While I wouldn’t technically call it eavesdropping, I can easily overhear my office staff answering incoming calls at the front desk. And interestingly, I can tell within seconds if the “lead” on the phone is going nowhere. In addition to the initial phone call interaction, it quickly becomes evident that leads are going nowhere in all forms of communication with our office, including emails and website submission inquiries.
5 Ways to tell you’re getting low yield leads!
1) If you receive a message through the website contact form that consists of monosyllabic sentence fragments and misspellings…you might be dealing with low yield leads!
2) The incoming phone caller starts off asking very specific, directed questions about cost, as if they’re simply comparing your prices to the office they just got off the phone with. In any case…you might be dealing with low yield leads!
3) Any email or voicemail interaction that occurs after midnight, when the caller/emailer is likely to be drunk…is probably a low yield lead!
4) If the caller is resistant to giving you their contact info so that you can send them more information…you’re most likely dealing with low yield leads!
5) Upon calling, the consumer asks if your cosmetic plastic surgery practice accepts insurance for cosmetic procedures or asks if your office will tell the insurance company that their eyelid lift or tummy tuck is medically necessary (i.e. insurance fraud)…you’ve probably got a low yield lead on the phone!
If this sounds like your office, there’s something you can do about it. The common thread to all of these issues is the patient’s lack of commitment prior to the phone call. They’re calling to get pricing info or learn more about the procedure. Utilizing your front office staff’s time to learn this basic information is wasteful. A filter on your website that qualifies patients more readily is just what the doctor ordered.
By providing helpful information on your website, specific to your practice that the consumer can’t find anywhere else, you’ll save time. Details regarding surgical options, recovery time, before and after photos and most importantly pricing information will eliminate most of the inquiries through the contact submission form. With an automated pricing estimator, the consumer can check pricing on their own time without your office staff having to manually respond to those pricing requests.
Think about the time savings in the context of my practice. I have both a contact submission form on my website as well as an automated pricing estimator wherein I get the consumer’s contact info for follow up and they get automated pricing information on the services and procedures I offer. Over the last three years, I received 74 submissions through the contact submission form. By contrast, I received “wishlists” from 2,765 consumers checking pricing. They get the pricing information automatically emailed to them from our doctor-provided pricing database and the contact info from their lead is synced to our email marketing database, so everyone wins and there’s no wasted time.
Over 90% of the website submission inquiries are focused solely on price. So if we didn’t have an automated price estimator on our site, then you could argue that rather than 74 manual requests for pricing information, we would’ve received over 2,700! And consider all of the wasted time manually responding with pricing details to all of those website inquiries. The bottom line is: do everything you can to separate the serious inquiries from the drunks emailing you after midnight and allocate your limited time and resources to those leads that will go somewhere!
To see how I use a Price Estimator on my website, click here. Or to get your own Price Estimator for your website, click here.
Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Jonathan Kaplan for BuildMyBod.
