A few weeks ago we talked about how to increase professional referrals to your practice. Developing this referral source is essentially a networking exercise, but the point of the post was to provide a framework in which to do it without feeling weird, creepy, or uncomfortable.

I know there are a lot of alternative and complementary practitioners who are involved with networking groups like BNI. While I don’t generally promote those groups a great deal, I read a fantastic tidbit from Ivan Misener, the founder and CEO of BNI, in a piece on Entrepreneur.com:

3. Word-of-mouth is more about farming than it is about hunting.

Building your business through word-of-mouth is about cultivating relationships with people who get to know you and trust you. People do business with people they have confidence in. One of the most important things I’ve learned in the past two decades is this: It’s not what you know, or who you know, it’s how well you know them that counts. [emphasis mine]

It’s a great metaphor for the development of your professional referral base. The approach we recommend – of slowly gathering background and connections before you approach someone – is about choosing to farm relationships. Nurture them gradually in the form of inquiry, research and contemplation. Plant them, water them, and watch them grow, but don’t harvest them until they’re ready.

And whatever you do, don’t hunt them. That’s what everyone else is doing because they haven’t yet realized that you can only eat prey once, but you can harvest a garden forever.

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We’ve been considering some new treatments and tools, so Tara’s going through her usual willing victim/guinea pig phase, being poked, prodded and zapped. It reminds me again of how effective it is to fully immerse yourself in the patient experience, and how great it is for referrals. When was the last time you actually were a patient, as opposed to just treating one?

Switching roles has some fantastic benefits, including:

• A better grasp of what works and what doesn’t
• Deeper empathy for the challenges patients face during treatments
• Ability to increase patient compliance with lifestyle changes
• Improved patient outcomes
• Increased referrals
• Greater insight into patient flow and treatment management
• Better insight into pricing and perceived value
• Smarter decision-making when adding new products and protocols

If you decide to become your own human test-subject, here are a couple of tips to help you make the most of your self-experimenting:

Don’t Forget to Try Your Existing Stuff
When was the last time you tried that cleanse you recommend? Or took the supplement? Or had a treatment? Being a guinea pig for your own protocols is a must for new and existing products and services. You can’t beat the hands on experience, and it gives you credibility with your patients that you can’t buy. As a result, they tend to follow through, get better results, and refer more. And if you’re not doing it, how good is it, really?

Try Someone Else’s Stuff
If you really want another practitioner to refer to you, book an appointment with them. You can schmooze and network and lunch and send notes and letters, but nothing seems to work as well as just booking an appointment. You get to understand what they do much better, and in most cases, you’ll get a decent amount of talk time in so that they can understand what you do, then refer more. Works every time.

Play The Role
If you’re going to do this, try really being a patient. Run through the whole process from appointment to re-booking so you understand the entire flow. And make sure you pay with real money – don’t exchange services when you’re trying someone else’s stuff. Paying out of your own pocket will give you a better sense for the value of the service and put you squarely in your patient’s shoes.

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As your practice grows, existing patient referrals begin to make up an increasingly large portion of your new patients. Practitioners will often know where a referral came from, but rarely will they know exactly why that person referred. We often know the source, in other words, but not the cause.

The truth is, however, often the patient herself often doesn’t know exactly why she referred. You can ask, but you might find the answers a little vague. Here are some of the behind-the-scenes reasons that patients go out on a limb to refer to you:

Successful Outcome
The most obvious: they got better. Helping someone find their way to good health is one of the surest ways to win their referral hearts.

Personality/Emotional Connection
Although it applies to all service business, it’s particularly powerful in CAM care: patients who you connect or “click” with tend to come back more, and refer more.

Feeling Special
If alternative health care has a competitive advantage in the modern health care market, it’s the ability to individualize. Many MD’s don’t have the time to treat people as unique cases. Your ability to make each one of your patients feel like their health care concerns (and solutions) are important and unique will go a long way toward driving referrals.

Treatments
We discussed this previously – people love having things done to them. Many CAM modalities have the distinct advantage of being able to treat patients in a way that’s actually relaxing, soothing, or even fun. Making the treatment process something to be enjoyed rather than endured makes it easy for people to refer. Expand this to the rest of your office, too: make sure all your procedures – from booking to paying – are something to be enjoyed.

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Generating More Existing Patient Referrals for Your Alternative Health Practice
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CAMLAW has a new post on the “acceptance” of complementary and alternative medicine by the AMA.

While I’m sure many of you didn’t need the blessing, it does provide more ammunition for getting more referrals from MD’s who have been reluctant to “buy in” to your modality, or who are nervous for liability reasons.

CAMLAW : Complementary And Alternative Medicine Law Blog: American Medical Association Supports Alternative Medicine

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It’s one thing to understand the types of referrals, but quite another to know which type is growing your practice. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I want to stress it further.

Tracking your referrals is actually pretty straightforward, but often neglected. For the most part, it’s a front-line job, and needs to happen the first time a patient arrives. The easiest way to do it is to make it part of your intake form. It’s very difficult and far less accurate (and less likely to happen) later on in the patient cycle. The great thing is that it’s easy to implement – if you’ve got staff, just make it part of the new patient process. That’s it.

If you’re using any type of software to run your office, there may be a place to enter this information. If not, a spreadsheet will do just fine. Even a piece of paper will work, but it’s a lot harder to do the math at the end of the quarter or year.

You can use the 5 referral type framework to categorize your new patients, each with a sub categories:

Professional

• Break this down by profession – chiropractors, naturopaths, MD’s, acupuncturists, TCM practitioners, etc. – and then even further by the actual professional (Dr. Jones, Dr. Ahmad, J. Doe, etc.).

Patient

• List by patient, and enter into the referring patient’s file as well, so you know when you see a patient who they’ve referred recently. It’s quite helpful to jot this on the inside cover of their file so you can see it as soon as you open it, and thank them on the spot for recent referrals.

Promotional

• Again, this can be categorized by print, other media, speaking engagements, internet, etc, then broken down further by the actual magazine, paper, website, etc.

Purchase

• Patient files you’ve bought. If you’ve purchased from more than one source, list them separately

Personal

• Family, friends, etc.

In a future post, we’ll take a look at how this info can be used to help you grow faster and spend smarter.

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One of the barriers to referrals from other health care professionals is their perception of you and your modality. Allopathic medical professionals in particular live in an environment of increasing litigation that is resulting in a fear of the “unknown”. Add to that the fact that anyone who refers is putting their own credibility on the line, and it’s easy to see why other health care professionals might not choose to refer to a CAM / holistic practitioner.

For most of these professionals, their comfort level with alternative medicine is determined by knowledge of whether the proposed treatment or modality is a) effective and b) safe.

The higher you can present your practice on each of these scales, the more comfortable all professionals will be when referring to you. Look for specific evidence from established sources that support the treatments you use, and put your qualifications, training, continuing education, code of conduct and other professional indicators front and centre whenever possible.

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Of all the types of referrals, the ones that come from your existing patients are most likely to be high in both quantity and quality. Existing patients tend to refer clients who are a better fit for your practice, and a patient who’s had great success in your holistic office can champion your cause with more enthusiasm than even your best friend. And although a new startup may only have a handful of patients to draw on, over time that practice will build a patient base of hundreds or thousands of files that can refer hundreds of more prospects with little effort on the part of the CAM practitioner.

The best part is that getting your existing patients to refer to you is neither time consuming nor expensive. Most of it is just about your personal interactions with your clients. Here are a few strategies to use:

Thank Patients for Their Referrals
This is so simple it’s often overlooked. Send a simple thank you card for the first couple of referrals. Ask your staff to make notes in patient files of who they’ve referred so when you treat them in your office you can thank them in person, too.

Ask Them for Referrals
Many alternative medicine practitioners miss out on extra referrals because they don’t ask for them. Remember that patients only see a small slice of your daily practice, and may not realize you’re seeking new referrals. Add to that the fact that most people simply to love to be asked for help, and you can generate an enormous number of new referrals simply by asking for them.

Provide Exceptional Service
In addition to providing great alternative medical care, remember that patients need to have a complete experience. Are you keeping your wait times short? Are you making it easy for people to pay? Is your staff pleasant, respectful and confidential? Is your office pleasant to enter? Is parking available? Is it free? All these things add up to a complete experience in your CAM office that affects whether or not your patients will refer their friends. Remember that when someone refers, they’re putting their own reputation on the line, too.

Show Your Gratitude in Other Ways
Why not put your money where your mouth is? Throw your best referrers a freebie once in a while to show your appreciation. Include them in new office plans, testing of new protocols and open house events. Make them feel like they’re more than just another appointment in a busy CAM practice.

Help Them
Above all else, if you legitimately help people resolve their health concerns, they will refer to you. If you’ve helped someone with a chronic condition that no one else seemed to be able to treat, you’ll have earned that person’s respect and referrals for years to come. Focus on providing alternative medical care with integrity passion, and the referrals will take care of themselves.

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I like to think of every new patient as a referral, even the ones that come in from direct advertising – I find it’s an easier way to build a new-patient strategy. Here’s a way to break down your referrals into 5 categories. You can break each down into sub-categories as required, and track each using something as simple as a spreadsheet or notebook.

Patient Referrals
Still ranking as the best source of new patients in my book, existing clients tend to refer other people who will also find success with your approach. And they’re so easy to market to – it’s a captive audience whose contact info is (or should be) at your fingertips.

Professional Referrals
These are the clients that come to you via your colleagues – other naturopaths, chiropractors, RMT’s, homeopaths, MD’s etc. – as well as related professions like health food stores and personal trainers.

The best part about many of these referrals is that they’re in similar industries, so they tend to refer people that may already “get” what you do.

Personal Referrals
This is a catch all for the friends, family and acquaintances who come to see you because they know you. Also includes anything you generate from networking.

Promotional Referrals
Anyone who finds you via traditional advertising, phone directories, newspaper and magazine articles, signage, the internet, etc.

Purchased
I use this 5th P to refer to files/patients acquired by buying a practice or buying patient files.

Each of these referral sources has its own strengths, and requires a unique approach. For example, the flyer that you direct mailed to 1000 households may not be effective at generating referrals from the MD down the street.

If you use this as the top-level breakdown of where your new patients come from, you’ll easily be able to see over time where to best spend your marketing time and budget.

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Picking up from yesterday…

Regardless of where you fall on the alternative health opinion spectrum, these folks can be an amazing source of referrals. By presenting yourself as a complement or support to your local physicians, you may find them far more likely to refer to you.

To do this successfully requires three critical characteristics in the way you approach and work with MD’s:

Don’t Take Food From Their Plates
Or at least don’t make it obvious. Even the busiest MD’s seem to be highly territorial, and presenting yourself as competition is not helping. If you are competing directly, you don’t need to brag to them about it. If MD’s don’t see you as competition, they’re more likely to refer.

Make Their Life Easier
In most cases, you’re really not selling the same thing as the average physician. Whether you’re a naturopath, a chiropractor, or a TCM practitioner, there’s a good chance that you deal with chronic, difficult-to-resolve complaints. Trust me, these are not the complaints the average MD wants. They don’t have the time for them.

Sell them on the idea that you’ll take the difficult stuff – the patients that aren’t getting better, or aren’t generating the billing that they look for. The people who need counseling, or someone to talk to.

Like any selling, focus on the benefits – how you’ll make their life easier. How they’ll make more money. Not on how you’re better than they are…

Be Professional
Nothing burns anyone more than having their professional opinions and status undermined. You can disagree, but you don’t have to badmouth. Conduct yourself as a professional with respect to confidentiality, medical records, office procedures and the like. Demonstrate that the ‘stargazing-tree-hugger’ CAM stereotype isn’t justified, and you’ll find the referrals flowing your way.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s Putting the “Alternative” in Alternative Medicine, I thought it would be interesting to look at the term complementary from a business strategy perspective.

There are some deeply entrenched camps on this issue. There are many who view the term complementary as subservient to the allopathic medical community. It’s the “either-or” attitude, and it’s not right or wrong, it’s simply an opinion. There is a growing mountain of evidence that multi-disciplinary approaches to health care (read: professionals complementing each other) are great for patients. Whether you want to believe the data or not is up to you.

In terms of how you approach your business, however, you may be missing out on an incredible referral resource by not considering yourself as complementary. While existing patients are truly an exceptional source of new client referrals, they are only one source. CAM practitioners, by virtue of their “alternative” status, often fail to tap one of the best business growth opportunities out there: medical doctors.

MD’s have some terrific advantages as sources of referrals:

They’re In the Right Market
First of all, they deal with sick people all day. While your patient Bob may be well connected and sing your praises, not everyone he knows may need your help. Just about everyone who walks into an MD’s office, however, is a potential client. Nearly all of them have a complaint of some sort.

They Carry a Big Stick
Secondly, MD’s are authority figures (whether you like it or not, it’s true). If Bob tells his golf buddy to come see you, they’ll “think about it”. If an MD tells the golf buddy, he’s far more likely to go.

So, if you can get physicians referring to you, your practice can really take off. The challenge, however, is that the average MD is notoriously difficult to swing to the CAM side of the fence. If you’re smart about this, though, you can slowly build a great referral network of physicians who will bury you in new patients.

Next: Leveraging MD’s as a Referral Base

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