14 - 3 Habits to Connect with More Internet Leads

What is up, my friends? It's your boy, Troy. Welcome to a fresh, piping hot, nice, right out of the oven episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast, where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule. This is a in the wild episode. I am out on a walk at the moment. I like to do my client calls out walking. I enjoy the fresh air, I enjoy getting the blood flowing, getting the ideas flowing, keeping my brain sharp. And so I just wrapped up a client call and wanted to share with you some of the recommendations that we discussed on the call, which all revolve around booking more of your online leads into consultations. So this is a big area of opportunity for practices in today's day and age. If you've been in practice for more than a few years, you know that you receive fewer inbound phone calls of people who are looking for your services. And you receive more leads coming from the web. Your contact forms, your self schedulers, your online self test, your Facebook ads, your landing pages, your pay per click ads. You're getting more leads online than you're getting on the phone. Now, if you're in a spot where you're thinking, man, I just, I wish our phone would ring more. I wish more people were calling in. I understand that and I'm with you. I wish that was the case as well. But the reality is that is not the trajectory we're on and it's going to keep going the way of online. Okay, so rather than trying to change reality and getting frustrated, my encouragement first and foremost is to face reality and then build your systems around that to give you the best chance for success. So three habits that we're going to talk about real quick for how to convert more of those opportunities that are happening online into consultations. All right? And wouldn't you know it, all three start with the letter P. Okay? So the three P's, Number one, you gotta be proactive. All right? Proactive wins online. If you go back to the first few episodes of the Practice Growth Machine podcast, we have several different deep dives into aspects of follow up. One of those is how quickly you follow up. I won't get into all the details now, but as you can imagine, the faster you follow up with these online leads, the more likely you are to connect with them, the more likely you are to get them when they're still excited and thinking about coming in for that consult. And that gives you the better chance to do it. And to get that Booked. Okay, Proactive. And let's just be clear on this. I don't mean if you get a lead this morning at 10 o', clock, that somebody calls them by the end of the day, that is not proactive. Okay? So if you think like, hey, well, we call them all back within 24 hours, that is not proactive. Proactive is calling them back within 30 seconds. And I'm not exaggerating, that's not hyperbole. 30 seconds. All right? The problem is that a lot of your systems are set up where your online leads come in. They go to somebody's inbox, that person's away from their desk, they come back and check their email. A little bit later, they go to, oh, wait, got interrupted, they can't call them back. Right. And so it becomes a back burner issue when really the inbound leads, the fresh ones that you're getting, have to be the number one top priority. Okay, so functionally, how do you do that? You got to set up some kind of an alert system. Even if it's just a text that goes to somebody's phone that says, hey, John Doe, just filled out your contact form, Click here to call. Then that's what you got to do. All right? If you've got a CRM like Salesforce or something like that, you can probably set up those alerts in that way as well. But the bottom line is as soon as someone hits send on your contact form, on your Facebook, form on your, on your landing page, whatever it is that you are getting an alert and somebody is calling them back. And if that somebody is busy, the backup person's calling them back or the backup of the backup. So you need to have some cross training done so that your best tech, who doesn't normally answer the phone, if it gets down to the third or fourth person and it's them, then they're the ones that are calling the patients back. All right? We don't want delays. Call them back within a minute of that lead coming in. The sooner you do it, the better chance you're going to have of booking that consultation. Okay, so we have to be proactive. All right? Number two is persistence. All right? We have to be persistent. It is not good enough to call that person back one time, leave them a voicemail, and hope that they call you back. All right? The reality is people are busy, people are distracted, people have a thousand things going on. And you're not just competing with other practices in your area. Of course you are, but you're also competing with the distractions of family, the distractions of social media, the distractions of the inbox, okay? You're competing for attention. That is the battle that we are fighting, the battle for attention. All right? And reality is that somebody's not going to maybe not answer your phone call when you call them right back, alright? It's not uncommon for somebody to send a phone number they don't know to their voicemail and not answer it. There's a lot of spam calls that are going on right now. Of course you're not spam, but they don't know that. Okay? Point is, persistence is going to win the day. Call them back quickly, right? We want to be proactive. If you don't connect with them, we need to call them back again. Use your text messaging, all right? Texting calls, voicemails, email, follow ups. It's a multi channel thing. It's not just one. All right? If somebody has raised their hand and said, I'm interested in what you guys have to offer, I have a problem, I think you can solve it, then they are interested in talking to you. All right? On that note, don't take the fact that somebody didn't answer your call as a rejection or if someone didn't respond to your text as a rejection. It's not. They're probably just busy, okay? They want what you have to offer and if they don't, they will tell you, please stop contacting me. Until then, be persistent in your follow up. And the third thing, positivity. And when I say positivity, what I mean is we want to be so excited that we have the opportunity to help anybody who reaches out to us. All right? So it's important that that is conveyed through tonality, through our language, through everything, through our smiles, through the energy that we have on the phone and of course in the practice as well. We want to be positive and energetic throughout the whole patient journey. We want people to know, even if we have to leave them a voicemail, we want them to know, man, this person is really excited and happy about what they're doing. They must have some great things happening over at this practice. All right? Positivity is contagious, energy is contagious. And we want people to feel that. We want people to get sucked up into our energy and our momentum and to follow us. We have to be the leaders. We want to lead our patients to the decision that is right for them. And that starts with having a positive, energetic attitude toward our patient engagements. All right? So the three Ps, the three habits of booking more of your online leads into consults are being proactive, being persistent, and having an attitude and a presentation and a tonality of positivity. All right? Do that and you're going to win those patients that are coming in from the web, this is important at this moment that I'm recording this podcast. This is going to be more important in a year, going to be even more important in two years. This is the direction everyone's going. All right? So make sure you have the right people on the bus and make sure that everyone is on board with being proactive, being persistent, and being positive. All right? That's what we got for today. If you like the show, if you're getting value out of this, please do me a favor. Take 30 seconds, head over to iTunes, leave us a five star review. It helps the show out, it helps us out. It lets me know that you're liking this content, that you're finding value in it. So please, please go do that. If you're interested in some resources for growing your practice templates, budget outlines, all kinds of different things, head over to troycold.com resources or just go over to troycol.com there's a button right there in the menu, says resources. Free resources. Click on that thing and you'll get some practice growth tools that I know are going to help you. All right, we will see you on the next episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast. Thank you.