Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others and I keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing”.
This episode is brought to you in part by PAR.
The Personality Assessment Inventory Bariatric compiles the results of the PAI into a useful report for bariatric surgery candidates, available on PARiConnect PAR’s online assessment platform. You can visit parinc.com/products/PAI-BARIATRIC.
Hey folks, welcome back. We’ve got a business episode for you [00:01:00] today. This is a really cool episode because we’re talking about marketing and you might be thinking, oh yeah, we’ve heard about marketing.
That happens a lot, but this is a little bit different. In most of our marketing, we’re talking about digital, Google Ads, or somewhat vaguely talking about in-person or warm marketing, but today, the conversation is very applied. That’s why I called it real-life marketing.
My guest, Saul Marquez, is a prominent figure in healthcare digital marketing, serves as the founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a global digital marketing agency that helps health technology companies that struggle to get customers or don’t have enough customers to scale their business as quickly as they had planned to or would have liked to.
Our conversation today, like I said, is very applied. He brings about 20 years of experience in healthcare marketing to us. Not only is this a fresh framework for thinking about marketing, but [00:02:00] it is super concrete so you could put a lot of these things into place tomorrow.
We also include a little bonus discussion at the end of the episode, where we break down the value of a clear marketing strategy. So you’ll hear Saul in the episode, throw out some numbers like if you do this tomorrow, you’ll make an extra $100,000 next year. Even at one point he said, you’ll make an extra $300,000.
We include a little bonus discussion at the end where we break those numbers down. I challenge him to back those numbers up and we worked through it, and turns out the math works out. So listen all the way to the end to find out why. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Saul Marquez on real-life marketing.
[00:03:00] Saul, hey, welcome to the podcast.Saul: Thank you so much, Jeremy. Great to be here.
Dr. Sharp: I’m excited to talk with you. We’re talking about marketing today, lots of different aspects of marketing. I’m excited because I feel like there are so many different dimensions to marketing and you bring a different perspective than we’ve had on the podcast before.
So we’ll dig into that here as we go along, but first, I will start with the question that I always start with, which is, why is this important to you? How did you somehow end up in this arena to spend your time, energy, money and emotion, all that stuff?
Saul: I really appreciate the question, Jeremy. I remember making the call, I was in my office in San Diego. I had the phone in my hand and I was nervous. My heart was beating really fast. My palms were all sweaty. I [00:04:00] had been working for 17 years, various different jobs in medical device.
I had worked myself up to an executive level at Medtronic. They’re a global medical device company. Actually, they have a location right by you in Boulder. It used to be convenient.
Dr. Sharp: Yes, this sounds familiar.
Saul: I was calling my boss and I was going to give him my two weeks notice. At that point, I was taking my leap of faith into entrepreneurship. My decision to do that was very much based on the very well-known statistics that 50% of all businesses fail within 5 years and 97% fail within 10 years.
I remember being at home with my wife, she knew how frustrated I was at the time. And like many of the [00:05:00] listeners, I felt frustrated. And like many of you listening, I wanted to do things faster and better. And like many of you, I felt like I didn’t want my great ideas to be shelved. I wanted to do the great things that I wanted to do.
So I shifted from wanting to build a career in medical device to our new mission, which is to help 5,000 healthcare technology companies, leaders and physicians fulfill their full impact potential in the markets that they serve and with the people that they serve.
And that’s what we’re all about now. It was that wake up call for me that if people are dedicating their lives to improve health, they shouldn’t be failing. It was this mission that I was pulled to take the leap and [00:06:00] so I’m doing it because I really care about health for my family, I care about society and I feel like the work that we’re doing now is making an impact.
Dr. Sharp: I’ve heard from different folks in different industries; consultants and marketing folks that it seems like there’s something with medical professionals or mental health professionals, counselors that we don’t do well at running businesses. That seems like a theme from folks I’ve talked to outside of industry.
It sounds like, I don’t know, maybe you had a similar experience if you were feeling this call to help healthcare folks be successful. Is that true or am I making an assumption there?
Saul: No, you know what? There’s a mix. There’s definitely a mix but those statistics apply to our country. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s [00:07:00] physicians or doctors, PhDs, or folks in the helping professions, it’s everyone in the business statistics of our country.
Being at a large medical device company when I was there, I saw these folks failing, man. It was sad. Look, hey, you and I were chatting before the podcast and we saw another example of that. We were talking about a company that was doing neuropsychological testing digital. I was sad to see that.
That stuff breaks my heart. To see companies like that, that are making a huge impact fail is criminal to me. I said, we got to do something about this. There’s a lot that could be done. And that’s what we’re focused on is those physicians building companies, those people that care building companies.
Maybe there’s not always that [00:08:00] clear understanding of the mechanics. And that’s what we exist to do is, hey, let’s help these folks that are really great at math and science and helping people, let’s help them find the algorithm for success.
Dr. Sharp: I like that. I know that you’ve worked with, sounds like bigger companies for the most part, larger platforms. We’re going to talk about how to bring that down to maybe a small business level for most of us who are in maybe solo practice or small group practices.
I am curious, from that big picture view and working with larger companies, larger healthcare entities, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in terms of marketing and client acquisition, what’s working on a bigger scale? I think that’s always interesting for us to know, even as smaller practitioners.
Saul: No, thanks for the question. Jeremy, I will say, [00:09:00] my first 17 years in my sales and marketing career, it was big companies. Now that we’re at Outcomes Rocket, we definitely help companies that start, even like the bottom of is $1,000,000. They’ve got at least $1,000,000 in revenue and they’re building up from there to venture capital backed companies.
And then we being “raised” in the medical device space, we know how it works and we are offering value to those folks. The trends that we’re seeing are very much based around two things is oftentimes misconception of the elements that make up marketing and the drivers.
Anything that you do in marketing to drive business falls into one of three buckets. It’s [00:10:00] either owned media, earned media or paid media. The nice thing is that the setup is very simple. Once you realize how simple it is, there’s certain things you could do within each of these to make a big difference.
Dr. Sharp: I want to talk about each of those. When we were figuring out what this podcast might look like, you proposed this framework and I’m like, that sounds good. That’s a little bit different. I haven’t heard people frame it that way. I think it’d be helpful to dive into each of those areas, explain what you mean, and what it looks like for practice, like a mental health practice or a psychologist practice.
Saul: I love that. Jeremy, just to better understand too, as a psychology practice that’s focused on testing, assessments, these types of evaluations, [00:11:00] tell me a little bit more, you’re looking to gain relationships with primary care physicians and other physicians, is that right?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, a lot of us get a big part of our referrals from these in-person relationships with other providers. We like to connect with primary care providers. Sometimes they’re specialty providers like neurologists. We connect with schools, we connect with therapists, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, so yeah, it’s a lot of individual providers around our communities is where a lot of the warm referrals come from or those word of mouth referrals.
Saul: Very cool. So putting the lens around a testing practice like yours, like your listeners’, it’s HCP marketing. It’s healthcare practitioner marketing. [00:12:00] In marketing, there’s cool ways to just simplify. If anybody tries to complicate, they’re either trying to sell you something and make you feel like you don’t know what you’re talking about, if that’s the case, find the nearest exit and run, but if somebody is like, why didn’t I keep it simple? That’s great because it’s more than likely they’re shooting you straight and wanting to help you.
And so if you’re marketing to HCPs, healthcare practitioners, which is a segment of what you’re doing in your marketing strategy, it’s neat because they congregate depending on who they are in certain areas physically and digitally. So when you’re considering your approach to the market; we talked about owned, earned and paid.
Let’s start with defining them and then as we define each of those, Jeremy, [00:13:00] let’s pause as you wish and talk about very practical steps that our listeners could take advantage of this information, is that good?
Dr. Sharp: Great. Yeah. We’re good.
Saul: Okay. Cool. All right. So what is owned media? By the way, Jeremy, I’ll share a one-pager that has all of this printed. So you guys could take notes if you’re listening and this is interesting to you, or don’t worry about it, Jeremy will link up the one-pager.
Owned media is all about the assets that you own in digital marketing; your website, landing pages, your social media channels, and your email list. I go here because you know what? The email list is yours. When you collect emails, whether it be from people that you’ve already served or because you’re putting content out there, those emails are yours and [00:14:00] it’s part of your own channel.
We can unpack that in a little bit because I find that oftentimes, it tends to be a commonly ignored asset that we have, that’s low-hanging fruit. Content and video marketing, and then there are stages. We talk about stages. You have an awesome stage here, Jeremy, with your podcast and there’s different things like that. So that’s owned media. Any questions around there before we exit?
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. I will ask you about email as we go along and the value of email. So you tell me, is now a good time to jump into that question?
Saul: That’s a good time, yeah man, if that’s where your head’s going, the listeners are probably thinking the same thing, right?
Dr. Sharp: Okay. Yeah.
Saul: Yeah, let’s do it.
Dr. Sharp: My question is; I saw a post on social media the other day that said something like email marketing is dead. And so I’m curious how you’re approaching email marketing these days because it is hard for us. I don’t think it’s natural for practitioners to [00:15:00] build an email list like it is for other industries.
So folks are wondering, should I be doing that? Is it worthwhile? I’m curious, from your perspective, if it feels like a valuable pursuit.
Saul: The short answer is it’s a very valuable pursuit. I will tell you, like everything else in marketing, there’s different layers. Let’s just use email. The email could be a cold email, warm email, and personal relationship email. That’s the email we all do every day, it’s people that you know and you’re emailing, and you have transactional or relationships with.
To answer the question, email marketing is dead, it’s not. It really isn’t. What has happened is email has gotten very busy and so we get spammed [00:16:00] and get turned off by these things. However, if it’s relevant, there’s something there.
Here’s the other thing is whenever somebody says something like email is dead, they’re thinking very one- dimensionally, because what we have also is other marketing channels. You have social media, you have texting, you have phone calls, you have so many different channels of communication that you have to understand email is one channel out of many.
I’m not as big of a fan of cold email because the likelihood that they’ll even open your email is very low. However, if you have a relationship with people and they’ve already worked with you, that’s a list. Many people don’t realize that. I think that’s a great place to start.
[00:17:00] If you’re going to take something out of this, I hope that you take away one thing out of each section and that you use one thing. I feel like this is a pretty nice softball that all of us, everybody listening can and should be doing it. And that’s this, the people that you already serve.How many physicians, communities and schools would you say is in a typical database of people that somebody in your position would serve?
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s a great question. We’re in a town of about 200,000. I know that there are, oh my gosh, 20 to 25 schools between elementary, middle school and high school here in our town.
Saul: Have you worked with all 20?
Dr. Sharp: I’m not going to say I’ve been in every single building, but at least [00:18:00] 17, 18.
Saul: Huge. So 17 there. Let’s just go one by one. This is a great exercise. And what about the physicians?
Dr. Sharp: There are so many physicians. I don’t even know. If we’re just talking about primary care providers, not even getting into specialty, I would guess there’s at least 200 here in our town. There are two groups.
Saul: Out of those, how many have you worked with?
Dr. Sharp: Oh, gosh, I’ve shared patients with, let’s just call it 120. I’m making this up.
Saul: That’s cool, but that’s the exercise, right?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah.
Saul: So you got 120 and the likelihood is that you guys have them in your billing system because you guys have done business before. So the exercise is get the people from your billing system [00:19:00] into a list. You have a list. We all have a list. If we’re in business, we have a list and we just don’t realize it.
So this list is actually not a cold list. That’s my favorite kind of list. It’s people that have worked with you and that you helped. You can create a campaign. Literally, this could be the one thing that you do that’s probably going to make you another $100,000 this year, I would say at least.
You’re going to grab this list and you’re going to create a campaign. What is a campaign? It’s a fancy way of saying two to three emails. What I would call this campaign is out of those, call it 140 people, you can segment them. Oh, wow, okay, I’ve already worked with these within the last six months. So I’m going to put these, call it 40 out of the 140 into the, I’ve worked with in the last six months, and these I [00:20:00] haven’t, so these other 100.
These 100, you could create a campaign about, hey, it’s been a really long time. This is what’s new and that’s working really well, and two ideas that you should be considering to help you take your testing to the next level. And so you’re leading with value and that will bring you to the top of their list.
They know who you are because they’ve worked with you. Maybe they don’t remember because it was only once. And so that’s why you send the second email. The second email in the warming campaign, it’s about maybe two success stories that you’ve had and that you’ve seen your other clients have, but you’re not asking them for anything yet.
The third one is maybe you have, I don’t know if you guys do [00:21:00] offers or sales or anything like that, Maybe you may not.
Dr. Sharp: We don’t really do that kind of thing. It’s tough.
Saul: No, that’s okay. No, all good. You don’t have to. For example, the tagline could be your latest exam results, and then in the body of the email, say, hey I know we haven’t worked together for a little bit over six months, want to let you know that we’re here and we’re available, multiple ways to contact us are here and just let us know what you’ve got going on because we’re here to serve you.
And then the person that would say email marketing is dead, they would probably just leave it there and say, well, out of these 100, I only got one call. Well, that’s one call that is now a test. But then here’s what you do, you take the email channel [00:22:00] and you compliment it with the phone.
Dr. Sharp: Okay.
Saul: Because now you’ve emailed them three times and guess what? These email platforms have data. You don’t have to call 100 because you could see that 30 of them opened. 20 of them opened all three. So you start with the 20 that have been the most engaged.
You call and you leave them a voicemail or they answer, and then you just have a nice call and say, hey, it’s been a long time. Remember that thing that we did? Hey, do you got anything coming up? Just so you know, we’ve got this opportunity. That’s an example of literally right now, everybody listening will make another $100,000, if you get out and you do this.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. We just took it to a very concrete level. People are probably thinking, oh, [00:23:00] man, what might these emails look like. I’m guessing, though, people also have questions about what email service are you using? Are you just sending these through Gmail or do you use something like Mailchimp or a different platform?
Saul: Yeah, great question. Mailchimp would be a great place to start. You don’t want to do it through Gmail because then you’ll have to do them one by one.
The nice thing about Mailchimp is that it’s low cost. What does that mean? Probably like $30 a month. So you upload your list of 140, by the way, there’s a separate campaign for the 40 that you’ve worked with within the last six months. That’s a thank you campaign, like thank you, we appreciate you. That’s a different campaign.
We could talk about that later or another time.
But Mailchimp is what you use. There’s a bunch of [00:24:00] them. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Mailchimp’s an easy, low-cost thing to do. They have a lot of great tutorials inside of it. All you got to do is upload your list and do two configurations. If you feel like it’s over your head, it’s cool because what you could do is go on Upwork. Have you heard of Upwork, Jeremy?
Dr. Sharp: Oh yeah.
Saul: You go on Upwork and folks, if you haven’t heard of Upwork, essentially it’s a freelancer community that’s willing to do a lot of really cool stuff for contract rates. You hire somebody for three hours at a $50 an hour rate, probably less. They’re going to knock this out for you for $150.
So it gets done and either you retain them to send the first campaign for you and say, hey, you know what? I want you to do this first [00:25:00] campaign for me, but I want you to train me along the way, or I want you to train my office manager along the way, because I want this to be something that I keep going with. That’s how you do it. You just got to get it done.
And so Mailchimp and Upwork are the two things that you’ll use to make this come to life. When you get those first calls, I want you guys to email Jeremy and say, wow, Jeremy, this was great, man. I literally just got a new opportunity because of your show. I want to hear that success story.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. I think people do struggle with what to say in these campaigns and how to reach out. And so I like that you provided some examples for that as well. It does not have to be super complicated.
Saul: Agreed. By the way, I’ll add one more thing to what you shared, that you struggle what to say, it’s
ChatGPT. [00:26:00] ChatGPT is game changer. If you guys have writer’s block, you literally open up ChatGPT. You’re not putting in any patient information so this is totally just content.
You’re plugging in, you could literally get this specific, write as if I am an email marketer that is also a testing professional, this campaign will go out to people that I have not worked with in over six months. It is a warming campaign and make a series of three emails that I could send out giving them updates.
And then you could insert your own updates, these are the updates or not, and then hit enter. And now you have templates that you could edit. So you copy and paste those templates into a Google document or a Word document, and you’re about 50% done.
[00:27:00] Dr. Sharp: It’s true. It’s so easy. I love talking about ChatGPT. That’s a perfect task. This is great. So we did a little detour to talk specifically about emails within that owned framework. What’s the next one, earned?Saul: Earned. Let’s talk about earned. So earned is exactly as it sounds. Earned media is about earning an opportunity. So whether it be an article; a news media agency writes about you or you get invited to a podcast. Jeremy, thank you for inviting me to your podcast. I’m honored to be here.
I’ve earned the opportunity to be on Jeremy’s podcast and I don’t take that lightly because I know he serves all of you all and you guys are working your butts off to help the [00:28:00] community and to build your careers.
So this is an earned stage. Jeremy’s owned a stage. He owns this podcast digital stage and I’ve earned an opportunity to be with him. That’s earned. So if you get on other people’s stages, those are earned opportunities.
And by the way, this oftentimes gets overlooked, but when somebody gives you a Google review, I’m sure folks are potentially putting their Google for business stuff out there and you might get reviews, and so those reviews are something that can be used. If somebody writes you an email, that’s really complimentary. You could literally reply back and say, thank you so much, would you be okay if I use this on my website and gave you credit for saying this?
So you could literally take everyday stuff that’s earned, people are giving [00:29:00] you their feedback. Third parties, the big thing with earned is third-party perspectives and voices around what you do, that’s earned media. It’s PR. It’s media relations as well, more specifically, but there’s other things. It’s basically other people talking about you and your business, and you using other stages to talk about you and your business.
Dr. Sharp: I like that. Since we’re talking about reviews, I’m sure people are asking questions as they listen, it’s hard for us to solicit reviews for Google. It’s a part of our ethical code, we can’t solicit reviews from current clients. That’s why I liked that you mentioned the email quotes that we can put on our website.
In my mind, that is totally fine. If someone sends you an unsolicited, positive review via email, you can throw it up on your website. That’s totally fine. We get stuck in that a little bit, [00:30:00] not being like other industries where we can actively solicit reviews.
I’m curious about other earned stages for practitioners like us who, let’s keep going off my example. I’m in a town of, like I said, 200,000. It’s a university town, college town. What other stages might we be looking for on a local level?
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Let’s get back to the podcast.
Saul: That’s a great question. When you think about stages, think about owned and think about OPS, other people’s stages. There’s two types of stages, either you own it or you don’t. And then you could bifurcate on the other people’s stages and there’s physical and digital stages. So you have both.
The nice thing about being in the community is that you could work both. At the local physical stages level, think about all the constituents that we were talking about just now, Jeremy. We were talking about schools, we were talking about primary care physicians, we were talking about different types of physician groups. All of these [00:33:00] groups congregate.
They congregate at the local level, at the regional level, at the state level and at the national level. There’s association groups. All of those groups are always looking for speakers. You know this very well, if you go at the national level, it’s going to be a little harder to get that spot on somebody’s stage, right?
Dr. Sharp: Of course.
Saul: It’s going to be hard. It’s not impossible, you should go for it if that’s what you want to do but what I’m saying is the further down you get in the local scheme of things, it becomes easier. So if you go and reach out to a local chapter of the Association of Primary Care Physicians, there’s probably 50 or 100 that are going to be there either virtually or physically, and you want to just give a talk on the [00:34:00] latest advances in testing and things that they should be considering.
It’s educational. You go and you share what you’re finding. You ask questions, you lead with value. Now you have 100 physicians that know about what you do and you’re top of mind. That’s a great way to do it.
Dr. Sharp: I like that. I have not thought of that before. We’ve certainly been into physician practices, these smaller groups or even larger groups, and do a lunch and learn or something like that.
Saul: I love that. Those are great.
Dr. Sharp: People are always wondering; how do I do this? How do I reach out? What do I say? Do you have any thoughts or have you seen any models from other practitioners as to how to actually make these things happen? How to get on the stage?
[00:35:00] Saul: Yes. And so the person is typically the local chapter leader. I will tell you, this is funny, but it’s true, the more local you get and when you find their landing page, you’re going to find the person’s name, but the higher up you go, if you’re searching at the national level, the organizer doesn’t want to be there because everybody’s calling them.Dr. Sharp: Of course.
Saul: At the local level, people are struggling to get expert speakers to add value to their group. So you will literally find people’s names and contact information on the local chapter. Once you know them, here’s the advice, very actionable, very simple, it’s not about you, it’s about them.
It’s about what problem are you going to solve for their [00:36:00] group? Primary care physicians are overwhelmed. They’ve got a lot of patients. They don’t have enough time. We know that you’re busy and we help primary care physicians that are struggling with burnout and struggling to help their patients. We help them do a great job with psychology tests.
We want to help answer questions and help fast-track this process for your audience. That’s the message. I think we could be a great resource and I’d love the opportunity to speak at your next event. Let me know what would be required, really appreciate it. That’s an email.
But also pick up the phone. I’m going to give you guys a secret. The secret is this, [00:37:00] it’s called the introductory video. You grab your phone, by the way, nobody does this and that’s why it’s going to work for you. So you grab your phone, you open it up like this, the rule is record it once and send it, don’t think about it.
So you say, hey, Jamie, it’s Saul. I’m here at Testing Associates in Colorado. Listen, I see the great work that you guys are doing at the local primary care physician organization. Look, we work with helping primary care physicians that struggle with burnout and are doing their best to help their patients but are having a hard time.
We make psychology testing easier and got two tidbits that I think could help everybody out. We want to help our community, especially nowadays. Would love to be a speaker so whatever you need for me to be [00:38:00] considered, let me know. You could reach me at 312 213 6532. Thank you so much. Thanks again for what you do for our community, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. And then you hit send.
You don’t go back and you edit it. You literally leave it and then send it to them via text if they’ve left their cell phone number on there, but if not, send it to them via email. And that helps them get to know you a little bit better. It opens up the opportunity. They see that you’re real. They see that you want to help. It’s not about you, it’s about them, and lead with value.
I’ll tell you, that’s opened up a lot of stages for me. It’s helped me get the opportunity to serve people in a bigger way.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I love the confidence. I wish people could have seen that whole process. You literally just pulled out your phone and were talking to your phone off the cuff, which is [00:39:00] fantastic. I get the impression you’ve maybe done that once or twice.
Saul: I definitely have.
Dr. Sharp: Which is good. So if are somebody out there, if you need to rehearse once or twice, maybe that’s okay. Just keep it simple. People might say, oh, isn’t that too desperate or thirsty or something; sending a video, isn’t that a little extra? But it sounds like this is a successful thing. People like the video, people get into it. It makes you stand out.
Saul: And by the way, do you believe what you do makes a difference?
Dr. Sharp: I do. Sure.
Saul: And if somebody doesn’t get the chance to work with you to receive the value that you’re able to deliver, it’s almost a moral obligation to do stuff like that so that you do get discovered. [00:40:00] You have to do it if you’re going to get out there.
Dr. Sharp Yeah. I like hearing you say that. I’ve used that very argument or strategy with my consulting clients a few times in the past. You’re actually depriving the world of something they desperately need if you don’t market yourself and put yourself out there.
Saul: I’ll give you a big Amen on that one, Jeremy.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. No, I like this, keeping it super concrete. Take note folks, I know there’s some anxiety with reaching out to people in a cold manner like that, but send the video, just take the leap. Let’s talk about what if people say no, or what if you don’t get a response, then how do you deal with that?
Saul: You know what? You learn. If you don’t get a response, you follow up. So back to this idea that we started talking about with [00:41:00] different channels; email marketing is dead, yeah, if you just use email marketing. Well, the phone is dead. Yeah, if you just use the phone.
If somebody doesn’t respond, it’s usually because either they were busy and they didn’t get a chance they wanted to. A lot of times what I find is that it’s not the right channel. So you could email them till you’re blue in the face. If they’re not a big email person, maybe you got to shoot them a LinkedIn message or maybe a Facebook invite because there’s a channel that works for them. You just have to find a channel that aligns with them.
Eventually, I’ll tell you this, if you’re persistent enough, people are going to be like, holy crap, this person really wants to work with me. Or they’ll say, oh my gosh, they are so [00:42:00] persistent. I don’t know if I want to work with them.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, it’s true. You hit a breaking point at some point, you have to make a decision.
Saul: But guess what? They’re going to reach out to you. You’ll make a connection and you’ll understand, but you’ll be in communication. That the key right there.
What I would advise folks, especially if maybe it’s not as comfortable of a thing is that if you don’t do it, you’re going to be in the same place you are, and are you happy with where you are today? If you are, great, good for you. You don’t have to do this, but if you want to grow, if you want to do more, if you feel like you have the potential, then why not just try it?
Dr. Sharp: It’s a great philosophy. Talking about earned stages, it was great concrete example. You said the third one is paid. Is that right, paid opportunities?
[00:43:00] Saul: Yes. We’ve covered owned media. It’s all the stuff you own. It’s that email marketing that we talked about. You already worked with these folks, send them emails. The earned media, getting on those local stages.For paid, you have the ability to reach people in a targeted way with a lot of the platforms out there whether it be Meta with Instagram and Facebook or LinkedIn, where a lot of the professionals that you guys would want to target are spending their time. LinkedIn is a fantastic place to put your messages out there and put a little money behind it to target them.
By the way, you can actually take a list that you have, the same list that we talked about in Step1. You could upload that list into LinkedIn and create what’s called alike audience. What happens is, [00:44:00] you set geographic parameters, you upload this list and you say, all right, this is the list of people. I want to create alike audience with it.
What the algorithm does is it will create everybody else that it knows within a geography that matches the qualities of the people that you just uploaded and it’ll target them for you with specific messages. Here’s the thing, you’ll upload that list of 100, well, to do it, you need a list of 300 minimum to create alike audience. On Meta, you could do 100, but on LinkedIn, you need at least 300. Just FYI, if anybody’s thinking.
So where’s your database? If you know the number of the people that you can send emails, then you’re already a step ahead of most because you did the homework. Now you could understand, okay, man, I guess I have more than 300. So if I really [00:45:00] wanted to, I could reach out to alike audience. So now instead of reaching 100 or 300, you could reach 1,000, depending on where you’re at, if there’s even that many people.
Dr. Sharp: Can I ask you a question real quick? I just want to clarify that. So you’re saying you can upload an email list to LinkedIn, it will search through presumably and find the folks who have profiles with that email address and then create or find other folks who are similar to those original individuals on your email list.
Saul: Exactly.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s great.
Saul: That’s why it needs 300 because LinkedIn is definitely more fine-tuned at the professional level. I think there’s over a billion people on LinkedIn, but it’s not like 3 or 4 billion on Facebook. Facebook has a little more to work with so you could [00:46:00] do with a smaller sample size.
What happens is you upload 300 and then it does a match rate. And then it gives you your match rate. And then it says, all right, we got about 50% match rate, we could run with this. And then based off that match rate, it allows you to get a bigger sample of that same profile type.
You can’t, on these platforms, target people individually. You target audiences. And when you target your audiences right, you’re able to understand the results and get information out there on the services that you’re doing.
Maybe you’re having a grand opening of a new office or maybe you’re doing a new type of exam that you think is very game changing. You want to put it out there and inform the community and you want to accelerate it, you just throw it on one of these platforms, you put a little money behind it, and then [00:47:00] you’re off to the races. That’s one form of paid on social.
You can also decide to do a paid piece of content at a local paper. A sponsored content can get you, you got to think about though, what are your end customers reading? That’s what you would do, you would sponsor a little promotional piece in a local magazine or a journal that talks about what you do with the end goal of sharing it with them.
I would tell you that make sure it’s digital because print’s not going to get you very far nowadays. What you want to do is make it a digital sponsored piece of content, write it so that it adds value and then it gets published, but then put it on your website.
You could put it on your [00:48:00] website under media and the news so that it’s something that is easy. You don’t have to earn it because you sponsored it. It’ll say sponsored content, but nobody cares. You’re adding value. You’re putting yourself out there.
Typically, something like that, it always depends on the volume of the publication. It could run you between $500 and thousands. You could sponsor content under large, like the New York Times, and that would be not very cheap. You wouldn’t be paying a lot of money, maybe like $100,000 to sponsor content on there.
At the local level, you could do some cool things with sponsored content. Maybe there’s a local conference and you want to have a booth there. That’s another form of paid. [00:49:00] So you get your little booth and you go, and you are in a place where there’s literally hundreds of physicians walking through there, and you have your booth. You’re just chatting with people. You’re catching them.
Dr. Sharp: Can I go back just a little bit to the print advertising or print content? I feel like that’s a thing.
I love, by the way, that we’re not talking about Google Ads at all in this digital realm, that’s the direction everybody goes. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Google Ads, but I like that we’re doing different stuff.
I am curious about the print media and whether talking about a dead medium, is that worth it? Are you seeing is that worth it? If I were to go to my local paper or parenting magazine or whatever, and write an article for them, is there an ROI on that?
Saul: What I would tell you is that it’s [00:50:00] what you do after you write it, that makes the difference. If it’s print and they don’t do digital, then make sure you get a copy and you take a picture of it and make it clean cut, and then you demonstrate that on your digital assets.
Because if you’re talking about local newspapers, it depends on where you’re at and what town. If it’s a very small town, I think it could be effective, but always make sure you digitize it if they don’t have a digital version, because once you digitize it, you could do so much more.
You could put it on your website. You could do paid campaigns with that particular thing that you did, that sponsored content. You could put it at the bottom of your email signature like, hey, check out our latest article in the Local Tribune. There’s so much you could do with that, just make sure it’s digital.
There’s also the avenue [00:51:00] of print, targeted print. And that’s like making flyers and printouts and sending them to the offices of these physicians. That could be really strong. That could be really effective because not a lot of people are doing that, and you could differentiate yourself.
It’s another channel of print media, but that’s targeted print media. You’re literally getting a clearly defined list of physicians and you’re sending them a pamphlet.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Just to clarify, would you say the point with print media in this kind of thing is to actually generate leads and business into the practice or is it building a profile or recognition in the community name or brand recognition or both? How do you get this?
Saul: When you think print, just think digital because it’s got to be [00:52:00] digital. When you get a digital article, the value is backlink. You give them your website, make sure you get indexed. It’s got SEO value, which helps with your search result; where you land in the search results when people are looking for solutions that you offer. So that’s number one.
Number two is, this type of coverage is top of funnel. What that means is it’s an awareness play. You got the top of the funnel and you got the bottom of the funnel, at the top, they’re getting to know you, then they know you, and then they’re considering buying from you. So it’s awareness, consideration, decision.
I’ll tell you what, though, if you got content in the earned space, it can help reduce the time that somebody takes to decide [00:53:00] because they go from, okay, I’m thinking about this person to, oh, I saw this and this about them, so I could trust them. So it does reduce the sale cycle when you do it. It could also reduce acquisition cost because you already have credibility based off of this. And so it really does help you accelerate creating trust.
While it’s top of funnel in awareness, it won’t help generate leads right away, but it will help create the trust because you’re going to communicate that through different channels and make it available for people so that when they consider working with you, they see these things.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. This is great. It’s got my wheels turning but it’s cool that we have talked about [00:54:00] specific examples in each of these realms and again, not spending a lot of time on Google Ads, which is the top of mind. The easy option.
Gosh, our time is flying. What else? I don’t know, I feel like we’ve covered a lot and we’ve hit these three areas.
Saul: We’ve covered a lot of ground.
Dr. Sharp: Yes.
Saul: From my end, Jeremy, we have covered quite a bit. Oftentimes what we do, we work in the healthcare space with our clients that want to move the needle fast. One thing that I wanted to mention to you is our assessment. It’s a tool. It’s really great. It’s called digital marketing maturity model assessment.
It helps you understand where you sit in these three different [00:55:00] areas. It takes 7 minutes. You answer two questions and in the end, it gives you very clearly defined; here’s where you’re at. Level 1 is the lowest, level 5 is the top. And so if you come in at a level 3 or a level 4, it gives you the next steps.
We gave you two examples on this podcast today. The assessment will give you specifics that you can do. So you could use what you learned on today’s show, but also take the assessment and get very specific next steps that you can take to take your practice to the next level.
I’d recommend that. Folks could find that at outcomesrocket.com/assessment. That is definitely a tool that I would recommend to anybody and it’s free.
Dr. Sharp: People love free stuff. [00:56:00] I’m going to put it in the show notes, for sure. You gave your website there in the URL for the assessment, but we didn’t really even talk about the agency and Outcomes Rocket. Can you tell people a little bit about it, what you do, what you get into, and if people want to reach out, how they can get in touch with you?
Saul: For sure, Jeremy. At Outcomes Rocket, we help healthcare leaders that are wanting to get additional customers, help them get there faster through the three pillars that we just talked about. We didn’t talk about Outcomes Rocket, but we talked a lot about the areas that we worked in. So I feel you guys have gotten to know a little piece of each of the pillars.
If you want to dive deeper with us, we’re open to it. We’re healthcare only so we get the space very well. We love the space. As I mentioned [00:57:00] there’s so many businesses like yours, you listening today, that bail at those rates that we shared; 5 years, 50% and at 10 years, 97%.
That shouldn’t be the case. I believe that if you’re making a difference in the world, you got to find ways to get those advantages. The advantage that sits within the three-part column is, it’s an algorithm. Once you know it, you could play the game and make sure you’re adding value of consistency, and that you’re taking care of your family, and that you’re building a business that you’re proud of.
If anybody’s curious, check out the assessment. I think that’s the best thing to do, outcomesrocket.com/assessment. And now’s the time. You’re going to have an opportunity to grow.
[00:58:00] You may feel like, hey, you know what? Things are going really right now. That’s okay because things change. If you prepare for change, you’ll be better off. Or maybe you might be in a place where you’re like, I need this now or I’m glad we’re reaching you through Jeremy’s show because now’s the time.And so I’m hopeful that you’re able to benefit from our time today. I feel like we’ve given you maybe about $300,000 worth of additional things you could, if you do what we said today, you’ll make $300,000 extra next year. I believe it. I’m not even kidding. You guys will.
We believe in you. We hope that you take the next steps for your success, for the success of your communities. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you, Jeremy.
Dr. Sharp: I appreciate you being here. This was really cool, getting into some concrete recommendations. I feel [00:59:00] like it’s easy to do theoretical stuff and talk philosophically, but we put some boots on the ground and got into some details. I think people appreciate that.
I love the off-the-cuff confidence about how much money people are going to make. I have no idea how you’re coming up with those numbers, but they sound great. Everybody take some of this advice and check out the assessment and grow your practices. Thanks a lot, Saul.
Saul: It’s a pleasure, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.
Dr. Sharp: All right, folks. Thanks for listening to that conversation. Like I said, stay tuned. We are going to follow up with a more in-depth discussion of the numbers that Saul mentioned during the podcast. Let’s get to it.
I love that you are so confident about these numbers. I don’t know where you’re getting that from, like I said, but let’s talk through this, how are we making an extra $100,000 next year from this list?
Saul: I love it. Thank you so much for going there, Jeremy, because the breakdown [01:00:00] oftentimes, it’s a lot easier than you think. So what is the annual contract value of working with a physician, number of tests do they send on average?
Dr. Sharp: Let’s say we have a pretty steady physician referral source. They send us a little less than two people a month. Maybe we get 20 referrals a year from one particular physician. The average, people’s rates are all over the place, but let’s just call it, we’ll even lowball it for the sake of this discussion to be conservative and say it’s $2,000 per referral. So what’s that? $40,000 a year.
Saul: $40,000 for a group. So you’ve got $40,000 for referring physician group. By the way, they exist in your warm list, so they’re in your billing system. So you grab that list and you [01:01:00] email them. Through interactions with them, let’s just say you increase them by another 10 per year. That’s not even one extra month. If you’re interacting and you’re building relationships, that’s another $20,000 there.
So that’s $20,000. And then now you go and you do your community stage. You go talk to a group of 30 physicians. And that group of 30 physicians, you actually get another practice. You get another group that does 20 with you, that’s another $40,000.
As you can see that now you’re at 60. If you’re consistent with this, if you spend a year doing this, you’re going to make more than $100,000 [01:02:00] extra that year. So it’s very doable if you’re able to stay with it over the course of time. It’s just a matter of, do you want to do it?
Dr. Sharp: That’s a great point. Do you want to do it? Are you willing to do this? That seemed easy. That makes it really easy to see how we could reach $100,000. Let me see if I can do the $300,000. You also mentioned if we do a bunch of things, we can make $300,000.
Saul: Let’s do it.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. The lifetime value of a client is $2,000. We’re trying to hit $300,000. That means we basically need 150 referrals over the course of a year, right?
Saul: Yeah.
Dr. Sharp: 150 clients. So that’s a little over 10 per month, that’s about 12, maybe 13, we’ll call it 13 referrals per month to get 150 over the course of the year. That feels very doable, 13 referrals a month.
I don’t know if [01:03:00] one person could do all those evaluations over the course of a month, maybe you need to hire someone to help out, but 13 referrals over the course of a month at $2,000 a pop is pretty, that feels very doable.
It’s good to talk through this. I’m sure people heard when you were like, you can make $300,000 a year, and people were like, whatever, that’s crazy but it’s 13 referrals, it’s 13 evaluations. That feels very doable.
Saul: Yeah. If you approach every aspect of this model that we shared; the owned, the earned and the paid, you could take an element of each and for example, Jeremy, I’ll give you an example. You could have a podcast series that interviews local physicians on top things that people need to be considering for their health in [01:04:00] the community.
So now you’re interviewing primary care physicians that are in your community and guess what? You’re giving them a stage. All those interviews that you do with them are actually opportunities to grow your practice. That alone will get you to $300,000 extra in a year.
I promise you, that alone, if you’re interviewing, let’s just be conservative here. Let’s just say you’re going to do one a week. Just one of those four, some months have five. So one of those four or five starts working with you, in that one year annualized, I bet you’ll get close.
Dr. Sharp: I think it’s possible.
Saul: And then this [01:05:00] stuff is cumulative. So after you work this for a whole year, so like I’ve done 1700 podcasts on my channel.
Dr. Sharp: That’s incredible.
Saul: Dude, I built a whole business on it. We have a very successful marketing agency. So I’m telling you personally, that’s been one of our biggest opportunities is our podcast. We lead with value with it because we’re giving people an opportunity to be on.
And by the way, folks, Jeremy is going to be on our podcast. I’m excited to have him on the Outcomes Rocket. So certainly we’ll make sure that you get to listen to that because he’s adding massive value here on this channel and we want to make sure he gets rewarded for it.
That alone locally, anybody that listened to that, that one thing will get you to $300,000 extra this year. It’s just capacity from that point.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. We get, that’s another conversation. That’s another problem to solve. We’ll figure that out.
Saul: I like those [01:06:00] problems, though. I like capacity problems versus trying to get new business problems.
Dr. Sharp: Yes, exactly. This has been great. Thanks for talking through the numbers, making it a little more real, a little more doable for folks, and just breaking it down into more simple terms.
Saul: Oh, my pleasure, Jeremy. Great question.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
If you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development; beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We [01:07:00] have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, [01:08:00] diagnosis or treatment.
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