In this video, Etna Interactive CEO Ryan Miller discusses how elective healthcare practices should structure their follow-up on new patient inquiries. As patient expectations for fast response keep rising, having a defined, staff-wide standard for lead follow-up has become as important as generating the patient leads themselves.
Follow along to learn why every inquiry needs to be logged before it can be nurtured, why speed to first response has such an outsized effect on conversion, and how many follow-up attempts the research shows you actually need before you let a prospect go.
Video Transcription:
Hi again, it’s Ryan Miller with Etna Interactive, and we’re just coming back into the fall peak season for elective healthcare, and it’s the perfect moment in time for you, whether you’re a clinic leader, in charge of marketing, or the client success team inside of your clinic, to stop and reflect, and potentially retrain your team and introduce new protocols to ensure you’re doing the best possible job at nurturing new patient opportunities.
The test that I like to use with clinics when we’re having these conversations is just, do you know your number? And importantly, does everyone on your staff know your number? The number of… minimum number of times you will follow up with every new prospect, before giving up on that opportunity.
And, if you don’t know the number, or if your staff doesn’t know it, stick with me. And even if you do, let me open with a story that I think will get everybody thinking. So, in my family, we have a bit of lore.
My in-laws owned auto dealerships, and the story that was, I think, most important, for them was, in the late 80s, there was an old man who walked onto one of their Chevy dealerships, dirty overalls, a tatty t-shirt, and none of the salespeople would get up off their butts off the sales floor to go and talk to this guy.
My former father-in-law, who ran the dealership, kind of walked out and greeted the man, had a conversation, and that day he walked away with 16 brand new Chevy trucks—a fleet of vehicles—because that old guy was actually this guy, William Randolph Hearst Jr., heir to the Hearst Empire fortune, who is shopping for a new fleet for the ranch land that they maintained on the central coast of California.
And why this is, I think, important is I hear all the time as a specialist in online digital marketing about bad leads. Sometimes it’s a lead that’s not financially qualified or someone who maybe has a health condition that would prevent them from going forward with a procedure. Still further, someone who maybe is asking questions, but they’re definitely not ready to book a surgery or a non-surgical treatment today.
And, to me, none of those are bad leads; those are just opportunities that need to be qualified. And importantly, I think most of that you couldn’t assess from a voicemail or from an email. And so, it’s, in my opinion, it’s not your staff’s position to determine lead quality at that initial contact stage. It’s their opportunity to set in motion really 3 principles that I’m going to talk through today, and I’ll give you a quick action plan to wrap up.
The first thing I need you to do, if you’re the practice leader, is just admit and get your leadership to engage with the idea that you can’t even begin to nurture things that you can’t recall. So if you don’t have good record keeping for each and every inquiry that’s coming into the practice, you have no hope of performing as well as the best practices in your market.
So, you need to set the expectation of the team: 100% of inquiries get logged, whether it’s form or email, and they get entered into your protocol, whether that’s a real-world protocol or if it’s software-driven, to drive the follow-up protocols.
Now, you need to train the team to overcome objections about information sharing. So this is a real challenge that many people who you hire, you’ll assume that they have this skill set.
But if a patient calls and they’re just asking for pricing information, what are you going to teach them for them to be able to have that person really just prefer to hang up the call to help patients understand and see the value in sharing their contact information with you so you can nurture them?
You know, ultimately, you need to audit that this is happening. You can pick a couple of days or a week in the last month, go back and look at your sources of inquiries, check the records that made it into your CRM or your physical logs, and you’ll know right away whether your team is already being successful at this, or if they need to be coached.
The second principle we need for you to understand and really embrace is that speed to lead has been proven to matter. So, the most important study that we see cited again and again now is over a decade old. It came out of MIT; it was vetted and validated by two additional research institutions.
And it’s the idea of the 5-minute follow-up. We’ve all kind of heard it before. I think most clinic owners kind of shrug and say, yeah, but is that realistic? And the answer is, well, it is, if you want to be the top converting practice in your market. Ultimately, 5-minute follow-up performed about 21 times better in the published research than even as short as 30 minutes, which a lot of practices still struggle to meet even that mark.
But at the end of the day, I think the thing that just we have to acknowledge is the farther you get from the time of the initial inquiry, the lower and lower conversion. The positive way of framing that is the first responders, they usually win. And it’s largely about convenience. The folks who can answer the question in the right way for the patient first, it becomes an easy and obvious choice for at least the consultation.
So, the third and final one is probably the one, and it’s really the question that I opened with, that a lot of clinic owners struggle with, but I will tell you, a lot of trusted parties have researched this. The two that I put the greatest faith in are RealSelf and MyMedLeads. This is actually a slide that I borrowed directly from the team at RealSelf here, about how frequently you need to follow up.
And the data from RealSelf here is really compelling. Four follow-ups, you’re 48% more likely to connect and convert the consumer. Eight follow-ups put you at 60%, and interestingly, the team at MyMedLeads found that the optimal conversion happens after the 11th try.
And, you know, I’ll share candidly, as I have conversations with the clinics that we work with, many abandon the conversation or the attempt to reach and connect to the patient at 3, and it’s just not enough.
You know, and ultimately, these prospects have given you permission to try and start the conversation. Most of them, even if you haven’t connected with them on the third try, are still very, very interested. Their life is just busy, and you haven’t yet found that moment where it’s the perfect time to reconnect.
And while there are many great ways today than just endlessly… better ways today than just endlessly following up with them on a straight phone call, SMS—many practices find enhanced connection options there—what’s important is the number of tries, and that you’ve named that number, you’ve trained it into your team, and that you have the software in place to tell you whether or not it’s actually happening.
So, I think the first and most important place to start, if you haven’t done this already, is talk with your team about the value of every inquiry that’s coming into the practice. You don’t know when that person is or is not ready to become a patient, you don’t know their financial needs in the earliest stages of the conversation. You don’t know their medical readiness for that procedure, and you need to leave them with the best possible impression so that when they are ready, when they do have the money, when they have cleared any medical hurdles, you’re the first and most obvious choice for their procedure.
You need to, if you hope to have any nurturing in place at all, make sure 100% of those inquiries get logged in the system and software, or whatever physical log you use, so that you can go back to it and follow those recall protocols.
Speed to lead is important, and if you’re the business leader inside of your clinic today, my biggest challenge to you is reflect deeply on this one, and help your team remove barriers to be able to getting back to patients quickly, to prospects quickly.
This might mean increasing staffing, shifting job duties, moving some responsibilities away from key players who are responsible for patient communication, so that they have the time to rapidly address inquiries as they are coming into the practice. And then name your number, right? This is where we started this whole conversation.
Pick the number of times you expect your staff to continue to attempt to connect with prospects once they’ve expressed an interest in your clinic and then hold them to it. Now, that’s going to be really difficult to do unless you have some kind of software solution. You can certainly try to do this with paper records and chart keeping; it’s just going to be a lot harder.
But get the system in place that gives you the visibility to whether your team is being successful here. Do this before the end of the year, as we enter into the strongest periods for elective healthcare, and you’re going to have the best possible outcomes in 2027.
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