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Healthcare marketing, sales training and recruiting to grow your practice, clinic or private hospital

LiveseySolar is a medical marketing and sales training consultancy specialising in serving small to medium-sized clinics, hospitals and healthcare chains grow their sales. Our London based company has over 12 years of experience in helping customers generate, nurture and close enquiries resulting in millions of pounds in incremental sales.

Our services can be quickly summed up as:

1. healthcare internet marketing and sales consulting
2. healthcare training in customer service, telephone sales, and consultation sales
3. healthcare marketing recruitment

We consider the entire marketing and sales pipeline when we consult with our clients

You’ll notice we talk a lot about hurdles. We think there are 4 critical hurdles you need to focus on as a healthcare business owner or manager. Each hurdle can be addressed by different combinations of marketing, sales and recruiting solutions.

Start with your highest marketing hurdle first

Many of our clients come to us with many questions and some confusion as to where to start first. Is it better to work on the new website, train the sales staff, buy that new piece of equipment, or build a customer survey? What will have most impact? Our answer is always the same. Focus on your highest marketing hurdle. Most practices know where they have the biggest problems.

Select your highest marketing hurdle below to see potential solutions:

1. “I don’t have as many enquiries as I’d like”
2. “I don’t have as many appointments as I’d like”
3. “I don’t have as many patients / clients as I’d like”
4. “I don’t have as many patient / client referrals as I’d like”

A services “laundry list” is below, however you don’t have to read it all – start by finding your hurdle

“I don’t have as many enquiries as I’d like”

There can be several reasons why you don’t have as many enquiries as you’d like:

• A failure to offer your target market the unique value proposition it seeks: Perhaps you’re not targeting the right market. It may be too small, too disperse, too hard to reach, or too poor. You may not be providing as much value as your competitors. If you suspect one of these issues might be the cause of a lack of enquiries, we can help answer your questions with services including marketing positioning and planning, market analysis, competitive analysis, strategies, campaigns, budgets and calendars. New healthcare marketing businesses, as well as established ones, can benefit greatly from this market positioning.
• A failure to be found online: You be hitting the sweet spot between market and value, but your website may not be attracting enough visitors to sustain your enquiry goals. Or, you may be in such a competitive space that a Google search for the keywords relevant to your offering finds you on page 2, 3, 4, 5 or worse. If you’re finding it difficult to attract new visitors to your website, you might need professional help to plan and implement search engine marketing with (search engine optimisation [SEO] and/or pay per click [PPC]) to increase visitors to your website. Getting ranked in search engines is all about consistently creating compelling content – and if you’re on a limited budget – we can help you do it yourself.
• A failure to convert website visitors: It’s possible that you’re attracting a reasonable number of visitors to your website via direct, referral, organic or paid search sources. However, your website may be failing to generate the sufficient trust required for your visitors to get past the homepage. It may be too out-of-date, too ugly, too confusing, or too boring to convert visitors into enquiries. When your website content, design, usability, or calls to action fail to meet your desired goals – it may be time for a website redesign. If you don’t yet have a website, you needed one yesterday.
• A failure to provide informative alternatives: Perhaps you’re customers want to learn more about your product or service before they contact you. If all you offer is a phone number and a contact form, they may wander elsewhere to find the information they want. In these cases, you can generate more enquiries over time by educating them with information products. These include free reports or white papers about your industry, helpful guides on choosing a provider, top 10 lists, info-graphics, or other education materials they may want to download from your website.
• A failure to open new healthcare marketing channels: If you’re looking to add to already successful channels of generating enquiries, you may want to begin sharing your content across social media. Sharing your content in a Blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and other platforms enables you to generate awareness amongst your target market that hasn’t yet found your website. Your involvement in social media marketing enables you to extend your reach beyond conventional means of generating enquiries. Social media when combined with remarkable customer service produces more referrals, which tend to convert better than any other type of enquiry.

“I don’t have as many appointments as I’d like”

Of course, not having as many appointments as you’d like is a consequence of not having enough enquiries. But, there are other causes too:

• A failure to keep accurate and comprehensive records: If you’re already generating a sufficient number of enquiries, you may not be converting enough of them if you’re not collecting their information in a effective healthcare marketing database. Keeping records in spreadsheets or contact management systems can be adequate for some, but if you really want to capitalise on your enquiries, you’ll want a healthcare marketing system that enables you to automate lead capture, track your sales efforts, segment your enquiries, and follow them up without introducing manual labour.
• A failure to convert enquiries on the telephone: An inability to convert enquiries into appointments on the phone is one of the most common reasons for a lack of appointments, and consequently a lack of sales. Frequently, the people who answer your phones have little or no training in effective telephone sales techniques. Often, the people answering your phone would rather do just about anything else than “sell”. You may need to hire and train the right people, or you may need to train the people you have, to convert more callers into appointments.
• A failure to follow-up: If you’re looking to improve conversion rates that are already good, you may be able to convert more of your unconverted enquiries either following up by phone, post or email. Nurturing your leads involves setting up personalised follow-up sequences (involving calls, post and/or calls). These messages can be sent only to people who’ve requested them, targeted to serve their specific interests, and delivered without any of your busy staff’s involvement.

“I don’t have as many patients / clients as I’d like”

A lack of enquiries and appointments can lead to not having as many patients / clients as you’d like. However, there are a few improvements you can make to overcome this hurdle too:

• A failure to convert appointments into patients / clients: Doctors and other medical professionals rarely have any training in interpersonal communication, let alone advanced techniques related to influence or persuasion. Importantly, we’re not talking about the skills involved in convincing people to do anything they don’t want to do. Rather, we’re advocating providing doctors and other medical professionals with consultation skills to understand what their patients really want so they can illustrate the risks and benefits of a prescribed treatment in such a way that patients can make the choices that are right for them.
• A failure to treat your patients / clients as they expect to be treated: Sometimes, patients and clients fail to convert even if you have done everything you can to provide them with the best examination and treatment available. In these cases, it’s possible that other, non-clinical factors, may cause your prospects to look elsewhere. These are what are know as hygiene factors – reasons to reject you – and they may include a failure to provide the standard of customer service that your target market expects or a failure to meet the expectations you have created (in your facility or your staff). These non-clinical hurdles can sometimes be overcome with customer service training or a customised service improvement plan.

“I don’t have as many patient / client referrals as I’d like”

• A failure to be “remarkable”: Why is it that nearly every patient or client says they’ll recommend you to a friend but only a fraction at best actually do? One of the reasons you may not be generating as much word of mouth as you’d like is because you’ve done only what’s expected of you, and nothing more. Perhaps you’ve done nothing worth “remarking” about, so even your satisfied patients fail to mention your name unless they are directly asked. Turning satisfied customers into loyal customers that recommend you to everyone who will listen is no easy task – but it’s worth trying. Customer service training can help, as well as specifically designed service improvements that serve to delight and surprise your customers, so that they have something to talk about.
• A failure to remind your patients / clients that you exist, well after you’ve served them: Everyone is busy and people have a remarkable ability to adapt to new circumstances. Soon after you’ve changed their lives your patients become accustomed to their new reality, especially if they have no reason to interact with you again. In such cases, customer research, automated email newsletters, blogging, patient forums, patient events and social media help to keep you foremost in their minds. And, when you combine great service with consistent communication, you get more patient referrals and repeat purchases as a result.
• A failure to ask for referrals. This one’s a no-brainer. If you’ve done a great job, your patients will think you’re already successful. Why would you need their help to get more patients? In fact, you do. And one of the simplest ways to get more referrals is to ask your loyal patients to give them to you. This can be done with elegance, or crassly. We can show you how to do the former.

Healthcare marketing fundamentals

Every successful healthcare business needs to have their marketing foundations in place. For practices, clinics and hospitals that are just getting started or are looking to revitalise their marketing communications, we provide