Key System Number One From The Infusionsoft Training Guide For Physical Therapists: The Value Added Welcome System
So key system number one of our Infusionsoft training guide for Physical Therapists; here we go! This is something that I call the value added welcome system. What is it? Well, simply it’s what we do to make the patient feel special and welcomed before they even arrive at our practice. It helps us to give them a clear understanding of what they’re really paying for before they are asked to pay for it, because at my physical therapy clinic, they’re not just paying for physical therapy; we like to provide an experience. We like to be judged on the experience that we provide for patients, the time that we give to people, the decision that we help them make. We like to brighten the day and have some fun with people, and we want them to judge us on that not just as a Physical Therapist.
A problem that lots of physical therapy clinics are running into is that they are commodities. They have people calling up and asking the price and then looking for somebody cheaper, or canceling appointments because they found somebody cheaper halfway through the cap line. That’s because you’ve let them judge you on the Physical Therapy, okay?
Now there are hundreds of thousands of physical therapists around the world, so the game becomes, how do we get them to judge them on something else? How do we get them to judge us for something other than physical therapy? So in my clinic, we are being judged on the people of the business and the experience that we provide, and how we make people feel in terms of how special they feel when they enter our world, not just on how well we’ve recovered their ankle or their knee.
When you hit like that, it’s pretty dreadful. When you want to be judged on the outcome of a knee pain or a back pain, anybody can do that. What’s important is that they judge you on something that nobody else is providing, which is the experience and how you make them feel as a result of doing business with you. So the value added welcome system from our Infusionsoft training guide helps us to do that.
How we do it? Here’s a quick example from day one. Patients are entered into a simple webform, which I’ll show you in a moment, that’s connected to Infusionsoft.
They can be sent a sequence of emails telling them more about our physiotherapy practice. We get to reinforce our USP, which is, what our unique selling proposition is, and explain who we help and how. So when we communicate with patients who we help, so we say, “Hey, somebody just like you come to see us every single day,” they become part of our physiotherapy community. They feel more part of a community. They feel as though they’re part of a tribe of people just like them rather than simply going to a physiotherapy clinic.
Again, when you hear it, it doesn’t sound a lot better? Would you be prefer to be part of a community of people like you, or to go to a physical therapy clinic? And we also educate them on how we will help them, okay? We talk to them about the why and the how, and what we will do for them before they even arrive, so that there’s no fear about giving us their money, no fear about giving us that time. We’re educating them before they even arrive because it makes this wonderful thing called a prescription of care a lot easier for the therapist come the day of evaluation.
So when we have to look them in the eye, and we have to sit down and say, “Hey, you need nine sessions or 12 sessions of physical therapy to solve this problem,” it becomes a lot easier because we’ve already helped them to understand what they’re going to get from us before we come along and tell them. These prescription of care sessions, you know that one hour that you have with a patient, you think that they’re listening to everything and they’re not.
Human beings can only take in 7% of the viable message. Probably cut that in half, given that our patients are actually in a lot of pain, stress, worry, fear, uncertainty, doubt in that first session, that’s the irony. Towards the end, when you’ve got that incredible relationship with them, they’re hearing more about what you’re telling them because they’re not as closed off, because they’re not in as much pain or worry.
So at the start, you’ve got to do everything that you can to open them up, to get them to feel relaxed, to get them to feel comfortable, to have already read ahead something that you repeat in the prescription because now, all of a sudden, it feels familiar. How do you get trust? The familiarity. The familiarity breeds trust, so the purpose of the value-added welcome system from our Infusionsoft training guide is to build trust already into the relationship before they start to even get to the practice.
So we put them at ease with videos and information that confirms they made the right decision. We don’t want buyer’s remorse when they arrive at my practice. And because they’ve been further informed and enlightened, patients show a warm and are happy to say, yes, at much higher prices than anybody else around here.
So most clinics, the patients show up with nothing but a bunch of insurance forms and questions about how much it’ll all cost. We eradicate all of that before they arrive, okay? They are just showing up, they kind of aware, they are excited to see us, we’ve got them excited, we’ve given the warm fuzzy feeling, and all thanks to the infusionsoft system that does it, and the content and the material that we put into the system, powered by Infusionsoft.
I call it giving the patients the warm fuzzy feeling before we exchange expertise for cash, all right? You will be judged on expertise, you will beat. Somebody will come around the corner, we’ll do the same physical therapy for cheaper, so you can stay in that model, not anymore.
There are too many options for these patients, and we’ve got to move into a whole new model of running a physical therapy practice (using infusionsoft), the experiential model of running a business, and using systems to provide that experience.
So here’s an example of what we do in our Infusionsoft training guide. So we use Infusionsoft that sends an email saying, “Hey, welcome to our physical therapy clinic. You’re now a member of our practice”… (keyword: member)… and we email out again within 24 hours of the booking this appointment, so they haven’t been in to the practice yet. And they get an email with the subject line, “Do I have to take my clothes off?”
Now, that’s the video that they get. Thousands of people now watch that video, and it tells us true story. As you can see the email, “Hi Joe(?), it’s Paul here again, please let me continue to welcome you to my clinic. What I want to do today is make sure you saw this video. And it’s a video, that’s of three of my staff, and the one in the middle; Vicki, actually came to see me as a patient.
Now, this was seven or eight years ago. She’s now the manager of my business. She walked into my treatment room with a shoulder problem, didn’t really understand you know, what physio was. I wasn’t doing any of this stuff back then. She came in, and I took for granted that she knew the procedure. So she asked me the question, “Do I have to take my clothes off?”
Now, I was walking out at the room, this is a true story. I was walking out the room to get something, and I said, “No.” She obviously didn’t hear me. I left the room, I came back in and she was in the middle of taking her clothes off. Okay, pretty routine for most, you know, patients and therapist. Patients sometimes have to take clothes off in front of you, we all know that.
What the story that unfolded was obviously, as I walked back in, I said, “No, no, you know, you don’t need to get your clothes off blah, blah, blah.” Vicki was very embarrassed, even more embarrassed that within a couple of weeks, I’d offer a job at my practice and you know, obviously that kind of relationship all of a sudden then became she almost took her clothes off in front of her boss. Now, that is a completely different thing altogether.
So what happened was, when Vicki got the job, she started tell her patients this story, that she came to see me and she didn’t really understand what was going on, and she almost took her clothes off in front of me, and patients thought it was hysterical. Patients loved it. They found it hilarious, and it really put them at ease.
So I continued to encourage Vicki to tell that story more often, and then we realized there was a better way than to do it when they arrive. “Let’s tell it to them before they arrive.” So now we use Infusionsoft to send them this email and to ask them to watch this video, and as well as answering the question, “Do you have to take your clothes off?” which is a very common question that even if they don’t ask it, they wanna know the answer to it.
We answer some of the FAQs of physiotherapy, so we’re helping them, we’re putting them at ease. We regularly get replies to this video every single day, and patients telling us that they know they’ve made the right decision, you know, they’re already at ease. They have a laugh, they have a joke, they have a giggle, they’re so happy that we sent it to them, and they will sum the whole thing up by saying, “I’m glad I chose you. I know I’ve made the right decision.”
Now, bear in mind that we haven’t even looked at their knee or their back yet. All that we’ve done is use some marketing systems from our Infusionsoft training guide; we’ve used Infusionsoft email funnels to send this type of thing to make them feel warm and fuzzy about coming to see us. They are already in love with what we do because we’ve made them feel special, and we put them at ease, the experience game.
Can you understand now how easy it would be for my physical therapist to come along and say, “Hey, you need nine physical therapy sessions, or you need 12 sessions and this is the fee,” because these people are warm and comfortable and familiar with us already due to the infusionsoft marketing funnel and nurturing.
Now again, you can it gives my patients comfort to know who will actually be serving them and looking after them tomorrow, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or whatever day it will be when they arrive at the physical therapy practice.
So how does infusionsoft help? Well, physical therapy is what you expect or what they expect us to do. The experience is the thing that they didn’t expect us to do. They did not expect that to happen. They did not expect us to have some fun and a laugh and to giggle with them before they arrive, you know, they didn’t want that. So they didn’t expect it. They didn’t ask for it, but we give it to them through infusionsoft. And everybody wants that type of thing to happen.
So we can be good at what we do in the treatment room, but if you’re focusing on it, you will lose to the physical therpaist who gives you a better…who gives these patients a better experience. So if you’re not focusing on it, we will lose to the physical therapy business around the corner who does do it.
So since we started implementing the marketing systems from our Infusionsoft training guide for physical therapists, we got less no-shows, and less resistance to care plans, and even if one of my secretaries is having a bad day, the patient still gets to experience what we’re really all about as a physical therapy clinic.
So what I mean by that is, again, you could have a receptionist who’s just had a bad day, she’s not feeling well, she’s having problems at home, or he’s having problems at home, or just is having an off day because humans do. Even if that is happening, and the phone doesn’t get answered as well as we want it to, and we know that that influence is whether or not people show up and how much they pay, and whether or not they feel confident in the decision that they’re about to make, the patient still gets to experience what we really all about as a physical therapy clinic.
So this is me starting to show you a little bit now about Infusionsoft. This is a webform that we use and the systems are kick-started by a simple. So that is a marketing strategy that we build inside an Infusionsoft email funnel marketing campaign. So my secretary there can use that webform. It sits on her computer, on the desktop. She can enter the patients’ name, type of client, how they found us.
She can enter some you know, a little welcome chitchat that says, “Hey, Steve, you know great to talk to today, dah, dah, dah, where does it hurt?” Other things that we put in there just in case it isn’t back pain, or knee pain, or whatever it’ll be, how long have they suffered? Person’s main concern, what stops the person from doing, number one thing person would like to achieve, all right?
‘Booked physical therapy appointment by’, so we can put Vickie’s name or Becky’s name in there. We can put the physio’s name. We can put the clinic location. We can mail match the time and the date. Pretty much everything that gets entered into that webform, gets mail merged into an email.
So within 60 seconds, they get a completely customized email to them literally delivered in a heartbeat, and that form takes like 60 seconds for my receptionist to fill out. When the patient gets it, it looks like the email has taken 10 minutes to write because of the infusionsoft system
So we’re saving time, but we are basically putting into that webform what they are telling us they are looking for. So it confirms to the patient very quickly that we listened, we understand it, and we know what they want to achieve. That is what drives certainty into decisions. And certainty causes people to show up, to pay confidently and to stay on schedule. And that’s what I love about Infusionsoft.
There are very few if any of the software or the equivalent CRM systems out there that compete with infusionsoft. You know the cheapest of that you might be considering that lets you do this type of thing, and that is the justification, you know, for kind of moving forward, or something like Infusionsoft, because it allows you to create.
These are just simple webforms. You go inside, you create them, you enter the details, and the automation takes over after that. And you access it you know, if you think, well, how you access the webform. You create it inside your app. You get an application, and you go in and you make the webform.
And then you get a link. You get a URL like this just like a web link, or, you know, a webform, paulgoughphysio.com or whatever, Infusionsoft will give you the form. And I give that link to my secretaries who have it on their front desk. We have it open in our tabs. Whenever we want to go to it, we just click it or if it’s already open, obviously, it’s there for the staff to access.
So a lot of the systems get kick-started by these types of webforms at the beginning, and then it kick-starts all of the emails in the communication that goes out after. It started by you, and it saves you so much time moving forward.
This one system from our Infusionsoft training guide has alone significantly increased our arrival rates and complete plans of care. So before Infusionsoft, we had an 89% arrival rate, and since Infusionsoft, it’s 95.5%. We’re almost hovering around the 95% arrival rate. So 6% is a significant difference that becomes more valuable as you grow.