A Marketing Funnel

For Referrals

Building a referral practice is incredibly rewarding, but for most practices it seems impossible to do. Which is why we have crafted a world class program for any practice to maximize their referral generation, leaving nothing to chance for such a critical practice growth priority.

The goal of this program is to build a relationship through ongoing interaction with an expanded list of potential referral sources.

800 Leads Targeted Per Year

7,800 Interactions Per Year

Targeted & Value Focused Interactions

Propelling Your Referral and Patient Growth to Unprecedented Heights

Building Strong Referral Relationships

It Only Takes One: One referral source that starts referring patients every month can generate significant revenue over many years. In some cases, one referring doctor can transform your practice; for example, a retina specialist will see an estimated 150 new patients every month that should be referred.
Team Referrals: In many cases, the doctor is not the only one referring patients out. Sometimes the office manager or technician spends significantly more time talking to patients than the doctor.
Minimize Your Time: Having the specialty doctor visit every referral source once a month would improve referrals by 100%. However, a successful referral program cannot place an unbearable burden of time on the doctor or staff. Focusing on scalable interactions is at the core of our strategy.
Awareness: Referral sources will refer when you are on their radar. Otherwise, they are too busy to look up who to send a patient to and if that will be in their patient's best interest.
Ease: Busy ophthalmology practices or pediatrician's offices are far less likely to refer if it requires time and effort.

Providing Value and Building Trust

Always Provide Value: Whenever interacting with a potential referral source, focus on how you can provide value to them at that moment. Value can happen in many different ways, but is best achieved through understanding that each referral source values different things. For instance, interacting with a first grade teacher should be different from interactions with a local optometrist.
Provide Value Always: Frequent interactions are essential as they facilitate education and increase awareness, neither of which can be achieved with just one or two interactions per year.
Education: Specialty services are similar to a new product. Would you send a patient for a form of eye surgery that you did not learn about in optometry school and knew almost nothing about?
Trust: Trust comes from interaction, witnessing that you are genuinely looking out for the well-being of their patients, and providing a service that is unquestionably effective.
Patient Feedback: If referring professionals receive feedback on the value the referral had for the patient, it reinforces that behavior powerfully.

How do we identify who to target?

Your specialties:For a low vision specialty practice a retina specialist would always be at the top of the list, while a pediatric office may choose to focus on pediatricians or local optometrists first.
Distance from the practice: When targeting, start with leads that are closer to your office, while referrals can happen from as far as 1 or even 2 hour drive from your office, the closer they are the more likely they are to refer.
How many patients could they refer: While a first grade teacher at a private school may seem like the ideal target for referrals for a pediatric specialty practice, you should consider how many referrals they could make if you are successful. Assuming they teach 20 students, and refer 10% of them for suspected vision issues, that is a potential of 2 referrals per year. Conversely while optometrists or pediatricians may seem harder, they have a large potential for referrals. A typical pediatrician will see more than 4,000 kids per year, and an optometrist will average around 600 kids a year. A pediatrician that refers 10%, would yield 400 referrals, and an optometrist would yield 60.

Using Social Media

By combining targeted referral marketing with daily videos across social media, you ensure that the referral source and their team interact often and positively with you. This interaction and visibility is essential to keeping you top-of-the-mind and building trust in you as a specialist.