At RevaHealth.com we help patients from all over the world to contact health clinics. These enquiries are then used by the clinics to generate business. In sales speak, every enquiry is a new lead.

In our experience, some clinics are very good at turning enquiries into paying patients, while others let good business slip away by making simple mistakes. This guide was originally written by Owen Cooney (ocooney@revahealth.com) specifically for health clinics, but it is relevant to any booking business that receives customer enquiries through email or form capture on the web.

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Do you feel that the enquiries you receive through the internet do not produce actual customers? Do you feel that the customer is just shopping around and that dealing with these enquiries is just an extra burden that produces no results? If the answer is yes, this guide is for you.

I will share a proven process for successfully converting online enquiries into paying customers. Innovative sales professionals who are successful in converting online enquiries into actual paying customers do this on a daily basis.

The reward for learning this process is immense. More and more customers are beginning their relationships with their service providers online, and the sales process has definitely entered the internet age.

Online is different
Online patient enquiries require a different approach than dealing with traditional enquiries. We all know how to deal with customers who turn up at our business, or call us to book something.

The difference with online enquiries is that now the initial conversation begins by email instead of face to face or via the phone.

Because the customer has contacted you online and has not talked or interacted with you, they have no real relationship with you yet. This carries a very real risk. If they break an appointment with you or stop answering your calls, this is no big deal for them because they don’t know you.

The Secret
The secret to successfully converting customers who send you online enquiries into paid bookings is to build a relationship with the enquirer. Building this relationship requires discipline.

Successful sales professionals tend to follow a similar process for building a relationship with the customer from that first enquiry through to the paid appointment.

The Process

  1. Fast response to the customers’ email enquiries giving all relevant information on the product or service requested.
  2. Follow up with a phone call within 24 hours of sending the email. In this phone call:
    1. ensure that the customer has received your email
    2. answer any immediate questions the customer has
    3. ask the customer for more information about their needs
    4. ask the customer to make some form of follow up commitment, even if it’s just another phone call

    The idea here is twofold; first, to get a better idea about how serious the customer is, and second, to help cement the budding relationship.

    This commitment helps establish trust between you and the customer. If they are not willing to make any further commitment, this may indicate that trust has not yet been established. Without trust, it is unlikely that this customer is ready to buy from you.

  3. If the customer needs more time to make a decision, arrange another phone call at a specified time and date. Call at exactly this time and date and try to move things forward again, e.g. confirm a time for a consultation, make a booking etc.
  4. If the customer is unsure, repeat step 3. Research shows that if you give up after the initial contact that you will lose more than 50% of your potential customers.
  5. Once you have some initial commitment, you still have to close the sale. As the old saying goes, “Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched”. For clinics using RevaHealth.com we suggest the following checks:
    1. A week before the patient is coming for treatment, call them to confirm that the dates are still suitable.
    2. 24 hours before the treatment, call them again to confirm that everything is fine.

Remember: It takes time and persistence for enquiries to turn into sales. For clinics, if you follow the process above, a good rule of thumb is that for every successful conversion from enquiry to booking that you get within 2 months of the enquiry, you will get a further conversion from enquiry to appointment within 2-6 months.