Acara Partners CEO Francis Acunzo shares the steps needed to grow your medical aesthetic business:
Are you hoping to grow and expand your medical aesthetic practice? Interested in generating an increase of $10K or more each month on the top line of your income statement?
This may seem like a daunting or overwhelming task, but it doesn’t have to be! Here are some quick tips and steps you can take to begin the process of growing your business. This starts with two very basic steps:
• Strengthen your marketing program and drive more leads.
• Tighten your sales process and assure each lead is properly optimized to maximize sales.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Here are what Acara’s successful clients are measuring and monitoring in their aesthetic medical practices:
• Track lead source. Implement a tracking system into your marketing program. CallSource is a tracking system that many of Acara’s clients utilize with great success. Through unique telephone numbers, this service tracks where each lead heard about your practice. (You will still need to ask each caller “how did you learn about our practice” since there are always the leads that call because of a referral and not an ad or other marketing communication.)
• Track lead to consult conversion. How many of the leads (telephone and through digital communications) are converted to consultations? Important: do not qualify leads on the phone; focus on converting them to consultations.
• Track consult to patient conversion. How many actual consultations are converted to new patients?
• Track average purchase per new patient. Keep track as to what the average purchase is per new patient.
If you have multiple sales consultants at your practice, then the above numbers 3 and 4 may be tracked by individual consultant.
Now that you’re measuring these basic (and important) marketing and sales metrics, you can begin to monitor the success of any best practice implementation that has an objective to increase your sales.
Here are a few examples of sales and marketing best practices that Acara will often implement for our clients:
• Identify what marketing efforts are working, and increase those budgets to drive more leads. Example: if your local print ads are successfully driving leads, then increase the frequency or possibly run two in the same publication (perhaps with one ad focused on the body and the other on the face). Something to remember when utilizing traditional and digital advertising: keep the message focused. Don’t sell your practice; sell results (like permanent fat removal). When an ad is focused on the face, it’s generating telephone calls from people (leads) specifically interested in the face work listed in the ad (e.g., wrinkle reduction, smoother skin, getting rid of age spots).
• Identify your lead capture methodology (define what details should be obtained prior to passing the call onto the sales consultant, and how they will be obtained) and assure that all personnel answering the phone are fully trained.
• Implement a standardized consultation process. Acara Partners has developed these for many medical aesthetic practices over the years and would be able to help you establish a process for your needs.
• Review the metrics on a weekly basis and coach your team to support their improvement.
• Give your sales team incentive to encourage them to do a great job.
• Review how you currently package your procedures. Possibly adjusting the protocol to increase the standard number of procedures per package will better benefit the client and increase your average patient sale. For example, some of the most respected physicians believe that optimal benefit is achieved after five photofacials.
All of the above are best practices that have to be implemented with rigor and discipline, along with a big dose of passion and drive in order to experience success. It doesn’t happen overnight, but with consistent implementation, you should see a bump in your top line within 6 – 8 weeks.
As always, if you have any questions or need any specific help, please contact me or one of our experts at Acara Partners. We have over 30 years of highly successful experience in helping our clients grow their practices or business.