Speaker 1 0:00
You've just been added to the med spa marketing group chat. This group chat that you're about to listen to is with me and Mitch and our good buddy Charlie, over at line. If you don't know what line is, line is a software that monitors call performance. I know monitoring sometimes can feel a little big brothery and icky, but just know that the data that you're able to get through line is really important when it comes to coaching and tracking and seeing how marketing is performing. Yeah,
Speaker 2 0:30
there's kind of this tension between data and acquisition of that data, right? How do you get the data? And that's the beautiful thing about line, is that where most of the time, in order to get data, insights into how your business is performing in a category. It requires time spent. It requires a person going in sifting through data, which requires hours, which requires capacity. And most practices don't have a overabundance of payroll hours that they're looking to Oh, you do this now, right, they're usually at capacity and right? That's something that Charlie and his team really understands, is that practices don't have time for data entry, but businesses really need data in order to know where maybe some of the bottlenecks are. Once you've spotted the bottleneck, you can remove that, and then you can really scale. So that's the goal of what line does, and what's so beautiful about it is that it sits in the background, and your people don't even have to know that it's there, because there's no difference between answering a phone with line in the background versus answering a phone without line in the background. And yes, it does monitor the call. But what's cool is that it can be a positive thing as well, because there's positive reinforcement with celebrating. That's something that a lot of our partners actually have done, is like, hey, Susie is actually doing a really good job. Look at this conversion rate that she has, right? Because you're able to measure those things. The flip side is also that you're able to measure some of the opportunities where maybe you can coach a little bit better as a practice, right? Because your employees aren't dumb. If they're not doing something, they just haven't been educated enough to know how to do it. And so that's where coaching can come in. Yeah,
Speaker 1 2:07
we're all constantly trying to get better, trying to be better. We're trying to create more beautiful and recognizable and memorable brands and experiences, and we're trying also to improve providers, improve treatments, and the technologies behind the treatments are constantly improving. Everything is constantly evolving, right? And to have data that's tracking the performance at this level is so, so vital. One of the things that I loved about our conversation, too, was kind of honing in on some of the opportunities when it comes to coaching. Charlie actually gave some ideas, even though line doesn't do coaching. I thought that some of his ideas for how to coach and kind of philosophy behind it, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 2:53
we're excited for you to
Speaker 3 2:54
listen to it. Here we go. Here we go. Charlie has just been added to the group chat. Thanks for
Speaker 2 2:59
being on the pod man. Appreciate you excited that you're here. We can talk about line and all the things that line does and how it's impacted the practices thus far that we've installed it for. We've installed it for all of our practices now for all of our partners. So that's a big benchmark to be able to say we're here. We've been able to go through that process. So I'd love to just kick off with talking through the origin story of line. Tell us a little bit about the early days. It reminds me a lot of Google. Actually, in the early days for Google, you had a form, right? You had a form name, email, and you're like, requesting information. Someone would go and find and then send it back to you, right? And that was the early days of Google. And it kind of reminds me of you guys, how you talked about you had headphones on and you were listening in on the calls to score it right? Because there is such a need for call analytics, and there wasn't a whole lot out there right now. So talk a little bit about
Speaker 4 3:48
that. Yeah, now I'm thinking of how to make it sound like a Google origin story. And thank you guys for having me super pumped to chat with you. So short version of light origin story was it was doing a consulting project. Used to do sales consulting. There was a guy who was older than me and a lot more credible, because I wouldn't have been able to get consulting contracts. It's like 1012, years ago, and one of our customers was a behavioral health platform. Private Equity backed spending a ton on marketing, high dollar, you know, lead value. It was all like inpatient addiction stuff, and they had Salesforce. They had purchased Salesforce, and they didn't use it because they had clinically trained people that were handling all the intake, that didn't know really what a CRM was, and were more focused on creating patient charts in their practice management system and those sorts of things, and not keeping up with like marketing or lead conversion animals. So the project was our team manually listened to all of the inbound calls coming in, all of the outbound follow up calls that were also occurring. And we were like, their little Salesforce scribes, right? We were like. Keeping track of their lead records and putting together marketing performance reports for the leadership team. So for the first time, they knew, how many leads and admissions did we get last month from this Google ad campaign or whatever? And it was transformational for them. And from a lead conversion standpoint, we identified like all types of things that were happening that were correctable, that were keeping these leads from becoming patient. So my co founding partner, Brad, one of my co founding partners, Brad, was coming out of private equity. We had met in college. We met in this crazy summer job where we sold books door to door in the summer. That's for another time. Mitch, when I come out there, I'll tell you about those experiences. But we were like, Hey, we should start a couple start a company one day. So the Insight was, we know there's a healthcare specialty practice group that's focused on patient, acquisition, investing and marketing that doesn't have what they should have, which is performance analytics. And we just did this manually, and the results were great. So how do we start using technology to mimic that. That's where we started. We happened to get a referral for the consulting. I was doing anesthetics, and it was a med spa, and I didn't know what a med spa was. I thought it was a massage parlor. So I was driving there, like, this is such a wasted time. What is this? And I got there and she was like, Oh, we spend 30 grand a month on Google ads, and our leads are worth 1500 bucks and 50k lifetime. And I was like, Oh my God. And so we started in esthetics. We're in like, 15 or 16 specialties now, but what you were talking about with headphones is when we began, it was myself and our CO founding partners listening to every single call coming in, coming out and manually marking what happened and comparing that to what this sort of rudimentary scoring thing we had put together with third party systems was. That's how we started, initially training it, and so that we got like 12 customers, I would spend two or three hours a night doing this, and then the entire weekend of scoring all these calls, and then we would download all this stuff into Excel, print PDFs, and email them on Sunday nights, and we got to like, 15 it was just absurd, right? We didn't have enough time to do it. I remember, we have a family lake house about two hours away, and I think this is the story I told you Mitch, where I'm sitting on the dock, because I would go there on the weekends and want to be outside at least while I was doing this tedious thing, and my dad was like, how many customers you guys have? And I was like, I think I was like, nine. He's like, Are you sure this is scalable? Like, Dad, stop, I'm trying to train the model, man. And my now wife, was also like, yeah, what the hell is
Speaker 2 7:37
So how long did it take them before you started moving to software, then from modeling into, like, a scalable model. For
Speaker 4 7:43
the first two years, there was, like consulting projects, along with some of the stuff I'm describing. And so we got to 15, I mean, you know, we'd have a customer for six, eight months. I don't remember what we were doing. And so probably, I think, we started doing what I just described, like sometime in halfway through 2017 and then maybe end of 18, we won this grant. There was a pitch competition in Raleigh, Durham area, and we won this, like $50,000 no taxes grant, and we brought on our CTO, and that is when we started to actually have tech. So not right, then, right? That's when we started working on it. And I can't remember the exact same exact sometime in 2019
Speaker 1 8:24
Charlie, I love this story. It honestly reminds me of Henry Chadwick. Does that name ring a bell to you? Henry Chadwick, yeah, but I can't remember who it is. I'm gonna take you for a little spin here. Mitch. Henry Chadwick is the founder of modern baseball scoring, and Henry Chadwick's in the Hall of Fame for re defining how baseball gets scored. Before Henry Chadwick baseball was not scored off of, like, the big scorecard sheet that we're used to seeing. What Henry Chadwick did was he brought in his understanding of, like, I think it was cricket and how cricket gets scored. And here's the connection, just so you guys know, I'm not just speaking out of left field. That was ironic.
Unknown Speaker 9:08
There you go, Baseball, baseball, but Henry
Speaker 1 9:11
Chadwick is this data guy who brought to baseball, tracking every pitch on every play. And when you do that, you're able to corral data that later on, sabermetrics, which is the team behind, I don't know if you ever saw Moneyball, I did. Yes, but that's sabermetrics. Sabermetrics was able to use data all because Henry Chadwick was tracking, or introduced the tracking of everything that's happening. So what's the connection here? Like, the work of listening in on a call and capturing everything that happened on the call is data that could later be used. So instead of approaching the project like, hey, we want to know this specific data, right? Like we want to know I don't know, like the. Conversion of this age demo. And we're only interested in the conversion of this age demo, so only pay attention Charlie to what's going on here and then build your system that way, as opposed right to tracking everything that's happening. It's a lot more labor intensive. And whenever you're designing, and we call it puppeteering, right whenever you're bootstrapping and puppeteering like some software. It's really easy to start falling into the cutting corners and the jumping to, okay, we're just gonna track this. But those two years a formative time for you to develop the data undergirding of what would become line software, right? Totally.
Speaker 4 10:40
I love that analogy. Moneyball is such a good movie as well. I mean, what I took away from what you said, you're basically just being open minded as you evaluate something like this. So you're going to find other stuff that you might not have known is going to be super valuable. And you can build patterns around, yeah,
Speaker 1 10:54
and even like, you know, Salesforce is such a customizable software, right? It kind of is a framework to do whatever you want to do with it. And when you start developing software, you inevitably introduce features, features, features, features, like line, does this, this, this and this and this. But if we're really starting from like a high level and tracking conversations, I think that that's such a more healthy place to kind of address what it is that we're trying to accomplish, what is the practice is trying to accomplish, and what it is that an effective marketing campaign is trying to accomplish? Yeah,
Speaker 2 11:27
so you started with nine. You started with nine. You were manually scoring these, and then, obviously, over the course of many years, you scaled now to how many practices, I'm not 100% sure.
Speaker 4 11:39
I think we have like 350 or 400 accounts, but some of those are really big, right? So there's probably a couple 1000 locations, right?
Speaker 2 11:47
Yep, yep. So 1000s of locations, essentially, at this point. So over the years, what would you say has been the most impactful thing when practices look at the metrics that you offer, what are some of those metrics where they're the highest leverage metrics to look at and say, if we can adjust this thing, it's actually going to transform your business. It's
Speaker 4 12:09
like a category rather than a specific one, but reasons not booked, and sometimes that could be like by marketing channel or whatnot, but the technology tells you when a lead is not scheduling a initial appointment or consult. Why didn't that happen? And the other thing that was going through my mind when Kevin was talking about Moneyball is this concept that I believe in, that I referred to as the aggregation of marginal gains, which means, if you're looking at a lot of different stuff in a place where it's easy to find it. You don't have to, like, even significantly alter one thing in a massive way. You could, like, slightly tweak two or three things and then add them up in it. And the outcome is big. That's what they did in Moneyball, right? They focused on maybe some different metrics compared to what people typically would. Well, they were like, you know, this guy gets on base point one, 5% more than this guy. So that's why we need to draft him like that kind of stuff, right? Reasons not booked shows you that you can look at it by person, by location, by treatment type, by marketing channel. So when practices take that insight and then you have to go make some type of a change, right? That's when we see a lot of transformational change. And then the other one, I would say, is speed to lead. So when a lead is filling out a web form, the amount of time it takes for a practice to call that person, the shorter that time gets, the more likely that person enters the phone and books. And that is some of the most transformational stuff for practices that get a lot of web form leads, they can significantly improve their conversion rate if they tackle that makes
Speaker 1 13:45
sense. You have some benchmarking that you could share with us from all of the practices that you're currently supporting that are currently online, what is like a really healthy score look like for missed call rate? Or what does a really healthy score look like? What others?
Speaker 2 14:00
Yeah, we can start with missed call. I mean, you guys have your metrics, right? There's like, top X percent is a x percent missed call rate. Like, talk
Speaker 4 14:08
about that a little bit. Yeah, I guess a couple. So we'll start with missed calls. So the average esthetics practice doesn't answer the phone to 14% of the time. That's average, the best is below five. So if someone's 14% or higher of missed calls, I'd tell them to shoot for 10 or less. And so I'd say in the five to 10 range is pretty good, and then anything below five is elite. Now, if you have a call center and you have a queue and you don't have like, a missed call concept, like someone would be on hold until they abandon, you got to find your abandonment rate. Of course, same concept, but those are the metrics you don't write missed calls sometimes, just by the way, like, we'll turn on line, and I've seen 73% missed calls. Like insane numbers, just in case someone's like, oh my god, I'm at 20. There's somebody worse. So that's what's going on with missed calls. And then lead to appointment conversion. Conversion rate overall is about 50% which includes the inbound calls and forms, not including online bookings, which we also capture, because online bookings convert at 100% because they're online booking, and we talked about reasons not booked. So what I just said was, half the leads don't schedule. And why is that? By far the number one issue is caller procrastination, which is anesthetics. Leads are going to ask a question. I don't know what the percentage is, but like, what probably 70% of the time. What does this cost? Tell me more. Does it hurt? Does it work? Who does it? Tell me about them, whatever. Because it's all cash pay, and they're usually searching online. Maybe their friend told them, but there's so much consumer mindset behind the inquiry. And what most staff members do is, when they think about what their job is of answering the phone, they're focused on being nice. Hopefully most people are and being helpful, and that translates into answering people's questions. You have a question, I'm going to be nice and helpful. I'm going to answer it. There is no like influence towards the direction of scheduling, and they're just waiting for the person to ask the next question, and it's a friendly interaction. How much is this? Okay, cool. Would you do this? Okay, great. Well, thanks so much. Have a good day. Oh yeah, you're welcome. Bye. That's caller procrastination. So just wasn't ever focused on scheduling, and no specific reason. So let me look at this real quick. Of the 50% of people that don't schedule ever 41% of that 50% is caller procrastination. And then the next one is staff taking a message, meaning they get a question they don't think they can answer. That's number two, and that's 15% so caller procrastination is head and shoulder is more common than anything.
Speaker 2 16:42
And it's so cool too that it's broken down by sales team member, because if someone doesn't feel equipped to to what you just said, answer that question that they were just asked, now we can start highlighting things of like, oh, this person just needs some more training, right? We haven't trained this person well enough. We need to focus more on this person. And that's the beauty of having the
Speaker 1 17:01
stats. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. Charlie coaching. Is that something that you provide, is that something that line provides? Or do you have insight that you can play way into that if caller procrastination is a by and large the biggest metric that is an opportunity right to improve on what are some ideas that you can provide to how to mitigate that? Yeah,
Speaker 4 17:25
we don't do coaching. We have some partners that do that, and real quick connection to our backstory. This might be of interest. When we first started, we were pretty focused, like we actually did do some coaching. And we were like, it's an entrepreneurial lesson. Because we're like, oh my God, these people need help with this. Nobody knows how to do this, man. And what we found was the people that are successful, like when you give them a talk track, and we even would measure it, you need to tap into what we call a job to be done. So someone in that organization already needs to be trying to actively elevate the performance of their team, right? If that's the case, and you give them a tool to help make that better beautiful. But it wasn't the case with almost all these practices. And so you had to sort of educate them, or create this internal initiative that didn't previously exist. You can do that, but it takes an enormous amount of effort, you know, to do so. And so then we got way more focused on providing data, and honestly, getting way more focused on marketing insights, which I know we've talked a lot about Mitch, because that's already a job to be done, right? Marketing leaders are trying to get better marketing data all the time. That leads to ROI to make better decisions. So as our product evolves, which we'll talk about, where we're headed at the end, it is more and more focused on a marketing leader. But going to your question, Kevin used to do coaching. I think I've trained or coached a couple 100 staff members. Here's the biggest issue, it's mindset of team members. I went a second ago. I said we're talking about caller procrastination. They think their job is to be nice and answer questions or be nice and be helpful, which translates into answering questions. They should think their job is to help people schedule, and even though that's sort of like, well, duh, of course, why would they answer the phone? If you ask your staff what their job is, they probably aren't going to say word for word, to help people. They're going to say something else. And so until they think and realize that that's the only thing I'm here to do when I'm answering the phone and talking to people, then any feedback or skills you give them just honestly aren't going to translate because they're not connected to the mindset of that person. So the first thing we would work on in coaching is, ad nauseam, literally having people say before a training session. Rami, what is your job? Oh, people scheduled, that's right. And if they don't do that, it's wasted effort, in my opinion, right? So it starts there, then the actual tactical stuff is imported at the beginning of the conversation. We were talking earlier about whatever, 70% plus of the callers are gonna ask a question. Know this. You can go in and hear it and see it. The staff know it. They handle the phone all day. People are typically asking a question if they're a new patient. So you don't want to just answer the question. You want to do something else. What is that thing? What we learned is it's this simple little phrase that is so easy to do. So someone says, How much do you charge per unit for Botox? And the answer should always be, I'd be happy to help you, because if you start that way, the person's like, great, you're going to help me, right? And then you can ask them a question, how did you hear about us? Have you been here? Whatever. And it's not like you're avoiding answering it. You could still give them an answer at some point, but now you actually are in a position to influence the direction of totally different than $14 a unit. So people that are hearing this are like, well, of course, that's true, but their staff doesn't do it because their mindset of how they think about their job is incorrect. It's
Speaker 2 20:54
the old adage, right? You can't improve what you can't measure. And so that's the thing that I love about when line is implemented, you can start getting those metrics and getting those KPIs, those key performance indicators, so that you know otherwise you're kind of just golfing in the dark. It's difficult to try and improve. You can try to be proactive and train based off of principle, but it's much more powerful to train based off of data. That shows you. Susie is having a tough time when she's asked this question, or she's having a hard time asking for the sale. So now we can give Susie the help that she needs to do. So Right? Because your people aren't dumb, they just haven't been trained, and so that's the responsibility of leadership, right? And so when they're trained, then we can level up. But where the training starts is, I think the thing that line really helps with, right? Yeah,
Speaker 4 21:43
for sure, and you have to have the data. And there's definitely some good training programs and consulting folks that do a good job with this. And certainly, like people I've met on your team Mitch, are fantastic that have a good understanding what I'm talking about. Most of the training is about the services and credentialing, like, that's what people think helps. So I call in, and I go, What do you charge for Botox? Oh, my God, our injector has been here for 20 years. That would be like, I don't care. You know what I mean? Yeah, because the psychology is just I asked a question, and if you answer it, I'm going to keep going. And if you tell me you're happy to help me, then I'm going to listen to listen to how you're going to help that's literally it. And if everybody did that, I bet their conversion rate would jump like five or 6% which is more than a marginal gain. But the only way you can do that is what Mitch said, you have to measure it, and then you have to have internal leadership who is going to make this a priority to that step. There's a variety of ways to do that, but without that piece, it is not going to happen. And so the insight for us was we can't control whether that organization has that leadership component or not, and if they don't, they're not going to successfully use and so even though they had good data, they were churning because they were like, hey, because they thought about it as training. They're like, Oh, this has been so helpful. We learned a lot from this. It was kind of like people that were breaking up with their gym membership. Oh, my God, this is so good for us, and you're so great. We're just not going to be healthy, right? You know? And then that's why we shifted to more and more data that connected to stuff that people were all the time trying to understand. But just going back to what you said Mitch, have to have data, have to have leadership that's making a priority, which means people are going to spend time with staff, like reviewing stuff with them and to actually help them. You know, it free,
Speaker 1 23:33
I think about the connective tissue that is required for a healthy marketing campaign to really understand and really see how a lead goes from wherever they're at in the ether all the way through sitting in a treatment chair. There's so many components that need to be really connected, and oftentimes in marketing, you can only say with certainty to a certain point. This is the ROI but the cool thing about being able to not just drill down to a conversation that takes place or maybe doesn't take place because of a missed call, is that you could really inform with that connective tissue, right, the decisions that are made at the beginning, and then really drive home all the way to what we really want, which is not just a really excited lead, but we want to have a raving fan who comes again and again and again, which takes place at that provider, at that treatment level, right? And you can only do that if these things are connected. And so much of what Mitch and I have been talking about with line is the integrations piece, right is where line can integrate with other softwares and really integrate with just ideas like ROI and how we track that.
Speaker 2 24:53
Yeah. I mean, even just the past month, we integrated it with go high level, which was a. Really big deal, by the way. We haven't even talked about that yet, Charlie, but we've booked, yeah, that's
Speaker 4 25:04
because you didn't respond to my email, bro, get in line. Just text me. Man, just text me. Yeah, text me. We'll
Speaker 2 25:12
talk about it. No, so, but we've booked 16 people from the missed call, text back feature, I mean, and when you think about lifetime, I don't even know about it, that's awesome. Yeah, come on, man, 16 people, and we're in conversation with, I think, around 60 people still in process of getting them booked on the go high level platform. So having that integration is a super big deal. Let me take a step back. So go high level and line are connected now via API sync. So it's basically like two remote controls talking with each other on the back end. So when someone calls in to line, go high level. Now knows that there was a missed call, if there was, and then what happens is line fires off what's called a web hook, but it basically is just a notification that there was a missed call with the information of the individual who the missed call was for, and then go high level, then we'll send them a text saying, so Sorry we missed your call. How can we assist you? And then the sales team can pick up from there. It's a huge deal, because for a practice, if you measure from installing line that they have a high missed call percentage, it's going to take some time to fix that issue, right? That's an operational piece where maybe we're short staffed on a certain day, maybe short staffed on specific hours. Maybe we need to train on how to put people on hold while still treating the patient in front of you with the same quality of patient care that you want. So there's a lot of things that take some time for training on that, but then in the interim, you can make that connection. And now we're saving all of this potentially lost revenue because of that integration. So super cool integration.
Speaker 4 26:44
We'll talk about where we're headed later, but there's going to be like, other layers to that. But, yeah, that's killer. Man, I'm glad that 16 have been they've been booked the word you used, or the concept connective tissue. Kevin, I love that. It's a lot of it's tech, right? Is the data flowing, but the connective tissue is also the individuals on different teams or departments that play a role different touch points in the journey, meaning, like marketing top of the funnel, then the front staff who are handling lead to appointment, and certainly people coming into the practice and hopefully moving forward. And when you have data that's connected, you actually gonna have conversations together that are real about what you would adjust so like in the live dashboard, you can see reasons not booked by marketing channel to figure out when people aren't booking from this campaign or these types of campaigns. Is that a marketing insight in the sense of something's off with our audience or messaging, or maybe there's just something different about the way they're asking question or the types they're asking because of where they came from. It doesn't make them a bad lead, but our team wasn't prepared for that. Like those discussions will dramatically elevate those teams working together in a way that will lead to more bookings. So I love the connective tissue concept.
Speaker 1 27:59
Yeah, I love that. I love also having conversations about how different marketing pillars are performing. And that happens a lot at top of funnel, right? So top of funnel, it's like, okay, this is our print strategy, and this is our Facebook, Instagram strategy, and this is our, you name it. And then we've got, we're AB testing, and all of these different pillars. I was gonna say email too. And oftentimes it's very easy to become myopically focused within each pillar and be like, Okay, I'm tracking ROI in this. I'm tracking ROI in this. The most exciting conclusions, though, are drawn when you're able to take a step back and look at things holistically fly 3000 feet, which is not to say that there's not benefit of having a comparison channel to channel, but that it is just to say that having your bottom of funnel or middle of funnel data tracking be connected throughout all of those different channels is really, really nice to have. It's really exciting. Yeah, and
Speaker 2 28:58
the thing is massively important. Go ahead, bitch. I was just gonna say. The thing I love about line two is, when you think about data, there's typically a cost to that data, and most of the time it's time, right? So we have a struggle as we're trying to help partners see data and find the data, so that we can all have actionable insights. Because the more data that you have, the more you can recognize, oh, there is a bottleneck here, here and here. So if we can remove those bottlenecks, then it's going to take the ceiling off of the business, and we're going to scale right? So finding those key performance indicators, those metrics, is super important. You have to have data to do so most of the time that's held in tension with, well, what capacity does my people have to get the data? And in the case of line, it sits in the background, right? You don't even have to know that it's there necessarily, unless the practice wants to be involved and see that. So mostly the leadership is just looking at it and analyzing all the data that it's been crunching in the background, right? Well. Whereas the people who are actually answering the phones, they don't answer the phones any different. So it's not a heavy lift on the people when we're asking, like, here's the data that we need and that we want in order to know where we can remove the bottlenecks to scale. So that's the thing that's really cool about it, is it's not really a big ask to implement because there's no additional time spent. Yeah, yeah,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai