill Fukui 41:44

Yeah, that that’d be great. So my last question I’ll save for the end was, was if you have any parting suggestions, or the one thing that you would say, you typically see making the biggest difference in a practice, when it comes to, you know, intake tracking? Follow up? What would be the one thing that if people walk away with today… Do this?

Charlie Winn 42:14

Obviously a good question. Hard one to answer but so many things, but yeah. No, no, but it’s good to it’s a great… I mean, it should be, you know, that it’s helpful to think about, about, you know, a main takeaway. So yes, I see lots of different things. I think, if I had to give one piece of advice to a practice, simplify. I think, simplify. So we’re talking about things on the business side, there’s a lot of noise, there’s a million technologies, there’s lots of stuff being said. AI is a buzzword, patient experience. Take the time to simplify what you’re trying to do and map out, these are the steps and then an example would be call a web lead immediately. Like, don’t worry about anything else until you do that. And if you take that simplified approach to any aspect of your business, you’re going to be way better off. The alternative is, you’re just like getting a lot of different technologies and people together. And and you’re not thinking in a simplified way what you’re trying to do and you basically just create a mess. So simplify everything on the business side you’re thinking about, and you’re gonna really appreciate that later on.

Bill Fukui 43:38

Charlie, best advice I’ve heard from anybody on these.

Charlie Winn 43:43

Thank you.

Bill Fukui 43:44

They talked in details, what you’re talking about, is that 80/20 rule? Yes, 20% of things that I need to focus on, that’s going to turn into 80% of my business. Right? And, and keep that on your radar and simplified, the more you can send. The more moving parts you have, the rest of your team can’t follow all the steps. You got to make it for everybody and great advice. Charlie, thank you again, for for joining me, I do encourage anybody that’s interested in, you know, a different way of looking at follow up and managing intake following and really concentrating on, I think the one takeaway I would get is just focus on this stuff. Practices that ignore the value of intake and monitoring of intake, the efficiencies of intake, are leaving so much money on the table. And quite frankly, you’re making work harder for your marketing agency like us, because we just have to get you more. It’s not about more, it’s about better, and it’s about higher percentage in order to get a higher ROI. But thank you again, for all your insights. Charlie. I look forward to having you on as things go. I look forward to having you on another session with me.

Charlie Winn 45:06

Yeah absolute pleasure and just always love chatting about this stuff so I would be down anytime and also I’ll make the intro to my friends at Repeat MD for you as well Bill. Thank you so much

Bill Fukui 45:18

Great, you guys all have a good afternoon,

MSD Insider 45:22

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.medsharkdigital.com/medshark-insider/.