E453 | The Key To Word of Mouth Referrals

If your customer experience is as good as it should be, then you should be driving internal referrals from the clients you are already working with. This is something you should be tracking and something you should be highly aware of. If you are doing this effectively, it will begin to snowball and drive growth for your business. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff do the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they had to. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I wanna talk to you about the number one most important metric that we see as far as if your customer experience is as good as it should be, and that is internal referrals from clients that you're working with. So how many of the people that you work with send you a friend or family member to become a new.

This is something you should track. This is something you should be aware of. If it's like nobody, that's not a good sign. If it's everybody, that's a great. What we really wanna see is at a minimum, three out of 10 as far as a baseline, three outta 10 people send you somebody else to work with. The higher the better.

Now imagine this, what if you worked with 10 people in a month and eight of those 10 people sent somebody your way the next month? Now you've got eight new patients directly from internal referrals that's going to basical. Keep snowballing as long as you keep doing a good job of getting those people better.

And I think that when we look at growing a business, this, the idea that word of mouth referrals are like, I think people like put 'em down. Yeah, word of mouth. Referrals are not predictable. Word of mouth referrals are not scalable that I disagree with. I think they are predictable. If you have a system to get referrals from people within your business, from clients within your business, from prior customers within your business, and I think that they're incredibly beneficial because in comparison to cold traffic ads, things like that, Facebook, Google YouTube, whatever you're using.

And advertising you're doing, the people that come your way that are referred by a friend or family member that you have worked with are the best clients. They are just the best people to work with. They're much more likely to send you somebody. They're much more likely to commit to a plan of care and not drop off and not be a pain the ass to work with.

And I'll take. As many of those people as I can possibly get. Now, here's the thing that you have to just check your ego when it comes to this. You may think, man, I'm awesome. I'm a world-class clinician. I get people better. I get them the results they want and all of that, and that might be true.

But the one thing that is very objective is how many of those people are actually sending other people your way? Because there's three areas you can exist. Number one, you suck and people will never send somebody your way. In fact, they'll probably go out of their way to tell people not to work with you.

Because of whatever you did to them. Oh, don't work with those people. They suck. Or they're scammers. Stay away from that business. They'll leave you a negative review, and they'll just talk bad about your business as, as much as possible. Now that's very few businesses, most are not so bad that people negatively, talk about their business negatively all the time.

Because it won't be in business very long, they go outta business. Now, that's probably a small percent on the bottom of this sort of bell curve, but the middle 80% is businesses that are good enough to go to and get what you need, but not so bad that you're gonna go out of your way to, talk poorly about this business, or leave a negative review or put them down to, people that are asking about the business, but they're not good enough.

To be referred to to ha to have somebody send somebody their way that they have to interact with. Because what you have to keep in mind is, When someone recommends a group, they're putting their reputation as a recommender of things. If that's the way to put it on the line, what that have you ever told somebody, man, you gotta check this restaurant out.

Like their pizza's the fucking bomb. Go get some of this pizza, and they're like, no, it was okay. That was okay. And then they. Like they, they never trust your opinion ever again. For anything. Anything. You've lost them. Like people are aware of that. That's status. Status. You can't buy status.

You just have to earn. And people like that's something that people are very proud of. The fact that oh, they have a guy for everybody and they're the person that is a facilitator of where you should go. They've curated these things for you and it's status. They're the person in their friend circle that like, that's who you trust for their opinion for things.

We all have people like that. I have friends and I'm like, man, I'm gonna go this part of town. I am gonna ask him where I should eat cuz he's a big foodie, right? And I trust his opinion or her opinion. And then I got other friends of mine there that I would never ask about those things, right?

And that's because they've earned it. They've earned the status. Now when somebody refers to you and you make them look amazing, Their status goes up. It's like a plus one. If they refer to you and their status goes down, they don't want that. That's not something that they're interested in doing because they want to maintain that status.

So for you to get somebody to refer somebody your way, that's a friend or family member, you gotta be so damn good, not just at getting them better. But at the interactions at the building of trust, the customer experience, the timeliness in which you're interacting with them and them being seen, Or followed up with, or questions being answered.

All of these things have to be on point every single time. Otherwise you lose the likelihood that person is gonna send somebody your way, and the more that you take people that are referred to you and do a world class job with them. Now, this is, again, somewhat irrelevant as to whether they actually get better or not, because in some cases, People need surgery.

People need other things. They need additional imaging. Like we can't fix everything, but we can do the right thing for people every single time. So if somebody is referred to you and then you refer that person somewhere else appropriately, you gain even more trust. And I'll give you a perfect example.

I had a patient referred his sister to me. And she had vague shoulder pain and she didn't really know what she did. It was sounded weird. I talked to her on the phone just to do like a phone consult to see if she was even appropriate for coming in to see me. And it, I just dug in a little bit about.

Like how it started or whatever. It turns out she, she had started taking like some new medication. It was like a, basically like an antidepressant around someone around the time when her shoulder started to bother her. And I told her, I said, look, I think this sounds strange. It doesn't sound like you have any sort of like symptoms that get better or worse with movement and it correlates with when you started a new medication.

I think you should talk to your primary care doctor who prescribed that for you first. Make sure there's no, no sort of interaction potentially that can cause a shoulder or cause shoulder irritation because of this new me medication. And and see if that's at first and if they clear you then come in and see me and we'll know we're working on the right things.

And she actually got really frustrated. She got upset on the phone and she was like I was told, I need to see you, you're supposed to help me with this. This is really, affecting my life. And it was a weird interaction the way it was left. And I, but I told, I stood by it and I was like, look, I just, I wanna make sure this is the case.

I'm being conservative. I hope you appreciate that and understand and she, it ended the phone call in a strange way. And I have never seen this person in per, I've never seen this lady in person. She emails me about two weeks. And she goes I made that appointment with my doctor.

They changed up my medication, my shoulder pain is gone. And she was like, thank you so much for, helping me out with that. And she basically apologized if you email that one person has sent us, I don't even know how many people many like dozens of patients because of one interaction of me doing the right thing for that person without even actually seeing them not actually not even seeing.

Is what happened. And not only that, but the person that was she was referred by also refers people to us because of the same damn thing. So here's what you have to keep in mind. If you're tracking this in which I highly recommend that you do, and you're not seeing a relatively high percentage of people that see you, that then sends somebody else your way, you aren't as good as you think you.

And I'm not necessarily saying clinically, obviously we can all be better clinicians and constantly improve. I'm saying what other variables as part of your business, as part of your interactions with them, can you improve? Can you do a better job of communicating? Of getting trust and buy-in and really getting clear on what's going on, maybe slowing down and trying to really build more trust and develop the relationship before you go and try to stick a ne a needle in their shoulder or whatever you're gonna do.

Like what things can you improve to where you can make it the greatest healthcare experience they've ever had in their entire life. And they cannot shut up about how awesome it is to every single person that they see. Because if you do that, you're gonna get a hell of a lot. Word of mouth referrals and your business is gonna grow because of it.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle. To a full-time clinic, even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems.

Best fit for you for your current situation. We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themself that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business plan.

This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action. That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge.

Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go. Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel.

I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about. 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.