How to Deliver Hyper Convenience
Our next referral essence component is convenience. Please, don’t be deceived by the casual name of this crucial element of referral intensity.
You will increase your practice production by 20% or more. Keep in mind, you can’t be overpriced of course. And assuming you’re not trying to price yourself out of practice, this material will do more for your personal financial future than if you won the lottery.
I’m going to show you how you can not only remove one of the most insidious referral barriers out there. I’m going to show you how you can get access to a literal untapped wealth of new patients. There’s a premium in today’s world on consumer convenience. And I have to admit it came to me really as a complete surprise.
Certain negative forces have put downward pressure on most practices, namely managed care and increased competition.
While competitive pricing and value selling can help you level the playing field, knowledge of convenience dynamics can give you an edge that few practices in the country can match.
You can have all the referrals and walk-ins you want. But that can cost you upwards to $1,500,000 or more to get all those walk-ins and referrals you want.
How’s that possible? When someone’s impressed by my clinic’s services, prices, my staff’s winning personality, my clinic excellence, isn’t that free? I mean, all that cost made was a smile and a kind word?
You couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I told you that referral patients purchase more. They’re easier to work with. They show up for appointments. They refer their friends, etc., etc., etc. Yes, I said that. But I never said that referrals were cheap, or even cheaper than advertising patients. If you want referral patients, you have to be ready to pay for them just like advertising patients. Referral patients are indeed a blessing for poorly organized practices, staff with half-trained unmotivated people.
See, strong referral patients are everything you want in a patient, but they’re not cheaper than advertising patients. They’re just better. See, that’s different than cheaper.
Practices want to maximize the number of referral patients they’re seeing each month and they want to achieve optimum monthly profit. Right? Well, here lies the problem. This is like trying to be fat and skinny at the same time. You just can’t do it. I told you that the title of this recording is convenience. Well, convenience is a patient term.
The practice word for convenience is productive capacity. Or from this point on just capacity or peak time capacity. It takes the capacity to provide true convenience. You see, it’s not convenience that inspires a patient to refer. It’s hyper-convenience.
The difference between stagnation and an additional five referrals every single month to the practice is Convenience, that is not running behind or making patients wait for days to get on the schedule. That simply manages to not frustrate patients.
Hyper-convenience on the other hand inspires patients to refer as you effortlessly deliver this much appreciated but totally unexpected level of service. If hyper-convenience is the goal, hyper-capacity will be the price you pay to reach that goal.
What you have now is productive capacity. In fact, you would argue and I would agree that you have the excess productive capacity.
After all, aren’t you just standing around much of the time with no one to treat? Well, now we’re at the heart of the referral mystery. Yes, you have excess productive capacity, but not at certain times of the day.
You have excess capacity during times of the day that are unpopular with patients. You want patients to take off work repeatedly so you can fill your slow times, thus avoiding your having to increase overhead in the form of additional staff, space and equipment. Well, how is this approach work for you? Am I mistaken or are you still running around chaotically in the afternoons and sitting around with nothing to do in the slow times? How long do you have to wait to be convinced that patients aren’t going to fill up the slow times of the day? A year? Five? 10 years? Give it up. Patients aren’t ever going to fill the slow times. Doesn’t matter how much you advertise, how much you ask for referrals, that isn’t when people want to come in.
You know, if you’re a CPA, everybody wants their taxes done the first three and half months of the year. If you told everybody if you’re an accountant, you know, this isn’t a good time for us, come back in the summer, what would happen? I can tell you, the same thing that’s happening to you now.
Let me sum it up. If you’re looking for more new patients, you needn’t look any farther than the high demand times of your day. You already have excess demand in your practice during these times. You’re waiting to figure out a way to get excess demand during these slow times.
