Urgency to Get Currency: The Patient Conversion Formula

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinals experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex: What’s going on, everybody? We’re recording. We’re live today. We got Atlanta’s Nashville Joint Enforcers. What’s up, Jessica?

Jessica: Hello.

Alex: Hello. Y’all need to know she’s up for an award. The Sherpas are up for an award. What award are you up for tonight? Obviously, this will not be tonight when people listen to it. Three months ago, a month ago, what award were you up for?

Jessica: We’re up for what’s next in healthcare in the Nashville community. It’s a fun group of entrepreneurs and celebrating other entrepreneurs. It’s a lot of fun. My team’s in town from all over the country to celebrate, so we’re excited.

Alex: I love it. Winning awards is fun for the most important thing, which is hanging out with your team and celebrating each other and stuff like that.

Jessica: We get to wear sparkly dresses. We’re excited about that, too.

Alex: That’s right. All right. We already told them where you live. Tell them about the Sherpas. What do you all do?

Jessica: We’re really solving the last mile problem for prospective patients. Cardinal helps you be all these leads and brings them to the table, brings them to your website, click, they call, now what? Care Sherpa picks up from there. We make sure that every lead that is generated is managed and converted and supported. I work with partners like Cardinal to go back and say, “Hey, that campaign rocks. That was great leads. Let’s keep going.”

Alex: Thank you. It’s never Cardinal’s fault. As you know, we always drive the best leads. [chuckles] I’m just kidding. It’s not always. You help us figure that out. With the measurement and tracking and all that stuff, we can at least get to find out what the problem is. Sometimes it is the advertising and sometimes it’s the conversion. Sometimes people don’t pick up the phone. Tell us more about how you guys optimize the last mile service. By the way, I love that. We’re talking logistics today. This is fun. Finally, we get to run a freight company. This is good.

Jessica: When you and I were talking, I was in your shoes for the last 20 years, working on patient acquisition, patient engagement, and would bring all these wonderful leads to the table. Then my practices, just had a hard time moving them to the next step or wondering what happened. They fell into a black hole. That’s what we do.

To your point, it’s 100% bringing great data in real-time so we know what’s working and what’s not. My team acts as an extension of the clinic team. We are there to help, number one, qualify, is this really the lead we’re looking for? Then number two, if it is, let’s make sure they choose us, our surgeon, our provider, our clinic, by talking to them about the benefits of working with you. It’s like an outsourced sales team, I guess I would say in some ways, but we are dedicated to you. This is not a call center. It’s not like a chatbot, but it is both technology and people that are there to help you with your pipeline.

Alex: You sound like Star Wars, these are the leads you’re looking for.

Jessica: Exactly. That’s exactly it.

[laughter]

Alex: She comes in there with her sharp-of-mind tricks and gets the right leads in there. When you talk about data and people, let’s start with the data. What do you usually find are the biggest gaps? Is it training or they’re not a centralized call center or they don’t have the right sales or CRM? They all assumed, and that’s what an ideal thing looks like.

Jessica: All the above, keep it in the space, these are the challenges. If I were to say where we start with a clinic, what usually motivates why they call and say, “Hey, Care Sharpa, can you help?” It is that first phone call. Either we’re missing the calls, we’re not answering them, or if we are, our team is just having a conversation that’s very transactional. “Hey, what insurance do you have? What’s your date of birth? Do you want to schedule next Thursday?”

We like to say we focus on the transformational. How do we focus on the patient as a consumer? Treat them as a consumer and then elevate that experience. Some of the leakage points that we find to your question is, first and foremost, the top of the funnel. Are you answering the call? Are you answering the call consistently? That’s about 81% of lead leakage is there. Let’s start there and get to the problem.

Alex: 

Jessica: Why? Well, you know as much as I do. Number one, we typically give this role to the front desk and Sally at the front desk is also checking patients out, checking patients in, calling verification of benefits. When someone’s calling to find out more about your treatment procedure, she doesn’t have the time to spend with them to answer their questions, nor is she trained on how to properly handle a sales call or a first lead call. That kind of formula first starts it. Then the second, when they work with groups like Cardinal and you all generate web leads, those get ignored until I have time.

Alex: The lead forms, it’s brutal. You got it.

Jessica: Yes. Then the second area of leakage that we see is once we actually get them to come to your clinic, your practice, and come in for that consultation, that’s another black hole area. About 52% of leads don’t move forward at that stage, not because of lack of desire or interest, just that no one’s following up with them. This is a follow-up lead nurturing, lead closing support that we help both with peer service services, or if you’ve got a great team and you want to train them, we’ll bring in our resources and help support you with the sales skills and leveling up their skills.

Alex: Are you telling me that after the actual lead, let’s assume this Sally at the front desk screwing up our leads, but let’s say we get a good Sally on a good day and she actually books the lead to a booked appointment, you’re saying half of the leakage then happens from booked appointment to showing, so kept appointment, I guess you could say.

Jessica: Yes. You get no shows. Then even those that do show, they don’t move forward. There’s something that they have hesitancy. They have concerns that weren’t addressed during the consult. They maybe will still do it, but there’s a knock of urgency.

Alex: That’s a lot on the provider or the mid-level. I want to go to the actual showing up and the appointment. What needs to be done to get homie to show up for the appointment that they booked? What do we do in that middle ground of those few weeks?

Jessica: I’ll tell you what’s not enough. A lot of practices just think, “Oh, we’re going to send them automated reminders and then they’ll show.” That’s not enough. We actually find our most effective tactic is we call it the cheerleader call. It’s 24 hours ahead of time actually reaching out. One-on-one communication, text, phone call, and just making sure, “Hey, Alex, I’m excited for you to meet Dr. Jones tomorrow. Do you want me to know anything in the chart of any questions you have? Do you know where to find parking? Give yourself enough time to get there for paperwork.” Just that enthusiasm call. Two-fold. Number one, make sure are they still planning on it.

Alex: Or they’ll cancel right there.

Jessica: Exactly. Then we can backfill with our wait list.

Alex: Yes, beautiful. That will get them engaged. Dude, your tips apply to low-acuity and high-acuity. Does it apply to dental groups, all of this? Making sure Sally can convert, going into sales training, and then a non-automated follow-up. Does that apply to dental, or with these low-acuity things, you’re like, “Give them basics. It’s more of a volume place.”

Jessica: Yes, I would say that everything. The biggest thing that if your listeners take away from our conversation is that don’t sleep on the importance of this role. Even a low-acuity dental and everything else, when there is a new patient lead, you have to have that speed to the lead. You have to act on it if you want to convert it. That often means you need to have someone who is dedicated to that function. They are held accountable, responsible, they’re trained, they’re supported.

It’s not fair to Sally that you’ve got all the other things happening and then, oh, by the way, expect her to be in sales mode and follow up with leads. The carve-out of having someone focused on it, you will see direct ROI, no matter the size of your practice. That’s probably the biggest thing. Put urgency to get currency.

Alex: Urgency to get currency. That’s the headline of this podcast. Yes, you gave it to us, making our life easier. We don’t have to have AI do it. By the way, we’ve got some clients moving to AI call center shenanigans. Is that a good move, bad move? What is your thinking on that?

Jessica: Yes, I believe that that’s a great move. When you talk about transactional, like I need to get my prescription refill, I have a question for the doctor, whatever the case may be, these transactional events that happen that we can take out of a human intervention. However, if we’re elevating there, we need to also then elevate our human support so that when it’s a more complex question or it’s a complex concern, that there is a human on the other end that is empowered and trained and knows how to deal with it.

We work with a lot of partnership with AI solutions that we’re the human in the middle, human on the other end. As we embrace that, I think it’s a great move, but you still need to have someone watching the store.

Alex: Absolutely. The robots can’t do it all yet. I think it’s good for a lot of the regular stuff, but if it senses frustration or it’s a more complex question and stuff, somebody needs to interject pretty quickly. Yes, I agree, I can do some of the basics. We’ve got huge groups. Using them to fully book appointments, I’m like, “Oh, who’s to care?”

Jessica: Here’s the thing, too, because they’re also not paying attention, is that some people get frustrated with AI bots and they hang up. Then what? Who’s going to follow up with those dropped calls? Who’s going to follow up if someone– if it doesn’t complete the sequence, we just lost an opportunity. That’s another scenario. We step in and we see missed calls, dropped calls. We’ll step in and just follow up. What signal does that send to your potential patient? I care about you, I’m paying attention, and can I help you?

Alex: Man, the lead forms, you got me thinking, it annoys me so much. So many clients are lead form heavy, but no one wants to follow back up with them. It kills me.

Jessica: I’ll give you a little hot tip, too. Beyond having someone focused on this, we find that it can take six to nine touches of a lead to get them to move forward. What happens today, most clinics, practices, do one call, maybe two, maybe an email, and that’s it. The nurturing to get people on the next step, six to nine times. People can feel like, “Oh my gosh, that’s a lot,” but you get returns on that time spent with actual conversions.

Alex: People that have distributed, the calls are coming into the individual practices, what do you recommend to them for lead nurturing? Sally’s never going to go back. You’re telling them, dedicate a human to it.

Jessica: Yes. Dedicate a human. I tell people all the time, this is a different elevated experience. When we talk about, you want revenue. We all need the revenue to stay in business. You have to focus on it. You can’t do it as happenstance. How do you then get that dedicated human that knows how to handle these calls? It’s even the simple things. You’ll appreciate this from a remarketing perspective.

We find that when we mystery shop practices, probably about 87% do not ask for our name, do not ask for our phone number, do not ask for our email. There’s no ability to know for future remarketing. Someone showed interest and you just let them off the phone. These are the subtle things that make a huge difference in your revenue and your ROI.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. It’s the only thing that we have a client engagement right now. Well, we’re not converting enough patients, but on the service, the advertising looks good. This helps a lot.

Jessica: I find many practice leaders have not mystery shopped their own opportunities to see what that’s like. We do that. If you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we’re happy to do a free mystery shop, that’s so telling. That tells you where your leakage is happening. It is typically, number one, getting someone to answer the phone, and then number two, how do they react when I’m on the phone with them.

Alex: I want you to mystery shop on my clients. I’m going to hit you up later.

Jessica: Absolutely. Honestly, that’s how we build our benchmarks, by the way. We are tracking all this consumer conversion behavior over the years that we’ve been in business. It’s very telling. Here’s the very lead comment here. It’s gotten worse since when I started Care Sharpa in 2019. The conversion factors have gotten worse.

Alex: Why? Because there’s less margin in medicine, and so people are putting even less, or because the demand is higher?

Jessica: I think that they’re putting more on. We’ll use our example of Sally at the front desk. It’s not her fault when you’re not setting her up for success. Then we’re not putting the systems and the technology. We have a lot of feels about what’s happening in our practices, but if you don’t put the reels behind it with the analytics and the data, you can’t change anything. Right?

Alex: [laughs] I’m going to glide later today. This sounds like feels, not reels.

Jessica: That’s exactly it. We use that all the time because I’m going to bring you the hard data to say, “No, this campaign is rocking,” or, “Hey, this campaign stinks rock, so we’re going to change it.”

Alex: You’ve got more taglines than anybody I remember. I love this. Yes, it’s a private equity firm, so they’re going to fire me immediately when I say that, but this is good. What did you say? It’s rocking or it stinks like rocking?

Jessica: That was just off the cuff. We could probably come up with a better one than that one. It’s either rocking or it’s sucking, right? There you go. My thing is, you know this, too. You want to help your clients, so let’s redirect those dollars to campaigns that are actually working to give us the patients that we’re looking for.

Alex: Yes, to practices that can accept them and are going to do the appropriate follow-up and actually want to sell. What final things? This is not my expertise, so I almost don’t know the right questions to ask. What else do you see as a big gotcha and it’s time to call the Sherpas?

Jessica: I’ll just give you an example of a recent practice that we just started with. We came in and they said, “We feel like there’s a problem.” There’s the feels statement because they’re competitive threats. We’re happening in another clinic of a similar style, came in and taking their market share. We started with a mystery shop and it was terrible. They said, “Okay, well, Sally just needs training.” Great. We’ll come in, we do a day and a half intensive, train all the staff, not just Sally at the front desk, because everyone needs to be prepared how to have these conversations and treat that, right?

Post-training, the team had a moment of like, “I can’t do this on top of everything else because it felt like a lot.” Then that was a conversation to say, is it better for us to carve it out and have a partner? I say, here’s my closing comment in this. Sally at the front desk doesn’t put her pay at risk for whether or not she converts your leads, but I do. At the end of the day, I know we’ll get ROI if you commit to it and dedicate to it.

Alex: That’s absolutely true. When there’s comp tied to it, things generally improve. I feel bad for Sally today. There are some Sallys at the front desk. I love it.

Jessica: You’re changing the expectations and that’s not fair, right?

Alex: I love it. Groups often scale out quickly and they scale their advertising out really quickly and they centralize the call center and they lose track of what actually matters, which is converting the leads and not all leads are just going to auto-convert because you’re medical and there’s three dermatology groups on every corner. Let’s not forget. Jessica, this has been awesome. Where can they find you? We’ve got three to six listeners. I found one. Todd told me he was the fifth listener, so that was very nice. We’re looking for the sixth. Where can the sixth listener find you?

Jessica: Find us on LinkedIn. We very actively share a lot of our data and our case studies of what we find. Outside of that, we’re headed to some of the major healthcare conferences. Like I said, let me mystery shop you, give you some insights, no pressure, no sales pitch. We’ll just tell you how you’re doing compared to our best practices.

Alex: Bam, bam, bam. I love it. I can’t wait to have you mystery shop one of my clients. They may not like it, but I’m going to love it. Jessica, this has been awesome. Thank you. Go win your award.

Jessica: Thanks, friend.

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