Rule No. 1: Don’t Overlook the Patient Leads You Already Have
By Charles Winn
When you ask an oral surgery practice about their current growth initiatives, the answer typically centers around “top of the funnel” strategies. Whether it’s building stronger referral relationships, upping their digital market efforts, or generating stellar patient reviews, the focus is usually on getting more leads and rarely about what comes next.
To be clear, lead generation is a critical component of growth. But unless converting leads is given the same attention and resources as attracting leads, this lack of balance will lead to a lack of results.
Having analyzed more than 600,000 new patient phone calls at Liine, we found that the average oral surgery practice only converts 55% of their new patient leads into an appointment. Said differently, the probability of a new lead booking an appointment in oral surgery (cosmetic and medical) is only slightly better than a coin flip.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not my practice! We get most of our new patients as referrals!” As crazy as it sounds, referral patients only convert at a marginally higher rate of 62%.
There are several reasons why this conversion rate is lower than expected, but here are the core contributing factors:
A Significant Number of New Patient Calls Go Unanswered
This one hurts: the average practice fails to answer new lead calls over 16% of the time… DURING BUSINESS HOURS! Few things are as detrimental to the patient experience (and conversion) as not being available. If you pick up the phone more often, you will schedule more patients. If that’s not the definition of “low-hanging fruit,” I don’t know what is.
Because of this, the most successful practices in the country continually monitor their missed call rates (NOT just their voicemail messages—most new patients hang up and don’t leave a voicemail) and ensure they have adequate staff to cover the phones.
Staff Aren’t Focused on Helping Patients Schedule
Outside of insurance issues, the top 3 reasons new patients fail to book an appointment are:
- Needing to take a message 11.1%
- Lack of desired day/time slots available 10.8%
- Caller procrastination 6.3%
All three of these conversion killers are symptomatic of one major issue: most staff members aren’t appropriately focused on scheduling appointments. Instead of actively leading the caller through the booking process, they passively wait for the caller to book themselves.
Top performing oral surgery practices (conversion rates above 70%) are not leaving this up to chance. With a guiding belief that a scheduled appointment is not only the best outcome for the practice but the patient too, they make it an organizational priority to do whatever it takes to help new leads book an appointment. When a lead is struggling to find an appointment that fits their schedule, these practices go the extra mile to find other options that are suitable. If a patient is having trouble deciding about next steps, their staff members are trained to confidentially (and honestly) recommend a one-on-one visit with their top surgeons.
Practices Are SLOW at Responding to Web Leads
Even if your practice doesn’t receive a ton of website form submissions, a web lead represents just as much revenue as a phone lead. However, most practices have no formal process to ensure these leads are followed up with quickly, and thus a normal time frame is hours or days. Why is this a bad idea? Speed matters, as a recent Harvard Business School study found: responding to a web lead within the first 5 minutes increases the chances of a connection by 900%.
High performance practices leverage technology and implement protocols to respond to web leads immediately and track subsequent follow-up.
The Upshot
Next time you think about your lead generation strategy, spend some time on your lead conversion strategy as well. Whether you create a system internally or use a third party, it should be documented, measured, and preached throughout the organization. You can’t help patients unless you get them in the door!
Demand for oral surgery and related treatments at an all-time high. Our data shows that new patient volumes 104% greater than pre-COVID levels! Someone is going to capitalize on this industry growth, and there’s no reason it can’t be your practice.
Charles Winn
Chief Revenue Officer
Liine
Liine is a call recording and automated lead management platform that is an all-in-one solution for converting more new patient calls and web forms into patients.