Recession-Proof Your Practice

Recession-proofing Your Practice with MyMedLeads

If you’ve been skimming recent headlines, it seems probable that a recession is heading our way. Are you taking steps to sustain your practice through an economic downturn? Preparation is key to planning for uncertain times and having the right tools in place will give you an edge over the competition.

Having systems in place to help your practice run more efficiently during economic uncertainty will be pivotal to your success. CRM and marketing automation platforms, like MyMedLeads, allow you to identify new patient opportunities, keep track of in-progress client relationships, and help you build and track your marketing funnel.

What Happens in an Economic Downturn?

Money gets tighter and people’s decision-making shifts from an abundance mindset to one of fear and scarcity. Elective treatments that consumers once viewed as necessities, like injectables, may suddenly be deemed unnecessary luxuries. During a downturn, practices tend to see a sharp decrease in new patients. As individuals grow more risk-averse during a recession, they are much less likely to try new things. Those who do view cosmetic and elective procedures as a necessity will often reallocate money down the spectrum, opting for less frequent treatments and lower cost procedures.

This collective, fear-based behavior inevitably takes a toll on your practice’s cash flow and is the biggest threat to cash-based practices during a recession. As consumers begin tightening their belts, proactively reaching out to current and prospective clients is more important than ever. Right now, you have a window of opportunity to cast a wider net with your marketing and get more leads into the top of your sales funnel.

What You Can Do Now to Prepare

While many elective care practice owners feel blindsided and helpless when the market takes a turn for the worse, that doesn’t have to be you! Don’t let fear paralyze you into making scarcity-based decisions like your patients. Those who keep a level head and make well-informed, strategic decisions about where to cut expenses and where to ramp up will fare the best during a downturn.

Good management looks at a recession as a time to eliminate waste, streamline processes, and focus on the fundamental assets of your business that drive the most growth and revenue. Doing this will not only keep you afloat during a recession but will also allow you to get a leg-up in the market and outpace your competitors during a post-recession recovery.

To do this though, you must have a complete picture of your sales pipeline and patient interactions. This is why a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is truly a strategic tool during times of economic turbulence. You might even think of a CRM as a Company Recession Management tool, as they allow business owners to avoid many of the common pitfalls of recessionary thinking. In fact, according to research firm AMI-Partners, companies that utilize CRM systems out-perform those who don’t by over 140% higher revenue per employee.

How MyMedLeads Can Help 

So, with this in mind let’s take a look at how a medical-specific CRM tool, like MyMedLeads, can help you continue to see a steady profit even in the midst of a recession.

Increase Lead and Patient Outreach

Practices that can weather economic storms the best tend to be more customer centric. Disengaging from your patients and prospects when you need them the most is a recipe for disaster. Targeted marketing outreach is one of the most cost-effective ways to boost revenue and leveraging a CRM solution like MyMedLeads (that integrates with practice management software) is the most efficient way to execute a targeted approach.

MyMedLeads automatically captures lead data from your online marketing and inbound phone calls. Once you have new leads in the top of your dashboard funnel, MyMedLeads can help shorten your sales cycle by accelerating the lead nurturing process. Our automated sales funnel workflows keep potential patients engaged with the ability to:

• Automatically segment and track leads through conversion
• Set up personalized communication sequences based on specific criteria
• Engage prospective patients with two-way texting straight from your dashboard
• Stagger your procedure-marketing campaigns to match average purchasing timelines
• Automatically send recall messages when a patient is due for treatment
• Send post-consult reminders to keep your practice top of mind

It may not be what you want to hear, but a solid email marketing strategy will work harder for you than almost anything else you do. Adding personalization and segmentation to this approach will significantly boost your results. MyMedLeads not only captures detailed information about leads, like their procedure of interest and where they’re at in the sales pipeline, it also connects this information directly to our email marketing suite.

Consider how much more effective a targeted email to a segment of patients whose last Botox appointment was over 3 months ago would be as opposed to sending all leads and patients the same newsletter each month. Visit our marketing automation page to learn how MyMedLeads can help you stay top of mind with prospects and patients at every stage in the sales process.

Make Informed Budget Decisions with ROI Tracking

A recession can trigger many business owners to go into “safety” mode where decisions are being made from a place of fear and a sense of urgency. These individuals tend to be the ones who cut every business expense, and too often, marketing budgets are the first one on the chopping block. But stopping your marketing with no rhyme or reason just doesn’t make sense. There’s no time more critical to reposition your services and continue generating leads than when facing down a potential recession.

This rationale, however, is completely understandable from an emotional standpoint. Cutting marketing items is certainly more palatable when compared to cutting payroll. Unfortunately, when financial decisions are driven by emotion and fear of the unknown, bad economic outcomes aren’t far behind.

Resist the urge to panic. Instead, invest in data-driven insights to put more of your ad budget toward what’s working and cut what’s not. MyMedLeads integrates with hundreds of lead sources commonly used by the medical industry. The system can automatically track where each lead comes from and the revenue that resulted. MyMedLeads then compares each ad’s marketing cost against its resulting revenue to give you highly accurate ROI reports.

Having access to reliable reporting and insights is crucial in any economic climate. When the economy changes, knowing consumer preferences becomes more important than ever. The messaging that worked for your practice before a recession was looming may no longer be effective. You need access to current and comprehensive data about your marketing performance so that you can chart the best path forward.

Automate Processes and Improve Staff Workflows

Recessions demand that sales activities and operational processes be more targeted and efficient. While CRM tools are great for automating customer-facing processes, they’re also indispensable tools for enabling internal efficiency. MyMedLeads offers a host of tools aimed at boosting staff productivity and freeing people from repetitive tasks or unnecessary complexities in their daily workflow.

CRM and other business tools are meant to support your employees, not replace them. During times of economic stress, you want your team focusing their attention and energy on patient-centered tasks and other growth-oriented work. A recession can be a great time to identify workflow bottlenecks in your organization. If the need to perform certain processes manually is currently slowing you down, now is the time to see if these tasks can be automated.

Below are a few additional features MyMedLeads offers to help reduce complexity and overwhelm in your front office.

• Full Lead Management Suite – Our lead management database keeps all your leads and patients in one centralized and easy-to-use tool that syncs up with your practice management software. All interactions are tracked and recorded in the lead’s history, making it easy for staff to see what the next step is.
• Live Chat Feature – Our live chat tool essentially provides your practice with an extra staff member trained to handle website inquiries in line with your medical practice’s guidelines. While your staff still has the option to manage the chat box during business hours, having the choice to offload a portion of this work is extremely advantageous.
• Two-Way Texting Dashboard – Let’s face it, text messaging has quickly become the average patients’ preferred communication method. It makes sense then to use the method they prefer and cultivate a better relationship with your office. MyMedLeads makes this incredibly easy with our text message dashboard. Staff can quickly communicate with leads and patients in real-time right from their account.
• Patient Review Service – Your team’s time is far too valuable to be tracking patients down to ask for online reviews. MyMedLeads integrates with practice management software to automatically send review requests after appointment check-ins.
• Staff Performance Reports – Our staff performance reports give you the ability to look at your practice through the lenses of your prospects and patients. The system automatically generates staff performance reports showing the average lead response time per user along with other important benchmarks that affect profitability.

Even in the best market conditions, no practice is operating at maximum efficiency. Fine-tuning your processes now by adopting more automation will ensure your team can quickly adapt to whatever changes may come.