How to Manage Follow-Up with Pending Cases
When it comes to following up with visitors who left your practice without making an on-the-spot decision to start, having an organized, consistent system of ensuring timely follow-up with those visitors is a requirement to avoid losing cases.
Space precludes me from going into a lot of detail here, but my recommended method of quickly getting to yes-or-no with pending cases is outlined in detail in my book No to Lost Cases; the “rub” is ensuring that you, as the TC, have time in your schedule to do the required follow-up.
Unfortunately, most TCs do not do this; they attempt to do their follow-up work “on the fly” as time allows. In a business with as high an activity level as yours has, that is a recipe for follow-up disaster, because, as you have surely found, there are weeks when you never get around to making those all-important follow-up contacts, and when that happens, good starts promptly fall through the cracks.
What is the solution?
It isn’t complicated. At the end of the day, either you control your calendar, or your calendar controls you. This means that the key skill required here is good planning. Specifically, you should have a designated hour (or two, if your activity level with pendings requires it) each week set aside on your schedule exclusively for this purpose.
For example, a TC might designate Wednesday mornings from 11 am to noon, every single week, for the sole purpose of completing follow-up work with active pendings. She then gets the doctor’s approval for this to be established on the schedule and everyone in the office is made aware of this change – the change being that she is not available during this time on Wednesdays for any other purpose. The schedule is accordingly adjusted around her. This makes the activity a priority, not an afterthought.
The other key to making this designated follow-up hour highly productive is to stop the endless merry-go-round that many of you follow of calling people for months on end in a fruitless attempt to get them started. If that effort produced an acceptable return on investment, I would tell you to do that; it doesn’t, and it never will.
My method ensures that you know whether or not you have a new start within 10 business days of the visit, virtually every single time, and you are going to limit this weekly activity to following up with those people.
So your “hour of power” each week is focused on people who are actively in buying mode only. Those who have exceeded the two-week follow-up process go to an electronic email list where we stay in touch with them periodically without investing valuable TC time that is better used elsewhere; the only exception to this list transition are families with a specific, valid reason to start later in the year, such as FSA January starts.
