MSD Insider  0:00  

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

Bill Fukui  0:08  

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another MedShark Insider. And today I wanted to chat about lead management and sales, it’s such a huge part of our job, is generating the leads. But when it comes to leads coming to the, to the practice, a lot of that is out of our control. So today, I’ve actually have a special guest. He’s actually a surgeon. And he is also the owner of Ad Vital, which is a software management, a lead management software. But I wanted to really talk more about just generally, let’s start about your background being an MD. How did you get into the lead management business?

Dr. Patel  0:59  

Yeah, thanks, Bill. So, you know, starting out as a doctor, and then going backwards into his lead management, it was pretty much from like childhood, I grew up on a motel and had to manage leads at that time, they weren’t called leads, they were called phone calls, right? Like you had the old rotary phone, and you had to pick up and you had to pick up within a certain time. And, you know, you got you got held accountable from, you know, I got held accountable from my parents, right in terms of like, hey, you know, what happened? Why didn’t they book, you know, what, why didn’t they get a reservation? Why didn’t you get a card on file, like, all this other stuff, right? Like even the transition of like, oh, they said, they’re gonna pay in cash, or this and that. So in terms of, you know, when I got done with residency, and I got into private practice, it was like any other business, and I was like, oh, my god, I’m back in childhood again. And I was like, Oh, wow, it’s this is the whole business side that they’ve never even talked about in medicine. I mean, I literally got little, you know, brushes of it through residency or some private practice, and like rotations and stuff like that, but I never, like, knew the nuts and bolts of it, right? And I was like, oh, you know, how, how in the world are we going to do this? And so I was like, alright, well, I’ll hire a practice manager we’ll hire the right people, and the stuff will just fall into place. And that was wrong. Right. And, and so in terms of each one of these little kind of failure points, I learned from my failures of what I needed to do to have a process in place. And that was, you know, it took me a few years to figure out that I actually needed a process, versus I’m like, alright, well, I can hi- for… hire for the right personnel, and then they’ll do the job. But then what I didn’t take an account for is that the personnel leaves and the process leaves with them. And so that was what kind of led me into the lead management world and the other piece of it, and it came back to childhood, right, it’s like, you know, my parents always said, hey, you know, we have to measure what’s happening, so that we can manage the expectations, and then we can improve upon it month over month. But it was like that whole philosophy that also leads into private practice to say, if you’re not measuring it, you can’t manage it. And if you can’t manage it, you can’t approve it, and you’re going to be stuck, right? In terms of your, you’re going to be defined by what the market tells you. And that’s where I think we struggled in my practice, you know, with COVID, and all these other things happening. And that’s what kind of led me into lead management and more so of almost like, all the different metrics that you need to measure in a private practice to actually get it to improve, because we as surgeons want to improve our work in terms of the surgeries that we do and the patient care that we do. But the actual business side of it also needs improvement if we’re going to make the greatest impact in our lifetime.

Bill Fukui  3:52  

Now, you know, and you talked about, you know, being able to track the data, that otherwise you’re flying by the seat of your pants, right, you’re just a week to week, you know, and when I talked to clients or like, you know, especially during the pandemic, you know, when we talked about the pandemic it was, let’s face it, it was it was fruitful, it was like low lying fruit everywhere. Right? [Yeah.] If you weren’t busy, then something was seriously wrong with your practice, right? In most cases, right?

Dr. Patel  4:21  

Yeah, in most cases, and I think that there’s some hampers in terms of like places to operate. Right. And so it’s like, I think there was a huge, if you didn’t make the transition to non surgical, and you know, get those people in terms of foot traffic, or if you’re allowed to see that foot traffic during certain periods of time. Then I think you profited. On the other side of it. The, when you were handcuffed by not having an operating room or you know, not having a busy med spa or converting over the non, you really struggle.

Bill Fukui  4:51  

Yeah, you know, and I actually have a client that is, that actually uses you guys and actually that’s how we kind of met was through common clients, you, your company never reached out to sell me anything, I actually stumbled on to you guys, I kind of felt like you guys were my own discovery. You know, I stumbled onto you guys. It wasn’t like a trade show or something that you came up and we talked, it was because of a mutual client. And I learned firsthand kind of what you guys were doing. One of the things that, you know, a recent client that we were talking about, is he’s projecting he’s projecting, you know, revenues and need based on revenue. It’s a way of, you know, planning for the future. And we’re talking, you know, even during the pandemic, everybody says, Oh, I’m booked out five, you know, five, six months, or whatever it may be. But we all know that, that’s kind of that, that ebb and flow, it’s, it’s, it’s now starting to taper off what we, this demand that we saw for the past two years or more, is kind of leveled off. And in many cases, we’re also seeing search volume and consumer activity starting to decline. So being able to project and being able to plan and budget and everything else, what you’re talking about, most practices never really thought, you know, they didn’t put the time in. And quite honestly, it was just business was just there, right?

Dr. Patel  6:23  

Absolutely. And I think that most people, you know, have rested on their laurels, right, of like, hey, what they built through it, you know, and they need to continue to produce. But in terms of these productions, if you don’t measure your marketing activity to actual revenue, it’s really hard. Right? And that was the one thing that also like we realized, in our practice is like, we didn’t have marketing attribution all the way to revenue, we only had it through like, click through rates and impressions, what marketing agencies were telling us, but then for some reason, our bank accounts weren’t matching up with all the activity, right? And so then you’re like, okay, well, what do I do, which part of my marketing is working? Where do I need to place more, you know, activity, or energy or effort and the other part is that we just didn’t know, right? And so that was the other reason for creating the software, because it helps give you that transparency in marketing, and from all the way from a prospect to a patient to a procedure.

Bill Fukui  6:57  

You know, let’s let’s jump in real quickly, because we’re talking about a lot of things that practices, many surgeons, doctors, haven’t really even looked at yet, you know, in terms of, we’ve heard about, you know, leads, and that’s what they get from their agencies all the time, this is how much traffic came in to the, to the website, this is what we, you know, got in terms of, you know, click throughs on Pay Per Click advertising or organic traffic, it gives you on, you know, that top of the funnel data. But when it comes into the practice in the form of a lead of, and let me know, what type of lead, you know, are you tracking all the way to revenue? And how does that all work?

Dr. Patel  7:17  

Yeah. And so in terms of leads, we’re tracking them from any website, social media, any form of ads, a billboard, it can be any marketing technique that they’re using in their practice. And if we can tie it to either a specific phone number or a specific pathway, then we can track it, and then give it attribution all the way down to the endpoint of revenue, because we integrate with the EMRs. And so we decided to do that enormously heavy lift of figuring out how to be a universal connector between all these different platforms that people use for marketing and connecting it to the EMR. So that way, we can have those two pieces of data attached. So we can have the clarity, and actually the marketing that’s working and the marketing, that’s not. And sometimes it’s really important to look at what’s not working, so you’re not spending more time energy, effort, money on that activity.

Bill Fukui  8:56  

You know, I would agree with that. I’d also take take the other side, too, if it’s really working, why not spend more on it, right!

Dr. Patel  9:04  

Absolutely, if you put in $1 and it prints you out $4 why not keep doing that, right? And so, it’s, it’s a win, right? And you want to find that in your practice, because you’ll find that, you know, it’s Pareto’s rule of 80/20, right? 20% of your marketing is giving you 80% of your revenue. Now, what 20% – that is, you need to go figure that out. And I think we’ve as practices, we’ve kind of been blind to it or been fortunate enough that we’ve been busy enough that we haven’t had to look at it, but with economical changes in the you know, the digital age of marketing and all the other stuff right now from the social media. I think we’d be fools if we didn’t look at it now.

Bill Fukui  9:43  

Yeah, you know, and you kind of touched on it a little bit now, is the diversity of of how practices are getting, you know, leads and business and it’s changed. There was a time early on when it was just, you know, I’m old school so I’m older than probably every person on this attending this this podcast, but back then it was just yellow pages, you know, you ran yellow pages, you have one thing to market on it was yellow pages, then it kind of turned into more media types of advertising. And then, you know, the internet came around, cable television. Now all of a sudden, you’ve got every digital channel out there, social media platforms. So does your software track, like an all the different, you know, medium channels, even traditional television, radio, that type of stuff?

Dr. Patel  10:42  

Yeah, it can track you to pretty much every single traditional and new age terms of marketing, right? In terms of the older forms of television, and a magazine, all we do is tie a specific phone number to it. So you can see, you know, that part of the attribution. In terms of partial attribution, that’s a piece that no one’s really figured out yet. I know, Google has been working on it for a period of time. And that’s where probably the thing is like, hey, how much can I attribute a billboard to. If they don’t, if they drive by they keep seeing it, they keep seeing it, and then they decide to like, then look you up on the internet, I can’t give that a billboard attribution, because now the only thing that we will see is, then you found our website on the internet and do the next thing. So partial attribution super hard. But I think in terms of first and last attribution, though, those are the two segments that we’re looking at, to get a clearer picture on what’s working and what’s not. And that gives us 80% of the data, right? I think the 20%, we’re missing in terms of the partial attribution. And, you know, we’ll see what happens with Google here in the near future with some of those things. And I think it’ll be interesting to see, like, as AI rolls out, you know, how that impacts a lot of the marketing, in terms of what you’re doing, how we respond, all the different segments in our practice that we can use AI to leverage all those, all those communication channels.

Bill Fukui  12:06  

Yeah, the funny thing was, is when when I was kind of evolving into the digital space, it was hard to track, you know, all that stuff. And you’re right, the general attributions, you know, what we what we ended up doing in, practices are looking to see, if there are ways of measuring, you know, things. Google Analytics is a huge value to helping you overlay the data to someone or when that billboard goes up, you know, the date that that went up, you should be able to see an increase or by, you know, purchase a big display thing with real sell, a lot of the stuff that’s in there, you can see how much is being attributed or if I see a spike in branded search, like my practice name, because on a billboard, you got five seconds, maybe five seconds to capture somebody’s attention. So what are they going to remember, your practice name, may be a phone number, but most likely the name. So you typically see your branded search volume go up, you know, people looking for your name, the business name, doctor’s name, etc, that all goes up almost identically, you can overlay that with, with other marketing and advertising that you’re doing. And you’ll see spikes in things. And if you didn’t, that’s when you can say, Well, maybe it’s not really doing what what I think we wanted it to, but you should be able to see that.

Dr. Patel  13:39  

Yeah. And I think you alluded to a good point, you know, you said five seconds, right? So the latest studies on YouTube, it’s 1.8 seconds, is the amount of attention that you have to capture their attention to it for them to watch the rest of the video. Now, in terms of billboards since you’re driving, you’re stuck, right? You can’t change the billboard, in the new age, there’ll be little, a little swipe, and the billboard will change, right? And it’ll be rapid fire and stuff like that. But you know, in terms of the attention spans have changed, the content needs to be more attractive, has to be more engaging all these different pieces, right to get you, the actual patients, the prospects that you need in the door to get, to turn into patients, and then to do the next thing in your practice, right if they qualify for the next thing in your practice.

Bill Fukui  14:30  

So let me ask, I’m going to back up a little bit. Going from surgeon to now digital marketing, I get the, the, you know, parent, my parents, I grew up in a greenhouse business, right. So when people say, you know, in their early life, I used to be a florist. They’re like, wow, that’s that’s a huge change. But, you know, there’s some overlapping things, or life experiences. Are you going to talk now, are you currently, are you planning on doing, working with Ad Vital exclusively? Are you? You’re still a surgeon, right? 

Dr. Patel  15:09  

Yeah, I’m still a surgeon right now, plans are to do the transition, because ultimately the goal is to help as many providers as possible. And that means doctors, med spas, everybody in healthcare, I think that there’s going to be a two player system, one’s gonna be cash based, and one’s going to be insurance based as reimbursements go down. And I think everyone’s going to need to know these, the, these things in terms of the process that they need to put in place for their practice. So they can, you know, it can be a win-win for the practice, the providers, the patients themselves, you know, the patients improve on communication, the providers, they get their, they get more time back, and the practices can generate more revenue to grow and scale, right over a period of time and actually build the brand. So in terms of things, for me, it’s like, I’m looking at the greater purpose of like, what can I do with my time to help the most people possible, and that is going to be on the Ad Vital versus the surgical side is just one on one, right? And so I can take the skills, leverage, you know, that piece of it and knowing, hey, what does it take from the inside out, because most of these softwares are not built by somebody that’s on the inside, they’re built by people on the outside, what they assume that somebody will need, right? They haven’t lived the life of like, okay, what is my page care coordinator need? What is my front desk need? What do I need, right, to give the patient the ultimate experience in a practice, so that they’re raving about it, and we’re doing the right thing that we love doing every day? Right? It’s on both ends. And so I think that’s where everything is headed. For me.

Bill Fukui  16:40  

You know, and I love the perspective of, you know, boots on the ground, you’re in the trenches, you know, and dealing with the day to day of issues even today, right? Do you even see issues today where, you know, we probably need to be adding this to the, you know, to the platform. And so it’s kind of a never ending thing is is life and our businesses, teams that, that’s going to continue to change. So when you’re talking to, I just want to know, personally, I don’t know of a surgeon who’s done this, right, that went from plastic, successful plastic surgery, private practice you’re doing very well, in your practice? You know, that, I mean, what does your wife, family, what did they say? What is? “Hey, you know, I’ve got this, you know, this Ad Vital company, I’m going to, you know, I’m thinking of just doing it full time.” And they think you’re crazy?

Dr. Patel  17:40  

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know, my mom thinks I’m crazy, right? My wife is extremely supportive, because she sees a greater vision, right, that she sees the why, behind what I’m doing. And you know, what I’ve been meant to do, I think, you know, being it’s like having zones of genius is right. And so I think the software with what I’m doing with it in terms of plastic surgery, aesthetics, med spas, and medicine, is its own genius. For me, I think plastic surgery itself was it’s own genius, in terms of treating patients in that part of it. But now amplifying it one step further, in terms of software. I think, you know, everyone already knew that, like, I was already computer inclined. I mean, I changed things. In each one of the residences, I went to whether it was like, hey, a scheduling, you know, hey, we can’t see the schedule from home. And I’m like, why? Right? I would I’m, I’m bold enough to ask why. And then actually come up with a solution that actually works. And you know, and made it easier for everybody, right? And even when I was in general surgery in the ICU, like, why do I have to write the same note every day? I was just like, what, why am I doing? Why is my hand hurting? There’s no mental, you know, challenge in this. I’m like, why can’t we just put this on a computer? Right, then just adjust it day by day? And they’re like, well, that sounds like a good idea. But how do we do that? And I was like, okay, well, here’s how we do it. And we literally did it. I mean, I did it. And I was an intern, right? And I was rotated to the ICU. And I literally did it and took me like, maybe three days, right. And then from then on, I got an email from the billing of this hospita,l is like major hospital system. They were like, thank you so much. Now we can read the notes. And, and then like three months later, I got an email from the head administrator and was like, our revenue has exponentially increased since they can read the notes and other billing for things that they weren’t billing for before. And I’m like, I had no idea about these things. This was just a byproduct of making it easier in terms of writing the notes, but there’s all these downstream things, right. And so sometimes we don’t see the bigger picture. And I think, in a lot of practices, we don’t see the bigger picture of where the time can be allocated for your staff, outside of the repetitive tasks.

Bill Fukui  19:57  

You know, and I’m going to kind of jump into another area that I think people want to know about. I mean, people have heard about lead management. And I’ve been preaching sales and, you know, as part of advertising and marketing, for the better part of 25 years, right, we can get the phone to ring, we can get emails to come in, but at that particular point, you know, there’s a difference between being mildly successful and wildly successful. And that in is in the follow up, the intake, the devil is in the detail. So give them an, you know, our audience today, give me some, you know, what you’re seeing in terms of when you use this type of platform, and you’re managing it correctly to make better decisions? Have you seen, you know, documented revenue, like when you’re saying, you’ve made this update in this platform, and then you know, now all of a sudden, everybody’s getting in touch with you saying, man, this is so great, even it’s boiling down to revenue, so how does it boil down to revenue?

Dr. Patel  21:05  

Yeah. So I think, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head, like the fortune is in the follow up, and what we realize, you know, by putting our philosophy of measuring to manage, and then that management helps improve. In that piece of it. There’s certain specific time points that you need to follow up with the leads, and also your patients that get quotes. A lot of the money that’s left on tablr is like, you do a quote on somebody, and 42% of people that get a quote from somebody will actually get that procedure done. But we only follow for two weeks. And now if you only follow for two weeks, I did the hard work, I prescribed you what treatment plan that you needed, all the things that you wanted. And now you’re going to take that to somebody else, because you’re like oh, I saw this other advertisement, they seem nice. They’re following up with me, they’re talking to me, they’re calling me. So that’s where the details are right, in terms of like, that fortune is in the follow up. Some of our practices have doubled their revenue, like in a year, right. And they’ve literally added, you know, $2 million to their bottom line over one year, just by putting the processes in place, that their staff are supported. It doesn’t remove the staff completely, but it helps them do the higher level things, right. Ultimately, you want to get to a point where your staff is making decisions. They’re not doing tasks, the tasks, the computers can do them any like, I mean, like Elon Musk, you know, has said it, I think Jeff Bezos has said it, any repetitive tasks will get replaced by a robot or a machine. And so when we think about these practices, and what we’re doing, there’s a ton of repetitive tasks. Even so much of the EMR is like, you know, I can make wild predictions in terms of, hey, what what do I think is coming? I mean, I don’t think there’ll be a use of notes in the future. I think it’ll be video consultations, and it’ll just be a repository of video consults, and plans that you might have. And that’s it. And I think that that would ease up a lot of the documentation, the extra hours doc- doctors have to do for all these things. It’s an easy, [inaudable] right?

Bill Fukui  23:06  

You know, and I think I think the idea of, you know, the repetitiveness, when you add in the human element, there’s always gaps, right? Even though we’re supposed to, you know, like a surgeon, we try to cover everything right, to make sure that we’re covering all bases. But let’s face it, there are times when, you know, I didn’t mention that, or I should have said that or, you know, so those kinds of things happen. One of the things that you mentioned was the follow up may take, you know, you may follow up with them for a week or two weeks. In fact, two weeks is good. I think by most practice standards, I don’t think after two weeks, I think most of these leads fall to the wayside or even consultations. If they don’t book right then, they just fall between the cracks, knowing that the average consumer spends months, if not, as, you know, the society says it could be years before they ultimately build up enough courage have the money or something happens in their life when that zero moment of truth happens. And they’re gonna do something about it. Right. So they spend all this, building up all this emotional momentum, that we we only stay in front of them for a really short period of time.

Dr. Patel  24:23  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s like, you know, people are motivated by two things. Either they’re running away from fear, right, or they’re running towards pleasure. And so in terms of that piece of it, the nurturing and the amount of touch points, you know, it used to say 8 to 12 touch points. Now, it’s gone up to 12, the 15 touch points that are required to get people to do the next thing to see what’s in it for them. Right. It’s like the society is changing, like, what’s in it for me, how can you meet me in the conversation that I’m having? And so now, it’s like, it’s almost like you have to turn into a semi-magician to be like, hey, in what phase of the conversation are you in? So then I can show you the path forward. And it be super simple, super easy for you to live your best life for the longest amount of time. Right. And I think it’s like, you know, before, I think, you know, in terms of billboards and marketing, it wasn’t about meeting people in the conversation, it was to evoke emotion. And that emotion, then started the conversation. Now, I think people are like, they’re past that they become tolerant to that. And so it’s like, now you got to evoke emotion, and meet them in the conversation at the exact point that they are, that they’re either considering it, or they’re just an awareness phase, to actually do the next steps in their, in, in doing that part for them. Right. And this is super important in cosmetics, especially in terms of aesthetics. Because there’s a whole psychology behind it, there’s a mindset piece of it, right? Like there are, you know, there’s books that are written about this Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, right, you can change someone’s nose, and you can make it look perfect on the outside. But if they don’t feel it on the inside, their mentality will not change. So, in terms of what we do as providers, now it’s, it’s amplified. Right, it’s psychology, with the physicality of what we’re doing in terms of the changes.

Bill Fukui  26:18  

So in terms of the follow up that that you recommend, because most practices, you know, when we secret shop, or mystery shop, you know, leads and how they’re handling stuff. And we also see how long do they engage multiple times do they respond with with multiple things? What do you recommend for practices that are, you know, in that, or not seeing the conversions happening, consistently, with their staff? What, what can you do? What can Ad Vital do? And how many follow ups do you recommend? Is that all email, is that text message? How does that all work? 

Dr. Patel  27:00  

Yeah, so there’s different spike points, right. And so we’ve been able to analyze the data. And we’ve actually fed it through machine learning to say, Hey, what are the critical time points, and so critical time points, are day minus one, till day three, right, and having a process where your patient care coordinator that’s going to meet them on the day of the consult, the day before, super important, your no show rate goes down, they put a voice and emotion to the name and the practice. Now they meet the same person. Now they know like, and then when they meet the doctor, they can trust them as well. There’s pre nurture sequences in terms of videos that we use for patients that know me better right before they come in. So that way, my consultation times turn into q&a’s versus me having to talk to them about all the ins and outs of like, what is a breast augmentation? What type of implants are out there? They already know that. So they’re asking, what should I do for me, right, and that is a better conversation. So day minus one till day three, the date, so the day of consult, and then the day after, the day after is the most important time to follow up from your patient care coordinator. And this is usually a phone call and a text message. It’s not an email, right? If they don’t book at that time point, then there’s the next time point that ends up happening in three weeks. And so you have to nurture them between those three weeks, we usually recommend an email a week, right for that period of time. 

Bill Fukui  28:22  

So basically once a week?

Dr. Patel  28:23  

Once a week, an email, right? And then also once a week, a text message. So text message, the open rate is 98%. Okay, versus an email, an email is nowhere near that right in terms of nowadays, because we get flooded in terms of inbox, but a text message 98%. Right. And so the messaging has to be on point, it has to be tied to what they came in for it has to be tied into possibly the objection they may have had, why they didn’t book and how can you help them get over that objection? That other three weeks then after that, we saw another peek at six weeks, right? And so there was the first three days, the essentially, the three weeks, six weeks, and then out at three months. And so we found that 60% of our patients were still opening up our emails at three months later. 

Bill Fukui  29:14  

Oh, my goodness, yeah. 

Dr. Patel  29:15  

And so we’re literally put them on a cadence of once a week, essentially for three months. And then after that, we go to the newsletter that essentially goes out once a month, just to keep them top of mind of saying, hey, these are things that we’re doing and what we’re offering, this might, you know, be of interest to you, right? If we’re going to do any events or anything like that. Any group consultations or anything like that, then we can throw those events in there as well in terms of the cadence that goes out for communication, in terms of email and text message sometimes, also our text message, we’re texting them to a social media post, not just a text message that gives them the information because we want them to then go and see what we’ve been doing on social to see if they find something else that, you know suits them of what can help them right now and right here.

Bill Fukui  30:00  

Right, you know, and, and I think that’s where you’re combining that, you know, information or even that emotion, but also with the engagement part where you’re saying, you’ve got to meet them in the middle kind of thing. So it’s kind of not just, you know, siloing it in, we’re gonna send emails, and this is what we do, because that’s what we used to do years ago, we used to just say, okay, put him in a nurturing campaign, and we just run it. This is actually so much more different because I’m reaching them with different messaging at different stages of the cycle. So there’s a lot more psychology involved with this process, as opposed to just say, oh, well, they didn’t, they didn’t schedule, so we’ll just drop them into a newsletter, right? So, you know, that was old school. Now, all of a sudden, we have the ability, the technology, to manage leads. So if somebody does respond, I don’t want them to keep getting this stuff. What happens? How do we keep, you know, a, a potential patient that said, okay, hey, now I’m good, I’m ready to do something. And how do we turn that? Does that turn off? Or how is that manual? How does that all work?

Dr. Patel  31:09  

Yes, it’s all automated, right? So if they reply, and they do the next thing, right, whether so if they’re replying to say they want to talk to somebody, then it automatically will ping our patient care coordinator, it’ll turn off the automations. And as long as the close actually happens, right, or it puts them into a different nurturing sequence, its like, hey, check back with me in three months, we can put them in a manual follow up that is psuedo-automated, psuedo-manual. So in three months, it’ll automatically ping our staff to say, hey, follow up with this person, they were interested in this, right, if they don’t want all the different, different drip content that’s out there. So there’s all these different ways of, of setting it up, your process is dependent on where you live, there’s different people in different parts of the country, and it’s different, now you have to do something different in New York, versus California, versus Miami, versus Chicago, versus Houston, versus Dallas, every single area is a little bit different of what’s accepted in the culture. Once you can figure out that piece, then you know, what your what your patients want from you. And then then you can build out the system within our software to automatically do that messaging and the other piece. We also, you know, we just rolled out AI this, this, this week, actually, for our practice, in terms of when they respond, the AI starts having the conversation with them. And it’s, it’s, it’s AI powered by human, its not the other way around, right. And so what it is, is the AI starts the conversation, if it gets stuck, it then lets the staff know and the staff takes over in terms of the conversation. Its pretty seamless in terms of that piece of it, but in terms of people wanting to know your location, or all the common FAQ questions, it’s able to give those answers. And then it drives them to an online booking, which they can fill out all the required information. So you’re not having to transfer it down the road. Right? And that’s the whole thing. Every place that you can transfer is a possible, you know, area for a mistake. And so if you have a typo if you have an address error, this and that whatever, there can be some issues down the road in terms of taking payments and the other stuff. And so we’ve tried to streamline the entire thing, because you think about right now, it’s like, you go to get a massage, you literally just go to the online booking piece, click the date and time, they take your credit card, they’ve already take payment, right, what’s so different of what we’re doing, right? There’s not that much difference in in terms of the booking side of it. And so we’ve we’ve trained some AI to do the appropriate conversations to have with patients, in terms of nurturing them to get them to actually book the appointments. And then from there, we’re, you know, in the next quarter or so we’re actually rolling out a back office AI that will know the patient’s story, and then be able to talk to them about that to get them to overcome their objections.

Bill Fukui  33:43  

So are you right now, does or are you planning on incorporating some of the say, on website engagement elements like live chat and adding those features where you’re actually managing they’re all in one system? Or because I know there’s live chat services out there, or bots or stuff like that, that..

Dr. Patel  34:05  

So we already do. Right. So we already do in terms of it’s a web chat, but it’s the web chat is transferred over to a text message conversation. And the reason is that there’s a 14% bump in actual conversion when you go off the computer to someone’s cell phone. [Yeah, no] we’re just using the psychology of that, and especially what was… in the in the field that we do, right. People want to be private and secret. A phone is way more private and secret than the screen.

Bill Fukui  34:31  

Right. Right. Psychologically completely, completely correct. You know, one of the things that I would say are actually several things and that came up in our conversation today. In terms of differentiators. Differentiatiors because I’ve heard of other, you know, lead tracking software, right, there’s there’s a handful of them out there. But some of the differentiators that we’re talking about is It’s not just tracking your leads, it’s what are you doing with them? And how are you helping staff, you know, manage, in some cases, a high volume of leads, right, a high volume, they can’t keep up with it. And yet, this isn’t all they do it low time, it’s the PCC, you know Patient Care Coordinator. There’s also doing all the follow up too, and they’re wearing a lot of hats. And they can always get to the sales side, right?

Dr. Patel  35:26  

Yeah, absolutely. And so it’s like we have certain clients, I have 10,000 leads a month, right. And as the leads come in, we’re able to organize them. So it’s one piece of like getting them in and start responding in terms of conversation, but then organizing them into qualified or unqualified to do the next things that they need to do in terms of the process to get the entire funnel kind of made out. And you know, the funnel concept is probably new for a lot of practices. And it’s just a matter of saying, hey, what do I do in terms of marketing, to get someone to the entire journey of what happens in my practice? And that’s the funnel, right? In terms of the simplest way. 

Bill Fukui  36:04  

No, I think you touched on so many things today. And I hope our listeners will follow up and follow your lead, because I think I recommend you guys. And I get no financial incentives from you. Right? I, I don’t get paid. I’m not incentivized to promote you at all. But I do at every turn, simply because I know it works. I know it works, what you guys do. And you guys have filled a gap, at least from a marketers side, my side, you fill the gap for a lot of our practices that I’ve you know, I didn’t have the ability to, to implement anything like this for a lot of my clients. So, how can how can some of our audience get more information from you? How can they learn more about the details? And even just, you’re great with the education side. Even if you’re not even working with them? Right? Even if they are not your client, you know, how can they start, start on that path?

Dr. Patel  37:10  

Yeah, so we have a YouTube channel on Ad Vital, that I go give free content in terms of what are the best processes? What are the best metrics, like even without the software, how can you use these things to make your practice function better? And the things I wish I would have known, you know, five years ago, right, and so that’s one place. Another place that you can find the details is advitalmd.com. And then also on my LinkedIn as well, you can find Dr. Shitel Patel, and I give away tons of value in terms of a what does it take in terms of marketing, clarity, sales operations, and then the other piece of the attribution, right? Of, what do you do with it? How do you how do you actually make a decision from the data that’s in front of you, because a lot of data can be misleading. And I think a lot of people put all these things and it confuses you, you need to break through the noise to actually, you know, be the, be the needle in the haystack that can puncture the next layer that you want to write. If you keep going at it with a larger piece of objects and stuff, it’s going to take a lot more force, you want the thing that takes the least amount of force, so you can get to the next stage in your practice to grow and scale. And so that’s the main sources that you can find me at. And, you know, appreciate your support Bill, you guys are awesome and MedShark. And for us, it’s always a privilege to work with good agencies, because we we want to show them, that you want to show practices that these agencies are doing their job they’re dragging in the leads, we need to do our part in the process after the leads come in to actually get the whole machine to turn like it should. So that way we can make the greatest impact in our local communities and nationwide.

Bill Fukui  38:51  

Yeah, well, super. Dr. Patel, thank you again, for your time today, I really hope we will have a chance to have a second interview with you, as we kind of, I’d like to get into this AI stuff at some particular point. It’s going to change what we do. It’ll change what you’re doing. You know, maybe somewhere in the near future, we can reschedule and invite people to join us for a discussion on AI.

Dr. Patel  39:20  

Absolutely. I think, you know, for us, like we’re, we’re lacing our entire system with AI. And so I think that’s where everything’s headed, to help support. It’s not to replace, but to support the entire staff. So that way you can you can get staff to make decisions.

Bill Fukui  39:35  

Right. And then I think AI what it also does, is it adapts to, you know, the most important person that, that, that’s our consumers. You know, it learns the patients, it learns kind of that type of stuff. So we’ll have another conversation about that, because I’m all excited about that. But hey, thank you again for your time today and we’ll be chatting with you here shortly. 

Dr. Patel  40:00  

Thanks, Bill. 

Bill Fukui  40:01  

Okay.

MSD Insider  40:01  

Thanks for joining us for The MedShark Insider, with Bill Fukui!  Join us next week for another dive into all things medical marketing. All episodes can be streamed at https://medsharkdigital.com/medshark-insider/