How will this book help you and your refractive surgery business?

Written by Rod Solar and Laura Livesey, and sponsored by ZEISS, in this book, we aim to provide you with the most efficient, consistent and predictable methods to grow your refractive surgery business. Specifically, we will focus much of our advice on refractive solutions for presbyopic patients, how you can integrate these into your existing services, and how to market them.

Over the last 20 years, we have held hundreds of personal interviews with leaders of top refractive surgery businesses across the UK, US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. During our conversations, refractive surgery business owners revealed the most significant challenges they face.

We have consulted and trained hundreds of refractive surgery professionals around the world on how to grow their businesses. We regularly participate in internationally attended practice development symposia and panels where we present topics and field questions about refractive surgery marketing and sales, and the marketing aspects of practice management.

Through our experience, testing and practice, we have identified and developed a 5-Step Healthcare Marketing System that helps laser refractive leaders identify and solve their specific business problems.

The 5-Step Healthcare Marketing System addresses the specific needs of business leaders in refractive surgery who struggle to adapt traditional marketing and sales approaches to the private healthcare space.

Healthcare customers (patients) are a unique breed of customers trying to make buying decisions while in an emotionally fearful state about their medical outcomes.

Patient fear presents many opportunities for clinics to provide high levels of customer service and hand holding. Unfortunately, many refractive surgery providers react differently to patient anxiety.

As a refractive surgery professional, you might worry that your patients will misinterpret you. You are anxious about coming across as too pushy. You do not want to be reprimanded or shunned by your peers for being “too commercial”. These are understandable reactions because the consequences of making mistakes in private healthcare can be catastrophic to patients, professionals and the industry as a whole.

Everything you say and do when selling and marketing refractive surgery is technically a part of ‘informed consent’, and therefore can be considered a part of the patient’s medical record. This vulnerability – legally and professionally – causes most refractive surgery business leaders to pursue ‘safe’, but ineffective, marketing and sales approaches that fail to impact their revenues positively.

In a sea of red tape, confusion, and marketing and sales advice that is often at odds with the private healthcare context, refractive surgery leaders need a proven path that guides them to grow their businesses while respecting the constraints of their industry. We have road-tested our 5-Step Healthcare Marketing System in the most prominent hospitals; public National Health Services and upmarket refractive surgery clinics around the world. The system works time and time again.

Who is this book for?

This book is an indispensable guide for refractive surgery professionals to help them navigate around the inherent fear-based landmines in marketing and sales. We provide the tools and confidence to tackle a patient’s fear head-on, in a way that has been proven to reduce legal complaints, help patients feel better served, increase patient loyalty and improve revenues.

How is this book unique?

There are several reasons why this book is unique. First, we are not just sharing tips and tricks we have come across that might work in some contexts and not work in others. Instead, our book provides a proven step-by-step interdependent system for refractive surgery business owners and managers to increase their sales and marketing effectiveness.

Second, we draw on decades of science in psychology – influence, selling, persuasion – and multidisciplinary best practice, yet we focus on a particular sales and marketing situation that others have not yet comprehensively addressed: refractive surgery sales and marketing.

Third, while this book is useful for those marketing refractive surgery in general, we focus mainly on the most prominent emerging market – the presbyopic Generation Xers and Baby Boomers seeking relief from reading glasses, bifocals and varifocal glasses.

Who will benefit from reading this book?

We have written this book for refractive surgery business professionals. The target audiences are refractive surgeons who control the marketing aspects of their clinics, non-medical executives charged with marketing refractive surgery, and sales and marketing managers working in refractive surgery businesses selling refractive surgery services directly to consumers.

Specifically, we are speaking to refractive surgery professionals who wish to be the leaders in their respective markets. They will get there by following the advice contained in this book. These professionals will invest in the right marketing tactics to target their markets and hire and train specialists to sell their services to consumers both on the telephone and at the point-of-sale.

The practice of refractive surgery is a synergy between the capabilities of current technology and the skills of a healthcare professional who uses the technology to perform a medical procedure. Only a good combination of both will result in both good patient outcomes and high levels of patient satisfaction. To create a patient experience that goes beyond the visual outcomes alone and extends to ideal patient emotional experiences, we provide recommendations in this book that will help you as a practice owner and help non-medical staff in your clinic support a surgical procedure with customer service.

Importantly, we should note that refractive surgeons reading this book still need to be competent and confident with refractive surgery. For those who want to market laser vision correction for patients with presbyopia in addition to their existing refractive surgery portfolio, you will also need to feel you can deliver excellent outcomes for your patients before you consider attracting more. While high competence in refractive surgery is not enough to be successful in refractive surgery, your skills remain an integral ingredient in the recipe that creates refractive surgery success. No quality or quantity of marketing will offset a lack of competence and confidence. Combine both, and you will have a recipe for success.

What problems will this book solve for you?

Delivering effective sales and marketing results in a refractive surgery business is challenging. The majority of refractive surgery leaders are looking for more clarity, guidance, and tools that are industry-specific.

You will benefit from this book if:

• You want to understand better your goals, your customers, your competition and what you can uniquely offer the marketplace.
  You want to know what works to generate quality leads for your refractive surgery business.
• You want to know how to convert more first calls into first appointments without being considered “pushy”.
• You want to learn how to execute world-class first appointments that maximize patient service and close rates.
• You want to know how to set or raise your prices while competing against lower-priced, high-volume and down-
• market competitors.
  You want to improve your customer service and reap the rewards of more patient referrals.

The 5-Step Healthcare Marketing System will remove the uncertainty that is preventing high-quality refractive surgery leaders from realizing their full potential. It will give you the confidence first to diagnose, and then act upon, the most pressing refractive surgery business problems you face today.

Our book is unique in that it focuses on the business of selling healthcare in the business-to-consumer space, targeting business leaders, owners and sales and marketing managers. This market currently has no guidebook, and that’s why you’re reading the book in front of you!

How we organized this book

We organized this book into nine chapters. In Chapter 1, we discuss the five most significant marketing challenges that refractive surgeons face. For each challenge, we tell you how to solve these problems and so you can transform your refractive surgery business.

In Chapter 2, we help you lay down a firm foundation from which to take the five steps. We discuss the setting of objectives, understanding your customer, analyzing and positioning yourself against the competition, and identifying your unique selling proposition.

In Chapter 3, we focus on the first of the five steps – lead generation. In this chapter, we break down the marketing tactics we have found to be most efficient in refractive surgery markets.

In Chapter 4, we will dive into showing you the second of the five steps, how to convert the leads you generate. We will take you on a journey into the first telephone call, and show you how you can train your staff to leverage this crucial conversion point.

In Chapter 5, we will talk about the third of the five steps, how you can perform world-class refractive surgery first appointments to convert more of the patients you see. You will learn how to involve your clinic staff in the highly choreographed staging of the first meeting with a new patient, which will result in increased bookings and better customer service ratings.

In Chapter 6, we will turn to the fourth of the five steps, the thorny issue of pricing. Here we will show you how you can grow or at least maintain your price when competing against lower-priced competitors.

In Chapter 7, we will focus mainly on the fifth and final step, generating more referrals for your clinic so that your conversion rates can grow even higher and you can reduce your marketing expenses.

Lastly, in our Conclusion, we will focus on practical matters relating to enacting the five steps we have discussed in the other chapters. In this part, we will provide you with advice on executing each of the five steps we have taught you to take.

We are keen to get started, so let us begin.

What’s in the book?

• 141 pages of refractive marketing surgery insight that took 20 years to accummulate
• The 5 refractive surgery marketing challenges – and how to solve them
• Establishing a firm foundation for marketing your practice
• How to increase your leads
• How to convert more leads into first appointments
• How to convert more first appointments into patients
• How to set and increase your price
• How to get more referrals
• Where to go from here

• Powerful tips in succinct and timely articles
• Insightful interviews that educate and inform
• Useful videos that show you how to grow your practice
• Invites to interactive webinars that teach real-world techniques
• Case studies that show you how we reliably grow your colleague’s practices