How do you survive, or even thrive in a changing or troubled economy? The first two questions must be, first, are we playing into national news hysteria? Or, should we just do our work and ride it out?
If we adhere to the hard and fast rules of economics, a recession is defined as two consecutive negative growth quarters and the US economy hasn’t actually had any negative growth to date.
We all know reality is in the eye of the “beholder” and in this case it may be more accurate to say in the “eye of the beholder’s pockets.” We’ve been hearing grumblings across the country, but in the offices we visited this spring, the reality has been they’re all still busy. They may be getting fewer phone calls, or even scheduling lesser procedures, but people are still purchasing aesthetic services and surgeries.
So whether or not you’re feeling it, business must continue. That doesn’t mean you have to like it…. but it does mean you have to adjust your thinking about how you view the world from your economic advantage. You might have held off on buying that new laser, or took a lesser vacation, but you are still going to do both, the timing has just been adjusted.
Your patients are also adjusting their timeframe. They’re still going to have the procedure, but they have more doctors to choose from than ever before and better pricing than any other time. With so many competitors, you’ve got to eliminate all the possible barriers to the sale. You’ve got to be more creative than the competition and work smarter, not harder.
Tales of woe abound, but are they true?
The news reports that the hardest hit region for foreclosure in the whole US is Riverside, California. In May, during visits to two plastic surgery practices within 10 miles of Riverside, the doctors were completely unaware of a problem. Oh, they had seen the news (or even driven past it), they just weren’t experiencing a downturn.
In areas like Florida, Boston, and Detroit, all very different to say the least, there were fewer phone calls in the first quarter for sure. Even traditional practices such as oral and maxillofacial surgery saw a decline in their bread and butter procedures by as much as 30%. But they are making it up now.
For those practices that enjoy a strong cosmetic following and brand awareness in their communities, they have ridden this wave much more easily than those practices that were new to the game or for whatever reason were never able to establish a quality brand. Having watched this industry for more than 20 years I can tell you that just about the time some of your colleagues will be ready to throw in the towel, is the time that the market will shift upward once again.
To quote Winston Churchill, “the greatest fear we have is fear itself.” And, after all this is the war of politics and economics. One more thought on this subject before I jump off the soapbox and onto what you can actually do. Across the ocean, Europeans are still having cosmetic surgery and they have much more expensive gas!
1. Your mindset
Your attitude and the way you “program” your staff to approach sales is key.
The practices where the doctor is walking back and forth wringing his or her hands, and looking over the shoulder of the scheduler, saying “Oh woe is me,” is not only driving the staff crazy, but also driving the patients away in droves. It’s as if there were an invisible cloud hanging over the practice with a megaphone blasting, “THE SHIP IS SINKING!” Employees emotionally start fleeing and every fiber of their being shouts, “whatever you do, don’t schedule your procedure here.”
Potential patients calling or coming in can feel that there is a problem even if they can’t identify what it is. It generally feels like desperation, and our natural response is to get as far away as possible. I’ve seen this happen in consultations and I’ve certainly heard it on the phone. There is only one way to overcome this, and it is to simply stop thinking about defeat and start thinking about how you are going to succeed. It’s exactly the same principles top athletes apply in a bad game or a losing tournament. They start focusing on what they want to happen instead of what they don’t.
In your case, you want patients to like and trust you. You want your staff to loves working for you and easily promote you to incoming callers. The goal is to schedule more of the right patients and to produce great results that are referral-worthy.
2. Respect money and it will respect you back
As a business owner, you have to remember that the phone is directly responsible for your cash flow. Therefore, you have to allow each phone conversation its full potential. The receptionist is like “triage” – she is always connecting the caller to the best person in your office for the call and is never too busy with front desk responsibilities to give her attention to the phone.
On the other hand, have you ever stood in a business with cash in hand, and had the person helping you put you off to answer the phone? It’s pretty offensive and in the case of a doctor’s office can cause you to lose of thousands of dollars. This is not your receptionist’s fault! The flow of phone calls has to be managed independently of the in-office patient flow.
3. Has the gatekeeper gotten so good she’s even keeping out the good calls?
The best phone screeners talk to every caller long enough to truly understand who the best person in the office is to field the call. They introduce themselves when they answer the phone, without exception, every time. This simple act begins a crucial bonding process with the patient which cannot be repaired later if it the opportunity is squandered.
And for heaven’s sake, have someone who speaks English as their first language answer the phone. If you have a bilingual phone person, fantastic! Just be sure to use this resource wisely.
4. Laugh in the face of recession and have a party!
The act of buying is strengthened exponentially by a group. Why do you think women like to go shopping together? Use email to announce the event and get the staff to personally call and invite your top 100 list. You don’t have to spend a fortune on an open house – use your product reps, skip the catering, offer great incentives and one time pricing on injectables at the event and bonus laser treatments with the purchase of big-ticket procedures. Don’t discount too much, but definitely add bonus medical spa treatments as incentives.
Make the financing process easy as possible and have it up and running during the party. Reward your regular patients handsomely for bringing friends.
5. Maximize free or low-cost resources!
Recent web statistics from cosmetic surgery websites show a dramatic rise in the number of searches for financing – which tells us that your readers are looking for ways to pay as a more serious factor in their decision making process. But their top search hasn’t changed a bit – before and after photos are always the first thing a prospect wants to see.
Shore up your web performance with new links. Use your aacs.org listing, double check your presence on Botox.com and Juvederm.com, answer more questions at RealSelf.com, set up your Google Local and Yahoo Local listings, get a link on the website of your local newspaper, link to doctors who you refer to and have them link back to you. Links are like friends – having abundant and powerful links is the secret to successful long-term website performance. Just don’t pay for fake ones because there are very serious consequences Google finds out.
6. Answer every email with a personal response.
If you’re sending too much copy and paste information in the response, you may be overwhelming them. If you send too little in an email response, it might look like you don’t care. Three to five sentences should be enough, with an introduction, just like the telephone – “Hi Jane, thank you for your inquiry about surgery. My name is Nancy and I am the patient coordinator for Dr. Wonderful.”
7. Don’t overanalyze Google results.
Being on the first page or two, for the treatments you specialize in, is a terrific result! Our naturally competitive nature can skew the way we see results if the competitor down the street is one or two spots above us on the list, but the truth is, the actively buying reader looks at all of the websites and makes a decision based upon the content of the site, not who was first in Google.
Do analyze your website performance.
Get real statistics from your webmaster. This means, how many visitors, how many page views, how long were the readers on the site, and how many contacts did you receive? This is the standard for performance and if you’re not getting this data, hopefully you’re not paying some kind of fee that gives you nothing.
Top 5 Free or Low Cost Resources
1. Realself.com
2. Google Local
3. Yahoo Local
4. Your colleagues!
5. Your patients!
8. This is not the time to pull back from marketing and advertising.
While your competitors are pulling out of almost all media outlets, you should be negotiating to place your ads and play your radio spots at reduced prices. Wait, why am I giving away all of our secrets?! You should let a professional like Strategic Edge Partners do it for you.
Remember that advertising outlets are reading the same press as you are; they are as panicked as anyone else. They have planes about to take off with empty seats, just like you do. So is it better to have a sale or let the plane leave empty out of principle?
9. Cosmetic Surgery Sales and Discounts
Specials are not always a bad way to go. If done correctly, you can create a buying cycle with the right terminology and the right strategic thinking. It’s okay to let patients know that if they want to qualify for a special price, they can be placed on your “3 day notice” list. If they can be available to fill a canceled surgery spot they can receive a significant discount. Remember the plane leaving with an empty seat. Once it’s gone you can’t retrieve it. Specials for Botox and other fillers, bundling skin care or laser services with procedures, all of these tactics work - they just need to be alternated so the offering doesn’t get old. We’re in an era where Botox is not a luxury, it’s a necessity just like hair, nails, and clothes.
9. A Unique Selling Proposition has never been more important.
You can look through any magazine in the country and find the same boring list of cosmetic procedures with the same stock photography. I would venture to say that in almost all of those cases very little surgery is ever sold. These are ads placed because people don’t know what else to do. You’re not marketers, you are doctors! And thank God for that, because otherwise I’d be cutting into people and you’d be writing this article.
Deciding on a unique selling proposition is no easy task. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to determine what you are good at and where you may be lacking. Sometimes, what is most unique about your procedure offering is not your most profitable set of procedures. So let’s talk about that.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do everything in your bag of tricks, it just means that for marketing’s sake you may need to do what Gypsy Rose Lee did. She understood that a girl has got a have a gimmick and became one of the most recognized strippers in the world. Not that I equate cosmetic surgery with burlesque, but I think you get my point.
