Pre-call and post-call CRM note templates

The whole system runs on one convention: every visit gets a single note titled Office Call [date], containing a pre-call section written beforehand and a post-call section written afterward. Because both halves live in the same note, reviewing a prospect a month later shows you, in date order, what you set out to do and what actually happened.

Any CRM will do — the format matters more than the software — as long as it holds prospect information (practice name, address, phone, fax, specialty), a status showing whether the office is actively referring, a contact list for every doctor and staff member, a notes field robust enough to be long and repeatedly edited, and a calendar for scheduling visits.

Three parts, always in this order: goals, position points, questions. Goals give the visit direction, position points are the messages you repeat to everyone you meet, and questions are how you get there without lecturing anybody.

Two or three per visit, no more, weighted by how much time each will take — finding out who does referral coordination is cheap, pitching to the doctor is not, and you do not want both in the same visit. Over the life of a relationship you are working through roughly this sequence:

1. Meet and introduce yourself or a new team member to staff.
2. Gather information. (This one keeps overlapping the others and never really finishes.)
3. Update your prospect on office or policy changes.
4. Discuss elements of referral coordination, with the right person.
5. Meet and pitch to the doctor.
6. Discuss patient progress with the appropriate staff or doctor.

If your visits start to feel like a burden on the office, look at your goals first — it usually means you are trying to do too much in one call.

One-sentence messages that position you as distinct from the other options, repeated across the visit so the whole office hears the same thing. Match them to the goal. If the goal is to get past the receptionist, “I keep my physician visits short because I know how busy doctors are” does the work. If the goal is referral coordination with the office manager, “We make referring easy by providing completed treatment plans for sign off” does.

On a first visit, keep it to two: what you specialize in, and one benefit of massage therapy for your patient profile.

Sketch the questions that will move you toward your goals and give your position points somewhere to land. Close-ended on the first visit; open-ended once there is a relationship to build on. A sorted bank is on the qualifying question page.

This is the note as the book writes it — abbreviations and all. PP. is position points, Q’s is questions. Keep it terse; you have to be able to recall it in the parking lot without reading it.

The first question changes if you work with a population other than the injured. Everything else about a first visit stays the same office to office.

Review the prospect’s file the day before, not the morning of — your last post-call may contain a small task you have forgotten (a stack of rack cards, a referral pad), and the day before is enough time to put it in the folder.

Goals for a follow-up come straight out of the plan section of the previous note. Add one fall-back goal that does not depend on any particular person being available, so a visit can still succeed if your primary target is out.

Use the fall-back only when the primary goal is genuinely unreachable. “Leo is busy right now” is a soft objection, not an absolute one, and the answer to it is another question — “Can I schedule a time to meet with him, then?” or “When is a good time today to come back?”

Write it immediately. Not at lunch, not that evening — as soon as you are somewhere quiet, even if there are three more prospects in the same building. Detail and names both decay fast.

Three parts, appended to the same note:

• Office call summary. Free-form, one to two paragraphs, everything you can remember — including what you read off body language, not just what was said.
• Goals checklist. Which goals you met and which you did not. This is what determines the next pre-call.
• Plan the next visit. Your strategy for next month, written while the visit is fresh. It may well change by the time you read it again.

When goals go unmet, note why. Was it an absolute objection or a soft one you let stop you? Being derailed by soft objections is normal early on and gets better with practice — the point of writing it down is that the same goal moves to the next visit rather than quietly disappearing.