Make A Follow-up Call

After you have called on all of your opportunities in the first month, you will now repeat visits to offices that have remained on your list in the second month. Remember to visit the offices on the same day of the month and the same time.

If you have already crossed off some of your prospects because they did not qualify, then add new ones in their place and begin at Stage II for them. For all the others, you will continue on with a follow-up visit.

Prepare Your Follow-up

As is the case with your first call, it is important to prepare before you return to an office. You may be tempted to relax in your preparation for your visits as time goes on, especially in offices where the staff is very friendly, but I encourage you to make time to prepare for every single visit. Preparing for a follow-up call is perhaps even more important than preparing for your first call.

If you show up into an office and someone there happens to remember your name, but you do not remember his or hers, this will not reflect well on you. It is essential to remember each person’s name that you received, the subject and content of any talk that was made, small or big (what is small to you might be big to the speaker), and that you follow up on all promises made.

Hopefully you have recorded everything into your CRM so that you can review it before you go on your follow-up calls.

Reviewing your CRM

The day before you go on an office call, review your notes about the prospects you will be visiting. Why do this the day before? Because your notes may include small tasks that you have forgotten to get done. Did the receptionist want a stack of rack cards? Did the doctor want a referral pad? Reviewing these details the day before gives you enough time to gather your material.

Your post-call will give you an idea of how the last visit went. Is the receptionist difficult to talk with? Did you find out that a nurse named Leo is the referral coordinator and that Leo was out of town last time you stopped by? All of these details will be in your post-call from your last visit, so start by reviewing that.

Next, look at your plan that you wrote out after the post-call. Does the plan still make sense? Did you make a plan that needs adjusting? If so, you will be making that adjustment in a new note. Let us move on to that now.

Create a pre-call

Create a new note and title it “Office Call, [date].” Create a section called Pre-Call, and fill out a pre-call for this follow-up visit. Remember, a pre-call consists of three parts: goals, position points, and questions.

Under the goals section you will include the items that you have decided to pull forward from the plan section of your last note. If your plan says “Talk to Leo about referral coordination and find out if he wants Rx pad,” then your goals for this pre-call would be:

1. Pitch to Leo
2. Ask about referral pad

These two goals would be enough for one visit. The only thing you might want to add to a goal section of a follow-up call would be an alternative goal if Leo is not available. As you go, you will be able to lean on your experience to adjust your goals mid-office call, but in the beginning have a specific goal and a fall back goal for all follow-up calls.

This is worth doing because a visit in which you accomplish none of your goals can be demoralizing. A general fall back goal might be something like:

1. Find out if they have anyone that they currently refer to for MT.

Something like this is not dependent on a specific person being available.

These fall back goals should be used only if you absolutely cannot attain your primary goals. For example, if you ask the receptionist to speak with Leo and he says “Leo is busy right now” then this would not be a time to use your fall back goals. The receptionist is offering what is called in the sales world an “objection.” However this particular objection would not be an absolute objection, or one that cannot be overcome. It would be a soft objection, or one that can be overcome.

If the receptionist were to give you such an objection, an appropriate response might be:

After you have created your goals, flesh out the rest of your pre-call using your position points and questions as methods to reach your goals.

Integrate outreach material

On nearly every follow-up visit, you will be integrating outreach material into the office call.

Let us say you called on a particular office a month ago and it went well. You greeted and pitched to the receptionist and he led you to the RN who does the referral coordination. You asked the RN a few questions and determined that they might benefit from a referral pad. On this follow-up visit, you will bring the referral pad, remind the RN of your conversation, and discuss with him the nature of the content.

Remember, outreach activities are things that you do with your prospects that engage them in the marketing process. Bringing material to your prospects is considered activity because your goal in doing so is not only to present the material to them, but to further build the relationship, display to your prospect that you are helpful, reliable, and professional, and to let them know that you are available and ready to receive a referral.

When you show up into that office with the referral pad and prescribing guidelines, I guarantee you that you will surprise the nurse. It is almost certain that he has already forgotten about you and I would bet the farm that he has certainly forgotten about what you discussed. Presenting him with the material will jog his memory enough for him to remember what you discussed and he might even be impressed with your follow through. Hopefully he will have an opinion of you that you are someone worth relying on. This is the purpose of outreach activities. They say more with their actions than they do with their words.

Before you go on to making your office call, prepare your outreach material and place it into your folder.

Office Call

It is time to get out there and actually visit the offices of your prospects again. Remember to dress appropriately and, if you are like me, check your pre-call one last time before entering the office. If you can list your pre-call without looking at the notes, you are ready. If not, spend a few minutes making sure you know your goals, position points, and questions before you go in.

Greet and pitch

Your greeting and pitch on a return visit are important parts of the office call. If you meet the same person as on your first call, then skip the elevator pitch in favor of a reminder about who you are. If not, repeat your greeting and elevator pitch to the new person. Remember, you want every person you come across in the office to know who you are and what you do.

Get to the right person

After you have taken care of the greeting, it is time to cut right to the chase and ask to talk to the right person. The “right person” will be determined by your goals. Do you already know who takes care of referrals in the office? If so, ask to talk to that person. If you have been in a few times already, ask to speak with the doctor. Once you have the trust of the staff, speaking to the doctor is a much more likely scenario. We will talk about that more in just a moment. Keep the small talk light in these follow-up visits and stay on target toward your goals.

Ask the right questions

Once you are speaking to the right person, engage in your outreach activity. Remind them about what they asked for last time and present any appropriate material. After that, do not sit there dwelling on how great of an accomplishment it is that you just brought them a pad of paper that they will probably throw away as soon as you leave. Move right into your position points and use questioning to reach your goals.

For example, if you bring Leo a referral pad, remind him that the last time the two of you spoke he mentioned that the doctor might use a referral pad if you brought one by. Hand him the pad and as you hand it to him, ask:

“What kind of injury do you most commonly see with your patients?”

While he begins thinking and listing types of injuries, show Leo that you are an active listener. Let us pretend he says that many patients come in complaining of low back pain. Do not start telling him about the latest research on massage and low back pain. Instead, ask him a follow-up question:

“Does the doctor have a standard treatment plan for low back pain?”

These kinds of questions will yield you more information than you will probably know what to do with at first. But if you ask Leo this question, you had better listen to the answer because it will be very valuable to you in your marketing efforts. And by not pouncing on Leo’s answers with arguments about why the doctor should be writing massage prescriptions instead of pain killer prescriptions, you will be showing Leo that you can be trusted and that he can be revealing without eliciting a sales pitch from you.

From here, close out your call.

The close

After Leo completely finishes describing the way the doctor treats low back pain patients, go back to the referral pad. Point to it in his hands and take the information he has just given you and engage him in the material that you have brought him. Tell him that “when” he gets a patient with low back pain, “he will” fill in lumbago on the diagnosis line and “the doctor will check off the treatment goals here.” Say this as you point to the corresponding boxes and walk him through a referral using the information he has just given you.

It is almost certain that if you take the information that Leo has provided and use it to engage him in the material that you brought, he will be interested in what you are saying and may even ask some follow-up questions.

Finish off by asking:

“So can you try that the next time you get a patient with low back pain?”

When Leo gives you the affirmative that he will, you have just closed the deal — all in a natural and compelling way that engages the prospect the entire time.

Once you have gotten this far with Leo, you have just had a successful office call. Enough is enough, and very politely thank Leo for giving you his time, perhaps acknowledge how busy he is, and tell him that you look forward to hearing from him soon or that you will be by to follow up with him about any questions that might come up.

It is important to close your calls with a forward-looking statement each time. Thanking Leo for his time and just walking straight out of the office would leave him with a feeling of termination, which is not something that you necessarily want to cultivate in your relationships. Rather than cultivating termination, work to cultivate a sense of anticipation in your closure. Leave Leo looking toward your next visit. This will set you up for a follow-up visit in which you will ask Leo if you can speak with the doctor.

We will take a look at that in just a second, but for now, let us make sure you record everything that just happened in your CRM.

Create A Post-Call

At this point, complete your CRM notes by adding another post-call assessment. Complete a brief one- or two-paragraph summary noting what happened in the office call. Be sure to record any names of the people that you met.

Did you meet your goals? Check off the ones you did and push the other ones to a future visit. If you did not meet your goals, try to think about why that happened. Is there something you could have done differently to get to your goals? Was there an absolute objection or a soft objection? If you were derailed easily by soft objections, do not worry, you will get better at this as time goes on. Add this goal to the next visit and resolve to reach this goal the next time. The key to a good office call is to focus on real relationship building instead of the selling of your services.

Take a moment and think about what your next visit’s strategy should be. Keep in mind that this plan may be changed the next time you go in.

After you have completed your post-call in your CRM, you have finished up with your follow-up visit. Good job! Keep going.