Conclusion

You now have an understanding of what it takes to build a framework of medical referrals to grow your practice. Each stage of the referral development process can happen at any time for any prospect. You will find yourself shifting from Stage I to Stage III in the course of the same day with different prospects at different times.

The specifics of your referral framework may differ from mine and will reflect your unique practice and the needs of your area physicians and patients. However, all of the steps I have provided here will be useful in getting you started. If you follow the Frameworks System as I have presented it, you will be on your way to acquiring medical referrals that can supplement your practice or be the core of it. How you use this information is up to you.

Let us summarize here the stages of building a referral framework.

Stage I: Prospecting

1. Get a client relationship manager (a CRM).
2. Select a target market.
3. Create a master list.
4. Select starting opportunities.

Stage II: Make Initial Office Calls

1. Prepare by creating an elevator pitch and developing the three parts to your pre-call.
2. Make your office calls.
3. Analyze and record your visit with a post-call.

Stage III: Outreach

1. Prepare the material.
2. Engage prospect with outreach activity.
3. Meet with doctor and other office influencers.
4. Repeat these steps as necessary.

Where to go from here

Do not forget that the useful material referred to throughout this book — the flyers, the pamphlets, the pitches, the note templates — is gathered in the resource library. Take a look at what is there and get started building your referral framework.

I highly encourage you to approach this manual as a working document not just for you, but for others in our industry. We will all benefit greatly if there are more massage therapists approaching physicians in a professional and industry-standard manner about the usage of massage therapy on a regular basis. Please ask what you can do that improves what I have presented here and share that knowledge with others.

I hope to see a twenty-first century in which massage therapy explodes into American culture in a way that every single person benefits from. Marketing to physicians can be a truly exhilarating experience and I hope you get to feel that exhilaration in the same way that I have. That is the reason I have written this book. I hope you use it and I hope that it helps.