Does Asking Patients for Referrals Really Work? How to refi ne an important skill Scott Newman is a senior consul- tant, specializing in designing and implementing patient reactivation systems. He can be contacted at [email protected]. “A Shawn Veltman is a practice growth expert operating out of Hamilton, Ontario, and the founder of SV&A Chiropractic Consulting. He has helped practices in Canada,and the U.S.,develop systems to bring back patients, retain existing patients, and run their practices more effec- tively. For more information about SV&A Chiropractic, visit www. svachiro.com. sking your patients for referrals is the best marketing you can ever do!” In the chiropractic world, if you’ve been in practice for any length of time, you’ve probably heard this, more than any other so-called “practice growth” strategy. It always sounds logical, and so easy. But is it? Of course, like most things that seem too good to be true, this is a strategy that can easily fall apart when you try to bring it out of “Theory-Land” and into the real world. You can certainly generate a lot more referrals in your practice, but if you use the wrong strategy – or the right strategy in the wrong way – you run the risk of putting your existing patients in an uncomfortable and awkward situation, alienating these patients, while still achieving no new referrals. What makes just asking for referrals fare so poorly? You walk a very fi ne line in your practice. Yes, it is a business, but fi rst and foremost, it’s a place where your patients come to improve the quality of their lives. It is critical that relevant marketing strategies are applied to support this delicate balance. That is why asking for referrals can be a risky strategy. Simply asking a patient “Can you think of anybody that you might be able to refer to me” can be misconstrued by the listener, and end in disaster for the asker. WHAT YOU MEAN … AND WHAT THEY HEAR When most chiropractors say, “Can you think of anybody who you could refer to my prac- tice?” the underlying message from their point of view can roughly be translated as follows: “I’m so glad that I’ve been able to help you over the last few months/years. Every time you come in, I can see the difference between now and your fi rst visit. I just want you to know that if there is anybody in your life who’s going through what you were, who is in the pain that you were, that I’ll do my best to help them, like I’ve helped you. I don’t know if we’d be able to achieve the same level of success, but I’ll do anything I can to help them on the path to optimal health.” Unfortunately, more often than not, when you ask for referrals, your patient doesn’t hear that. Instead, he/she hears: “Can you think very hard, and rack your brain, to find a way to bring me more money?” Now, that is not the question you want to be putting to your patients, is it? HOW TO ASK FOR REFERRALS … AND GETTHEM One of the simplest, and most effective, ways to ask for referrals is to follow the LSR model of referral generation. It’s LaSeR focused and will give you great results. LSR stands for Limited, Specifi c and Regular. Before we look at these elements, though, let us look a little closer at why most referral requests fail. 34 • CANADIAN CHIROPRACTOR | OCTOBER 2009 www.canadianchiropractor.ca Shawn Veltman Scott Newman feature
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