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Increase Patient Referrals and Sales Each Month
What’s the best way to attract more patients to grow your medical practice?
Patient referrals is the short answer.
The problem is most practice owners only get a few a month, which is like opening up a bag of M&Ms and only finding one or two, instead of 16 or 20.
How about your practice, wish you could get 20 referrals a week instead of a measly 1 or 2?
It just takes 2 simple steps which we’ll reveal in an instant below, but before I do, let me tell you a brief story about Ray. Ray is one of our top employees and yesterday he came to me with a simple question. He wanted to know if he was going to get the $1,000 raise that everyone in the company gets when they master our core skill set.
The answer was of course! Ray was due the $1,000 and we were more than happy to bump up his base pay accordingly. If he hadn’t asked, we most likely would have forgotten about it.
Back to patient referrals.
What’s the first thing you need to do to get them?
You probably guessed the answer. Like Ray, you need to ASK.
What’s the big reason providers don’t ask for a referral?
They think they’re imposing on patients.
Which, by the way, isn’t true at all.
The truth is when you ask someone who has just made a large purchase, to recommend others to do the same, you are doing them a favor. You’re giving them a chance to justify and confirm their decision.
The key to getting referrals is to ask your patients and ask local physicians. Without asking, you will only get a trickle. Ask every day and you’ll get patient referrals every day.
Now, we’ve brought this simple idea up before. To be honest when we do, a lot of practice owners think we must be idiots. They tell us they’ve tried asking and it doesn’t work.
Who is right?
It’s true, if you ask for a patient referral at the wrong time or use the wrong words, it’s not going to work. People are going to stare at you blankly, or give you some lame excuse, like I’ll get back to you. Which tells you what?
It tells you that the way you asked them made it hard for them to answer, they got stuck.
The solution?
Make it easier for your patients.
This is exactly what one provider at one of our practices did recently. In May, when sales are typically slow, he started asking every patient, using a simple script we’ll detail below, and handing them a card they could hand to a friend. That’s it, ask and hand patients a card.
The result?
He, one provider, in one typically slow month, generated $210,000 in hearing aid sales.
The Proven Referral System
Step 1 – At the end of every appointment use these exact words:
- “It’s been great working with you today.
- Can I ask you a small favor? (these exact words are key)
- I know you waited a while to get help for your hearing loss. You must have friends that have the same trouble hearing too.
- Can you do me a small favor and give this card to a friend THIS WEEK and tell them to make an appointment with me?”
Step 2 – Hand them your customized referral card
Below are two versions. Just let your MedPB Practice Growth Advisor know which you’d like to use and they can edit the templates they have for these, save them as a PDF file and send them to you instantly.
Option A: Dementia
Option B: You Deserve to Hear
