What Do You Do When You Can’t Convert Consultations?
Let’s say you did everything right and now you are stuck because you don’t know how or even if you should follow up for fear of looking as if you are chasing the patient. Use these strategies to follow up professionally and close the procedure:
Follow Up Protocol
Develop a follow up protocol to follow each and every time to follow-up on revenue-generating consultations that didn’t book….YET.
Otherwise, it’s too easy to never got around to following up because there are a million other things to do. Protocol takes the emotion out of it and it becomes what you do automatically… no matter how busy you are.
Collapse Time
Time is your enemy in the follow up process. The more time that goes by without the prospective patient hearing from you, the more distant you become.
Collapse time by following up quickly, repeatedly and often. That’s how you differentiate yourself from your competitors who follow up weeks later (or never).
Add a Sense of Urgency to Your Follow Up
Since its human nature for prospective patients to put off making a big decision, you want to counter with a sense of urgency to get the patient off the fence. Give them very compelling reasons to stop procrastinating. For example:
- Your schedule is filling up quickly so book now or you’ll have to wait
- Your prices are going up next month
- If they can have surgery on a Wednesday next month, they get a $500 price reduction
- If you want it done before [wedding, summer, etc], they need to take into account the
recovery time (IE., even though the downtime is less than 7 days, they are still a bit
limited in activity like swimming and dancing), so they’ll want to get it done before this [date].
You need to customize these to your liking and use them in your standard protocol so you get comfortable telling the prospective patient WHY they need to make a decision now rather than later.
The most successful cosmetic practices have systems in place to follow up quickly, strategically and consistently. They spent a lot of time, money and effort attracting prospective patients so they do all they can to see it through to a YES.
These fix your follow up for plastic surgeons strategies “pave the way” for your staff to do all they can to confidently convert these valuable consultations.
If you need help with your follow up, simply go to www.catherinemaley.com for the details and let’s do a call to determine if it would be helpful to outsource this part of your lead generation plan since SOMEBODY needs to follow up on your leads.