2 Steps to Instant Patient Referrals
What’s the best way to attract more patients to grow your medical practice?
Patient referrals is the short answer.
1. Building Trust is Critical to Generating Referrals
Trust is a critical element in attracting new patients and increasing acceptances. Why?
It turns out, lack of trust is the biggest barrier to bringing in new patients. Without having experienced the professionalism of your team, much less the outcome you provide, they don’t trust you… yet.
In order to connect with that potential patient, you must create a way for them to overcome the trust barrier. The easiest way to do that is to lower the barrier or remove it.
Something you can do quite simply with referrals.
When a friend of a potential new patient refers them to you, or their primary care physician refers them to you – it’s like a gift. The potential patient already trusts you and wants to make a purchase from you. Well, not a 100%, but instead of starting at 10% trust, they are typically closer to 90%.
Most referrals arrive pre-sold on your expertise and your recommendations. This dramatically increases the chances they’ll walk out the door with a new pair of hearing aids from your practice instead of from one of your competitors.
Yet for most practices, referrals are like an occasional surprise gift or like a passing rain shower on a hot day, a random event. It is true they only happen on occasion — unless you have a system, a proven referral system.
2. You Have to Ask for Referrals
Ray is one of our top employees and yesterday he came to me with a simple question. He wanted to know if he was going to get the $1,000 raise that everyone in the company gets when they master our core skill set.
The answer was, of course! Ray was due the $1,000 and we were more than happy to bump up his base pay accordingly. If he hadn’t asked, we most likely would have forgotten about it.
Back to patient referrals.
Asking can help generate more referrals every day.
Like Ray, you need to ASK. Ask your patients and ask local physicians. Without asking, you will only get a trickle. Ask every day and you’ll get patient referrals every day.
Now, we’ve brought this simple idea up before. To be honest, when we do, a lot of practice owners think we must be idiots. They tell us they’ve tried asking and it doesn’t work.
Who is right?
It’s true, if you ask for a patient referral at the wrong time or use the wrong words, it’s not going to work. People are going to stare at you blankly, or give you some lame excuse (like, I’ll get back to you). Which tells you what?
It tells you that the way you asked them made it hard for them to answer, they got stuck.
Wish You Had a Reliable Way to Generate a Steady Stream of Patient and Physician Referrals?
There’s a proven solution. Make it easier for them to answer. Don’t make them think, at least not very hard. Make it so simple the name of a referral pops into their head instantly so they can share it with you.
You can easily attract more patients by asking for referrals. Discover how. Talk to Us
