If you truly want to grow your practice and turn it into the type of organization you’d always hoped you would one day be running, you need leads – and plenty of them. Growth depends on your ability to attract a constant stream of new patients, which will ultimately allow you to scale at the appropriate pace and better position yourself for the next few years and beyond.
The concept of “Speed to Lead” – that is, the philosophy that the first hour is always the most crucial time for lead follow-up – is absolutely critical to your success. When you’re talking about a situation where a difference of between five and ten minutes in contact delay could make a thousand dollar difference in your revenue, it’s easy to see why absolutely every second counts.
The Art of Speed to Lead and Your Medical Practice
Generally speaking, you should always try to call a lead and begin a relationship within five minutes of their original contact with your practice. This is important because the odds of contacting a lead if called in five minutes versus 30 minutes drop an incredible 100 times. The odds of qualifying that lead also drop a massive 21 times over the same period.
All told, over the first hour, your odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by a significant 10 times. Not only that but after 20 hours every additional time you call that lead, your efforts will likely hurt your ability to qualify, not help it.
When someone calls your medical practice, they have an urgent issue that they need help with. Maybe they have a question or maybe they’re dealing with something more immediately serious. It doesn’t matter – they’ve chosen you for the assistance they seek and to them, this is the most important problem they will face all week. The longer you wait to give them your attention, the more likely they are to look somewhere else. This means that the chances of them turning into an actual patient are slim, hurting your ability to scale along the way.
Not only do you need to make “Speed to Lead” a priority in your practice, but you also need to have someone on your team who deeply understands market research and changing technology, too. Only then will you be able to generate the greatest level of return on the leads coming in, all of which will mean a big boost to your entire organization in the future.
