Psst…Don’t Tell Your Competition: Mystery Marketing Hero Revealed.
First, do the hardball math. When the phone rings in your office, you are probably losing more new business than you’re winning. Close to 70 percent of new patient calls produce no revenue because the caller never comes into the office. That means your practice is seeing only three out of ten of these callers.
Our little analogy aside, here’s why staff phone skills, converting inbound phone inquiries into first appointments and staff training are serious business. It’s especially important for elective care practices such as cosmetic dentistry, facial and plastic surgery, dermatology, medispa and others.
In lost-opportunity annual revenue, it’s about a million and a quarter unrealized dollars if your average case size is around $5,000. If your typical case size is smaller—say $1,000—your annual loss is over $250,000. (Give us a call and we’ll give you the formula, but it will be scary.)
So with this much missing money, you may have tried the “secret shopper” idea yourself. The practitioner or office manager has a friend or sister-in-law call the practice to evaluate how the staff greeted them.
Often the Do-It-Yourself approach isn’t deeply revealing because the “shopper” doesn’t look beyond a “pleasant phone voice” for the true sales acumen of the office. (If there are any conversion skills to be found.)
In contrast, here’s a recent real-life illustration. We have experience in working with hundreds of physicians and their staff members. As part of the training for a client, the team mystery shopped the offices of six competitive practices. Not one of the competitors asked for an appointment.
That’s good news for our client…really bad news for those other guys. The more-bad-news is that most practices—perhaps yourself included—do not have a system, or the proper staff training, for converting inbound inquiries into first patient visits.
We are the guys you don’t want your competition to know. You might have a million reasons to keep his identity to yourself. And if you want to talk with us about staff training for your office, his secret phone number is (800) 656-0907. And more info is revealed here.
