When was the last time you took a day to focus solely on learning and thinking about how to improve your business? For me, that answer is this past Friday. Prior to that, I don't remember when the last time was that I took an entire day to focus only on thinking about how to grow our business. It is amazing what you can come up with when you take the time to focus on how to run your business, instead of spending all your time focused on running your business. This past Friday for me started by completing a 5 hour marketing training course I had purchased a few weeks ago. As I went through the…

No matter what role I am playing, from time-to-time I find myself falling into the “Busy But Not Productive Trap”. I will start the day with an impressive to-do list and end the day with a million things done, unfortunately, most of them were not on my to-do list. This usually happens when I’ve had a major change in my life, and I’ve managed to stray from my normal, more productive, routine. This morning, while I was reading a Launch by Jeff Walker, I had an AHA! Moment. I thought I would share the words that inspired that moment with you today: “Your most scare…

There are multiple sales methods you can implement into your Medical Practice marketing plan to ensure you are seeing a steady stream of Medical Practice and occupational medicine patients. In the past we have examined the Medical Practice Sales Funnel. Today I want to examine an even simpler method to help you master Medical Practice sales and marketing – The ARC Method. The ARC method is a simple way to remember the three keys to a successful sales conversation. A: Ask When you meet someone, don’t just jump straight in and tell them about the services your Medical Practice…

With cold and flu season upon us, ensuring you have a good online reputation is important for driving patients to your practice when they need your Medical Practice services but don't yet know your business exists. Additionally, having positive online reviews is also an imperative part of your SEO strategy. Medical Practice Success is excited to announce that Bob Sommers will be hosting a free webinar on Tuesday to discuss this topic. Before moving to Maui, Hawaii with his family 18 years ago, Bob owned and operated what became the largest customer service training company in the country…

“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” ~Charlie “Tremendous” Jones … The above is one of my favorite quotes of all time. I believe it is imperative that we continue reading, pushing ourselves to new limits, and exploring ideas with different people if we want to grow. I am often asked which books have lead to my success in marketing. The truth is, there are a lot of books that have made me who I am today, but I do have two favorites. The first is a book entitled Positioning: The Battle for…

Over the last six years I have helped build one of the top marketing teams in the industry for our Medical Practices. As our industry has started to evolve, I have transitioned into a supervisory position where I am responsible for training each of the community educators in each market where we have a Clinic. Whenever I speak about this topic at industry events, like the Medical Marketing Conference I just hosted last week in California, I always get a variation of this question from Medical Practices that are expanding and looking to add a marketing team into their mix: “Do you have a…

I wear many different hats at our Medical Practices, but the most important hat I wear is the “Director of Guest Relations” hat. While you will never find this title on an organizational chart, it’s the title I use when a patient calls or emails in with a complaint about the services they received. I take each complaint personally because I know that statistics show for every customer complaint there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent. I also know that studies show if you’re able to fix a patient’s complaint, you can turn them into a…

A few weeks ago an article ran in the sidebar of Medical Practice Success about tracking customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) System. It is one of the systems we use at our Medical Practices to both monitor our customer satisfaction levels and to also respond to patient complaints. After learning about it, one of our readers wrote in and asked: “Seems if the real goal is to find problems (since 95% will be positive), I feel that the current system you use is unlikely to necessarily do the job well enough -- some patients will be too timid to say something and hand a…

Last week I was frustrated by the lack of implementation that had happened on a new marketing financial policy we had put in place at our Medical Practices. A few months ago, our company’s chief financial officer and I co-hosted a 45 minute training session on the new policy with our marketing team. All of the marketers signed off on an agreement that clearly outlined what we had discussed. Yet here I was just a few months later wondering why so many of the things we had discussed were still not happening. As I pondered this, I began to also ponder other trainings I had put in place.

Last Friday the top items on my task list were to design four new marketing pieces for our Medical Practice in the morning, and compile the February articles for MPS in the afternoon. In fact, those were my only goals for the day, but none of them happened. Instead, I allowed my day to be hijacked. My day started with an unexpected meeting at 7:30 a.m. By the time I walked into my office to begin my day, I was already 40 minutes “behind schedule”. Before I was even able to sit completely down in my chair, one of my colleagues came in and said, “I need your help.” The…