03 - Follow-Ups: Will You Be the Last Practice Standing?

Will you be the last practice standing? Let's talk about it. Hello, my friends, it's your boy, Troy with a fresh episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Today we're talking about following up with your leads. The leads that are coming into your practice. How much should you be following up with those? Well, good news is we actually have some data to take a look at today. A Harvard Business Review study that looked at 15,000 leads across a hundred thousand phone call attempts to really drill down and see what is successful when it comes to following up with your leads. So let's get into it. One of the big comments that I hear when I'm doing sales training with my clients, someone will say, you know, when we're doing follow up, I just don't want to be a pest. I don't want to come across like I'm needy and I certainly don't want to feel like I'm bugging somebody. So I don't really want to follow up over and over and over. Look, that's understandable. But when you look at the data from this study, again published in the Harvard Business Review, it looked at 100,000 phone calls across 15,000 leads that were generated. It has some pretty eye opening data as it relates to follow up and how much follow up you should do. So when you look at the follow up numbers and you just start with one, so you do one callback, we'll just say that's one callback to a prospect, right? Let's say it's a web lead that came into your practice and your team calls them one time. On average, the chance of connecting with that person on that first call is around 25%. So one out of four. Now, when you make two callbacks, that percentage almost doubles. It goes up to right around 50, 55% and it continues to increase. And here's the crazy thing. Once you get to the sixth call, you've tried to touch base six times. There's a 90% chance of making contact. If you were to take 10 leads and call all 10 at least six times, according to this data, on average you should reach nine of those leads. Now, is that going to happen every single time you call 10 leads? No, but we're looking at the average of all of this data across a hundred thousand different calls. And this is what it's showing us. So what does that tell us? It tells us a few things. Number one, it tells us that people aren't necessarily ignoring your calls because they don't want to talk to you. Think about it. How many times in the last week have you ignored a call or a text or an email? Because either a it wasn't a good time for you to deal with it, B you didn't really have an answer for whatever the inquiry was, or even c you were going to get back to it later, but you just forgot. That happens all the time. It's happening to your prospects too. I mean, you got to picture what's happening in their lives. They sent in a contact form through your website or through your social media page or they took your self test in the midst of picking up kids from school or going to work or wrapping up their lunch break, right? Or watching Netflix or whatever they're doing. They're also doing their life at the same time that they are reaching out to you about one of your solutions. So when you call them back, if you don't get in touch with them on that first ring, it's not because they don't want to talk to you. It is because they're not sitting there by the phone waiting for it to ring with nothing else to do. It also tells us that we need to work to be in the right place at the right time. You can't be in the right place at the right time if you're not reaching out, if you're not engaging. What is the right time? I don't know. But if you make one phone call and never call that person back again, you're not going to know either. Now let's talk about another aspect of the follow up that is good news for you if you can pull this off. While it takes six times to connect with prospects at a 90% rate according to this data, how many people do you think are actually following up with their leads six times? The answer is less than 10%. Actually, it's less than 5%. It's really about 3. 3% of folks are taking the action that results in 90% of the outcomes. What does that mean? That means your competitor down the street probably only calling folks once. Competitor down the other street, competitor across town probably only calling folks back once, if at all. So if you can be the practice that follows up with the leads that you generate, three, four, six, ten times, you will gain the lion's share of patients in the marketplace who are currently seeking a solution. Simple math. How do you follow up with leads six times? Great question. You need to track what you're doing. Some people like to have a nice fancy CRM, a customer relationship management system like Salesforce is one example. Others I've got clients who just use spreadsheets. They've got these spreadsheets that get marked for every single time a lead is contacted. That's a little bit more rudimentary than something with automation and software around it like a Salesforce. But either one will get the job done. What you can't do is hope that somebody's jotting down the leads when they come in and then somehow just making sure to call them back next week or the week after and do all this follow up. That can't happen. You need some kind of a system, even if it's just a spreadsheet. And number two, you need some kind of supporting follow up automation system. So text messages, emails, those are things that we set up and we send those out from the practices that we work with. So it's automated touch points that don't have to be sent out manually, but they are working to re engage the leads and they are acting as touch points. And then we supplement that with scripts and timelines for our counselors to go ahead and make those phone calls as well. So you got phones, you got emails, you got text going out, and it's all in an effort to create these ongoing touch points and to be the last practice standing when it comes to converting the leads that you are paying good money to generate for your practice. To recap you, you need six or more touch points outreaches to your leads to maximize your conversions. Also you need some kind of a system to track it, a spreadsheet, a CRM software, something that you can use and that your team can be held accountable with to make sure that they're doing those follow ups. And remember, your competitors down the street will not put in the work or the systems to make this happen. If you go the distance, the patience can be yours. In the next episode we'll talk about what to say in your follow ups. Do you need to just call people over and over and say, will you book? Will you book? Will you book? No, that is boring. That actually is kind of a pest type of a situation. You need to bring value when you do your follow ups. And we'll talk about some ways to do that in the next episode. Until then, go forth and prosper my friends. Until.