Tired Of Crappy Leads From Facebook? Here Is A Proven Alternative

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Matt Scologli with the Practice Profit System, and welcome to another weekly installment of our podcast. And, uh, today I have John with Leading Response, and John's going to tell you what that is. But here's the number one problem for every client that I have, every doctor, med spa owner, is new leads, getting butts in the seat. And that's what John does. And John's going to talk to us about how you use dinner events, evening events, to drive the revenue into your practice. Uh, I have a couple of my clients that have done this. We're having some Really solid results. So, John, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you. And the funny thing is, is John and I are doing this again because we had a technical issue last time we did it.

Thanks for having me back again, Matt. We're sales guys. Technicality and technical stuff is a bane to my existence. I don't even know how to work my iPhone.

Yeah, so, okay, so tell us about Leading Response. What do y'all do?

Okay, so we are— we're the largest B2C companies in the country for— you want to meet people on a favorable basis that you're looking for bigger cases. We work with financial advisors that are helping people maximize their retirement or their investments. We work with senior living facilities. The spend is going to be $5,000 or more, not covered by insurance, fee-based, or rolling over assets. We do dinner events all over the country, and we're consistently filling 2 or 3 nights with 25, 30 people in medical that have at least $100,000 in the bank and can afford treatment on a cash basis.

Okay, and when you say $5,000, you're talking about it's $5,000, that's the average price of what you're— you want your doctors charging?

Yeah, that would be the minimum. I work with everybody from, uh, I have dental practices, they, they're getting $30,000, $40,000 for a full arch dental implant. procedure, plastic surgeons, regenerative and pain, probably our biggest growth area. $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 regenerative medical injections, anything not covered by insurance, and you wanna make sure that these people can afford treatment. We have over 25 years experience and a million seminars marketed, one of the best in the country for getting you consistency pretty much 12 months out of the year.

Okay, so let's kind of walk through the steps. Like, I want people to understand what this is, and I want to understand some of the keys. Why does— first and foremost, why does this work so well?

It surprises me. I've been doing this now—

That's not really a ringing endorsement there.

No, no, no, it surprises me that, you know, 24 years into this as a career, it's still vibrant. There's nothing like live. We're all getting out of COVID now and people wanna go out and they want, they're interested. Let's just stick to medical. You know, if they're in pain, they wanna get out of pain. They're maybe confused or, you know, getting different pieces of information. So our doctors will send them, we'll do the marketing for them. They send them an invitation to a local restaurant to learn about new advances in medicine on how to reduce pain or discomfort. So it's a compelling topic. And it's almost like dating. You know, when I coach my doctors, I go, we're gonna send you out on a date with 25, 30 people each night, and you gotta be able to date. So most dates could happen at a restaurant or a party, a neutral site. We're just ensuring that if you're gonna be feeding people a steak dinner, that they can afford the treatment. But we're helping doctors leverage their time talking about something that's a dominant need, and everybody in the room has an interest the way that we, vet them, and they do well. We have doctors that are scheduling a lot of appointments from these dinner events and earning 15-20x on, on their investment with us.

So let's walk through this. So these are direct mail pieces, right?

Direct mail. Direct mail, believe it or not, still has some distinct advantages over digital, but we're also a Facebook marketing partner and a premier Google partner. We invest over $10 million annually on behalf of our clients for those mediums, but There's something just about direct mail that, you know, people 50 and older are still going to their mailboxes. They like to get invited out to events like this. And we're just, again, making sure that the way our vetting process on who to invite on behalf of our practices, that they know, the doctors know in advance that they can afford the treatment, whether it's $5,000, $15,000, you know, $30,000 or more.

You know, what's interesting is You know, you know this. I'm a long time. I originally got started in the direct mail space, right? That's well after the golf business. But when I first started my first entrepreneurial business, we did direct mail, and I'll never. I will never forget this as long as I live. And so the guy that mentored me was like, "Hey, you got to do these direct mail pieces." And I was like, "What? 2001." Because I remember I started right about 9/11, and um. So it's 2001 and this guy's like, I want you to do these direct mail pieces and you do them every 14 days. And they were like in orange envelopes or lime-colored envelopes. And we handwrote the outside and it was this letter with like big headlines and everything like that. And you highlighted the thing and we were mailing to people that were in pre-foreclosure. And I was like, this is never going to work. But every single Sunday night, my then wife and I would sit on the master— you know, we'd get the kids to bed and we would do these letters and we would have them ready for the week. Within 14 days, I got my first deal. I did $90,000 off my first mailing. It was so successful, John, I stopped doing it.

Similar background. I was a loan officer in St. Pete, Florida, early '90s, making a whopping $25,000 a year. And I had a buddy that worked for a big insurance company, and he kept coming to see me, and it's like, you'd be great, you want to sell insurance? I go, I don't know, I'm like 28, and Half of my friends are selling insurance and I know they're all broke and I didn't have any, uh, you know, again, they call it a social network to try to sell insurance to. And he says, no, we do direct mail. I go, what is that? And he showed me, and then he showed me his paycheck. So I quit the banking job and worked for this company. I cashed in my 401, I did a mailing, and I got 300 leads. And to me, it's been a drug. And I went from making $25,000 in a year to $5,000 in a week. And I did it. And then I eventually got tired of insurance and evolved into this. Founder of our company at the time was the one that was doing my direct mailers. And to me, it's just, it's surprising that this is still working, or it's humbling. And there's a lot of reasons. Like, if I mail you this invitation, this is one of our financial seminars.

Mm-hmm.

You know, you're gonna go to your mailbox, you're gonna open it, you're gonna read it, and then you're gonna take action. You know, these are— for our medical events or financial, people are spending 10 minutes with us on the phone and talking to an operator. We're verifying their contact information, we're asking them pain level, interest level, and timeline questions. They remember doing that, and that's the key with direct mail as opposed to— just going on Facebook or responding digitally where, you know, 30 seconds, they're done. They may not remember registering. That, the way we integrate the data, execute these campaigns, and the fact that live events, you know, it's not like you go to a Ruth's Chris and go, I had a great dinner, we'll never go back there again.

Right.

Repeatable and it's scalable, but it's just, yeah, I've been very blessed to have a career where, you know, direct mail gets bashed a lot. you know, it's not sexy, it's old. But, uh, one of my favorite wrestlers, Hulk Hogan, said, uh, he always used to say, hey, Space Mountain, it's the oldest ride in the park but still has the longest line. And that's how I feel about direct mail with live events.

Well, I'm trying to think of somebody that was in our generation that still looks great. Like, you know, I mean, it's old, you know, Farrah Fawcett or whatever, or Raquel Welch still looked great for you. Like, the bottom line is, is that Sorry if that was sexist to anybody. You have to be careful these days, right, John? Insert Cary Grant for the women. But, you know, the reality is, is that it still works, right? And, you know, the interesting thing is that people don't realize there's less competition in direct mail today. So as an older— and I literally, up until— actually, up until the divorce, I had, um, I had big file folders of direct mail, right? Because I'm an old-school direct mail guy, copywriter. And the interesting thing is that, you know, back then we would get amazing responses. 10, 15 years ago, we'd get amazing responses and we'd be in the mail with like 30 other pieces every single day— bills, mailers, all these different things. Today, when we go to the mailbox and we go like every 3 days, we'll have 20 pieces over those 3 days, right? Versus going every day when we got 30 and there's less competition. Which means that you have more face time with your potential prospect, right?

Mm-hmm. There's more— there's— it's a direct connection. Again, if I mail you this letter, you're gonna get it. Yep. If I try and reach you through search or through Facebook or TikTok, you may get it, you may not look at it. It's all about the modeling. Again, this is what I call it, you know, direct to pen, where We're targeting for our practices potential patients of a certain age, certain income, certain wealth. It's about executing direct mail. It's also about data, which is very important. Any company, Matt, that your listeners— that won't tell you where they get their data from, don't use them.

Yeah.

We're an $80 million company, 150 employees, owned by private equity. strong financials, strong EBITDA, but we're not big enough to procure, you know, talking about $400 or $500 million, you know, consumer records, to be able not only to procure those but to update them every month. So we work with companies that are tied to the credit bureaus. Uh, you ever see that commercial on TV? John Cena, the wrestler, is like, hey, I just improved my credit score on the back of—

Of course.

So that's a company called Experian, who we've used before. These companies that are doing your FICO scores for your loan applications, some of them own or they'll work— they own subsidiaries or they'll work with companies where they're able to take all of this data and they have on you and me like 50—

Oh, got it.

Or more. They know if you're married, they have, you know, they know what your income is, they know if you have kids, home value. They're not allowed to give exact data, you know, they're not getting bank records or IRS records, but In America, very sophisticated in direct marketing. They'll take these data and they'll build a profile on you. And we're one of the largest renters of names. We went into records a month, so we have access to certain data and services other companies don't have. But we're, again, we're procuring this data which is 90% accurate, that if you want somebody that's 55 and older with $100,000 income, half a million in the bank, 90— it's going to have a 90% accuracy rate. So we're taking a range. Typically, when I'm doing elective medical campaigns, you know, dental, regenerative, plastic surgery, it's 40, 50, and older in age, minimum about $50,000 income, you know, $100,000 in savings. And that's why it aligns with these targeted cases. If you have doctors that are just doing weight loss or hormone therapy, you know, for 15 $102,000, probably not the company. Or, you know, you can probably send a nice postcard to a Red Lobster and get a crowd. But we excel in helping if it's minimum $5,000, but $8,000, $10,000, $30,000 or more. We're able to consistently get results not only through the direct mail, but through our call center and how we vet these potential patients that, you know, that they can afford the treatment and you know why they're there. You know what their concerns are, their interest level, and their timeline. And then the rest of it is up to the practice. They gotta have a good experience, a restaurant, you know, the restaurants are critical. Hardest part of my job, we fed in 2019 over 100,000 meals at Ruth's Chris through all our seminars. We couldn't get a contract with them, so we have Fleming's.

Fleming's.

Fleming's, all that business that we were sending to Ruth's Chris, and we're sending it to Fleming's, but restaurants are critical. The comfort level, the best time to hold these are during the lunch or dinner hour. And it's gotten to, you know, I spend a lot of my time motivating doctors. I bring it back to a first date. You know, if I go out on a date, I'm gonna, you know, meet at a restaurant and see if we like each other. If we do, then, you know, maybe I'll cook for her someday, or we'll go on a private date. But these people that are coming to these seminars to see the doctors, Matt, they're concerned, they're in pain. They've come to the They just don't wanna be sold. Their thought process is, if you hold it in an office or a hotel, they're gonna lock me in a room. They're gonna make me schedule an appointment that I don't want to, or they're gonna make me get my checkbook out. But when you have it at a Fleming's, they get the invitation, they go, well, we're not gonna close Fleming's down on their behalf. And then when they walk in the room and see 25, 30 people, they relax.

Yeah.

Like, you ever get invited to a party You always show up an hour, an hour and a half late because you don't want to be the first.

The only one there.

Yeah.

Yeah, because it's the equivalent. You have it in an office and you show up an hour late and there's 2 people there. You know, you know that it feels like plating. The consumer feels like, wow, it doesn't have enough value, there's nobody here. And then the doctor is like, I don't want to talk to 2 people. They want to talk ideally 20, 25, 30 people in the room because you have that group dynamic, you have that consensus, especially when a doctor is doing a phenomenal presentation. They have the fear of missing out. So there's a lot of reasons why we have recommended in our best practices restaurants, ideal days and times. It's because it works and it's consistent and it's in the doctor's best interest to follow.

So I want to talk about the list because, you know, the list is everything. And my longtime— we talked about this before— my longtime mentor is a guy by the name of Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy's like the guy, he's one of the guys in direct response marketing You know, and I've had the, I've had the good fortune of working with famous copywriters. A lot of these doctors won't know who they are, but guys like Gary Halbert and John Carlton and people that you probably know.

And we know Dan. He's the dinner seminar man.

You know, how much money did you spend with Dan? I'm like, at least a quarter of a million. How much did you make? Probably $25 million. Like, the guy made me a lot of money. And the thing that he taught me, and this was again 2000, probably 2003, 2004, is it's all about the list. You know, people really don't understand in direct mail That the list is everything, right? Like, the piece is really kind of almost secondary, right? But it's list and offer, or as Kennedy liked to say, match bait to critter, right? So, talk a little bit about the power of that list.

So, the list is critical, not to, you know, not this way. Seminar marketing is 20, 25 little things, but probably 7 or 8 of those are on the list. And even I'll have clients call me and go, hey, I got a list. Can I get a discount if I use it? I go, well, where'd you get it from and how old is it? And they go, I got it from another company I mailed with and it's about a year old. And I go, you're wasting your money. 'Cause lists go, first of all, list companies seed the names. So they protect themselves. You never own a list. You either have a—

Always rented.

Or you have an unlimited annual licensing agreement. And it's happened, it does happen where clients will go mail— we'll give them the list and they'll mail somewhere else, and then they get in trouble with the list company because they violated the list agreement. But even more importantly, a list can lose 10-20% of its effectiveness on, you know, annually, because people are moving, people are getting divorced, people are dying, all that. So Our lists are 97% deliverable. We bump up our list that we get through our data partners with the post office's national change of address. So every time you, you market mail, you get a fresh list. Even here, I'm in Florida, when people go back up north for the summer, if they have a forwarding address, we know that. So you're not marketing to, you know, maybe 5-10% of people that are up north. So Invest in your list, get a fresh list every time, and then make sure again, find out who the data partner is, you know, how they're getting it, what sources, and even the demographics. We have probably over 100 different filters that we can use when we're marketing to potential patients. The key is, you know, we can get lifestyle if they're health conscious, if they're into exercise, those things. The idea is to add some of that, but the foundation should be age, income, and liquid savings for cash. I've had clients that— I just had one down in Orlando where we took a list that had 20,000 people and then they put all these filters in it and it went to 300 names.

Yeah, yeah.

Never gonna be that. You have to have— like, I sold insurance and insurance works on the law of large numbers. You have to have a big enough sample size. Where we excel is not only on the list, the execution of the mail. We're one of the best companies in moving mail. I have clients, we need 30 days, you know, where else can you get— give us 30 days for the mailing to be executed from Tampa and then getting over 100 people in Seattle over 3 nights?

Yeah.

It takes a very specialized company. We're the only approved vendor for Merrill Lynch. They— their advisors and financial have to use us. We have contracts with Prudential Securities, some of the largest. We couldn't go to Merrill Lynch and say, oh well, it works in Tampa but it's not going to work in Charlotte, or something like that.

Right.

It has to be scalable and work nationally. And again, there's like 25, 20 little things, Matt, to be done. Data is critical, but printing, production, and meeting timelines, getting it in the homes with 12 days Notice that takes a very specialized company. Anybody can do mail. People listening could probably get the same list companies that we're using, but just like Mercedes and BMWs, they're not—

They're not going to know the selects, John. Like, this is the thing, right? Like, I'll use this as an example. So let's just— I get asked, people, oh, we got to get leads and we got to get leads coming in fast. Okay, great. What are our options, right? We can do direct mail, we can do Facebook, we can do radio, we can do TV. And they're like, well, I need leads right away and I wanna do Facebook. What they don't understand is it's gonna take about 30 days for you to really get leads flowing in, okay?

Mm-hmm.

Now, everybody that has an agency will tell you, oh, we can get leads for you right away, but right away means 30 days. We gotta do creative, the account's gonna go on and off, on and off, on and off. We gotta start slow, we gotta warm up the thing, we gotta— but there's very low intent on Facebook, right? Facebook has a place, right? Facebook is like a member of the baseball team. There is a place on the team for them, right? They're not going to be involved in every play, but they're important. But there's very— so there's very low intent with a lead off of Facebook. The difference in this is still it's going to take 30 days, right?

You get people with higher intent from the exact process. The only downside to direct mail is the timing, you know. Yeah, we got to create it. I said it's almost like making— probably get a, you know, microwave something or other, like, and have it in 30 seconds. But if I want a really good pie or a cake, I gotta mix it, bake it, get it in there. Like this, we need a week to get the art, you know, and the creative where the client agrees. They gotta sign off on the data. We gotta print it. We've gotta go through the postal system. We drop ship everything. We fly it out there. We don't trust the post office, you know, to go from Tampa to Seattle. So we do their job for them, but that takes some time. And then you wanna have in-home 12, 13 days, and it comes in over a course of a week. It's not— we send it out standard class. Why pay the government anymore just to get it there in 3 or 4 days where we do their job for them? We get it done right. There's no different response. But yeah, that's the only downside. And to comment on Facebook, we are big believers in Facebook. We're a Facebook marketing partner. The difference with what we do, we have— we're renting millions of records a month on the mail side. We're integrating that into our Facebook profiling. Plus we have a database of a few million responders that have gone to these millionaire financial seminars. The quality of our Facebook, a lot stronger than companies that aren't a Facebook partner or don't have financial data to append. But the difference, if I have clients that we do boost campaigns on top of the mail, if they wanna pack the rooms in, I go, you need to call everybody, especially the Facebook people. And the faster that you call somebody from a Facebook lead that's attending a seminar, the more likely the show rates are gonna be.

Yeah, there's a— one of my clients does about $200 grand a month. They did $220,000 last month, and they target women, and they do a lot of online. They probably generate about 60% of their leads via— 50 to 60% of the leads via various online. But it doesn't matter if they're coming from online, TV, radio, whatever. They have a mantra in their company: 10-minute callback. When they call in When they get a lead, however they get a lead, they have to call them back within 10 minutes, right?

If you're out of sight, out of mind.

Otherwise, you have a call center, right? So these calls don't go into the doctor's office, they go into your own calls. Talk about that.

Yeah, that's critical because I have some of my best clients are spending over $100,000 with me and I can't get them on the phone, you know, because they're practicing medicine. So Imagine if you send a mailing out or Facebook and then you gotta call the switchboard at the office. Like sometimes you're on hold 3 or 4 minutes.

Yep.

You're gonna get a lot of hangups. So we have a 24/7 American-based here in Florida call center. And what happens is on the invitation, we have the 800 number and then there's a 6-digit event code. The operator's gonna ask them for the event code and that goes right to the client's event. And then that's really where we excel. We're gonna keep them on the phone for 6 to 10 minutes. We already have their address and everything, but we're gonna verify their address. We're gonna verify their email, their cell phone, and then we're gonna run them through. If we're doing pain, we find out what type of pain they're in, back, knee, shoulder, hip. We find out the pain level. Then we find out the interest level on a scale of 1 to 10, and then we find out the timeline for treatment. So, After that, that's when— and if it's mail, I recommend 72 hours within, because there could be a, you know, the invitations arrive 12 days before and you want to transition the relationship away from us and over to the practice. And that way they're not going to feel— I can understand digital if it's not tied to an event, you know, 10 minutes, otherwise they're going to forget.

Right.

But this, if you call too much, you're going to be intrusive. But hey, just a A 72-hour reminder call, I mean follow-up call, say, hey, thanks. You— and I always recommend, you know, they're not going to know the practice. You're calling about the Fleming's— I'm calling about the Fleming's event on pain. Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. Say, hi, I'm John with McCloskey and Associates, looking forward to seeing you. Please get there, you know, registration a half an hour before. There'll be appetizers. And, oh, by the way, you said that you had knee pain and you, uh, you're about a 9 out of 10 in pain and You told our call center that you're a 9 out of 10 in interest level and want to get treated in 3 months. You know, what's going on? Oh yeah, you know, uh, golfing. I miss golfing with my buddies, and we have a house in Arizona for the winter, and I'd love to be able to golf with them again. Make sure that you get there early. And why don't we schedule a consult for you right now? You know, we still want you to come to the dinner, right? But Dr. Gululi is going to be speaking to 90 people here. We don't want you waiting in the back of the room And it takes 2 weeks to go in and see them. Let's get you scheduled now, no obligation.

Right.

So all of that process, you get a chance to bond with people, stay top of mind. And I do have doctors that schedule a lot of appointments before the seminar with the people that score high. And it doesn't happen as much, but there may be somebody that has knee pain. They're at a 4 in pain level, their interest level's a 2, and they want treatment in a year. Our call center does all of that. Wouldn't you rather know now than when they're in your Fleming's dinner? A lot of our events matter waitlisted, so there may be some more 9s and 10s on the waitlist that you can politely uninvite the people that score lower. Just because you send them an invitation, it's not a written contract you have to feed them. It's your event, so you can— we can help you optimize the room. And it's a simple process that we spent 25 years perfecting, and it's the most consistent for People that you have no relationship with, but you want to make sure they can afford treatment and then they're in your room for the right reasons. That's what I got.

You know, and it's— this is such a great topic too, because— and I'm so passionate about it because, you know, if you look at the cost of doing a Facebook campaign, okay, and I'm just— I'm using Facebook as an example because so many people do it and yet they're so disappointed. But if you look at the cost of running a Facebook campaign, You may only be spending in the beginning $20 a day, but in reality, you'll eventually need to spend $50 to $100 a day. But let's make the math easy, say it's $100 a day, okay? So that's $3,000 right there, and then you're gonna spend a $2,000 management fee on top of that. So the problem is, is that people generally don't do the math when they think about what they're spending in Facebook because they go, oh, it's only $100 a day or $50 a day. If it's $50 a day, then it's $1,500. But you're still at $3,500. So, you know, like for the mail pieces, and I'm not gonna hold you to this, but give like what, you know, to fill, not counting the cost of the dinner, to fill 2 rooms. We have one of my clients just did it, filled both rooms, 30 people. Like what are you gonna have to spend in mailings to do?

How much you gonna have to spend on the mailings? I tell prac with the meals, if you're looking for, you know, $8,000, $10,000 cases with people that have at least $100,000 in the bank, you're looking at about $5,000 Per event, including the meals, and we're about $3,000, a little less than that. We also have a guarantee program where they don't have to pay us per piece, they can pay us per reservation, and we'll guarantee that we'll get whether it's, you know, 20, 30, or 100 reservations, or they'll get money back. We have a 50% guarantee or 100% guarantee on dinners and lunches. Let's say they want— most popular one is a 50% guarantee on dinners. They're gonna give us about $6,900 and we'll guarantee 60 reservations with husband and wife count as 2, and it's on the gross. What we do is we mail to as many people that we feel would fill the requirement. And let's say it's a week before and we're at 50 people, then we'll deploy Facebook with the integrated financial data. And if we only got 5 extra people there, we would owe them 50%. of, I believe it's $115, so $57.50, we'd owe them $300.

Yeah.

It's like insurance. We're the insurance company. If we're— the risk is being transferred to us, you know, we've got to make sure they use the right restaurant and the copy. But conservatively, figure about $4,500 to $5,000 per event. Now that's getting you in front of 25, 30 people. That's 15 to 18 potential patients, and the rest of it is that first date. that are compelling and engaging. And this is important. The doctors that don't do well are up there practicing medicine, or they're trying to impress people with their medical knowledge. That's not how it works. That you wanna definitely be credible and a medical expert, but the doctors that make an emotional connection, are engaging, have good office conversion metrics, and are presenting to the outcomes. Yeah, there has to be a little salesmanship. You're not there to educate people or to feed them. You're getting there to instill value that they come in for a one-on-one consultation and you know exactly why they're there. But I recommend having some live patient testimony.

Yeah.

Live video is good, but live is even better. For the doctor to tell these people how they can reduce their pain or discomfort is one thing, but if you have Joe Smith who just got cellular injection And is now completely out of pain and with a before and after the knee, and now he's golfing with his buddies, that resonates so much farther. And I have a huge challenge sometimes with practices that they don't want to feed their patients, or they call them or bother them. Like, you can actually make money from your patients. Invite Joe and say, hey Joe, bring a friend, bring one of your golfing buddies that might be in pain, and Joe's gonna do the selling for the doctor. So We coach them through this, Matt. There's— I do what's called a night-of briefing just as a courtesy because I want to make sure they're doing the events right. I learned the hard way. First started this division, I had a client in Tampa doing a stem cell seminar, and I said, whatever you do, don't feed people while you're speaking. And they flew this poor doctor in from Dallas to Tampa, and halfway through the presentation, all the steaks went out, came out, and like nobody's listening to the doctor. Anytime you compete with food, food's going to win. So I actually will coach practices that have never done a live dinner event before logistically on how to run these from what we've learned in financial and our other verticals.

You hit a great point because, you know, doctors want to be technical. And I tell all my clients, remember, every purchase you've ever made in your life is emotional. Don't believe me? Just look at marriage, right? What's the failure rate on marriage? 55%. Widely known information. But yet what does everybody do?

They get married. Why?

Because they're in love, right? I mean, Right. You and I are both divorced. I'm getting married in 2. I've decided to jump and then I'm doing it again. Right. And what's the failure rate on second marriages? 65%. But I'm doing it again. Why?

Because I'm in love. It's 80 down here in Tampa Bay.

So it's 80. Well, yeah, there's probably more distractions. I don't know.

I got one more in me, you know, one more marriage, but not today.

Yeah. No, I have— Katie is my fiancée and I've told her, I go, this is it. And I told my kids, I go, if this one doesn't work, Dad will not be getting— Dad may go sugar daddy, but I ain't getting married again.

I believe in love and I believe you. I do.

So how do people get in touch with you? What's the best way for them to get in touch with you and learn more?

So, want to give me a call. What I offer is a complimentary strategy session, and I'll have data around your practice about how many potential patients. I'll have what restaurants have worked, which ones haven't in your area. And then I'll have— I give up— all my presentations are up-to-the-minute results. I'll have regenerative or other types of elective seminars that have been done in this week. So I offer that, a complimentary 30-minute strategy session, no obligation. Call me at 813-885-8270 or leadingresponse.com. Just go there and click the medical, the healthcare division, and then it'll get to me.

But tell them your number again. What's your phone number again?

813-885-8270.

885-8270.

8270. Okay. And he's in beautiful sunny Tampa, St. Pete.

Love it down here. Too many— don't move, everyone's coming down here now. So highways—

Yeah, like I don't tell people Charlotte's awesome. I'm like, that sucks, you don't want to live here because it's gotten insane. I mean, when I moved here 20 years ago, it was a much different city. But oh yeah, and I'm just going to say a couple things. So, you know, what's really interesting to this is that You know, when COVID hit, I had a couple of doctors that were doing events. They did transition to doing Zoom, but they're back out doing it because really, you mentioned this at the beginning, doing these Zoom dinners, quote unquote Zoom, that's not a thing anymore. You see those numbers dropped or what's going on there?

So great question. We had, uh, obviously COVID impacted restaurants and dinner events. We have a platform that Superior to most out there. It's called Webinar Connect. But we were relying on that heavily during, uh, during COVID We're actually— the challenge with webinars, I was getting 30, 40 reservations for a medical webinar, but the show rates are like 20, 25%.

They're awful.

What we found is, and we have a guaranteed webinar program, we found that if you have a dinner delivered to them a half an hour before the broadcast, the Show rates go to 80, 85%. But there is nothing like live. And like, I love Broadway, I like concerts, and people want that in-the-moment, in-the-present feeling. So people don't know this, but we really only had about a month or two shutdown when COVID hit, Matt. And I noticed like South Carolina and the southern states, they started to open up, and the results have been pretty consistent since.

Yeah.

You know, May or June of '20. Now it's back, and I'm consistently filling rooms all over the country in markets that doesn't matter what the politics are or the media, that people want to come out live. We do have a webinar. What I'm doing is we're actually giving you a free webinar. You market 2 events with us, you can pre-record a 30— up to 30-minute webinar. We'll market it alongside with the dinner events. And a good webinar now, you know, we'll fill up the rooms, you know, 30 people a night. We may get 6 or 7 people on a webinar. I have clients that market with me 2 or 3 times a month. You know, that may be 100 leads they didn't have to pay for, for people that want to go and watch a virtual webinar. You know, you give them a gift card. But the nice thing about our platform is it takes attendance. It's browser-based. You don't have to download Zoom or Teams. And you can ask questions that they'll answer, keep them engaged. And most importantly, we can hyperlink right to the scheduling calendar to schedule an appointment right from a webinar. But yeah, if I only have one chance to earn a doctor's trust, live events.

Yeah.

They're full. It creates a sense of urgency. There's so many different reasons or the dynamics of live, especially for the bigger cases, but No, we offer both. Yeah.

And the last thing I'll say is, you know, there's a— when you're buying somebody a meal, right? You and I are both fans of Robert Cialdini, wrote a great book called Influence. Actually, I had Cialdini speak at one of my events 15 years ago. I've been a Cialdini devotee for decades, right? And, you know, one of the key things of influence is reciprocity, is giving somebody a gift. And, you know, we found this in our ED clinics. So our ED clinics was really simple. Come to the clinic. Get a test dose or meet with the doctor and get a test dose. If you don't see results in 12 minutes, you owe us nothing. That's our guarantee to you. And we injected Trimix into the penis and we gave guys an erection in the office. Now, if you haven't had an erection in 2 years, like the only reason why you don't buy is you don't have somebody to use it with or you don't have any money. Those are the only 2 reasons why they didn't buy. And the first one they could usually justify and they would go, you know, do something on their own. So without getting too graphic, right? The point is, is that we were triggering that first thing. What Cialdini talks about is reciprocity, that gift. And the promise of the meal and a nice meal at Ruth's Chris or Fleming's or something like that, or Amagiano's, that really triggers something subconsciously in their head, doesn't it, John?

It does indirectly. It's tied to creating a different experience than, you know, a non-event or just come to the office. But yeah, there is an obligation inherently that if they're going to feed me or they're going to provide this gift or courtesy, Then I need to reciprocate. The key to that though, Matt, is the quality of the presentation and the office conversions. And I have, as you mentioned, Dr. Cialdini, I have one of my top clients is a dentist actually in Charlotte. He is a certified Cialdini trainer. He actually took his training and he teaches dentists the Cialdini method of how to ethically schedule and increase conversion. just using influence and persuasion. And he even takes it a step further. He loves wine. So you go to his— he calls them steakhouse seminars. The first thing you do is a wine tasting with some of his own private bottles. But done in the right way, there is that reciprocity and it'll help you convert. But again, if you ignore the fundamentals of conversion or too boring and things, that goes away in a heartbeat. They already feel like they Have reciprocated by sitting through your boring presentation. Yeah.

Well, this is great, John. Give them your phone number again. So I want people to give you a call. Look, I'm going to tell you right now, I got a couple of clients that are utilizing John. I'm actually getting ready to do some stuff with John. We're just getting the results in. People are filling the rooms. Again, at some point, you know, you got to be good in the presentation, which if you're a client of mine, I'll coach you through that. I'm a former front of the room pitch guy. I did 150 days a year for 5 years. So I can sell. I can sell from a stage. I'm not going to lie. I'm pretty good. But John, how do they get in touch with you?

Again, you call me directly at 813-885-8270. That's 813-885-8270. No obligation, 30-minute strategy session with results and data right around your practice. Cool.

John, thanks for taking the time. Enjoy the boat this afternoon.

Okay. All right, my friend.

All right. See everybody. Thanks for coming to the Practice Profit System, folks. As always, check out our free resources at srpmedicalmarketing.com. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com. Get our free book, or you get a mailer, see me and I'll buy you dinner. Have a great day, everybody. See ya.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals, or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling. Plus, you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.