Hello, ChiroSecure viewers, and thank you for joining me today. I’m Kim Klapp, Founder of Assistants for Chiropractic Excellence. And before I share how to attract all the new patients you want, I want to thank ChiroSecure. Not only do they sponsor these programs, but they also support the profession in so many other generous ways. Now obviously ChiroSecure has the best coverage hands down, but they also have exceptional customer service and fabulous resources, so I cannot recommend them highly enough. I also appreciate that you’ve chosen to watch.
Now for over 25 years, I’ve been managing my husband, Dr. Tom’s practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I’ve been coaching CA since 2000. With that experience in mind, if you have any questions on hiring, training, practice systems, what have you, just post it and I will be happy to answer either during today’s show or afterwards. And today what I’d like to do is share a snippet of information from my CA Excellence Coaching Course this month on community workshops. Now, Dr. Tom and I been doing community workshops since 2006 and in Dr. Tom’s now 40 years in practice, he has found this to be the most effective method for attracting a ton of new patients, as well as making it super easy for your clients to refer more to your practice.
Plus, it is awesome to have the new patients who come to you already understand a little bit about what chiropractic truly is. Now, I’ve got lots of chiropractic friends and I know quite a few who have had unsuccessful workshops in the past. So today, I want to share a few keys that are critical to help you set up and fill up your workshops. Now while you can present your workshop anywhere in the community that works for you, natural food store, the library, an auditorium, whatever, we find that we get much better attendance when food is involved.
We provide either lunch or dinner. Now ours is named WOW, which stands for Workshop On Wellness. Whether we’re presenting our WOW for lunch and learns, now that’s where we present it at varied area businesses or schools, anywhere with between 20 to 200 employees within a 10 mile radius of our office. The other option is our WOW Dinner and that’s where we’re presenting the workshop to our patients, their guests, and to any leads that we’ve generated, and we hold that a local restaurant. But in either venue, we use the same presentation and that’s how to get healthy, avoid deadly diseases and never be sick again.
Rather than having multiple topics, we find that having just this one appeals to about everybody and it helps us keep it simple. I’m a big fan of the KISS system. Now, we just updated this presentation last month in February, but we’ve been presenting a version of this topic for about 14 years now and there are still tons of people in our community who’ve never heard it and desperately need this information. But if your practice happens to be located in a small town or it’s just your personal preference to have a lot of variety, you can teach as many different workshops as you’d like.
Now, what I really love about the presentation that Dr. Tom created is that it positions to speaker as an expert about health and wellness. And as you can see, it focuses on stress, physical, chemical and emotional and the devastating effects it has on health followed by tons and tons of tips for our community on how to neutralize the effects of stress. And of course, chiropractic is presented as the best solution. But one of the most important ways that we keep it simple is to systemize our workshops, just like we systemize everything else in our practice that we want to be successful.
And that’s why I’ve created our workshop checklist and it’s got … This is a no fail detailed timeline on how to ensure that each of our workshops really are a wow. Now because of time constraints with the show today, I’m going to focus specifically on dinners. The first step for a WOW dinner as you can see is to select a restaurant where you can hold it and then schedule a date. Now when you’re looking for a restaurant, keep in mind that in order to accommodate your dinner, it needs to have a private room and it has to seat at least 15 people.
Now, our first dinner workshop, we marketed to our entire database and had 97 people attend. I would not recommend that. It was way too huge. We were crammed like sardines. This is a photo of the room that we currently use, which luckily can be expanded three times the size you see here, so we can fit a larger crowd. But because we hold it monthly, we typically have between 20 to 45 people attend most of our dinners. Now, you also want to make sure that the restaurant is close in proximity to your office.
You don’t want the restaurant that you choose to be on one side of town and your office to be on the opposite side of town. Psychologically, you want it to seem like it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from the restaurant to your office. You also want to choose a restaurant that’s a great place to go to. Somewhere that both your ideal new patients and the doctor enjoy eating at. This is really important or you’re going to have difficulty getting people there. You’re going to have a problem if you choose a cheap low class type of buffet, unless of course that’s where your ideal patients and the doctor love to dine.
Now at the restaurant that we use, dinner runs about $25 and that’s including the beverage, non-alcoholic of course, with soup or salad, entree and the tip. Now it’s really important that the restaurant you choose works with you. You want to develop a good relationship. For example, we’re not charged the per plate fee for no-shows, but we do pay gratuity on any no-shows to keep the servers happy. You want the restaurant to be flexible in case there’s a weather issue or some sporting event that prevents people from making it to your workshop.
You don’t want to be penalized for late cancellations. Now, the reason the restaurant is so accommodating is you’re going to be bringing people to their place of business, that restaurant every month and typically not on a busy night. We hold ours on the second Tuesday each month, and those people may become regular patrons of the restaurant, so it really is a win-win. All right. So once you’ve got your location picked out and your time, how do you get people there? Well, when it comes to invitations, understand that the more you ask, the more you get.
And when you’re asking, make sure to convey how fun it is. No one wants their friends to blame them for a boring evening out. It’s your energy, your enthusiasm, and your intention, per usual that make all the difference in the world with the success of your workshop registration. And when it comes to promoting your WOW dinners, there’s five avenues. Now, keep in mind, we did not start out by doing all of these. Rome wasn’t built in a day. However, once you have them systemized, it takes just a few minutes each month to change the date to your next event.
But remember, I’m always encouraging stress-free practice growth, so just one or two will work just fine. But the first avenue is to invite your clients and their adult guests and we use a ticket format for our invitations and like everything else you want to systemize when you hand these invitations out. So the first time that we do is on their second visit during the doctor’s report. The invitation is actually, as you can see, in our doctor’s report video, and we keep the tickets stacked in our consultation rooms.
That’s going to help the doctor remember to hand them out during the report of findings. The second invitation comes later during the second visit from the new patient’s personal client advocate. Now hopefully, that CA can at least register the client and their partner for the upcoming WOW dinner. And then we ask them to check with their friends and let us know on their next visit, visit number three, if they’d like us to reserve additional seats. Now, in addition, let’s back up. So we also have a slide show.
This plays on our video monitors. It’s always playing. Now when it’s playing in our office, it is much slower. I promise you. In addition to that, we happen to have, there it is, a flyer at the front desk. We keep this in a acrylic stand because it really is a team approach. The front desk CAs obviously play a huge role. So here’s our sample sign and every computer in our office, or at least in patient areas, have a shortcut link right on the desktop. That helps us navigate to the event registration page to make it super simple for either the CAs to sign up their clients and guests or for patients to sign themselves up on our kiosks.
And by the way, each team member does explain that attendees have to be over 18 and work or live in the area. And we put our initials on the invitation. And that way we explain that if they bring the invitation to the event, they actually have a chance to win a massage. The reason we do that. That way when they bring the ticket to the event, we know which team member is responsible for getting people there and I know which employee gets the credit. All right. You also want to promote the event obviously on your website.
So if you go to our website, there’s a link on the homepage, so someone can easily click on it to register for our current WOW dinner. This makes it so easy when I’m out in the community and I meet someone. I just have them pull up our website on their phone to register. You can just airdrop them the link if you want to make it super simple. And when you click on it, it takes you to an event landing page and we use constant contact. When they click on the registration link, they go to the registration page.
And like I said, in our office, we have the link right to the registration page, cuts through one step. But this is going to collect their name, their email, their cell phone, and again, it’s going to help them verify that they’re 18 years or older and that they live or work in our area. Of course, you also want to post it on Facebook and any other social media sites that you’re on. You may also want to create ads targeting your local ideal demographic audience. So what I find is that most offices that have a low turnout simply aren’t making enough phone calls.
We find that the best times to reach people are between 12 and two in the afternoon and between five and eight in the evening. Any day of the week is fine. And we do leave a message on voicemail because so many people screen their calls. But if they’re interested after listening to the message, they will call back. And if it goes to voicemail, we’ll typically follow up and send a text. But phone calls are the key to getting people to your event. It doesn’t work for a CA to attempt to make these calls if they’re going to be at the front desk or doing any other duties.
We know there’s always fires to be put out and what happens is the invitation phone calls end up on the back burner. So if it’s going to be a CA in your office who’s going to make the calls, make sure to schedule them during specific hours, the calls during specific hours, and have them in a private office so they’re not interrupted. However, we find it’s best to have one person, whether full or part-time, dedicated as a community outreach coordinator to handle all the external marketing and especially these calls.
Now per usual, I find that characteristics trump education for this job as a community outreach coordinator. There’s no experience necessary, just a very professional, friendly and courteous demeanor on the phone. Plus, of course, that energy and enthusiasm. Because the more upbeat that the person is who makes the calls, the more fun the event sounds. Honestly, no one who they calls asks about chiropractic or your office. They only ask about what the presentation is, where the restaurant is, etc. Because of that, training for the position of the community outreach coordinator or the person who makes the phone calls is really a piece of cake.
It does not take much time at all, but we find that truly makes the difference between a success and a flop is the dedication and commitment to making those invitation phone calls. So the more you make with the correct intent, energy and enthusiasm, the better your results, just like so many other things in your practice. Obviously, email is another easy way to promote the event. That does not mean you skip the phone calls though. It just means that you send them the details via email.
Now, we always feature upcoming WOW dinner in our e-newsletters, and again, like I mentioned, we use constant contact. But you can also text your clients a shortened link to your event landing page as you see here, so there’s a lot of ways to contact them. But it really makes a big difference when the invitation comes directly from the doctor. So make sure that the doctors are personally handing out those printed tickets and invitations. And another opportunity for doctors to invite clients is during a followup report of findings.
So when that patient has had their first progress examination, the doctor is going over the report of findings and covering some wellness topics, the doctor can then stress how important it is for them to attend the next WOW dinner if they haven’t already been. Now, in addition to that myriad of ways to invite your clients and their adult guests, you also want to invite leads. Now, leads are contexts that you receive a few different ways. The first way we receive these is via our client questionnaire. We give this out at the end of the second visit.
Now, not only do we get really important feedback on the doctor’s report and the entire second visit, but we also ask for contacts here at the bottom, as you can see, who might be interested in that type of information. We also generate leads at each of our workshops on our workshop surveys. But until you have enough workshops, I’d still continue emailing your entire client database. But at this point, we just focus on our newer clients. But at first, you want to target everyone, cast a wide net when you’re first starting out.
So once we have those leads, our community outreach coordinator invites them via phone calls, emails and texts, and we do the invite phone calls about two weeks prior to the event and they take honestly just between one and three minutes a call. Super simple and it’s really effective. Again, providing you have the right person with the right mindset and the proper amount of time making the calls. So again, if you’re assigning a CA to make the calls or anyone else on your team who has any other duties, it’s critical to schedule specific hours to make those calls.
Otherwise, the other duties tend to get in the way. The reason I emphasize this so much is because lack of calls is the biggest cause for low turnout. I cannot stress that enough. More calls yields more attendees. And if you don’t have someone on your team to make these calls, I really think it’s advantageous to actually hire a part-time person to do nothing else except make calls. We’ve done it both ways, but whichever way you go, make sure the calls that are made is making sure that the calls are actually made.
That’s going to be your primary success predictor. Now, the third avenue are area businesses, health clubs, vitamin stores, bicycle shops, any fitness supply shop, and those that you have a relationship with. So think about the businesses that serve customers who can afford your care. Spas, optometrists, dentists, accountants, other professionals. Ask them to post a flyer or to email it out to their client database. And here’s ours, registered to attend a complimentary dinner for two. And you’ll let us that we don’t print a date on this flyer.
We don’t want to have to replace the flyer at each business each month. So instead, as you can see on the bottom left, we include a QR code. That makes it super easy for people with a smartphone to register for the workshop. And if you’re unfamiliar with creating a QR code, I promise you it’s very easy and free to generate a QR code for any webpage. Here’s the link that you can see that I use here. But in addition to the area businesses that I already mentioned, make sure to ask the restaurant that you’re using to post it.
And you may have apartment or condo complexes that are close to your office. That’s another great option. And make sure, of course, that all of your team members are equipped with invitations or flyers to give to their friends, their hairstylist, their servers, anyone they develop a rapport with or to post those flyers when they’re out and about in the community. Now the fourth avenue are health fairs or screening events. So here you can see in the middle, that’s actually our six foot pop-up banner that we bring with us to events.
And rather than just handing out invitations, we find it’s a lot more effective to collect leads and follow up with those invitation personal phone calls. So really easy way to do. Put up a sign like you see here on the right, register for dinner for two at Pisano’s Restaurant and we just have them fill out their contact information and drop it into a bowl. And the fifth avenue are community calendars. Most cities do have a free online community calendar, so use it. You can also add it to any chamber of commerce calendar or any network marketing groups that you’re involved with.
Now one of the free resources that I like is eventbrite.com because it allows us to invite people in the community who don’t have any ties to our office yet. And we typically do range anywhere from two to five guests from Eventbrite each month. So like I mentioned before, we do utilize that workshop checklist. That’s going to help make sure that everything is perfect for the entire event, from promotion to confirmations to set up to showtime, which is the actual presentation, to the close, which is so critical, the appointment scheduling, how to do that and the wrap up.
But our systems are really the reason that 90% of guests schedule new patients and appointments. So again, if you have any questions, just added to the comments and I’ll be happy to respond after today’s show. And if I can help you in any way, whether you’re looking for this month’s CA excellence coaching on community workshops or on training for new CAs, hiring systems or practice systems, please visit my website, it’s chiropracticassistants.com, and you can click to call or email me directly. I would love to help your team reach higher levels of excellence.
And thanks again to ChiroSecure for providing this forum to help increase chiropractic success. Next week, make sure to tune in because your host is going to be Dr. Sam Collins. Be sure to watch it.
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