Get a CRM — tracking physician referral prospects

Stage I: Prospecting

Prospecting, or generating leads, is the act of collecting names, phone numbers, locations, and other information on prospective referral sources. It is arguably the most important part of creating a steady stream of referrals. Without thorough prospecting, you will spend all of your time and energy on the wrong doctors and the fruits of your labor will never be realized.

Prospecting for healthcare referrals today is different than it was in the past. Fifteen years ago, the only free way to generate prospects for therapists would have been to open up the yellow pages and see who is listed as a doctor. Anything beyond that would have required an investment at a local marketing firm in the form of purchased leads. Today the internet allows us to do for free what a marketing firm would have sold to us in the past.

Prospecting for medical referrals is easy if you know where to go and what to look for. Let us take a look now at the best steps to take while in the first stage of building a framework, Prospecting.

Step 1: Get A CRM

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Manager” or “Client Relationship Manager.” It is an essential tool for anyone looking to build a business from medical referrals. A CRM is a database with information that you can input and edit on each prospect. There are literally dozens of CRM options for you to choose from, each one with different strengths and weaknesses. I encourage you to spend some time and choose a CRM that meets your own needs and find one that works best for you. Many of them are even free.

Whichever one you decide to use, your CRM will need to include a few things. These are the essential elements that your CRM should have.

Prospect information. Name of the practice, address, phone number, fax number, and specialty.
Status. Indicating if the office is actively referring or not.
Contacts at each prospect. Each prospect will need to have an updated list of all contacts including doctors and staff.
Notes. The notes section needs to be somewhat robust as it needs to be lengthy, and updatable.
Calendar. A calendar to schedule your office visits.

In addition to these elements in your CRM, I highly recommend that you keep a task list in association with your primary list of prospects, which we will get to later. The CRM that I use integrates my task list and allows me to push tasks to my calendar so that my calendar and tasks are always with me.

Take the time now, before reading on, to get your CRM up and running. Any tool that has the five elements above will do the job; the point is that the prospects live somewhere other than your memory before you gather a single name.

2026 update

Choose a CRM by the checklist, not by the name

The 2014 edition named the specific product the author was using at the time. That recommendation has been dropped rather than swapped for a newer one. The CRM market turns over far faster than a book does — tools get bought, free tiers get withdrawn, pricing gets restructured — so any single name printed here would be wrong again within a few years.

What has not changed is the requirement list above, which is the part worth keeping. Judge a candidate against it rather than against a feature comparison:

Prospect information, including a fax number.
A status you can see at a glance: referring, or not.
Contacts at each prospect, doctors and staff both.
Notes that can run long and stay easy to update.
A calendar, with a task list that feeds it.

Any modern CRM that covers those will run this system. The one you will actually open every day beats the one with the longer feature list.

Editorial note added in 2026. The surrounding chapter is the original text.