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I talk to a lot of healthcare clinics. The one complaint I hear more than any other isn’t about their recruitment, marketing, or staff (though all of these would make a top 5 list).

The complaint I hear the most is that they hate having to sell patients on their plan of care. You didn’t get into this to be a salesman, right?

Well, the truth is, whether you’re a dentist, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, or some other kind of health clinic owner, your growth and influence in your community ultimately comes down to selling your plan of care to patients.

Ugh.

Think about when you have to convince a patient to follow your treatment plan. How much do they have to protest before you give in.  Or even worse, you don't even give your patients a treatment plan.

What are the consequences of this knee-buckling timidity? Four things happen, all of them terrible:

• The patient comes in a few times, irregularly
• They don’t follow the plan you’ve painstakingly developed and that you know is what they need to get healthy
• After one or two visits, they self-discharge, never to be seen again
• Finally, they tell all their friends and family that you didn’t help them

What’s the real problem with all this? Why should it really get you angry? Because they aren’t getting healthy!

It’s really no different than a teacher trying to motivate a lazy student. “You’ve got all this potential!”, they say. Then they try to break down the tasks of working, studying, and learning. But it’s all for nothing. The student doesn’t do any of it, and earns another D minus.

All your best efforts to provide world-class care – and all your marketing efforts – evaporate when that new patient stops coming back because they didn’t ‘catch the vision’ for what you were doing for them.

What you’re about to read isn’t basic stuff. This isn’t marketing 101. It’s upper division – healthcare marketing 401. Only this stuff, they don’t teach in chiropractor school (and probably not marketing school either!).

Get it, use it, and profit from it. Here’s where we start:

As a clinic owner, you know competition is fierce.

You probably worry that your competition are out there stealing your market share in your community.

While you do need to be aware that competition exists, worrying yourself over it is the quickest way to failure.

Instead, the key to crush your competition is to focus on your business.

To stand out of the crowd, really zone in and use the things that differentiate you.

Don’t try to copy the competition, instead be you, be unique.

And clearly explain how your story, brand, and your clinic is different so patients know what they are buying into.

But those three things (differentiation, uniqueness, yet clarity of service) are often hard for most business owners to achieve.

So let's break that cycle today, so you can forge ahead.

Using the following strategies you can become a market leader because one major advantage you have over bigger competitors is you have the power to get creative and adapt quickly with social media.

In this blog article, you're about to discover:

• How to dominate the market with little to no budget
• How to find the gap and fill it
• How to become an influencer in your industry
• Why looking outside your industry is the key to success
• How to get people talking and doing the work for you

Content marketing is really an underestimated marketing tool that most clinic owners aren't using effectively to fill up their patient marketing funnel. 

Many people think it’s a time sucker that doesn’t really return on investment. And while it can certainly seem that way at first, that’s simply the wrong mentality to have because content marketing does work.

It has worked for me and all the million dollar business I have built & sold over the past 15 years.  

And if its not working for you, then you likely have the wrong content or wrong message or wrong medium.  Or maybe you are not converting them over the phones? 

So let's talk about how to use content marketing to attract, engage and convert your online traffic to paying patients at your clinic.

We'll cover:

• Types of content to create
• 3 types of patients in your marketing funnel
• How to get patients in your marketing funnel
• How to nurture patients to become customers

I’m no SEO guru, but even so, I’m really good at it.

My other business, Clinic Supplies Canada, gets 55,000 in monthly traffic. We have 1000 keywords ranking on page 1 in Google. And our website traffic is converting into customers, as we’ve had year after year growth and increasing revenue. 

That’s the type of thing we all want to see in business, right?

Well, it’s all about doing the right things for Google. And thankfully I can help you with that.

In fact, I just came back from a business workshop for the PABC where I had a lineup of clinic owners asking how I can help them rank #1 on Google.

I thought you might be interested to learn the same tips.

So we’re going to cover:

• Why Google is so important
• How to be on the first page with Google
• What to do so Google rewards your website
• And one thing not to overlook

How was your sales last month?

Was it a record month? With record amounts of new patients booked into your schedule?

Or, were you on flat on patient bookings, as usual?

I had record sales for both my businesses because I did 3 things:

1. We focused on client happiness - I spent two whole days with my leadership team discussing how we could accelerate our client’s happiness.
2. We focused on gaining metrics - we discussed how we could get more clients to give us a 9 or 10 on our Net Promoter Score.
3. We mapped out the customer journey - from the very first touch point through the lifecycle of the client.

I really got pumped to DOUBLE DOWN on customer happiness after learning from INBOUND marketing conference in Boston. There was over 19,000 marketers there!!! 

Here is my biggest takeaway: there are still two major sources people rely on for making purchase decisions:

1. Word of mouth
2. Customer references

So even if you have good numbers, you should never stop learning how to make those numbers better, so your competitors can't catch up.

This includes always learning how to make your hiring and training process better - because your team, especially your front desk, play a great role in the customer happiness journey.

So today I want to share how you can hire and train your front desk staff to supercharge your customer happiness, and therefore, supercharge your business growth.

We’ll cover:

• A new trend occurring in hiring front desk staff that has the potential to increase patient bookings and revenue, fast.
• How to flick the switch and turn staff roles into more meaningful work they commit to
• My secret process to hiring the perfect front desk staff
• Why the first month after a hire is crucial and one big mistake to avoid
• Plus, learn how to measure your phone scripts training and figure out if you chose the right one

Ready to jump in? Let’s go...

Let me start by asking you a question: Do you like being put on hold?

Likely the answer is no. Because let’s face it, none of us do!

So… have you stopped to question HOW your clinic is putting patients on hold?

Chances are you haven’t.

That means you’re probably making the mistake most other clinic’s make.

When a caller rings, you (or your front desk) put a caller on hold by saying:

“Hello, this is ABC Clinic, please hold.”

So what’s wrong with this, you ask?

The answer is: everything is wrong with it!

There’s no consideration for the person on the other end, you haven’t used the most basic of customer service principles, and you’ve forgotten one major priority: the new patient caller.

If you are currently using the above script to place patients on hold, as a consequence, a large percentage of those callers will hang up and ring your competitor, especially new patients.

For real! At CallHero, we analyze a lot of phone calls  and our phone call analytics shows that, if put on hold, more than 50% of callers will hang up within the first 3 minutes.

More than 50% - that’s a lot of callers!

The good news is there is an effective way to put callers on hold so you don’t lose them.

Let’s dig into that now and I’ll also give you the exact script I use with the clinic's I mentor. 

Happy satisfied patients. That’s what any clinic owner wants.

But, do you actually know how happy and satisfied your patients really are?

It wouldn’t come as a surprise if you said: “I think my patients are happy but I haven’t measured it.”

What you measure you can manage. Not only that, when you measure, you can use the results to fix problems and drive better clinical performance.  

Thankfully, there is a great tool for measuring patient happiness: The Net Promoter Score, otherwise known as NPS.

NPS can be used to measure overall patient satisfaction. It can be used to identify unhappy customers at each point of the patient journey. It can also be used to identify your biggest fans so you can ask them for referrals or google reviews.

The data you collect from NPS is essential to running an optimized practice.

In this post, you’ll learn:

• How to use the NPS to boost your clinical operations
• How to calculate your Net Promoter Score
• What does the NPS score mean
• The NPS template I use for my private clients

In a sold out business summit I recently ran with over 118 clinic owners in attendance, one of the big factors we talked about was patient discharge.  And on the flip side, better patient engagement.

So let me ask you, does this sound like a familiar situation?

You seem to be getting a good number of new patients but the challenge is you finish the first appointment and YOU WANT THEM  to book the next couple of appointments in advance.

Or better yet, you schedule their entire plan of care so they make it through the entire treatment plan to a full recovery. But...the reality is this rarely seems to happen.

The patient gets to the front desk and says, “Ben wants me to book more appointments.”

The front desk replies, “Ben’s schedule is pretty wide open, what time works best for you?”

Instead of locking down a time, the patient responds, “Actually, let me just check my schedule and call you back later.”

Your front desk simply replies, “Okay" and the patient walks out the door — and they never call. Or, at least, it might take them a while to get to it.

Sure, they had every intention of calling back straight away but they got super busy and life got in the way - everything else seemed like a greater priority. While they may come in intermittently for a few more appointments, they aren’t fully committed to the treatment plan and end up self discharging.

This is really bad news for you and your business. That’s why we’re going to talk about how to fix it — to the point where you can pre-book a patient's appointments BEFORE they have even seen you for their first appointment. Sound impossible?

With the following strategies, you can boost your business by guilding and driving your patients to the end of their treatment plans.

Big, hairy, audacious goals - the type of goals that separate great companies from the rest.

These types of goals can be a little scary, even for the most experienced business leaders. But they are the type of goals that make your business 10 times more successful.

What I am about to share with you here may seem like a big, hairy, audacious goal — nurturing the career of your front desk team and rewarding them with bonuses or experiences.  

Okay, I can hear you already… you’re thinking:

Every year your front desk team asks for a performance review and a raise and you give them the raise without really doing a proper performance review.

You know if you don't, they’ll quit and then you’ll have to retrain another person all over again, which is going to cost you even more (in both money and time). Unfortunately, most front desk positions turnover every 2 or 3 years, so you’re always thinking — the longer you can hang onto them the better.

But, it doesn’t have to be that way...

That’s exactly why I’m going to challenge you to take on the big, hairy, audacious goal of nurturing the career of your front desk team and rewarding them with bonuses.

I’m going to show you:

• Why looking at your front desk team from a totally different perspective will instantly change the outcomes of your business
• How to measure front desk performance on a daily and weekly basis for rapid business transformation
• How to set definable, achievable goals that yield results
• How to give front desk staff a real stake in the outcome of your goals so you gain and maintain their commitment
• How to calculate the bonuses and rewards you intend to offer so you don’t break the bank

Once you know all this, you won’t lose your front desk team members, ever.

Are you ready to take on the audacious challenge?

Let’s dive in...

Mary Jane, otherwise known as The Phone Lady, has worked with over 400 clients training over 10,000 individuals how to communicate more effectively on the telephone.

As soon as you get a chance, I'd recommend you watch the recent webinar we had with The Phone Lady covering: How to Get More Patients by Fixing Your Call Performance.

Recently Mary Jane and I caught up for a phone chat about some of the simple phrases people can use to get more out of their conversations.

One thing we know is: Call performance is an underestimated skill.

But when it comes to call performance, the words that are spoken can literally make or break your business. Think about it.

Your front desk only has to say the wrong thing and you'll never see those patients again. This goes for new patient callers or dealing with existing client appointments, issues and problems.

All this can add up to big fat mistakes that close down the channels of communication. Not to mention, they cost you time and money. And these mistakes not only affect you but leave these patients upset that their problems weren't solved, which isn't so great for your reputation either.

While everyone is far from perfect, there are a number of phases to keep in mind that can rescue you should things go bad. And often, all it takes are some simple words to clearly express yourself, inspire conversation and build effective relationships.

Today's post will cover:

• 5 powerful phone scripts you need to include in your front desk phone training
• How to build relationships with patient callers over the phone
• Plus get instant access to the phone training webinar by The Phone Lady