BLOG: Every funnel tells a story
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
This blog is continued from Part 1: A counterintuitive approach to mapping marketing funnels.
In Part 1 I stated, “Mapping out your marketing funnel provides you with four capabilities that you would not have without a visual representation of your patient’s buying journey.” These 4 capabilities were discovered as I navigated a new way of managing LASIK growth from inside the practice.
My situation: I was a busy surgeon in a large multi-specialty practice trying to grow our LASIK revenue. At the time I couldn’t figure out why our number of LASIK cases had leveled off when our number of LASIK surgeons had doubled.
The main problem was that I didn’t know how many LASIK opportunities (to sell them surgery) we had coming in that were lost. The phone was constantly ringing, so for a long time we never suspected how badly the LASIK book of business was declining. In the meantime, we had plenty of cataract surgery keeping us busy.
Here’s the rub: How many calls never went anywhere? Did we have an actual count of the number of times we might have sold LASIK or cross-sold an alternative service (RLE or cataracts when the caller was too old)? Again and again, the answer was no. The call center didn’t know. The refractive coordinator didn’t know. Not for sure. Not by looking them up in a prospect database.
Besides not knowing the number of opportunities, we also never knew the disposition of those inquiries. How many attempts were we actually making to connect and bring them in? Were we losing a sale to another practice?
We had never explicitly instructed our staff on how many attempts to reconnect before abandoning a prospect as a lost opportunity. Nor had we specified how quickly they should reach out after a message was received. As you may or may not know, follow-up delays of over 3 hours for any new leads can amount to hefty opportunity loss, and not just for LASIK. Today’s callers want to hear from you ASAP since many will move on to your competitor if their questions cannot be answered in their first call.
Subjectively, I “knew” we'd done more surgeries in the previous 5 years with less surgeons in the practice. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much interest in the drop off or its root cause because cataracts were keeping everyone crazy busy.
So I had to go rogue. I did a careful breakdown and process analysis of our LASIK marketing and sales funnel.
Then it came to me...
By mapping the entire end-to-end process, I realized we could execute a better process for capitalizing on LASIK phone inquiries. We could do it with assets we already had or could build in-house. With zero advertising dollars. Needing no outside consultants or agency minions. No staff changes either. All I had to do was redesign the lead-capturing process and patch the holes through which our new LASIK opportunities were leaking. At the same time, I realized this was proof of the power of process documentation to not only improve our inbound LASIK marketing but also for other premium services as well.
It also became clear how valuable process maps were in aligning (and defining) all stakeholders BEFORE haphazardly running a campaign and cranking up expensive traffic generation with lots of advertising (after all, pouring more water into a leaky funnel will only result in a higher volume of leaking). I could foresee every aspect of a campaign BEFORE we invested one penny building it.
My plan was to begin with a simple “as is” and “to be” map showing where we were along with the major steps needed to attain our goal of selling more LASIK. This result would be measured by not losing organic opportunities that were flowing in over the phone, regardless of how the caller found us. Discussing this initial map among our LASIK group would, hopefully, reveal who was/was not on board with the new process and whether we were in sync about the goal.
So I held an alignment meeting with all stakeholders.
The attendees included the process owner who managed LASIK sales along with all LASIK process participants and marketing staff in charge of LASIK. The alignment meeting produced a unanimous decision on the “big picture” of how the new process should flow and what we each had to contribute to make the desired change.
After that, we developed a process map to help us identify new marketing assets we might need as each prospect moved along their buying journey. We called this map our production blueprint. Each existing or new marketing asset was noted on the LASIK marketing map and the LASIK sales map. We named our process “LASIK C.A.P.P. (Capture All Phone Prospects)”.
Building on our successful documentation and alignment, we decided to look at applying it to marketing for other premium services in need of revenue growth.
Within 35 calendar days (not business days) of activating the new process, we had captured low-to-mid 6 figures in LASIK opportunities from inbound phone inquiries.
And that's why I'm so excited to share the framework with you. Hopefully, your results will be similar.
Stay tuned ... in Part 3 I’ll break down each step of the process mapping framework and explain why it helps build, manage and optimize our LASIK C.A.P.P. (or any other service) phone inquiry funnel.
Collapse