Zeiss Secret Shopped 100 Practices. Here are the 3 biggest opportunities they discovered.

“Houston, we have a problem.” A familiar line from one of the most impactful movies of my childhood, Apollo 13.

If you remember the story, Apollo 13 launched to the moon and ran into major difficulty. And the movie is a depiction of how they addressed the numerous problems standing in the way of their mission – which was ultimately to get back home safely.

You have a mission as a practice. And while it’s less dire relative to Apollo 13, it’s certainly still vital – to change as many lives as possible through your surgical procedures, and help patients achieve the freedom, safety and empowerment that comes from crisp, clear vision.

And the Apollo-sized problem we most commonly see standing in the way of that mission? The conversion of leads into consults.

Namely when it comes to digital leads. When I started in this business 20 years ago (not quite back to the Apollo mission days, but feels like it sometimes), the concept of “Lead Connection” didn’t exist. Because people just called you when they wanted to know something.

That landscape of communication has obviously changed. Young and old, your prospective patients are using digital channels – SMS, social media, website and more – to reach out to you.

(Heck, my 67-year-old father shot me an SMS while writing this article. He sent me a meme)

So “Lead Connection” – which is key to Lead Conversion – is now a thing. And on some level, it’s understandably a challenge for the many top-tier practices across the country who reach out to our consultancy for guidance.

Enter Zeiss.

They saw this as an issue among their many clients as well. And kudos to them because they decided to see what they could learn about the challenge and what possible solutions may exist. So they teamed up with Dan Haddad, Jr. (Administrator of Laser Eye Institute in Detroit) and secret shopped a few practices.

Then they secret shopped a few more, and a few more. In fact, they ended up conducting the most comprehensive and in-depth Secret Shop study ever done in our industry:

All in all, they shopped more than 100 practices, for a grand total of 315 secret shops.

Before we get into the takeaways and pearls I have for you, I’ll set the stage on the details of this study:

• Targets – 101 US-Based LVC Clinics, 80% of them were single-surgeon or multi-surgeon, with some private equity and institutional
• Candidate Profile – 25-35 y/o, eye-surgery naive, no ocular pathologies, no reading glasses dependency. (In other words, the patient profile of someone you want reaching out to your practice for LVC)
• Contact Strategy – 3 contact attempts per office, with attempts made using the most suitable and visible method available on clinic websites (think contact forms and self-tests)
• Timeframe – Contact attempts were made Mon – Thurs during office hours, and they allowed for a 3-day window to respond.

To summarize, they did their best to serve up the best possible leads at the best possible times for practices to respond.

Once all the data was compiled, they invited me and Mike from Glacial to review it with them and share our insights. In fact, hundreds of attendees joined us as we presented this live on a webinar, a recording of which Zeiss graciously has shared publicly.

You can view the webinar here. (visit that link and scroll down the page about ⅓ of the way, and you’ll see it embedded on that page).

Looking at the data, we found a number of trends and opportunities that many practices are missing. While we deep dive on these in the webinar recording, I’d like to go ahead and share the 3 biggest levers I see for practices looking to move the needle with minimal effort.

“Geez Troy, thanks for the genius insights.”

Look, I know it sounds basic. But as famed entrepreneur and author Jim Rohn once said, “Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”

And the data doesn’t lie. 40% of leads in the study NEVER received a personalized response.
“That would never happen here!”

I’m sure it’s not supposed to. But things happen. People get busy. Their priorities shift (sometimes without you knowing it). Leads fall through the cracks.

Heck, sometimes technology breaks for seemingly no reason at all. You’ve seen it when your computer freezes or smartphone needs a restart. The same thing can happen on your website.

The problem is that the word “leads” is our short-hand term for “people who really need your help” and “the revenue you need to keep running and growing your practice.” So this is a BIG deal.

How can you know for SURE that at the very least, every lead is receiving a personalized response?

Do an audit.

Go in and fill out a form on your website and see what happens. Items to note:

1. What message did you see after you filled it out? Was it clear what the next step was?
2. Did you get any kind of automated SMS / email after you filled it out? Did you get others over the following days?
3. Did someone reach out to you? How quickly? Through phone and/or email and/or text? What was that messaging like. (Hint: If they call, don’t answer. See if they leave a message. What does the message say?)

Then you’ll have a good sense of where you are NOW and what changes you need to implement to ensure you’re reaching out to every lead.

And not just reaching them, but reaching them quickly…

The recommended time (based on data in this study, Harvard Business Review and other research) is within 10 minutes. That may sound fast, but let’s talk about why this is important.

First of all, the odds of qualifying a lead AFTER 10 minutes decreases by 400% (InsideSales.com/MIT lead response management study).

Why the drop-off?

We teach a concept on this called the “Cyber Warp Zone.”

Harkening back to the epic Nintendo series Super Mario Bros, one element of game play involved Mario finding secret “Warp Zones” as he traversed the various levels. Mario could enter a Warp Zone through secret passages, and instantly he was transported to a totally different world.

And if you think about how we use our smart phones, it’s in a similar fashion. Constantly moving between different “worlds” via the apps on our devices, the Cyber Warp Zone.

To give you a common example from your prospects – let’s say someone fills out a form on your site, and you call them back an hour later. That doesn’t seem like a long time. In fact, in actual minutes, it’s a relatively short time period.

But take into consideration the Cyber Warp Zone. Someone fills out your form, then clicks over to scroll instagram and “like” a few posts, then over to their inbox to clean it out and reply to 2 emails, while also having a text convo with friend to figure out the best spot to meet for dinner.

Time-wise, an hour is relatively short. But when someone has entered the Cyber Warp Zone and zapped into 20 different worlds… and THEN you reach out… it FEELS like they are incredibly far from the action they took on your site.

Which is why you get more no-answers / no-replies when you reach out to someone next day, by end-of-day, an hour later or even 15 minutes after they become a lead.

The solution is simple but not easy – Get to your leads faster.

How do you do it? A few practical tips to get you started:

1. Dedicate someone to manage your leads. Rather than having multiple people “keep an eye” on them, have one person whose top priority is to get the lead alert and reach them immediately.
2. We know from the data and our 20 years of experience that half your leads come in after hours or on weekend. Have someone “on-call” who can handle after-hours leads (5p – 9p) and on weekends. Rotate this through your team. Create incentives by paying them for each lead they connect with (or they reach out to) after hours.
3. Add an SMS automation that everyone gets as soon as they become a lead. This way, they’re at least getting touched quickly and you’re able to start a conversation. Bonus points when you make the SMS contextual to the lead mechanism by which they came in (pricing guide, self-test, contact form, etc.)

So the biggest opportunity presented itself on the macro, when we saw that of the actual best-practice recommendations, only 14% of practices were following them.

“Man Troy, that sounds like most places aren’t good at this.” I know, right? Which is awesome for you
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It’s along the same lines with which I talk about customer service these days. It’s pretty weak. You can recall a customer service interaction you’ve had at some business in the last 24 hours that was mediocre or worse. It’s just the nature of things.

Whether we’re talking about customer service in general or converting digital leads specifically… the bar is laughably low.

JUST call your leads personally and you’re already in almost the top half of practice.

JUST have a way to get in touch with folks quickly, and you’ll be head and shoulders above the MAJORITY of practices who take a day OR MORE to even reach out. (Yes, look at the slides if you don’t believe me)

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. (Pun intended)

Whether other practices don’t know what to do… or just don’t have the resources… or simply don’t have the drive to make it happen… is none of your concern.

The opportunity is there, everyone else is either missing or ignoring it. It’s yours for the taking. Get these simple items fixed, and you set yourself up with a massive advantage.