Here’s how the biggest practices “plus” their marketing efforts. Why there is momentum power in Synergistic Practice Promoting.

When you’ve worked with a few thousand doctors, it becomes quite clear why some practices excel at getting patients while others produce less satisfactory results.

You’re about to learn why million dollar practices seem to be able to attract monster patient flow, without seemingly doing anything out of the ordinary.

By monster patient flow, I define this as the ability to consistently generate 60 or more new patients per month, over an extended number of years.

Doctors will call us perplexed wanting to know why they’re unable to produce their desired number of new patients. “I’m doing marketing every week. I’m doing everything that I’ve learned to attract patients. Why can’t I bring in the big numbers of patients that I hear other practices are producing?”

The problem with going to medical conventions, is that you listen to successful doctors describing their marketing efforts. “I’m doing that!” you say. It’s possible that you are. But lying beneath the surface is the missing ingredient that is invisible to your eyes.

What is this missing ingredient?

The Snowball Effect

The Snowball Effect is the secret to causing serious patient flow — Ben Cummings

The Snowball Effect is a metaphor for explaining how practices are able to generate tremendous patient flow. As a child my favorite cartoons was Bugs Bunny. I’m sure you’ve seen the cartoon where one of the characters is tripped up while running down a snowy mountain, which causes him to grow into a bigger and bigger snowball, eventually looking enormous in size.

What successful practices do that is invisible to your eyes, is they employ the Snowball Effect in their practice promotional efforts.

What I mean is this.

You hear a successful doctor speak at a convention and let’s say he teaches a spinal screening method. He tells you he is producing 60 new patients a month. When you return home, you try out his method exactly as it was taught. You produce only 10 patients.

What are you missing?

You see, the successful doctor has multiple promotional poles in the water at all times. They often only talk about one. If these successful doctors were to do only one promotional effort, they too would produce small results.

However, they will do spinal screenings…

• combined with sending a monthly newsletter 
• combined with asking patients for referrals
• combined with lecturing in the community
• combined with doing fundraisers for the local fire department
• combined with writing articles, combined with…

Now you’re getting the picture!

The Multiplying Effect of Multiple Poles in the Water

The reason one doctor is able to produce 80 or 100 new patients a month, is because of the multiplying effect of doing a bunch of different – yet synergistic – promotional efforts simultaneously.

When a doctor does only one thing, such as sending a newsletter to his patients, he might produce 3-5 new patients. However if he asks each patient for referrals and combines that with sending a newsletter, he might now produce 10 patients from his newsletter effort, instead of five. This occurs because when you create a confluence of marketing programs that are out there all at once, they plus your total overall results.

You’ve experienced the Snowball Effect already

New doctors create the Snowball Effect accidentally. Their need to get things going is so great, that they are forced to do perhaps 5 or 10 things to try to bring in business. They’re able to create incredible growth their first three years, because they’ve accidentally stumbled into the Snowball Effect.

Such geometric growth occurred because they were doing many different things. These things together produced much greater results, then any one individual activity could produce.

This is why practices, doing rather ‘ordinary practice promotion’, seem to produce extraordinary patient flow.

One promotional activity will produce okay results.

Spin five promotional activities at the same time, and they feed off of each other and produce much greater overall results.

Look at the release of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. Within one week of these DVD’s re-release they produced $115 million in sales.

George Lucas understood the power of Multiplied Efforts. To promote these DVD’s, he didn’t just run one ad and hope for the best. No, he put many poles in the water at the same time. He:

• Authorized the release of an A & E television special, about the making of Star Wars
• Combined with television and print media ads
• Combined with publicity in the media and creating a buzz
• Combined with the release of a Play Station 2 game, at the same time (going after the younger audience who, after playing the game, will want the DVD set)
• Combined with Blockbuster employee’s wearing “Star Wars DVD Pack” t-shirts, all across the country…

Well, you get the point. By combing efforts he generated over $115 million dollars in 5 days!

In summary, the reason that million dollar practices are able to sustain big numbers of new patients, is because they all take advantage of the Snowball Effect.

They have many different poles in the water.

Conversely, doctors with low patient flow often do little or no marketing. Not surprisingly when they do try something, they produce lower then expected results.

Do you want to start attracting serious numbers of new patients?

Then take advantage of the multiplying power of the Snowball Effect.

Go out and make things happen, my friend!

To you practice success,
Ben Cummings

Don’t keep us a secret! Tell a practitioner about our practice building community!