The Patient Whisperer
Finding patients that fit
There’s a fundamental numbers problem facing practitioners in integrative medicine: most people aren’t buying what you’re selling.
Take naturopathic medicine. Good stats are hard to come by, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that less than 10% of the people in your area use an ND with any regularity. It’s probably closer to 3%.
at’s a pretty small slice of the pie.
e good thing about that slice, though, is that it’s tasty. It’s made up of people who already understand what you do and want what you have to off er. ey’re already on board. ey love you. ey need less educating, less convincing.
The downside of that small slice of the pie, though, is that it isn’t always enough to feed everyone. Most of us need to wade out into the vast blue ocean of opportunity that is the other 90% or more of the population. And that’s where the trouble begins: it turns out that the ocean is a big place, and not everyone in it is friendly.
The Problem With Skeptics
That unexplored area on the map represents the opportunity to grow your practice. It’s a vast, untapped mass of people who have often never heard of you or what you do, never mind actually considered trying it.
But strange territory has a way of changing how we behave. Faced with uncertainty and skepticism, we change our stance. We become less confi dent. We compromise more. In an eff ort to win over skeptics we cut fees, stay late, open early, and make a host of other concessions that impact our lives and the quality of the care we deliver.
In short, trying to win people over is when we become the Jackass Whisperer. We spend money trying to reach them. We give them time, and more time, and still more time. And worst of all, we let our confi dence hang on whether or not they’ll fi nally agree with us.
But the worse part of all of this is that chasing skeptics doesn’t work. It turns out that after all your eff ort, expense and agony, the skeptics are still the same way they were when you started: skeptical. And in the meantime, they’ve drained time and energy away from the people you love to help.
Worse still, it’s not even their fault. It’s yours. e problem with skeptics, it turns out, is not that they’re skeptical. It’s that we keep pouring energy into them. But that leaves us with a dilemma. Your fans currently aren’t enough to feed you. But the people that aren’t your fans can be an enormous drain of resources to market to. So how do you grow?
1. Understand the Cost of a Lost Skeptic…is Almost Nothing Before you can truly let go of the people that don’t fi t, you need to understand how little you’re actually giving up. ere’s often a little voice in your head that speaks up when you start pandering to skeptics. It’s a voice that says, “ is person isn’t a great fi t. Let them go.” en, of course, another voice speaks up that says, “Who do you think you are? You can’t aff ord to be so picky.”
That second voice is often the squeaky wheel – it gets all the attention. But the problem with that voice is that it’s terrible at math. It’s the voice of fear, and it believes that every lost opportunity is also lost income.
It turns out, though, that patients who don’t fi t simply don’t have that much value to your practice. ey often can’t be pleased. ey consume resources. ey don’t refer. ey don’t comply, and then they complain to others.
Let them go.
2. Define Who Fits Once you know what you don’t want more of, it’s important to defi ne the patients you do want.
In our clinic, the people who need our help the most and make the best patients have one or more of these three things in common:
• A health complaint that no one else could help resolve
• An intolerance to conventional options, or the need to reduce or eliminate a conventional care dependency
• A desire for better health care service. Th ings like more time, accessibility, no waiting, respect and informed consent.
That’s it. If someone meets one or more of those criteria, we can help. It’s that simple. Your criteria might be far more specifi c – what’s important is that you have criteria. Your criteria help strain that big, unwashed slice of pie, fi ltering out who doesn’t fi t, and leaving behind the people that we can best help.
3. Start Fan Whispering ose rules also serve an even more important purpose: they help other people understand who we can help. at’s critical, because even when you defi ne who you do want, there’s still a barrier to be surmounted: the people you want don’t know you. You may have what they want, but you may not have the credibility to bring them in.
But who does have the clout? e people connected to them – their friends, family, colleagues, service providers and more. And guess where they are? In your practice.
Tapping into new patients, then, begins not by trying to fi nd the people you want to be your fans, but by speaking to the ones who already are. ey’re your levers to help shift others. ey’ re the ones with the infl uence and the reach to step out into that big ocean and attract the people you’re looking for.
But how do you do it? What does it mean to focus on your fans?
Delight them:
You’re not really competing with the ND down the street – unless you want to keep squabbling over that same small slice of pie. What you’re really competing with is the idea in our minds that health care should be free. To justify your fee-for-service existence, you need to thrill your fans, every time. Do that, and they’ll do the hard work of convincing their friends and family that you’re worth every penny.
Eliminate barriers to entry:
Your fans are already out their singing your praises. But occasionally they’re stumbling across the same roadblock you are: the cost of what you do. We hear stories all the time of people desperately trying to convince their friends and family to visit a naturopath, but the person in question can’t seem to get over the cost issue.
Why not just remove it? Just for one visit?
Empower your fans to remove that barrier. Selectively give out certifi cates for a complete fi rst visit to your best patients, and ask them to off er it to someone. ey’ll know who needs it most. And once that person sees what you’re really about, the money may be far less of a barrier than it once was.
Find e Fans With Reach:
In terms of their ability to deliver patients to you, not all fans are created equally. And not all fans are patients. Who can you partner with in your community that can reach the people you’re seeking? One fan with reach can go a long way to fi lling your practice. We’ve met more than one practitioner whose practice was built almost entirely on referrals from another provider who was a true fan.
Patient Whispering Pays Off
Over time, the best quality and quantity of patients will come from inside your practice. ey’ll be delivered by the people who love you most, and fi t you best. Where they won’t come from is from people who don’t fi t. Spend your time speaking to the people who love what you do. When you meet a jackass – and you will – move on.
