When you first start a chiropractic practice, you want to build it up to cover all of your overhead and support your family but eventually, you realize that it can be so much more than just that. Your practice has an opportunity to make a significant impact in your community. But the only way to do that is by scaling your chiropractic practice. Scaling allows you to help more and more people while at the same time bringing more and more abundance to you, your team, and your family.
So today we are going to discuss 5 keys to scaling your chiropractic practice from wherever you are now to the next level and the level after that and any level you want to reach.
These five keys are crucial to any business:
You are already doing all five of these keys at some capacity in your practice right now. I know that because you are in business. If you don’t do these five things at all, you are not in business.
But the effectiveness of which you do these five keys will determine whether you can move to a next level with your practice, and scale your practice over time.
So let’s take a look at each of the keys.
Generating leads is the first key to scaling your chiropractic practice and how effectively you do this will determine how effectively you can do the other four keys. So what is a lead? A lead is someone who is interested in your product or service in some way. It is someone who downloads an e-book, comes to an event, stops for a screening, talks to you at church, or the grocery store about an issue they been having, or one of your patients tells them about you, or another professional tells them about you, etc.
This person has decided that what you offer has some potential to help them and they want to know more about it.
At this point, we would call this person an engaged lead. They have engaged with your company to see if you can help them. You can produce engage leads in lots of different ways including internal, external, and digital marketing strategies.
Your job now becomes how do you nurture this lead from being engaged to being marketing qualified.
When you have engaged lead whether it’s through digital marketing, patient referral, professional referral, an event, or another source. Now you need to nurture this engaged lead to become a marketing qualified lead.
A marketing qualified lead is someone who has put up their hand and said that the information they have is enough for them to take a next action. In a chiropractic practice, this means that they have inquired about a consultation. This can be done through an online form or a phone call to your front desk person.
When they get to this point they have identified that your practice:
This is a crucial place to get a lead. But now you have to take this marketing qualified lead and convert them to a sales qualified lead and a sale during lead conversion.
Now that you have a marketing qualified lead (MQL) the next step is to convert the MQL to a sales qualified lead (SQL). Converting MQL’s to SQL’s is almost exclusively done by your staff. This is why it’s crucial to consistently train your staff members on how to handle marketing qualified leads. The initial conversation and follow-up protocols to ensure the new patient actually walks through the door is critical.
The second part of lead conversion is converting a sales qualified lead (what we would call a new patient in the chiropractic practice) to an actual paying patient who has started care in your practice (a sale).
This involves an effective new patient consultation, examination, x-ray procedures, report of findings, first adjustment, care plan recommendations, payment options, etc.
But the key is to have systems in place for every aspect of the conversion within your practice.
Once someone has started care in your practice, you are far from done. Now it’s time to deliver the goods.
This is the key that upper cervical doctors are usually strongest. But delivery is not just about getting results it’s also about generating referrals.
A new patient who has started care continues in this process towards the fifth key which is all about retention, reselling, and upselling.
This key for scaling your chiropractic practice is all about retaining practice members beyond the initial care plan. This requires a resell to additional services, otherwise known as maintenance or wellness care. You may also want to upsell practice members to additional services that your practice offers.
If you don’t do this well you will have significant issues with scaling your chiropractic practice.
One of the best ways to know how well you are retaining patients is by evaluating your Patient Visit Average (PVA) over time. PVA is a statistic you should know for your practice. You calculate PVA by dividing your total patient visits by your total new patients over a period of time. I recommend at least three months but ideally 12 months is more accurate.
So for instance, let’s say over the last 12 months your practice saw 6000 patient visits and 360 new patients. 6000/360 = 16.6 PVA. So after about seeing a new patient for 16 visits your practice needs to get another new patient in order to maintain your current practice.
In order to scale, your PVA needs to increase while still seeing more new patients. Let’s say that instead of seeing 30 new patients per month you are able to increase that to 40 new patients per month. But you are also able to increase your patient visits from 500 per month to 900 per month. Now your PVA over a 12 month period increases significantly to 10,800/480 = 22.5 PVA.
When you work on lead generation, lead nurture, and lead conversion while at the same time working on retain/resell/upsell it can make a tremendous difference in your practice.
Every practice can improve in all five of these areas but as you read this article you may have identified one that is the most obvious issue for you right now. Or you may have multiple keys that your practice is struggling with currently.
We want to help practices develop a scale implementation plan to address all five of these keys. If you’d like to talk more about that give us a call at 877-252-1230 and let’s have a brief chat about your practice to see if developing a scale implementation plan with Upper Cervical Marketing makes sense for you.
