Dr. Vince Leone explains why practices get high no-shows and low-quality patients, then shares his core fix: charge a new-patient appointment fee upfront via credit card during the phone call. He recommends staff training to present the fee confidently, handle objections, and let low-value prospects decline.
Hey, it's Dr. Vince here and a quick training on how to decrease no-shows and increase the quality of your new niche patients. And so this is coming from training from the Profit Niche Mastermind. This is our coaching and consulting program for doctors that are looking to add high-quality and high-value cash services to their practice. So let's go ahead and dive in here. If you're doing paid advertising specifically online— Facebook, Google, YouTube— you're going to want to— well, if you have a problem with it. Now, in some— what I found in the more rural areas of the country, it's not as much of an issue for whatever reason. People are, you know, they just tend to follow through and kind of do as they say. But in the Yeah. You know, middle, medium-sized cities to the, you know, larger cities. I think one, they get more inundated with offers, but two, they just tend to not put as much value on the, whatever the new patient special is and coming into the clinic. So here's how we handle this. And by the way, this takes, you know, you need to train your staff on this. You need to role-play with them and you need to give them the latitude to fail, right? Because what we're gonna do is charge people for the appointment on the phone. Now we have an alternative to that as well, but say your new patient special is $97, right? It's covering your consult, your examination, potentially x-rays, your report of findings. Some doctors throw in the first treatment. So if that's the case, then, you know, at the end of the phone conversation, you know, you've scheduled the patient, right, properly, and then it's just, okay, so Mrs. Jones, because of the high volume of demand for this and because of our— the doctor's time and he's— he or she is quite busy and in the past we have had patients take advantage of this but they don't show up, so that leaves us large gaps in our schedule, wastes everyone's time. So we now have a policy of charging for the new patient special on the phone. We take credit card or we can send you an invoice, whatever works best for you. That will confirm your time. That's it. Now, if you get pushback, I don't want to give my credit card on the phone. Hey, no problem. We work, we have PayPal. Are you familiar with PayPal? Yeah, of course. Okay. We'll send you a PayPal invoice. As soon as that is paid, your appointment will be confirmed, but it will not be held or confirmed until that is paid. How does that work for you? Okay, I can do that. Great. What's your email address? Perfect. We'll get that sent out as soon as we get off the phone. And, and then once you pay that, you will get a confirmation of the payment and a receipt, as well as an email from me that confirms your appointment. I'll also include directions to our office and the paperwork so that you can fill that out prior to coming in. That always saves everybody a lot of time. How does that sound? That sounds great. Okay, so that's the ideal way. More and more people don't really— now the older people are a little more hesitant to give credit cards over the phone. Younger people, and when I say younger, I'm saying like 40s, 50s, Are not so, you know, worried about it, right? Because if there's any fraud on a credit card, it's just like call up, boom, hey, this was fraudulent, no problem, you're not responsible for it. Now, this is going to take, again, some confidence on your staff's part. Okay, so that's where the training comes in, and this is where the latitude to fail comes in. Okay, so in other words, um, tell— give them kind of the authority to let the patient go, right? So we can't be in a scarcity mindset. Oh my gosh, I need new patients, and what if they say no? Well, if they say no to that, they probably were not going to come in anyways, right? You were low value. Now, do you want to be low value in their mind? No. No, because if they won't even pay for their appointment to hold the appointment, then again, most likely they would not come in anyways. Or if they did come in, who knows if they would be a good quality candidate. So I highly recommend implementing this in all your online paid advertising efforts. Now, here's the maybe lower impact way. If your new patient appointment special is high, you know, in that $100, you know, $97, whatever, $67, you could do, hey, so basically do a $25 appointment fee, right? So instead of the new patient special, hey, we just have a $25 appointment fee to hold this appointment for you. It will be applied to your new patient special and any other charges that you incur in the office. I don't really like this one as much because it's like, again, you know, $97 or $67 or $47, whatever the new patient special is, it's not a lot of money, right? And if you act like it's not a lot of money, they will feel like it's not a lot of money. It's just like in the report of findings. If you're going to tell them, uh, tell— yeah, that, well, the price for your care plan is $4,850. If it doesn't seem like a big deal to you, it will not seem like a big deal to them. Now, whether they can afford it or not is a different matter. Some people just don't have the money, right? But the point being is how we dictate the conversation is how the response will come. And you have to be okay with letting people go, right? And so, because if you have enough new patient flow, if you have enough Calls coming in, it really shouldn't be a factor. But regardless, I think the most important thing is, doctor, your time, right? You want to be sitting in front of people that are highly qualified. They understand what you do, who you are, why you're different, right? Now, we achieve all that through our, you know, our marketing assets. But if you're a member, but if you're not, then, you know, you want to be educating these patients before they come in. Otherwise, you're starting from ground zero, and that's a bad place to start. So implement this, get it going, decrease your no-shows, increase the quality of your patients. Um, and, uh, I think you'll, you know, you'll be saving time, you'll be sitting in front of better quality patients, and you will enroll more of those patients into care. So I'm Dr. Vince, uh, from the Profit Niche Mastermind. If you'd like to learn more about what we do, we have a masterclass at drvinceleone.com. You can sign up for just an email and, you know, You'll go ahead and get instant access to that. Hope this has been helpful and take care. Bye-bye.
