Paul Wright
All right welcome everyone. Your next session on Profit Club and Profit Club Academy, and in my search for global excellence, I’ve tracked down Mostafa Hosseini from Calgary, Canada. He’s gonna join us for a presentation today about customer retention. So Mostafa, thanks for joining us.
Mostafa Hosseini
Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.
Paul
One of my favorite cities in the world, Calgary, and we chatted a few times over the love of Calgary so much. You’re in a beautiful part of the world.
Mostafa Hosseini
Thank you
Paul
My introduction, I’ll do the formal introduction.
I came across Mostafa on LinkedIn originally and then I looked at some other information and really intrigued me that the area that he’s got into and we’re going to talk today about the Viral Coefficient, which I love what he’s done there. And it’s just hot stuff for service based business owners.
Formal introduction, first. He’s the founder of Persyo Incorporated, which is the creator of Viral Coefficient Formula. He’s the creator of Simple Marketing Formula and Simple Time Management Formula. So mate, we could do sessions on all of those things. They are great areas.
For the past nine years, he’s helped business owners and entrepreneurs build profitable businesses in various niche markets and industries. currently, he’s focusing on helping coaches, consultants and speakers double their referrals and become more profitable. In his spare time, obviously a Calgarian, he’s an avid skier and hiker and love spending time with his family.
So mate, thanks for being part of profit club. What’s happening in Calgary?
Mostafa
So it’s raining right now. And it’s been hot and it gets hot in the morning and then it gets kind of cooler in the evening in Calgary weather is very, very unpredictable.
Paul
You know, what intrigued me when I did work in Calgary and Vancouver, so that’s sort of the Canadian countryside, I did a lot of work with, with groups of health business owners, and always staggered how few of them had a “Get fit to ski program” or some sort of skiing fitness program, and it staggered me that they hadn’t capitalized in that market in places where there’s mad skiers like you guys.
Mostafa
A lot of people hurt themselves skiing too. If you start working out two or three months before the season starts, like now would be a good time because in eight weeks skiing starts here Canada. So yeah, it helps reduce the chances of getting injured, I guess.
Paul
So what’s the real Mostafa story? Where did you spring from? I gave you the glorified introduction. Give us the real guts of how did you get involved in this? Tell us a bit about your background.
Mostafa
So I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Moved to Canada, back in September 2000. And back then, I didn’t speak any English. So I went to an English school for a couple of years. And then I got into engineering school, on the advice of my dad. You know, Asians and Middle Easterns, they all have to be engineers and doctors. So I went to engineering school for two and a half years, and I realized that it wasn’t my thing. I dropped out and got into business school, and I absolutely loved it. Got a diploma in marketing management. And then later I got a bachelor’s degree in business management with a minor in marketing. And while I was in school, I started Persyo Marketing.
Now, I grew up in a family where finances were always a problem. My dad was an employee, he was working from 5 am till like, you know, seven or 8 pm every day. And I had two sides to my family. One side were all doctors and engineers and people that were employed and the other side were all business people. And I was wondering, probably around the age of five or six, that why is it that my dad works so hard, and he doesn’t seem to make as much money as my uncle. My uncle doesn’t work as much. He’s driving a better car, he’s got a bigger, better house, they take more vacations. And generally, they seem to have a better quality of smile on their faces.
And so I think it was about, for what I remember, I was about five or six years old that I decided to grow up and run my own business and become a businessman.
So fast forward. Being in Calgary, I think it was around the early days of Google where I got exposed to the self-help world to guys like Tony Robbins and Jim Ron and, and Les Brown and the rest of the gang. And I remember reading or listening to Tony Robbins saying if you read a book from a person that put their 50 years of experience in a book, in a week you could pretty much get 50 years of experience. So if you read a book per month, in one year, you could have accumulated like about 600 years of experience.
So that resonated really well with me. So I started reading. And I think it was around 2007 that I came across Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, which was the exact the story of my life. It helped me confirm my opinions and my thoughts around life and business. And you know, sometimes you have ideas, but you’re not sure. But when someone else says, Yes, this is how it works. And it kind of confirms your thoughts?
And so it kind of that helped me kind of push forward with my business ideas. So fast forward to 2010, I started Persyo Marketing. And we did Done for you marketing services, with a variety of businesses and clinics and different law firms, accounting firms and whatnot. And we did all kinds of marketing services along with coaching and consultation. And back in 2017, I decided to drop the marketing services because that industry is super competitive.
And last year, I decided to niche down with health clinics. And
Paul
Why did you decide to get into health clinics, Mostafa? What was the attraction for health practices other than the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing?
Mostafa
So over the years, we’ve had a really good experience with health clinics. And I enjoyed working with a few health clinics that I work with. And yeah, it’s been good. So I enjoy working with them. That’s why.
Paul
So what’s a typical week for you now you’re on? You’re on calls with businesses, you’re doing marketing for them? What is it? What’s the structure of it?
Mostafa
So I just do my coaching and training and consultation basically.
Paul
well, let’s talk about how to use viral coefficient to grow your coaching business? So what is viral coefficient? I love that you’ve branded something. But what the hell is that?
Mostafa
Sure. So viral coefficient is a ratio that describes how many referrals you’re getting from your database, basically. So on this ratio on top is the number of referrals and at the bottom is the number of people in your database. for example, if in the past 12 months, you got 50 referrals out of 255 people in your database, that gives you a viral coefficient ratio of 0.2. Okay, that means that every five people in your database give you one referral. So that’s the simple explanation of viral coefficient.
Paul
Where did this spring from? Look, I’ve been in this game a long time. And I’ve interviewed expert after expert about KPIs. Right!. And, this is the first one I’ve ever heard of a referral coefficient. Like I said, I love it.
Mostafa
I learned this 10 years ago in a business seminar from a guy here in Calgary named Jay Fiset, I learned it from him. And as soon as I learned the name, I heard about it, I went out and secured the domain for that name. So I’ve had the domain for 10 years. And then in the past year, I’ve put a program together. And I absolutely love client retention, and referrals, which we’re going to talk about more today.
Paul
So in a simple nutshell, we’re looking at the number of referrals we get divided by our total number of people in a database, which is it’s not actually how many people are actually, what percentage of our clients are referring. It’s just how many referrals we’re getting as a percentage of a database.
Mostafa
That tells you what percentage of patients are referring to you as well. So 20% of your patients are referring.
Paul
Okay, I know, it’s in terms of the importance of tracking, it’s important that we know all the numbers, right? What numbers we looking for? What do we want?
Mostafa
We want more so in the viral coefficient program? Yeah. So we want to know, our net promoter score, we want to know, our client retention rate. And later on, I’m going to share with you a few more KPIs on that. Okay, let’s dig deeper into the program.
Paul
Okay, well, why did you do this? What led you to creating the viral coefficient program in the first place?
Mostafa
So over the years, I have done various forms of marketing; from lead generation on Facebook and Google, direct mail to phone calls, conversion optimization and more, and this is by far, bar none, the most profitable and the easiest way to generate business and to keep patient patients and get referrals.
So I put together a list of tools and techniques and action items that helps people grow and scale their business through client retention and through referrals. Basically, that’s why I created this program.
Paul
So how does it help them? It sounds like it just helps them with structure and gives them a target? Is that kind of the major benefit?
Mostafa
Yeah, so we have a checklist of 18 action items that needs to be done to complete. And then once you get there our main KPIs to get a VQ ratio of one, which means, each patient is giving us a referral. And so I learned this from Bill Glazer, who was Dan Kennedy’s partner.
So with lead generation, each new patient costs anywhere from $200 to $300, and that’s a combination of money, time and resources, right?. But with client retention and getting referrals, the cost is anywhere from $10 to $50 per year per patient. So it’s 10 times cheaper, almost. With that, clinic owners get sales consistency and recurring revenue.
And so what happens is that the first transaction or the first treatment that we do with a patient, because of the high lead generation cost, it is not very profitable. Right? It’s the repeat business, that becomes much more profitable. So if we have say, an average of 500 to $550 per patient, and we spend $300 to get that patient, we only have $200 in profits. And we have to pay our overhead out of that as well, right?
But if we could get that patient back with $10 or $20, now we have $500 to ourselves. So 10 times more profits, almost. It’s much easier that way, about 20 times easier, with better conversion rates. New lead generation conversion rates are about 1-3 percent if you’re lucky. With client retention, conversion rates are 10% to 20%. So out of every 10 phone calls that we make, we get about 20% to 30% in repeat business, new appointments or referral from our existing database.
Paul
Okay, so VQ then Mostafa, If we’re talking about as a number. So we’re trying to get it to one, in a database of 100 and I get one referral on the 0.01 viral coefficient. If I got a database of 100 and I get 10 referrals, I’ll get a viral coefficient of 0.1. It’s simple mathematics.
and is it over a time period? So when you do your VQ, if that’s what’s called the viral coefficient, the shortness VQ from what you said before?
Mostafa
right
Paul
Is it over a 12 month period? over a three month period? over one year?
Mostafa
You can do it any period that you like? 12 months, six months, last month, last quarter. So you could track it month to month. So we do track it month to month, and then we track it quarterly and annually to see where we’re at.
Paul
Okay, so I’m doing monthly, quarterly and annually with VQ. Because these guys, my members, love their numbers, they love to know what they can measure, and what they can measure they can manage and that’s how they want to be.
Mostafa
Absolutely. it makes a huge difference to track numbers. Because once we track numbers, we know where we’re going and what we can do with it.
Paul
Now I know our goal is one. So honestly, if I’ve got 1000 people in the database, I may have not got 1000 referrals. So what have you seen in terms of the viral coefficient scores that good practices are doing?
Mostafa
So a viral coefficient of 0.5 is pretty easy to get. And so it takes time to get to a VQ of one. But once we get there, because first, we need to kind of sell the owner on the idea. Once he is in, we need to sell the staff on the idea. We need to train and educate them to ask for referrals. And then they need to educate our patients on referrals, which, this all takes time. But some of the results come in fairly quickly when we start making phone calls and asking for retention or referrals. But some of the items takes time, a little bit of time to start seeing results.
Paul
What are some of the top myths around this? What myths have you ever seen about client retention and referrals? Because everyone’s got an opinion? What are the common mistake mistakes or myth?
Mostafa
So the number one thing that I hear all the time is: I don’t want to bother my patients, when we talk about client retention. They say I don’t want to call them too much. I don’t want to email them too much, I don’t want to be in their face too much. Which exact opposite is true?
well, you don’t want to call them every day, obviously. But if you don’t stay in touch with patients, it hurts you.
Because an average you lose, if you don’t stay in touch with your patients, you lose about 64 to 68% of your patients, because they perceive that you don’t care about them.
And quite frankly, if you do care about them, you would stay in touch with them, you would call them you would, you would gift them, and you would take care of them. So now that’s Myth number one.
You do want to stay in touch with your patients. Can I share a personal story?
Paul
Love you to.
Mostafa
Okay, so I bought $10,000 worth of furniture about five years ago from a local furniture store. The salesman kept promising to call me and let me know when the furniture was going to arrive. And it showed up a week late. And he kept promising he was going to call. He never called. I remember when they delivered the furniture, and I put 10 grand on that. This guy never bothered to call me and say Hey, how’s it going? You get the furniture? You did arrive? Was there any problems? Is there anything I could do for you? Apparently, 10 grand wasn’t enough for him. Right?
And so what happened was, I remember I was not happy. So what happened after that, four or five months later I went out and bought some more furniture. And guess where I didn’t go back to? that guy. He didn’t care.
I am a young guy with a young family. So I know a lot of people around me that are buying furniture. Guess who didn’t get a referral? that guy. So by a simple phone call, and it’s very simple. That’s what I love about client retention and this whole program. All you have to do is pick up the phone and literally talk to them for 60 to 90 seconds; How’s it going? How’s your knee? How’s your back? Is it fixed? So that bad experience helped me become more sold on my own program!
Paul
At what point Mostafa, do you think we don’t do this because we think like as a health professional, like, “I shouldn’t have to do all this, they should be coming to me. I went to university on the expert”, is there a perception that I shouldn’t have to do this,
Mostafa
which is the next myth. So the next myth is: They will call me when they need me, I’m not going to call them. With that attitude, you’d be hurting yourself, your staff, your family and your patients. Because what happens is, I’m sure you’re a physiotherapist so you know, people tend to hold on to pains and try different modalities, self medication and meditation, all kinds of things and hold on to pain for a long time, sometimes years before they go out and fix it.
well, if you would call them up and six months later and say, and people hurt themselves all the time, right? Yeah. If you say: hey! we fixed your back, do you have any other problems? Yeah, you know, my knee kind of hurts, I’m scared. And if you kind of give them the pat on the shoulder and comfort them, and say: Hey, we could take care of you. You could bring them in. It will be more revenue, it would be patient satisfaction and you will be known as the good guy. And all the goodies that come along with that.
Paul
Just perception Mostafa that we think that a follow up call is salesy and making us appear desperate, rather than coming from a place of patient service.
Mostafa
If you try to call them and sell them, yes, it is salesy, but if you approach it with the intention of helping your patients and staying in touch, then that’s a different mentality and different approach. Right? Yes, I have seen people when they call me as a follow up and they try to sell me. And don’t get me wrong, we do want to sell but we want to check up on you and see if they’re in a place to buy then we sell them If they are not, we will follow up three months later or six months later when they’re ready. Basically.
Paul
We just did the sell without selling product which I think I’ve sent you some information on so I got Steve Jensen, a really high quality sales guy to do a sales presentation or one day sales training. and remembering part of it Mostafa, he said when you get a lead on from a website or some other thing, if you got to ring them up within a minute to get the booking. If you don’t, you got to ring them two or three times throughout the rest of the day. And I saw the eyes of the health professionals in the room roll back. and I thought: what? I’m going to ring them more than once or I’ve got my contact again? night that was traumatic for them that I think they’re going to do multiple attempts to ring this person. It was terribly confronting for them.
Mostafa
well, some people have that attitude, which is fine. I mean, you would go with what you’re comfortable with. But there are some people who would appreciate the fact that you followed up with them because they were busy. I get that a lot. And you’d be surprised how many people would thank you for following up on a knee treatment or back treatment saying: Hey, how’s it going? Is your back Okay, now? They’d be like, Oh my God, thank you for asking. Yes, it is or no, it’s there’s still some pain. So people would absolutely love it. I haven’t seen a single negative comment or feedback on follow ups.
Paul
Is there a myth? Is there a myth Mostafa that I shouldn’t have to? I went to university for five years, I shouldn’t have to do this. Is that a myth as well?
Mostafa
Yes, of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Paul
And we’re gonna get over that defect to discuss patient service from a quality place. It’s a mindset more than anything else, by the sound of it.
Mostafa
Yes, it is. Taking care of your patients, nurturing your list, staying in touch; It’s a matter of relationship, right? I mean, you would stay in touch with people that you love, and you want to stay in touch with them. And if you don’t stay in touch with them, then there’s not much love there.
Paul
So what does the actual process look like? So if we talk about the process itself? So the viral coefficient formula? What are some specific action steps that make this happen or that you put into businesses? What are you going to do?
Mostafa
For sure. We got 18 steps in this program, I”’ share up to seven or eight steps, time permitting, and feel free to interrupt me and ask me any questions. Because once I start talking, I keep going.
Paul
I’m very good at this stuff. I want to drill down in each of these ones. Anyway. So when you get into each one before you say the next one. sighs anyone ask me about that?
Mostafa
Sure.
So the first one is quarterly plans and annual planning and having KPIs around referrals. So I am very big on tracking and measuring numbers. I follow the Rockefeller habits system by Verne Harnish as the foundation for my coaching practice. And so we do quarterly planning, annual planning and basically monthly planning. So what we do, the first step is to track and measure what is happening right now. How many referrals are we getting? How many patients do we have on our list? And then so once we know our VQ numbers, then when say Okay, We’re at VQ of 0.1.
And now we want to go to 0.2. So what do we need to do to get there? So then we set up goals. Basically, less than 3% of business owners have clear written goals. Those guys are 10 times more likely to actually achieve their goals. The guys that have a clear written goal, so you create a goal, and we set KPIs for referrals and patient service.
And here are some examples: First KPI is the number of referrals, how many referrals did we get? – in this program? Second one is the number of appointments per year, per patient. So on average, I know some PTs and chiropractors are trying to aim for maybe five appointments per patient, right? That’s per treatment. So they have a knee problem that come in five times three to five times and they’re discharged. Now this new KPI is a matter of how many times do we bring this person back in 12 months? So that we can if we have treated their knee, now we want to treat their neck, now we want to treat their back, right? So that’s the second KPI.
Next one is the number of reviews per discharged person. And so we want to make sure we get one review per treatment, basically.
Paul
Okay, we’re talking Google review? What sort of review we’re talking about?
Mostafa
Google or Facebook, or a video testimonial.
Paul
Okay, Can I go back to one of the other KPIs? He talked about the number of sessions delivered. So health businesses will talk about a Patient Visits Average or a PVA, which is how many consults did you deliver over every 12 months? What number you’re looking for, Mostafa? When you do these KPIs with the owners, give us a ballpark of what you’re aiming for.
Mostafa
So it really depends on the business. Let’s say if you’re at three, we try to boost it up to five. If you’re at five, we try to boost it up to seven. Right? Okay, we could go up to 12 visits per year. Let’s say that they come in for five visits for knee pain, and let’s say that you also offer massage therapy. Now, we could try to book him in once a month for massage therapy. So now they come in a total of 12 times a year or maybe even more.
Paul
Okay, so patient visit average we’re getting. and how many reviews? What’s that goal for reviews? What was the review goal?
Mostafa
One per treatment. So if they come in to get their knee treated, we want to have a review on that treatment.
Paul
Okay, right. Okay. well, per episode, I suppose or per problem.
Mostafa
Per problem? per course of care. Yeah, exactly.
And the last one is the net promoter score. And so every time we ask them, how likely are you to refer us? And we try to increase that as well.
Paul
How often do you ask them to do the net promoter score? When do you do it? Is it the initial consult? Is it that the discharge or is it both?
Mostafa
Pretty much right after the discharge. Right on the day that the guy discharged, they gotta get the email. Okay. And I want to talk about that later, as a side note, as well. So that was the first one
Paul
went for it, I’m going to call it look. So first step guys is the quarterly or annual planning with KPIs around referrals. Look at your viral coefficient, look at your PVA, look at your Google review number. And
Mostafa
the number of appointments per year, and the NPS, net promoter score.
Paul
Beautiful. Okay, so there’s step one, guys, get that organized, What’s the next one?
Mostafa
Second one is to hire a person full time for client or patient retention. So what this person is going to do is, he’s going to make phone calls, he’s in charge of following up, bringing patients back, securing referrals, staying in touch, securing reviews, and testimonials.
and this employee will perhaps be your most profitable employee. Right?
his full time job is to keep people, bring him back, and secure referrals. Now, what we want to do is, let’s say that you have 5000 people on your list. We have 261 working days in the year. We want to divide 5000 by 261. Now this person would want to make 20 phone calls per day to reactivate patients. And to follow up with existing patients or the new ones.
Paul
You’ve got it? This is a full time Patient Relationship Manager, full time marketing manager. This is what we’re doing here.
Mostafa
Yeah, some people call it the director of Wow, some people call them client retention manager. There are different titles, but those are my top favorite ones; client retention manager and director of Wow. And so this person would have a script. And we have the script in our program included.
So he/she would call and he would go something like Hey, it’s me from ABC clinic. I’m calling to see how things are going with your new treatment? Is it 100%? Are you still having pain? and what not? We get the response on that.
And then do you need to come back? or Do you have any other type of pain?. And based on what’s going on, on that checklist, on every phone call, this person would ask for a referral.
Who do you know around you that has neck, back, knee pain or shoulder pain? Every single time we get in touch with a patient, we ask them for a referral. And eventually when it when we asked them enough times, they will be able to kind of get educated. One myth that I didn’t get to discuss was some people say if I do a good job, they will refer me. And the fact is they do not automatically refer you. I’ve had many, many patients where we’ve done an outstanding job for them, but they do not refer us until we started asking them for a referral. So we got to educate them.
Paul
You might have heard the one. I heard this from Dan Kennedy once; It was: the barrier to refer is higher than the barrier to continuing to patronize. Which kind of was meaning from Dan Kennedy, Just because someone’s coming back to see you as a client, that’s a lower barrier than them referring someone. So you’ve got to go above and beyond that to get a referral. We think because they still coming back themselves, they’ll refer. The referral barrier is higher because that puts them at risk in case you do a bad job.
Mostafa
Exactly.
Paul
All right. I love this that the KPIs then for this patient retention person, I assume that we’re going back to point one and asking they’re doing the same thing. So what’s having this new person increase your viral coefficient? Has it increased your PVA
Mostafa
so in his case, one of his KPIs would be the number of reactivity patients, number of referrals that he has secured through his phone calls and follow ups, number of phone calls that he has made on any given week or given month? those would be some of his KPIs
Paul
Is there a clinic size that would justify that marketing cost, Mostafa? When you look at practices, you do have to have a let’s say, three full time equivalent therapist to make it viable financially to have a patient retention person full time, or I think it’s more practice of a part time?
Mostafa
I think it’s more about the number of people you have on your list. Let’s say if you make 20 phone calls a day, on average that will give you three to five appointments or three to five, a mixture of business or referrals. And if per patient is worth $500 for you, that’s about $1000 a day.
Paul
Okay, Where do you find this person? Where do we what do we look for in this in this patient? So I
Mostafa
I was thinking about putting a job description of this person in the program too, so our coaching clients don’t have to create it from scratch. So I will include that in there as well.
We would put a job posting and the job posting would be in terms of, how do I put this together, in terms of the results that they’re going to get. for example: Being able to reactivate five patients per day, being able to book three appointments a day, type of job ad. When they see it, they’re like, Oh, you know what, I could do that. But we put it out there we interview that person, and then get them going.
Paul
If you know your numbers well enough, Mostafa, if you know your number well enough, you know what a new client or returning client is worth for you. It’s not hard to work out; well, I’m going to put this person on, it might not be 40 hours a week, it might be 20 hours a week. And you can track the numbers and then you can if they do well you increase their hours. I think from what you’re saying and my experience with his businesses, they might get their therapists to make some of these follow up things between patients, they might get a front desk person to do some, but it’s not their prime job.
Mostafa
No, it’s not and most of them don’t like to do that.
Paul
And most of them aren’t very good at it and haven’t been trained at it. And as a result, the results aren’t great!
Mostafa
Right. But so you’re exactly right, you can hire this person Part time first, and have them pretty much pay for their wage and work their way up. Right? And so he/she would be working with your referral partners, maybe other doctors, other people that refer to you, and taking care of them. And then more on than that coming…
Paul
I remember hearing about a chiropractor I mentioned this in some of my talks, the chiropractor that had a full time concierge. He was basically the role of the concierge, she was just a meeter and greater. She was to make people feel special. And I’m sure they’re all had a lot of these other things in it, follow up and if you’ve got a good rapport, I’ll be bringing you up Mrs. Johnson to make sure you’re okay. That’s almost this position with an extension of it’s the relationship manager. Absolutely. That would be the director of Wow, deliver wow experiences to patients. Right?
So hire a person, number two is: hire a person for patient retention, make that a job description? Does that, just before we move on, do some practices think that’s just a practice manager like Hey, well, my practice manager does that?
Mostafa
Yeah
Paul
well, some people think their office manager should do it all of this marketing, managing .. you know… But no, this would be a full time job, depending on the size of the business.
Mostafa
The next item on the list is identifying your personal and company values and displaying them on your marketing material.
Now what happens is, your values is determined who you attract. for example, my top values are number one is family. Number two is business. Number three is growth and learning. Now, Paul, do we share any of these, me and you?
Paul
Very, very much so?
Mostafa
So we attracted each other. Now once people see that value, and you display that, attracting them becomes easier, and then keeping them becomes easier. And that’s how it plays in the client retention role because they’ll go around and be like, this guy’s shares the same values as I do. Right?
And so I should go back. And they will refer other people who have the saying values to you saying, hey, this guy’s a great family guy, he’s a great businessman, you should go sit down with him, or you should get her, you know, get your knee treated with him, or with her, basically.
So the way you want to do is, you want to display your values on your marketing materials on our website. And here’s an example, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see that I’m holding my kid in that picture. So that tells you right away that family is a value to me, right? Or you’ll see a picture of me and skiing because I love skiing. So we’re going to connect right away. That’s me without me saying I’m the father and I love my family. It is subconsciously, but it’s very powerful. Right?
Now, to get your values determined, you could go to Dr. Demartini’s website. He has a value determination process or software where you go answer a bunch of questions, and at the end, it will give you your top values. Right.
Okay, that’s how I got it. And then, yeah, marketing becomes a lot easier. And referrals, referrals become a lot easier as well.
Paul
So where do we actually display these, Mostafa? So you say: put it on our website? Do we have them on the wall? Do they have them at the front desk? where in our emails? how do we get the message out there? The thing that we value?
Mostafa
You could have it on your walls, here are our values. You could have on your about page under each, say PT’s bio, you could say Paul’s top values are this and that, and then you could show it and then so you would have your company values, then you would have your personal values. And then you would just display them on your about page, you could get a mix of pictures and show what you value.
Paul
It’s interesting you have the photo of your child. I do a lot of work with it with a guy named Terry Dean, who’s an online marketing expert, and Terry’s done lots of measurement of different things. And his mantra is to help people earn more workplace and enjoy life. That’s his plan. And when he does, he’s at marketing. He’s got a photo with him in a suit. And there’s a photo of him with his dog. And the dog, the dog photo always performs the suit photo every time but not what he’s about
Mostafa
all the dog people like him, right?
Paul
And just people say, well, if the dog likes him, and he’s about quality life, he’s about families, about fun, whereas the corporate suit is certainly an image, but it doesn’t fit the value of the family loving guy, the corporate guy with the suits a different value proposition.
Mostafa
Absolutely. And that the guy with the dog is a lot easier to do business with. And to pick him over a guy in a suit. Right?
Paul
And we look for and we look for commonality. we’re looking for what do we have in common? And if it is it the dog? Is it the family? Is it skiing? All these things make, people have a better affinity with you across the board. It was interesting to put this out there as an interesting one. Do you want your brain surgeon in his coat with a stethoscope? Or do you want him with his dog?
Mostafa
I would want him with his dog.
Paul
Yeah? What would you want as if someone’s going to operate in your brain to save your life? Who do you want the famous loving guy? Or do you want the guy with the suit and the stethoscope?
Mostafa
Um, I don’t know. For me personally, I would like to see the guy with the dog, that’s more of a person that’s more of a human.
Paul
So that perception is with the commonality. So what’s the number three must have identified personal and company values, display them, make them visible and website, make them in the office, write them all over the place. Brilliant.
Mostafa
Now for another way to display values is to collect reviews and stories on your values. So the way you would do that is, let’s say one of our values, let me just open this up and share with you, is nothing less than super happy patients. That’s one of our values.
So the way we do that on our Rockefeller habits one page strategic plan is the actions that we take to live up to our values to this specific values, stay in touch with patients on a daily and weekly basis to make sure that they are super happy. So we deliver that value through follow ups, through asking questions, through designing our service process, our patient journey map and the rest of it. The best time to get reviews is right when they get the treatment. So what some people do is they wait for a day or two or a week or two or a month or two, to get the review and by then, they have forgotten about it. You want to make and secure the review on the day that the gig the treatment.
If it’s the first treatment and they improve by 60%, say half of their pain is gone, right there and then while the emotion and the feeling is there, you want to ask for the review or the testimonial. because they’re 90% more likely to write a review for you then compared to two weeks later because by then to have forgotten about it.
Paul
Do you find it health professionals, Mostafa, are also reluctant to ask for reviews because they think well, I’ve done a great job; they’ll surely review me anyway because I’m good. Is that again one of these myths we talked about?
Mostafa
Everybody is. people are kind of scared to ask for a review. But once they’re hot with emotions after the treatment with the feeling and the emotion that: Oh my God, I had neck pain and headache for 12 years, and you just fix my headache with one treatment, that is the best time to ask versus two weeks later. And once you get into the habit of asking, it just becomes a routine after. I mean after a while.
Paul
Okay. So it’s a structured format where we are collecting stories, collecting reviews, and not being scared about asking for them.
Mostafa
Absolutely. I mean, you help fix somebody’s problems, it was a massive pain or whatever it was, you might as well just get some reviews. Now, these reviews are going to help people to pick you over your competition. Imagine you picking a hotel, hotel number one has no reviews, number two has five, number three has 27 reviews with an average of 4.8. Which one is more likely to get your business? probably the one with 27.
Another thing about reviews is you do not want to have 100 reviews of five out of five. That looks fake, people think you paid your cousin to write it. So once a while, it’s perfectly fine and natural to get a bad review just to make it look more natural. We always get those patients that are never happy.
Paul
As long as you reply to it and say we’re sorry, we didn’t live up to your expectations. And please contact me we’d love to, we’d love to make this ride as long as you can turn it into a positive?
Mostafa
Absolutely, you got to respond to all of them and make sure that, you know, it has been responded properly.
So the next one is: identify your top patients. these are the top 20% of your patients that give you 80% of your sales. I call them your top 20% Club members. The 8020 principle applies to everything in life and business. It is a universal law, so might as well just take advantage of it and use it to your advantage for your business.
If you double down your money, energy and resources on your top 20% of your patients, and try to find people similar to your top 20%, the 80% of your sales that comes from these people could easily double and you could go up to 160%.
And so it’s a matter of because now each patient that you add to the list will increase your sales significantly. Right? It’s just analyzing your current list and identifying the similarities on your top 20%; who they are, what are they like? How old are they? What kind of problems did they have and what not? and focus on those people.
Paul
What do we do with them? Once we’ve identified them, what do we do with them to make them feel special?
Mostafa
I will get into that in a second. I know this is good stuff. So these are your important patients, we don’t want to discriminate, but these guys bring in 80% of our sales, we need to take extra care of them. These are your VIP patients. So what you want to do is you want to have, if they bring in 80% of your sales, they kind of deserve up to 80% of your time and resources. But they’re not that demanding.
What I would do is put 50% to 60% of time and resources on these people and find people similar to this to this group.
Let me explain the next group of people, and I’m going to share with you what we’re going to do with them. Would that be alright?
So the next is identifying the top referrers. These are the people that refer to us all the time. In that list. 20% of their referrers, give us 80% of our referrals. Those become our 20% Club members as well.
These are our rock stars, these are the promoters, these are the people walk around and walk the people off the street into our clinic, into our office, right?
So what we want to do is take care of them, gift them, nurture them. And I’ll get into that in a second. But what these guys do is they send us business for free. So the $200 to $300, the cost of lead generation, with these guys, it is free.
What we want to do is with these people is that we don’t want to be greedy. We want to take care of them. And if we don’t take care of them, eventually they will stop referring.
We want to do that to encourage more of what of they’re doing, to reward them for their action for the business that they send us, and it doesn’t have to be a massive reward.
I remember I sent a referral to a chiropractor friend of mine, he gave me a $10 Starbucks card and I was super happy. But for the following 15 referrals that I gave him, I got nothing. I remember I was not happy. And all he had to do was to give me a cookie or call me and say thank you. Right?
So it’s just a matter of taking care of them. Recognition is the big thing in this game.
So the next thing we’re going to do with this top 20% Club members is this: we’re going to run a VIP event once a year, bring the top 20% patients and the top 20% referrers, referral partners, and throw a VIP kind of event with wine and cheese, food – a kind of fun event and get together.
Now we’re going to introduce these guys together, they’re going to network, they’re probably going to do business.
So we take care of them, we will most likely secure appointments in that event from this group of people or secure more referrals from them. And then you establish yourself as the authority for gathering people.
Paul
Have it at the practice, Mostafa? Do you have it at the business?
Mostafa
At the business or at a local hotel or a community center. If you have enough space, you could. It’s your preference.
Paul
Guest speaker? something to attract them?
Mostafa
Absolutely. You could have fun games, guest speakers, wine and cheese. Whatever that would fit the need of your niche, I guess.
Paul
My clients, members of the club, would remember the session we did with Dustin Burlington. You might know Dustin from Glazer Kennedy. He’s an orthodontist in Kansas, big, big business orthodontics in Kansas. He hires out the local amusement park once a year for a private client event and catered the whole thing and all these VIPs go to the amusement park for the orthodontic event every year. It’s just great.
Mostafa
That is awesome.
Paul
And they’re climbing over themselves to get their friends to be invited. So they’re all talking about orthodontics. That’s brilliant.
Mostafa
Absolutely. You show these guys a good time, and they’re more likely to refer to you, to give you their business, and pretty much, refer their network for you.
Paul
As a side to my guys, it’s easy for Dustin because every client was probably 10 grand to him. But in the healthcare business, you might be $1000 bucks, it might be $500, still, the principle is the same, you would have to book out the local amusement park.
Mostafa
Remember, these are a top 20%. they’re worth more than our regular average patients. They probably spend two or three times more than our average patients with us.
So the next one is to educate your team for better patient service. This plays a major role in client retention, which is if people are happy and they get good patient service, they’re more likely to come back and refer people to us.
So what we want to do is we want to draw our patient journey map of what happens step by step, each step of the game. Then, what we need to do is identify the bottlenecks. Where do we need to improve? What do we need to work on? What do we need to get ourselves better at? And the place that I would start is on your website? Is your website designed for good patient service? Is it delivering good value to people?
And one thing you could do is to do some user testing, get some of your patients or potential patients, have them interact on your website while you watch them quietly, not commenting, and have them speak their mind out loud. So they will say something like I was looking for a book now button here, but it’s not there. I was looking for this information, but it’s not there. If you do five or six of these user test things on your website, and apply what you learn, you’re going to improve your conversion rates and the usability of your site probably up to 30%.
Every time
Paul
We don’t do it, we get the web guy to do it. And we sit down and go: that was good. But we never, you never call your mom and, mom go on that website and see if he can make an appointment or something, will you?
Mostafa
yeah. Or ask your patients or ask someone else to go on the site, say: what do you think? when we design a website, we think it’s the best. And then, people go in there and they don’t book appointments and we’re wondering why it’s not working.
Paul
The big bottlenecks, Mostafa. Say the website is a big bottleneck for patient service, what about the front desk? are they a big bottleneck as well?
Mostafa
That’s the next biggest one, the front desk.
Absolutely. That’s why guys like Rick Lou with the Call Hero. Their service makes a huge difference there.
Paul
So we educate and I suppose most health professionals, Maybe they don’t even think they’re in patient service. They think they’re a health professional. And I suppose they’ve been brought up waiting in the waiting room of the doctor for an hour for Doctor that’s running late. And they just expect that from healthcare. But you’re not going to cut it these days? is it?
Mostafa
Absolutely. So what you want to do is you want to map out exactly what happens step by step, before, during, and after the treatment for patient service.
What this does is you could use this for training, for creating consistency with your staff, with your PTs with your chiropractors, massage therapists, so everybody is on the same page. That will do a lot of good for your patient service. And once you map it out on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard, you can see and you could eliminate the extra steps of what you’re doing.
Paul
It’s effectively you are gonna map out your client journey. What’s the client journey? Where are the opportunities in that journey to improve our patient service? And where are we falling down? We don’t do this stuff!
All right. But I’m looking at the clock, I’ve gotta get a couple more for me, and we’ll have to wrap it up, gives me a couple of other.
Mostafa
So the next thing is you want to educate your team to ask patients for referrals. This is probably one of the biggest ones in getting referrals. So your PTs, they should have a section or line on their checklist, hopefully, if they have a checklist, to ask for a referral. So they go through, they check the knee, they check the back and do the assessment and whatnot. When they’re done, right when there is a massive improvement, you should ask for a referral, and right before discharge, you should ask for a referral.
And it could be as simple as Hey, as you know, most of our business comes from word of mouth. Do you know anybody around you that is having similar issues or different pains in their body that we can help them, live a pain free life? or we can help them get moving? It’s as simple as that and that’s not that confrontational.
Paul
With that script, Mostafa, do you say would you be happy for me to give them a call? Or do you let the patient then let the person know about you? How aggressively? I just know, I’ve done a lot of work in the fitness industry? And they will ask you to write down the names and phone numbers of five people who may be interested. That’s a pretty aggressive approach, how aggressively do we do that? After we’ve done the script?
Mostafa
What I would do is if they’re in for a five treatment type of program, if on a second treatment they have a good improvement in what we’re dealing with, let’s say that half of the problem is fixed, I would bring it up and say hey, do you know someone that else that in your in your network that is having problems?
And if he or she says yes, We say: Would you be open to talk to them? So we can kind of bring them in and take care of them? And if they say yay or nay, you can say are you open to me giving them a call on your behalf? Or would you like to talk to them?
Now, if you bring that up halfway through the treatments, you have two or three sessions, or two-three, follow up sessions to kind of ask about that referral. But if you ask upon discharge, the guys is like: okay, I’ll think about it and then they’re gone. But then we’re going to have our client retention person call and ask for referrals. But while they’re hot on their treatment, that’s the best time to ask for a referral and secure it.
Paul
Yeah, it’s a nice flow. And as if they come back again: hey did you get a chance to speak to your mother about that knee problem she’s having? Because I really think we can help her. Do you want me to give her a call? Like it’s a nice thing you can bring up each time without being pushy. It’s just and again, as we’ve done with all of our programs, none of this is heavy selling. There’s a person out there with a knee problem, who you think you can help? You have a moral obligation to try and give them that help? They don’t know what to do.
Mostafa
Absolutely. If my mother’s knee hurts, and you can help them I would be happy if you actually, as a matter of fact, aggressively follow up with me.
Because Hey, it’s your mom, you should take care of her.
Paul
Has your mom’s knee, is she’s still limping around? Gee, what sort of son are you, Mostafa. She’s limping around, just get involved? Will you? I can see where this would go?
Mostafa
What’s the matter with you?
We talked about a client retention person as well, if the referral is not secured. Now, one thing we need to remember is, you are going to need to ask this person a few times for referrals to educate that person to refer to you; once is not enough, twice is not enough.
And the next point that I had, hopefully, I think we’re running out of time and That’s our final point.
We want to show evidence of referrals everywhere. This is what I learned from Dan Kennedy. Show them that everyone refers to us. And so should you. And if you’re not, something is wrong with you.
Paul
I love that. I love the very subtle approach from Dan Kennedy. It’s very subtle, isn’t it?
Mostafa
So well, we don’t quite put it that way. But it’s kind of like, Hey, everybody is referring to us and so should you. So we want to put evidence of us getting referrals on our website, on our monthly newsletter, in the waiting area, in the treatment area, on our marketing material on the back of our business cards. Basically, everywhere they go, they see evidence of us getting referrals.
And so what it would look like is say, in the waiting area we would say thanks to Stephanie Miller for five referrals last month. So people could see that there is a person that gives us five referrals! And then in next room, you’re going to say thanks, Joe Smith for 12 referrals this month, or you know, however, you are going to put it together.
I know one of our PT friends, he thanks his referral winner for winning the gift of the month, which is pretty common.
Paul
Certainly, a referrer of the month program.
Mostafa
Yep. Once they see it, you are subconsciously training them to refer to you.
Paul
Yeah, it’s simple stuff. Isn’t it, Mostafa? stuff, really. It’s systematic. It’s structured, that we just think we open the doors, people will come and we do a great job. And they’ll come, but Gee, we’re missing some opportunities.
Mostafa
Absolutely. So most of what I talk about, you guys have heard about it. It’s nothing new. And it’s easy to do but it’s also very easy not to do. But when we do it, boy, is it profitable. Boy, is it Sweet!
Paul
It’s crazy because you look at marketing, and you look at all the ways you can generate business, and we look at the money; like I have a client spending thousands of dollars a month on Google ads and thousands of dollars on newspaper and other things.
Other than the cost of your person that we are putting that full time patient service on and the odd cheese night, and the occasional gift, gee it’s a pretty cheap sort of investment, isn’t it?
Mostafa
Absolutely. I mean, if he could secure 10 new patients or recurring patients or reactivate 10 patients per month, you’re not going to pay five grand a month. If you’re paying them three grand a month plus some bonuses, he or she will pay for himself in no time.
That’s why I said this guy’s this guy or girl will probably be your most profitable employee.
Paul
And you could even look, just thinking about it then, we’ve often got to stand out front desk person, someone who’s really good with people and has a good, it’s pretty easy to promote that person and take them off the front desk and give them 10-20 hours a week to be in charge of patient service because they’ve already been identified as the superstar.
Mostafa
For sure.
Paul
Easy to do, mate. I love what you laid out here and stuff. I love the simplicity of it. I love the idea behind, certainly the viral coefficient. I love that. But how can people find out more about you? And the VQ program? Where do they go?
Mostafa
So I’m sharing the entire blueprint of the program and our site. If people go to www.persyo.com/VQ, they can download the entire blueprint, I shared 10 points here, there are 18 points so far. We’ll probably add a few more points to that list over time. But you could download it, you can start implementing the program yourself. But if you’d like to get my assistance, and if you like my help, I’m offering a free 30 minute discovery call, if you will, on how we could apply this for your business, we could probably go over your top challenges and see what we could do to improve your VQ ratio.
Paul
What’s the website again, Mostafa. What was the URL?
Mostafa
persyo.com/VQ that’s vector and Q as in Quora.
Paul
yeah, I love it.
Mostafa
Are we going to be able to include the link in our show notes or somewhere?
Paul
Yeah, because it’s an audio program, Mostafa, just, if I go to the URL, if you’ve got the URL, the link, you can go to your homepage or contact you, can contact you via LinkedIn. Is there a way to get in contact with you?
Mostafa
Search for Mostafa Hosseini, and I’m right there. I’m holding my kid in my picture. That’s how I differentiate myself
Paul
That is HOSSEINI, so Mostafa. You can find him on LinkedIn, or the website URL was:
Mostafa
Paul
I loved it. I loved your profile. I loved everything you did. I went to your website, had a good look around. Mate, I love what you’re delivering the moment so doing some great stuff, mate. So on behalf of profit club, but great, great session. I love what you did. I’m going to start working now on this VQ thing for all of my clients. I love the concept. I love the ratio. well done.
Mostafa
Fantastic. Thank you. Appreciate that.
Paul
Now, on behalf of the profit club, thanks for being part of the program.
Now, if you aren’t currently a profit club member, you got to listen, you’ve got this session in some other means, if you want to become a member of profit club and get access to great programs like this one with Mostafa, go to healthbusinessprofits.com/profitclub. That’s healthbusinessprofits.com/profitclub
and members, make sure you go into the academy and make sure you check out all the other past sessions and share that with your team. It’s great to get information to them from people other than just the owner of the business.
Look forward to seeing you next month.
Keywords: referrals, business, Viral Coefficient, patient retention, KPIs, Patient Service, Marketing, VQ, patient treatment, values, referral program, medical marketing program
