This Episode is Worth Millions of Dollars [Part 1]

Andrea Watkins (00:04):
Well, hi there. I am Andrea Watkins, and if you're listening to this while juggling three patient calls, checking in a couple patients, taking a payment, selling skincare, and trying to catch your doctor in between procedures, you might be working in an aesthetic practice.

Blake Lucas (00:18):
And I'm Blake Lucas and this is Practiceland. This is not Your doctor's podcast. Welcome back to Practiceland. Really excited that you're here. We have an amazing topic today. We're going to untangle conversions. What is it? More importantly, how to think about it and after we bravely attempt to define it, we'll give you the easy actual tactics to improve in your practice. Before we go there, I want to thank you for listening and remind you to share this with your friends and your colleagues and your coworkers, and we promise we won't tell your doctor. It's just our little secret as we go forward with Practiceland podcast. Here's what you can expect from us.

Andrea Watkins (00:54):
Yeah, so on this podcast today and always, we're always aiming to help you earn more and be really great at your work. Also, just to get s--- done faster, do it easier, do it better so that you can focus on what really matters, which is the patient experience and how we're able to help patients meet their goals and also to help you reach your own goals and advance your career and aesthetics.

Blake Lucas (01:18):
Yeah, we always want to hear from you too. If you have a topic or a problem that you want us to try to tackle on the show, please reach out to us on practicelandpodcast.com. We've already heard from a few of you from the listeners, so thank you so much. Special thank you to Jennifer, Sarah and Francis. Please keep all that coming. We love it. And the back half of today's episode, we're going to give you our very best tried and true and tried and tested conversion tactics, including one that got over 400 leads and 35 consultations from a single email. Didn't even know that was possible, so we're really excited to show you that. But before we get into conversion, let's introduce our guests. We have Eva here today, our podcast producer who's totally obsessed about conversion, so thank you so much, Eva, for being here.

Eva Sheie (02:02):
Hi guys. Yes, conversion obsessed is something that people use to describe me often, including I describe myself that way. The way that started is kind of a weird story. All the things that are weird about our careers, and it was writing content in the early two thousands. This was before doctors even had websites, so it was kind of fun, wild West Times, and I worked at a directory, so do you guys remember what those are? Does anybody use a directory anymore for anything? No,

(02:36):
But in the beginning that was the fastest way for doctors to actually be found for procedures, and that's what I was doing and whenever we didn't have a doctor for something like let's say it was breast augmentation in a city, we had a page for every procedure in every city. If I didn't have a doctor, it had our office phone number on the page, so the people would call me at my desk, which was in this guy's living room that I worked for, and I would say to the prospective patient, well, I don't have a doctor for that, but give me your name and number and I'll find one and I'll call you back.

Blake Lucas (03:07):
Oh, wow.

Eva Sheie (03:07):
Then I started going, well wait a minute. If I write something on this page, does it make someone call me? So I had that, not the feedback loop of people filling out a form, but actually I'd write something and then they'd call me and ask me for the thing I just wrote about sometimes within the same day. It was freaky and it was so fun. I'd take their name and number and I'd start cold calling doctors and be like, "do you do Thermage?" Like the mid 2000s, sometimes they'd go, "what's Thermage?" and other times they'd go, "yeah," and I'd go, "well, I have this patient who's looking for a Thermage, would you like me to send them to you?" And they would go, "absolutely."

Blake Lucas (03:47):
Oh my gosh, that's amazing. What a value add.

Andrea Watkins (03:51):
And that was only 20 years ago?

Eva Sheie (03:52):
Only 20 years ago.

Andrea Watkins (03:54):
Wow. Is it the dark ages? It is unbelievable. It sounds like the dark ages. It sounds like it should have been 70 years ago.

Eva Sheie (03:59):
I want to say it was like 2003 when this was happening. And then so someone would go on TV, like Oprah would have someone on TV talking about an aesthetic technology, and then we would get hundreds and hundreds of phone calls that day and we would be funneling these leads all over the place.

Blake Lucas (04:17):
Thank you Oprah.

Eva Sheie (04:18):
I know, I know. I remember she called it Restyl-een.

Blake Lucas (04:28):
Nice.

Eva Sheie (04:29):
She said it over and over, Restyl-een. You know how she is.

(04:33):
So anyway, that was the beginning. That was the puzzle that I got obsessed with was if I put something on this webpage, what will it make somebody do? Right. That's what I got better and better at over the years and became kind of known for that. I don't think it matters what channel you're putting information on where your content is. It matters that you're hitting the person at the right time based on whether you're pushing it to them or they're looking for it. You just have to think about who's on the other end and what are they looking for at that time and are we pushing it or are we trying to pull 'em in? It's like fabric. Andrea, have you seen that too? I mean, do you still see echoes of that today?

Andrea Watkins (05:14):
Oh, absolutely. It's all about when we're hitting them with what message, and that definitely helps to determine what is that outcome that we're going to get.

Blake Lucas (05:24):
Andrea, you're a little bit further down the funnel so to speak. Right, and so your day-to-day working with practices that are constantly talking to prospective patients, what are some of the challenges that you see with those providers understanding what conversion is?

Andrea Watkins (05:38):
This comes up every single week in what I do because I work for Studio III Marketing, which is a digital marketing company in the aesthetic space, and when our team that works on the marketing side for Studio III, they talk to our clients about marketing conversions. That's a totally different thing than in-house conversions that the clients and that the practice owners and doctors are actually focused on. They take for granted the whole front end of that funnel that Eva's talking about because they don't even think about the conversion from somebody out in the world looking for a provider. The conversion of awareness to calling or filling out a form, that's a marketing conversion, and that's what Eva really specializes in is what is the marketing that we have out in the universe and is it getting people to fill out a form or call? That's just the whole first step. Once they hit the front door, there's still a whole other process that we need to take to get them converted to having an actual procedure.

Eva Sheie (06:39):
You just gave me a really important flashback. There was a time when you could look in Google Analytics and see exactly what keyword somebody used when they converted. You could see, hey, we got a hundred conversions for Denver plastic surgeon and we got 10 for breast augmentation Denver. I went down a rabbit hole ahead of The Aesthetic MEET, which used to be called ASAPS for a presentation around 2008 maybe. I'm so old now that I remember my years wrong. I'm getting there.

Blake Lucas (07:12):
They always blend together.

Eva Sheie (07:13):
The study that I did at the time was how many leads did we get when they searched for a plastic surgeon compared to when they searched for a procedure and it was by a factor of 10x that the people who converted were searching for a surgeon, they weren't searching for a procedure. That has never not been true. Well, why? I mean, I know what I think about why. I think people who are searching for a surgeon are much closer to making a decision that's called high intent, and when they're searching for a procedure, they are trying to do research, they're just trying to get information. So well, why would that matter to your marketing budget?

Andrea Watkins (07:51):
Well, it just depends. How do you want to show up? If you're trying to attract people that are looking to learn and you're just looking for very top of funnel type folks, then you'll be more about the education and the procedure and doing that. Whereas if you need your keywords to be talking specifically about your surgeon that they're looking for, you would craft your messaging quite a bit differently knowing that information.

Eva Sheie (08:16):
And you would also allocate your dollars differently. So if you're trying to figure out how much money can we spend on Google AdWords? We only have $5,000 to spend. I would say put $4,500 of them towards plastic surgeon and then $500 towards plastic surgery. We have limited resources. We don't have unlimited dollars to waste on Google AdWords. So that's one of those little things that, because I looked at the numbers so much about what the humans were actually doing that that was a competitive advantage. I knew what they were converting for, not what they were looking for.

Blake Lucas (08:54):
It fascinates me, Eva, that idea of there's something on the page that gets the person to do something. Maybe. What are some of those tips or tricks that you have for someone out there that's trying to, maybe they're struggling to get the phone to ring or to get some of those leads to come in, maybe take me through what it is that helps bring that lead conversion through?

Eva Sheie (09:16):
Right. Yeah. This is a whole science. There are entire industries built around what goes on a page that makes somebody fill out a form or pick up the phone. In some practices, they'll have a landing page that's hidden that is only for ads, and that landing page will have certain things on it. Those would always include pricing information, how much is it? Can I afford it? And I think that's sort of table stakes. You don't go, I'm going to buy a new car sometime in the next three months and I'm going to start with Mercedes and it doesn't really matter to me how much that car is going to be. People just don't do that. You I think sort of approach every decision in your life with can I afford it? And if the answer is yes, then you move on to other things.

Andrea Watkins (10:06):
And not just can I afford it, but is there value? Is it worth how much I'm going to have to pay? So I can afford a lot of things that I'm not willing to pay for because I don't see the value personally for me. So it's really about value too.

Blake Lucas (10:20):
How does the practice benefit from sharing some of these ranges or rough estimates that we've been kind of talking about here?

Eva Sheie (10:27):
Oh, I think Andrea has said it on previous episodes. There's absolutely no question that having price information, even if it's not specific, gets you more leads. If you have it on your website, it gets you more conversions if you are proactive talking about it on the phone, and certainly Andrea knows more about that than I do. I think it's well established that keeping prices a secret definitely hurts the practice on the lead generation side.

Andrea Watkins (10:59):
Yeah, well, and from the conversion internally, if we're just trying to get people in the door to have a consultation and meet our doctor and hope that we can wow them when they walk into practice without giving them a range, we're wasting everybody's time because it's really important that patients, once they have gone through a consultation phone call and they walk in the front door, that they're mentally and financially prepared for what those next steps would look like. If they do want to take the steps to have us help them reach their goals, clearly they have a goal. Clearly they have a want, a need, a desire that they're calling us and hoping we can help them with. So it's absolutely critical that we start that conversation early and even people that don't need the money, especially with our current economy, interest rates are up, inflation is up, the middle class is squeezed, and so there's a lot of people that don't want to spend their money that's in their savings account.

(11:51):
They would rather take interest free money for 6, 9, 12 months so that they're not taking it out of their savings account. So especially for some of these higher dollar procedures, I was at a client's a couple of weeks ago and their facelifts are about a hundred thousand dollars, and every single one of those people that walked in that we consulted with while I was on site, they could pay cash 100%. Every single one of them also asked about financing. Do you guys work with any companies with free money? Can I get 12 months free interest and get the cash that way? So financing isn't just for people who need it to afford it. It's also for people who are really smart with their money, maybe don't want to part with what's in their liquid savings and just make 12 payments interest free. That way you're not taking money out of your savings. So all of those things, again, from my point of conversion, that's critical for a patient care coordinator to start having that conversation when they get them on the phone.

Eva Sheie (12:48):
Have you ever seen a practice, Andrea, where they don't talk about price until after the consultation and then they do the slide, the paper across the table thing?

Andrea Watkins (12:59):
I have seen them and we change with the clients I work with, we change that order of operations really quickly. It's like the good old slide it across the table just real slow, real easy, see does the bomb go off or does the bomb not go off? By the time we actually give a person a unique personalized quote, they should be completely prepared for that. We've already talked to them about it at least a couple times prior to the quote delivery for their unique procedure, so it should just be like, "Hey, this is the quote. It fell right within the range that we were talking about. Here's your options for payment. Here's your deposit requirement. It's refundable up to X amount of days prior to this, that and the other." There's a formula that works in order to make it not weird because the last thing we want it to be is weird. That conversion from you're in a consultation to we've got your deposit and we've got you booked so we can help you meet your goals. The last thing we want to do is make it weird for the patient or for us. I don't consider myself a salesperson. I'm an educator and I help people reach their goals and if you slide a quote across the desk and it's weird for anybody, you haven't done your job.

Blake Lucas (14:12):
The practices that we've worked with that have been the most successful with some of these things, especially with the cost conversation, some of the more interesting tactics that we've learned, and we've even had it on previous episodes here, is having kind of a subject matter expert in the office about financing, and I thought that was such a clever idea. I could easily see some practices start to push back from that and be like, oh, no, no, I don't want to have that conversation. I don't want to feel too salesy or whatever it may feel like or a car dealership or something like that. But it's not that. I think it's more of a comprehensive port, right? It's being able to provide support and create a great experience at every part of that journey and having someone that can speak confidently about some of the financing options and the things that they provide that's going to just again, an opportunity to build trust in that moment, especially when we know accepting the fact that 82% of people are probably going to want a financing option or a monthly payment. Meeting them where they are is so important as opposed to maybe ignoring that and like Andrea said, just drop the bomb on them or just slide it across in that moment.

Eva Sheie (15:15):
I love that you brought that story up, Blake. That was at La Jolla Cosmetic. They put Marissa on the website as the financing expert, and I think sometimes I have a hard time taking credit for my insane ideas that I've implemented. That tactic was mine and I gave that idea to them. Actually, I'm pretty sure I implemented it around 2008 when I was doing consulting and had spent a year working on La Jolla Cosmetic's content, and I was working through all these different points of conversion on their website and I felt very strongly at the time that if you knew who the person was in the practice that was like the financing ninja. There's always somebody who's like, oh, I know how to get you approved to do this one. That was way more important than click here and you couldn't even really apply online back then. So the idea was really old and they've taken it and they've certainly improved it since I put it in there, but I had dozens of websites that I was managing back then and that was what I was doing on all of them. I knew it was getting them more leads by having a human face to solve the problem for you.

Andrea Watkins (16:23):
Yeah, I've taken that recommendation from Janelle and actually suggested it. One of my clients over in Charleston, South Carolina, they are relaunching a brand new website and they're implementing that on their website because they do have someone in their office that is really kind of the expert there and I'm like, she's lovely and super smart and she can be that person people can look to for help. It can be tricky to manage that, but if it helps you convert them into patients, and again, yes, it's great to build your practice and yes, we want to generate more revenue and stuff, but also we're helping patients actually meet their goals. That's really what we're in the business about is the patient has a need. We're not going and asking people or telling them, "Hey, you could really use some work on your face. Let me call you and give you all the tools."

(17:09):
They're coming to us literally. I mean, I'm not picking out some bananas and like, "Hey, call me. You need a nose job." Nobody's doing that. The patients are calling us. So it's literally our job to know what are the tools, how do they work so that we can help patients overcome any barrier to entry that they have and meet their goals. And in that process, we're going to solidify our role in the practice and we're going to help build and grow our practice and make our doctors happy. What more do you want? That's what we should all be doing every day.

Blake Lucas (17:43):
One of the things I've noticed just with my own support team is some of our best agents are the ones that ask a lot of open-ended questions and try to get the most they can out of the patient. And I've heard it too. I hear coordinators like the best ones, the way they position their questions sound very different, kind of elicits a different response, and it's asking those things, "Now that I've had a chance to kind of go through some of these things, how does this make you feel?" And you start to get into those really open questions to get them to open up. In our team financing can be a very scary thing for people and they may be a little closed off to wanting to have that conversation. And I've noticed we do get a ton of people calling in at the very beginning, those research stages, they want to know before they even talk to a doctor, can I even pay for this?

(18:27):
They don't want to be embarrassed. And so having those vulnerable conversations where our team can ask some of those questions as opposed to just being spit out all the different facts, which is great, which is what they need, but also if we can take it a little bit further and have a deeper conversation and connect on a different level, now you have almost a consultant that you can trust. Being able to do that really kind of changes the dynamic and pushes that person more towards that advocate for your type of brand, which is when I see that, I always get so excited when we have some of those agents on our team as I want to spread that somehow show other people how this is done. It's amazing.

Eva Sheie (19:02):
I think you hit something really important in there, Blake, that a lot of us, I would say the majority of us, us meaning women who are having cosmetic procedures of any kind from small to big, we really want the doctor to like us. Most of us don't want to be a bad patient. We want to be a good patient because they're going to do something for us too. It's a two-way thing. It's not just them serving us. We want to do the right thing in that relationship.

Andrea Watkins (19:32):
That's such an interesting point that I've never really thought about and you hit the nail on the head when I was a patient before I worked in this industry, I wanted my doctor to be proud of me as a patient and my recovery. I would walk in at one week post-op of an 11 hour procedure and have makeup on and my hair washed and brushed into a sundress and they're like,

Eva Sheie (19:55):
Look how good you are at recovery!

Andrea Watkins (19:58):
Literally, yes, 100%. And I'm like, yep, I'm your best patient aren't I? But you're absolutely right. You want them to, you're so right. That's so funny. I've never thought of that.

Blake Lucas (20:10):
Let's kind of change gears a little bit and get back into conversion. A major part of conversion obviously is measuring it, right? Which conversions should we be tracking and how? So there's an old saying, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, which conversions should we be tracking?

Andrea Watkins (20:27):
That's so funny you say that. That was literally a slide of my presentation, my CME presentation to a bunch of surgeons on Saturday. You cannot manage what you do not measure. So yes, I fully believe in that and believed in in the practice as well as now that I'm out and working with practices all over. So Eva, I kind of want you to start because you're on the before part and then I can talk about the after the lead comes in part.

Eva Sheie (20:55):
Well certainly how many leads did we get, how many forms, how many calls? And so I have built for myself, it's really hard to look at actually. For me the purpose is putting the numbers in so that I know them. It's not really to look at if that makes sense, but I take the very top of the funnel, which is from Google Search Console, and I put in the number of impressions and I'll come back and tell you an example of why that's super important, and then the number of total sessions in Google Analytics organic sessions, so that's smaller than the total sessions getting traffic from more places than just organic search. So it goes from largest to smallest, impressions, sessions, organic sessions. I also track local sessions because you might get a ton of traffic, but only a smaller percentage of that is going to come from your market and you want to know are you doing better or worse in your market?

(21:55):
And I'll also tell you why that's a really important number to look at in your marketing funnel and then how many leads did you get? And then because I cannot, I almost pathologically cannot do this without figuring out how many people made it all the way to surgery. I couldn't do this ever in my life without a lot of lift. You'd have to call the practice and get them to export a report who had surgery and then I'd have to trace them back one by one to figure out when did they fill out the form, when did they match up the phone number? Like this is really psychotic behavior you guys. I don't recommend it.

Andrea Watkins (22:30):
Before I used LeadLoop, I literally did the same exact thing when I was in the practice for PPC campaigns.

Eva Sheie (22:37):
You stole my ending, Andrea, because sorry, slap until I had LeadLoop, I could not get to this number.

Andrea Watkins (22:46):
Yeah, it's true. It's absolutely true. I was spending one and a half to two days every single month doing exactly what you're talking about doing as the administrator of the practice. It was an absolute pain in the ass and a time suck, but I was so neurotic. I had to know, did these people actually ever generate revenue? We're paying 10 grand a month for two paid campaigns on Google. What the heck is actually happening with these campaigns? Are these people being first, are they being contacted properly? Which fun story I can tell you about that too. So internally, are they being managed properly and then if they are, are they converting and are we generating revenue from them?

Eva Sheie (23:29):
If you go back to the very top, which is impressions, that's how many times was your website seen in a Google search whether they clicked on it or not. In December, I had a practice. I still see these numbers for two practices and they're like my secret evil nerd labs, right? I can't love you. I mean, this is stuff that powers everything else that I think about and I need to stay close to it, even if it's time consuming and difficult, it makes me sharper and better and I love doing it. My practice in Portland, Oregon was getting roughly 250,000 search impressions and all of a sudden, almost overnight was getting 350,000. Sometimes when I am talking to the doctors about this spreadsheet, I call it my early warning system because it will tell you that something happened either positively or negatively if you're looking at all these numbers in the context of the big picture.

(24:25):
And what I figured out was that some of their content started being used in AI results and that was what instantly turned their impressions number from 250 to 350. And then of course then I was able to go, is this happening somewhere else? And I can look at my other one and I can call other people and say, have you seen this too? And I can explain to the doctors what's happening and then it's also worked in reverse. So in that same practice, very early on when I started tracking this and I just fill it in once a month, it takes about 15 minutes. If you're listening and you want a copy of my nerd spreadsheet, I'm super happy to share it so that I don't feel so alone.

Andrea Watkins (25:07):
Pick me, send me your nerd spreadsheet.

Eva Sheie (25:09):
You can have it.

(25:11):
What I had seen was that the traffic from local search had gone from healthy. It was like maybe 20% of the traffic from local search to zero. And so I knew very quickly that something had happened to their Google Maps listing and I was able to fix it very quickly. And so if nobody's watching that and nobody knows that that's happening, it could be months, it could be you have no idea how long it would be before somebody noticed on their own that you were not showing up on the maps anymore. It functions a little bit like an alarm, and I also learned because of my tracking behavior that in that practice Google Maps was their number one lead source, so as soon as I fixed it, they got 30 to 50 more leads a month because it was fixed. That's significant you guys. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue that was gone and came back. I don't have any magical skills. I just am measuring it.

Andrea Watkins (26:11):
You have to pay attention. Again, you can't manage what you don't measure if you're not measuring and tracking, you just don't have the data and the ability to make the decisions and the observations.

Blake Lucas (26:22):
It scares me too because you think about how many people are self-described technophobe or just don't like technology or don't understand it or maybe don't have that same expertise that you might have, and so how important it is to have a system in place that helps you track these things because I can only imagine the doctor's reaction after two or three months of a Google Map listing being shut off completely, and that's your number one lead source getting ahead of that, especially if you're not a tech savvy person, get a system in place to be able to attract that.

Eva Sheie (26:52):
There's one more really important thing here, and I've seen this a lot. It's actually one of my current soapboxes and it is that some practices think that, how did you hear about us is the same thing as marketing attribution. Tell me why I'm wrong, Andrea.

Blake Lucas (27:06):
Okay, unpack that one for me.

Andrea Watkins (27:10):
Because patient reported information is not accurate and just one simple example is, "hi, so how'd you hear about us?" "Oh, I found you online." "Okay, great. Thanks." First of all, that's not acceptable. Online could mean a million different things. Even if somebody says, "Ooh, I found you on Google," also not acceptable because they could be doing paid campaigns. "Cool. Did you click on a sponsored ad or did you look at our SEO rankings and see we were ranked number four and click on that button?" No patient is going to have the answer to that question, but those are two very, very different things. If you're paying for a paid campaign that says sponsored at the top or even at the bottom of the first page or whatever, that's something you're paying to show up for. If they click on an SEO, just a organic ranking, that's also going to be different. That's a different function of your marketing spend and of your marketing strategy. Same with the map. And so when we ask patients, where'd you hear about us? Unless it's "my grandma, Ida had her facelift here 20 years ago and now I'm coming here." That is reliable data.

Eva Sheie (28:18):
Even if Ida said it, you still went to Google and searched for them to get the phone number and clicked on the phone number or clicked on the map or clicked on the website and then the report said they came from Google Maps, but it was really Grandma Ida,

Andrea Watkins (28:31):
Right? Yep. So it's a really the marketing attribution. If you're collecting this, again, we did this on LeadLoop, I did it when I was in the practice and now use that with my clients, you can track granularly to the campaign level. Where exactly did this person convert from?

Blake Lucas (28:49):
Say we have a listener right now that hearing all of this and completely agrees and goes, oh my gosh, this is what I've been missing. I need something like this. But they're not the decision maker or they're not the charge of the budget type of thing. What maybe would you recommend, what type of approach or tip or trick that you'd give them to get the decision maker on board with adopting a system like LeadLoop?

Andrea Watkins (29:08):
From the owner's perspective, the thing that I like to talk about the most, the way that I envision it as myself because I took ownership of the practice that I used to manage, is how do I protect the investment that I'm making in my marketing dollar and my marketing spend, not just protect it from what I'm spending on my marketing, but protect it once it hits the front door, make sure that it's being nurtured properly, make sure that it's being run through the revenue cycle and my team is also doing their job. So it's really a protection. It's a safe fall for someone who's investing in their business, what's happening with my investment from the marketing side, and once it hits the front door.

Eva Sheie (29:49):
I like what some of our previous guests have said about being proactive. And so if you're still in spreadsheet land, go back and listen to what Heather and Jenna said about solving the problem and then coming with data and saying, here's how I think we could do this better. Because if you can show how much faster you could be bringing people in the door if you didn't have to use a spreadsheet, now you have a real argument for getting better tools.

Blake Lucas (30:18):
Moving forward in that timeline for kind of following the same kind of coordinator. Now they convinced the business owner or the surgeon to bring in this program. What are some of the advice you'd give someone just starting to track this?

Eva Sheie (30:31):
You know where your leads are coming from, how many are coming from maps, how many are coming from organic, how many are coming from pay per click and other sources, they get to the point where they've called or they've filled out a form, and then what do we track from that point forward?

Andrea Watkins (30:49):
So once a form is completed or a call is made to our front desk, then we need to look at different conversions of course. First and foremost is from the new lead stage, how many people are we converting to consultation scheduled? So how many people of those again are actually, are we going to see the whites of their eyes? Are we going to get to meet them in person? And that should only come after a qualifying phone call, and that's for surgical and nonsurgical. We want to educate the patient, start building trust and rapport through that initial phone call. Again, educate the patient and differentiate your practice and providers on why they would want to come to you instead of somewhere else. So if they're finding us online, from the presentation this weekend too, 48 to 56%, so just over 50% of people that call your office from an organic surge, they're going to go first of all to the top three-ish ranked people in the SEO and they have you and they have a list of even a million additional providers, but if they do call you and you don't answer your phone, 80% of patients would rather call a competitor than leave you a voicemail even. So from that conversion of even calling you, if we're not answering them, 80% of them are not going to even leave you a voicemail. They're going to pick up the phone and they're going to call the next person on the list. And so if you're not capturing that information, again, I'm not sitting here trying to tout LeadLoop, all the calls are captured there at the bare minimum. Does your caller ID capture these calls and do your front desk people call that person back as soon as they get off the other line and say, "hi, this is Andrea calling from Dr. Smith's office. I'm so sorry I missed your call. I was with another patient. Is there something I can help you with?"

Eva Sheie (32:40):
That tip right there is worth half a million dollars, Andrea.

Andrea Watkins (32:44):
Oh, at least.

Eva Sheie (32:45):
Yeah, I learned this from Blow Dry Bar because I often will just call and be like, oh, nobody answered. I'll go online and make my appointment later. They don't want to take the chance that I'm going to forget, and they just call me right back usually within 15 minutes, "Hey Eva, we missed you," because I'm in their system, and probably caller ID too, and I'm always like, "oh, I appreciate that so much. You just saved me a task that I have to do later."

Andrea Watkins (33:12):
With LeadLoop, if we don't have the capacity or the people or whatever to be able to call them back, at least we can send them a text message back that says, "I'm so sorry I missed your call. This is Andrea calling from Dr. Smith's office. Was there something I could do to help you?" And then even so if it's a bad time for them to talk on the phone at that time, that's okay. At least then they can text us back and they can say, "oh my gosh, I'm so glad that you reached out," or they can just ignore us and that's fine too, but at least it gives us the tools and the opportunity to be able to connect with them because we know that if we weren't able to answer that phone, 80% of people are going to call somebody else.

Eva Sheie (33:46):
I have two questions for you, Andrea. One, it is something that comes up frequently on the marketing side that is also heavily dependent on the front desk, which is when you hear "all these leads are bad, these are all really bad leads."

Andrea Watkins (34:04):
It's my favorite,

Eva Sheie (34:05):
Let's define a good lead first, and I think where I've landed after lots of thinking about it is were they reachable? If you got a lead that was like a web form and you tried texting, emailing, calling, and you tried, I don't know what you think the magic number of times is three times, five times, eight times, and then you did a takeaway and you said, I'm going to stop bothering you. I have actually built a number of takeaway, what I call takeaway templates in LeadLoop so that the one set of staff that I work with can say, I'm so sorry that we haven't been able to connect. Do you want me to stop to see if they'll actually say, please for love of God, stop. Yeah, stop. If they've done that, then I consider it over, but I have only done this once, so I want to hear what you think.

Andrea Watkins (34:57):
Yeah, so secret sauce, free hot tip to anybody on the line.

(35:05):
So I can see practices across the nation. There's about 150 that are on lead loop right now, and I could see everybody's data and do a lot of aggregation. What works, what doesn't work? Before I give secret numbers, just keep in mind this is going to be a little different for everybody because it really depends upon your bandwidth than your volume. If you have one PCC and you're getting 45 leads a month, you can follow out a lot more than if you have one PCC and you're getting 450 leads a month. Okay? So just keep that in mind. However, depending on some of that situation going on with my coaching clients, I usually set them up on about a five follow-ups with no response before we consider them lost and out of touch, and that is a timeframe spaced out about 21 to 26 days, and it's using call, email, text at different times throughout that.

(35:58):
It's also using different templates later on down those stages. We're trying to get them re-engaged with a practice, so we include hot links to social media, hot links to our before and after gallery, like, "Hey, remember how cool you thought you were when you filled out the form? Come check out our stuff again." Then at that very last, it's always what I like to call the breakup email where it's like, "now might not be a good time. Sorry we haven't been able to get in touch, but when you're ready, we're definitely here to hear more about your goals and to see how we can help you." Just because we lose them. Also in our lifeline, in our revenue cycle, they get marked as lost because maybe that first month wasn't the best time to talk and they never got back to us, so we lose them.

(36:37):
That doesn't mean they're lost forever. It just means we've taken them off of our desk and put them into the file in the other room, and so we're still going to pull from that file and we're still going to communicate with them if we're doing things properly, we're going to have email campaigns, we're going to be in the know. They're still going to see us in their inbox and when they're interested go in there and check out our videos and what we have going on. It just takes 'em off our front desk so that we're not constantly, there should be new people, and those new people really need to take precedence over the people that were a month out and we've never heard back from them.

Eva Sheie (37:09):
Did you have a definition for a good lead? What's good in your mind?

Andrea Watkins (37:13):
Someone that will fog the mirror when they breathe on it and is a real life person. Has a pulse? Yeah. Yeah, because again, even for me, even if I try and get a hold of them for 26 days, 31 days, and they don't actually respond, that doesn't mean they're not a good lead. It truly doesn't. We can maybe get in touch with them later as long as we're doing a comprehensive from the very first outreach and that we continue communication with them as long as we're doing something with them. You don't know if they're good or bad.

Eva Sheie (37:50):
Another thing I love doing is building systems that automate lead capture. One thing that comes to mind for me here is for people who fill out forms, when you can opt them into email, then you are automatically keeping them in the bucket whether they have responded or not. Right?

Andrea Watkins (38:10):
Exactly. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Eva Sheie (38:13):
And then I've even extended that a little further. So I will automate an autoresponder when they fill out the form and check the box that says, I would love to receive exclusive specials and promos from you, and that email has an offer in it so that when they open it, they move into my engaged audience. So they're actually a premium email subscriber at that point, and so then they remember I have an offer in there for whatever, $50 off a non-surgical treatment. When I forget what I do, I could certainly look it up, but just something basic that is engaging enough, and on the email side, I've always had a little bit of a rule that you don't ever send an email to anybody without value in it because you don't want to give 'em a reason to unsubscribe. So if there's always money in their email, they're much more likely to stick around.

Blake Lucas (39:04):
Do either of you have maybe an example of an initial lead that came through that was like this, where they were they just ghosted after they filled out the form, but then after the 26th or thousandth try turned into one of the greatest patients that the practice had?

Eva Sheie (39:20):
LeadLoop doesn't pay me, but I'm going to say I never had evidence that this happened until I had LeadLoop. They're rare, but I can see people who reached out in February of last year and then finally scheduled a consult in November and then had surgery in January. I've been for fun tracking how long it takes people to move from lead to surgery.

Andrea Watkins (39:42):
The reporting's getting updated and it's going to be in the update, PS. I'm so excited, because that's so incredibly important for me as well.

Eva Sheie (39:51):
Yeah, I just want to see patterns and behavior in it. Same, and there's certainly lots of places where you could do this and like Andrea, we both did it manually forever, and we're

Andrea Watkins (40:02):
Just save so much time.

Eva Sheie (40:03):
Really blessed to have a system that helps us do it faster now.

Andrea Watkins (40:06):
I have a client down in Arizona. They were doing kind of gynecomastia special at the end of last year, and they were doing $1,500 off of the fee for the surgery, and they were also lowering the price for Renuvion down to $2,000 if they wanted to add on Renuvion, and so using this software that shall remain unnamed. No, I'm kidding that Eva and I keep talking about that starts with an L. Yes. Yeah, I was able to go into the back data, so they had been using the system since March of last year, so for what is that? About seven months. Go in and look at anyone who had either filled out a form or called us and inquired about gynecomastia surgery because you tag it with the procedure that the patients are interested in, and we just created a cute little text in a little email to shoot out to anybody who had not converted for gynecomastia surgery.

(41:03):
This was on a Wednesday, and we put a sense of urgency on there. We said, "Hey, we're doing this special," it was around Thanksgiving. "If you want to book your surgery date before the end of the year, give us a call by Friday." Literally booked four surgeries between Wednesday and Friday, and these were a couple of them people we had never spoken to. They had just maybe put in a form they had gotten. Our communications never really reached out to us, and so they were just considered lost and maybe some people would consider that not a good lead, but if you capture the data in a way where you can filter it and have pointed communications with people based on what you do know about them, you can get them converted months and months later to Eva's point and you can help them reach their goals. You can show them that maybe there is a special that you can give them and then obviously help your practice. So with the data collection gives you also opportunity to mine for patients when you have something going on in the practice so that maybe it then wasn't a good time, but now happens to be the good time for them.

Eva Sheie (42:05):
Oh, timing is everything.

Andrea Watkins (42:06):
Yeah,

Eva Sheie (42:06):
It's everything. I almost could go back and argue with us half an hour ago and say that timing is at least equally as important as pricing information because that's the other thing that really slows people down from moving forward is that it's not the right time. So they might have the money sitting there, but they can't actually have surgery until the last week of July, and so they're like, well, it's March. Why would I bother them now? I can't even have surgery.

Andrea Watkins (42:35):
I was that person. I had a five week window, but I was doing consultations years in advance just due to my travel schedule with my then career and all of that. Timing was the main key to me being able to actually move forward and book my procedure.

Eva Sheie (42:52):
But I don't know a single practice in the world that wouldn't like to see somebody and have their schedule laid out. We know we have 30 surgeries booked for August already. Who would hate that? Nobody would hate that. So we should really think about how do we talk to people in a way that makes it okay for them to reach out, even if their timeline is long? There would create some conflict there with coordinators who are trained to only put people on the schedule who are ready.

Andrea Watkins (43:18):
It depends again on your bandwidth and your volume. If you have surgeries that you need to book for two months from now and you only have a limited amount of time for consultations with your doctor, you've got to get the people that are ready for the sooner date, but if you have more consultation time available, then you can bring those patients in so your doctor can see them and book them far out. We ran into that when I was in the practice all the time because if you have three PCCs and your doctor has plenty of time, and we were converting at about 90 to 93% of the in-person consultations, so nine and a half, almost people for every 10 that walked in were booking procedures, but then when we had a young lady go out for maternity leave and then one person, it didn't work out, so I have one PCC, she has limited time.

(44:07):
I have to book for three months out, not for eight months out because we can only see so many consultations. So again, a lot of that is going to be determined upon the practice. What is your bandwidth? What is your volume, and finding out do we need more bandwidth to meet our volume or is our volume so low and our bandwidth is so higher that we have overstaffed? So it's really a game and a balancing act, but again, if you're not measuring your data, you cannot manage those things and make data-driven decisions. You're only going to say, "oh, it feels real busy," or "these leads suck," and like, Hey, guess what guys? How about we have some numbers to back that up so we can make decisions that will really help drive our business and support our team. Nobody wants people drowning.

Eva Sheie (44:50):
Let's talk about feelings. Alright, so hypothetical scenario.

Blake Lucas (44:57):
Yeah,

Eva Sheie (44:58):
Yeah, okay. Totally hypothetical here. Surgeon looks at the schedule and goes, "something's wrong, something's very wrong. We don't have any consults scheduled for three weeks from now on Thursday. Something must be wrong." Well, then I go look at the data of course, and I say, "I see 72 consults scheduled. I can't personally tell you by looking at the data why that one weird Thursday doesn't have enough consults scheduled on it." I almost want to say hypothetically, "you're asking the wrong person the question. Who can actually impact how many consults are scheduled on that Thursday marketing or the front desk or the PCCs?" Your patient care coordinator. Exactly. What might cause a weird anomaly on a schedule like that? The PCC wants to call in sick that day. Okay, so, alright. Right. Let me give you another hypothetical.

Andrea Watkins (46:01):
A holiday. There are so many things, mercury in retrograde that could have this. Yeah, mercury is in retrograde. That was a good one.

Blake Lucas (46:11):
Thank you. I'm here all week.

Eva Sheie (46:12):
Why is it not a good idea to look at the schedule when you're trying to measure whether you're busy enough?

Andrea Watkins (46:20):
Well, it depends on what part of your schedule you're looking at. Are you looking at your consults or are you looking at your surgery schedule? I mean, if your surgery schedule isn't booked out, yeah, that's to be concerned with because that's where you generate your revenue. But if you're converting 95% of your consultations and you have a day when there's no consults, that's not even necessarily a bad thing because that means you're not just bringing in consults to put on your schedule to fill your consult schedule to make you feel better. I have a doctor in Boston, he said this exact thing. He's like, "Andrea, I'm a little nervous. My consultation schedule doesn't look that full." I'm like, "trust the process. This is what's going to happen. You shouldn't be spending your time in a bunch of consults with people that don't book. Just trust me, and I know it's really hard because you barely know me, but let's just take a breath."

(47:06):
This was towards the end of last year, and then three, four or five weeks later, he's like, "you know what? All the consult I'm seeing, they're so prepared and they're ready and they're more educated and these are really quality consultations." I'm like, "oh, so you're not seeing a bunch of people that are randos just coming in" and he's like, "no, this works." And then January literally had the highest revenue month of his entire career. He is been in practice for about 20 years, January of 2025 because we're actually getting the right people in front of him, really building the value. They're prepared, they're ready, and he had to add days to his surgery schedule.

Eva Sheie (47:43):
And he's probably a much happier person because he's not being rejected by people who aren't ready. Hit it home for me one more time. What's a normal or a good healthy percentage of people who should make it onto the consult schedule?

Andrea Watkins (48:02):
33 to 36, mid thirties. Of all of your leads.

Eva Sheie (48:03):
Of all of your leads, 30ish percent should make it onto the schedule.

Andrea Watkins (48:04):
So I see practices that are just "put anybody on the consult schedule."

Eva Sheie (48:09):
Okay, well, maybe if you have a young surgeon who's trying to get better at consults, but that's the only reason I can think of.

Andrea Watkins (48:14):
And has lots of time because they're not busy. Highest and best use of doctor's time is not meeting with people who are not qualified to have a procedure done and how do we optimize a practice, get the highest and best use out of everyone in the practice from the front desk to the OR table. So part of that is you don't want to get too high because then you're wasting doctor's time because in most cases you just don't have that high of a number of people that are really qualified and then too low means either you're not doing a good job getting back to people or you're over disqualifying them and you're basically saying you're booking the day you come in or else you're not coming in because in our current market back in 2022, 23, we all had just copious amounts of leads and copious amounts of patients who were ready, had money, had time off work, working from home, all the things.

(49:05):
But in this market, when you put up that type of barrier, you're sinking your potential revenue because their patients are more shopping around and they have the ability to, because more surgeons are readily available. You used to have to wait several months to even have a consult and several more months to even get on an OR schedule for a lot of docs back post COVID. That's not the case anymore. And so if you're just like "book or don't show up," you're taking away the opportunity for your doctor and your PCC to shine and really just get that last little bit that we need to get the patient over and to get them booked.

Eva Sheie (49:43):
It strikes me that one of the biggest requirements for that to happen is that your coordinators have to have enough time to talk to people to be able to figure that out. I want to kind of take it back to how many leads can one patient coordinator successfully handle.

Andrea Watkins (50:01):
What I see as being the most successful is 150 to 180 per month. That allows them to do a full follow-up process, do a full five six follow-ups, calls, emails, texts throughout several weeks of time, but also have the consultation phone call, which can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes if not a little more, depending if it's a multi procedure type of thing. And then you have to consider the time that they're actually in person in consultation with patients and the doctor because your PCC needs to be a part of that entire process. If the PCCs time is protected to be a PCC, which means managing leads, consulting with leads on the phone, consulting with them on the phone, booking their procedure, and then taking the baton and handing it off to the clinical team in the consultation with the patient. Some do, some do not, but the more time that you can have one-on-one with the patient as the PCC, the more trust, the more you understand the patient and the more likely the patient is to book with you.

Eva Sheie (51:07):
If you were in a situation where you had way too many leads for the number of coordinators you have been there, have you ever seen good problem to have, please start hiring. Start the hiring process. Have you ever seen anyone pre-screen leads before they get to the coordinator to try to take a little of the pressure off in that scenario?

Andrea Watkins (51:28):
The challenge that I see with that is that a lot of times those pre screenings, they end up just being like, "yeah, hey, price is between 27 and $33,000."

Eva Sheie (51:39):
Oh, I'm totally going to one up you with mine.

Andrea Watkins (51:41):
The pre-screening is more about the price and are they okay to pay the price? But then what that does is it takes the patient care coordinators total job away from them, which is for them to shine, to build trust, to build value, to actually differentiate your practice, the process, the provider. And so if we're just, again, if that pre screener is just giving out financial information and price ranges, we're kicking ourself in the face because we're not actually providing the value before giving the price, which is total wrong order of operations.

Eva Sheie (52:12):
I want you to pretend I'm the practice and you're calling me and ask me like a question about a mommy makeover. Okay. Ring, ring. I thought I was calling you. You're calling me. Okay. Go ahead. Ring. Ring.

Blake Lucas (52:26):
Am I the crying baby in the background? Yes.

Eva Sheie (52:28):
"Hi, Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. This is Eva. How can I help you today?"

Andrea Watkins (52:32):
"Hi, Eva. I was wondering, can you give me some information about a mommy makeover? How much do they cost?"

Eva Sheie (52:38):
"Sure. What's your BMI?"

Andrea Watkins (52:43):
That is a qualifying factor and a very important question, but it's not the first thing that you say to a patient,

Eva Sheie (52:49):
Nor is it a question you put on your contact forms.

Andrea Watkins (52:53):
Right. Let's have a conversation and have somebody feel a little comfortable with us before we're hopping into that.

Blake Lucas (53:00):
That's a little awkward. Yeah,

Andrea Watkins (53:02):
It is very important though. It's super important for us. If someone calls and they want a tummy tuck and their BMI is 46, we could then talk to them about if we do weight loss programs in our practice, "Hey, so our doctor has a threshold of a 35 or a 32 or 30 or 29." I've seen it all. It's all over across the board, depending on the physician in order to be able to do that. "So we'd like to you a little bit closer to that before we do consultation. We do have this really great weight loss program though in our practice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." So it does open up the door for those conversations and it helps us, again, to optimize our time. We don't want to meet with patients that are so far out from even being qualified candidates, but there is a different way to ask the question and it comes encompassed and enfolded in a very caring and legitimate consultation, consultative type of phone call.

Eva Sheie (53:55):
Again, it was just a hypothetical.

Andrea Watkins (53:57):
Yeah, right. You're lying. Yeah. Now I'm going to start calling every practice you've ever worked with. We'll see.

Eva Sheie (54:05):
They don't do it anymore. They stopped. It was killing their conversions.

Blake Lucas (54:11):
That is wild to me. Hey there, Practiceland listeners. When data junkies start talking, it's hard to stop. Because there's too much good stuff for one episode, we're pressing pause here and we'll be back with part two next week. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to get a notification for next week's episode. Got a wild customer service story or a sticky patient situation? Send us a message or voicemail. If your tale makes it into our She Did What?! segment? We'll send a thank you gift you'll actually love. Promise no cheap swag here.

Andrea Watkins (54:41):
Are you one of us? Subscribe for new episode notifications and more at practicelandpodcast.com. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and everywhere you can listen to podcasts.