Ken: All right. We’re back on The Bottom Liine. And today, we have Dallas Logan. She’s going to be talking with us about operations, some tech stack, some CRM questions, everything that can drive patient revenue. We’re going to talk about it. So Dallas is COO at ClearSight. Do you want to just say hi real quick, Dallas? Tell us who you are.

Dallas: Yeah. Hi, everybody. My names Dallas Logan. I’m based out of Oklahoma City and I run ClearSight. We are a refractive surgery practice, so we do Lasik lens replacement and everything in between. And that’s basically it.

Charlie: For Liine customers listening who didn’t know us before 2017. Maybe we used to be called SalesSync, which is a terrible name, obviously, but Dallas was like, I think you were like one of the first 15 groups, 20 groups we ever worked with. So Dallas is an OG SalesSync customer.

Dallas: Early adopter.

Charlie: Early adopters. A good way to say it, absolutely Excited to chat with you.

Ken: Yeah, thanks for coming on. I guess we can dive in then. I’ll I’ll throw some questions at you and I’m sure this will as always, devolve into more organic conversation. But why don’t we start with just big picture? You’re maybe you’re just getting started in this. What’s kind of the most important puzzle pieces to I guess, what’s what can you not live without on your tech stack?

Is it the CRM? Is it EHR? Where do we start? What’s what’s kind of the hub?

Dallas: Well, I mean, I think most practice starting out start on paper so you could probably live without your EHR. But you’ve got to have a CRM if you want to nurture your leads. And I know most practices start out with an excel sheet, and then they’re upset that their team isn’t following up accurately. There’s no way to track if they’re following up.

And that’s the nice thing about switching to a CRM is that you have some more active and easy follow up practices you can automate most of them connect to some kind of email platform where you can send mass emails. So I would say you got to have a CRM first.

Ken: Yes. And I think I read like HubSpot and some others aren’t HIPAA compliant is there certain ones to stay away from?

Dallas: Well, it just depends. A lot of us luckily live in the cash pay industry, so you don’t have to necessarily be HIPAA compliant and that very few of them are actually HIPAA compliant. So that’s why most people have CRM and then you switch and you also have some kind of medical platform like either paper charts or an EHR.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. There are some we’re getting asked this a lot now Ken and HIPAA compliant CRM and other, you know, lead management or lead tracking tools which is going to become more common, I think especially since google just came out with with the GA4 platform and said we’re not signing BAA it’s not HIPAA a compliant blah blah blah.

So I think a lot of people are looking into options more. So I bet more of them will be HIPAA compliant. But you’re right, if it’s cash pay, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s interesting. In terms of, by the way, side note, are a lot of people still using paper charts, Dallas, do you think?

Dallas: I know a lot of esthetics, dental and then I mean, I still think you see quite a few, you know, regular optometry practices and some refractive surgery practices still using charts. We actually just went paperless last August, so we haven’t been that long. It’s a hard changeover.

Charlie: Good gosh, that is shocking to me.

Dallas: It’s very hard. And we still have paper charts because used to be on paper. So it’s a process. If you’re starting a brand new practice, just go paperless.

Charlie: Hell, yeah. Hell yeah. That’s cool. Well, what about, like, so CRM is critical, but I mean, there’s probably some practices out there that like rarer now, but that aren’t really even thinking about a funnel and they’re just like, we get phone calls, people fill out a web form, we call them back, we get them scheduled for a consult, they come in and then if they’re tracking anything, they’re really starting.

there. People have scheduled, are they showing up? And then maybe they’re even good at okay, they had the consult but they didn’t decide to move forward with like LASIK yet. So they have some process there. What would you say to people about the opportunity in that bridge between lead and initial consult and how much fallout there probably is there?

That’s something like a CRM helps you take advantage of?

Dallas: Totally. Well, we know in the refractive surgery field, from the minute a person thinks about like I want LASIK that the funnels normally 12 to 14 months. So if you’re not nurturing that lead, you’re not doing yourself any service. And I know all of us are spending money on marketing in a way, lots of different formats. And so I think it’s really important to nurture that lead you know, no matter if they called one time, they said they had a contact us form.

They, you know, you put something on Facebook and they sign the form anyway. You get their contact information. You need to be continuously following up because one day, whatever you sell, that’s going to be on their mind. And if you’re not there, someone else will be there. And they’re going to be gone.

Charlie: Yeah, one day they’re walking their dog and all of a sudden they walk into a tree. They’re like, Oh my God, I’ve got to have Lasik now. And then they’re like, There’s that company that sent me an email.

Dallas: Truly, They’re like, Oh, yeah.

Charlie: Totally. I mean, stuff happens. I mean, that happens to me with a bunch of stuff. I just bought something on Amazon earlier that I’ve been looking at for a couple of months. I think it was a book and then it popped up in my head and I got it in 2 seconds with with that length of time, 12 to 14 months.

If I’m a practice and I’m like not doing lead nurturing or using technology or have a process around dealing with people before they book a console that seems like a big undertaking. So I imagine most of that 12 to 14 months is not human effort. There’s sort of like a front load of that. And then you’re doing like what is what is a what is a best practices core structure look like in that period of time to nurture leads?

Dallas: Well, and first of all, I want to tell everyone that you don’t have to start like we started. We’ve built and grown over the years and added not in that. And I feel like now we have a lot more than we did, but we have an automatic tax system. So the minute you put any kind of lead or contact us, anything populate through our system, you immediately get a text from whom we call Emily, and she starts the conversation kind of like a chat bot, except it only asks a few same questions.

If you respond to those, they go into our texting platform so we can start nurturing you with real people. If you don’t, it continues to text you for a few days. We also call every single lead within 24 hours minimum. And the goal is like 4 minutes. But reality, some like Mondays, we might have 150 leads. There’s no way.

And but we try to call them as fast as possible. If you have Liine you get help with that. Make sure that you’re calling them quickly. So we got the text message. In fact.

Ken: She said the thing!

Dallas: Oh, we got the call back from the actual people in our office and then we start an automatic email drip. So we don’t know what they’re a candidate for. We don’t know exactly what they want, that they get enrolled in a weekly email system that’s kind of telling them about our practice, what’s going on that kind of items we do based that on age.

And so depending on what you’re selling, we kind of nurture them in different ways until we get them to schedule an exam.

Ken: Are these all coming from different systems or do you have… like it seems like it would be easy for the data to get kind of siloed or have complication with talking back and forth.

Dallas: So so it all goes into our CRM. So any what we would call a web lead. So Google pay per click, you know, Facebook or social media, add anything off of our website that all filters into one location in our Sera and then you can send them to your emails. A lot of times it’s an easy place to start.

And then we work. All of those e-mails or leads have on to call it.

Charlie: How many calls, like is it just like obviously there’s the immediate call and then is it like a what was your basic first campaign? Or maybe you have it this way now, is it two or three calls? And if they haven’t gotten them on the phone, it’s all texting an email until the lead responds or what? What is the call part?

Dallas: Yeah. So we do the initial call within 24 hours and if they respond to a text or or the call, but they’re busy, then we nurture them via call 48 hours, 72 hours if they’re what I would call ghosting you. And don’t say anything at all. We wait and hit them again with a fresh set of calls at three weeks, but they’re still getting the rest of the automatic text message chain and those weekly emails during that time.

Charlie: Damn, that’s pretty impressive. And yeah, like Dallas said, I mean, that’s legit. You don’t have to do that the first day. But I mean, those are what I like about how she’s described. You’re describing it. It’s like it’s components of it. So just do something like say even if you said we’re going to call somebody one time and they’re going to start there and make sure we do that, and then we’re going to call them a second time and text them, start somewhere.

What is the most important thing to start with, Dallas?

Dallas: I can’t believe I’m saying this because I’m old fashioned and I think a phone call is keying, but they respond to text rapid fire at any time of the day. And so we’ve learned, you know, at a say, we have 100 Web leads on a monday and the automatic texts go out Sunday. You know, you did it on Sunday.

The automatic text goes out Sunday. We’ll come into 25 to 40 text messages replying to that, whereas your first round of phone calls, you maybe get a 50% pickup rate. Maybe so. Yeah. I think the auto text now is probably the way to go because it’s immediate if you can get that set up. And if not, I would say, you know, Monday morning you have someone go through and text every single person because that’s the fastest way to do it.

Start working those leads, and then someone else would start picking up the phone Monday afternoon, build some kind of process that worked for your team, where you do both.

Charlie: Totally. Yeah. That’s a lot of people you said that mentioned the old school mentality thing and like, look, people are just more and more used to texting with businesses now, obviously. Are you finding that that’s pretty I mean, a probably a 20 to 30 to 40 year old person is more likely to text than maybe someone who’s twice that age is what the objection would.

That’s what the objection would be. What do you say to that?

Dallas: It’s not true anymore. And also, we’re all fighting, I don’t know. Apple updated again a couple of weeks ago and it’s like says you’re a spam caller no matter what, basically. And so people just don’t answer the phone and versus a text message they can see what you have to say. They can make the decision to talk to you or not.

So it gives you definitely mixing both is probably the best. So if you catch them, if you don’t, but if you send the text and say this is yeah, this is Charlie from Liine when you call your apple phone picks up and says might be Charlie from Liine you’re no longer a spam risk.

Charlie: That’s right And when people see this is Charlie from Liine what’s the percentage of the pickup there Dallas typically?

Dallas: Ha. Mine is zero. Zero on the telephone.

Charlie: Actually you don’t pick up but you do respond to text. You’re proving the point. So yeah, that’s.

Dallas: Interesting if I can respond in a meeting, but I can’t talk to you on the phone.

Charlie: I know, I know. I know you could if you want. So summary there text got to have texting and even from somebody who still believes about calls like that, initial text is the way to go. And then doing both obviously helps. What about online scheduling? You guys have online booking right on your site?

Dallas: We do, yes.

Charlie: What’s the adoption been like with that? Like there are a lot of people doing it.

Dallas: We’ve had well, I’ve been here seven years and we’ve had online scheduling since before then. And. Well, you have. I think you have to have it. You can if you charge for exams, that’s completely fine. There’s a lot of platforms now that can take payment when you pay for charge for the exam. If you don’t, you put all the time slots in, but you’d be surprised how many people schedule an exam at 11:00 at night.

Well, you’re not going to answer the phone. So if they don’t have access to that and they forget about it and they get busy the next day, You lost a client.

Charlie: Yeah, like you can. You don’t you like it? It’s just like Amazon. You can buy at night. What do you think of that take It can have at that point Bingo.

Ken: We’ve heard this before. It’s quite a common theme.

Charlie: Yeah. And it’s just omnichannel like why, you know, and people will say I think I hear people say they don’t want to lose control of their schedule or just stuff like that. There’s lots of online scheduling vendors now. You know, we work with we work with a couple that we I don’t know if you know this, we actually integrate with online booking platforms now, which is pretty cool.

But there’s there’s ones out there that are that are legit and good and why would you not allow someone, regardless of time of day, the opportunity to schedule online And then also when you’re closed, like you’re giving people way more time to get on the schedule and generate revenue. So I’ve never understood why somebody wouldn’t have that. Do you guys incorporate that?

I assume you do in like, let’s just say texting. The messaging is like, Hey, it’s us, call us or reach back out to us or whatever. And I’m talking about the automated drip. Do you put in online booking links as well to say or you can also book online and people will go do that or those don’t really intermingle.

Dallas: And our current texting is a little more like, Have you ever thought about having a procedure before? Would this be your first concept? Like we’re trying to build a conversation, there’s a.

Charlie: Little more qualification and and needs building.

Dallas: Yeah, before we just hit with schedule an exam and we don’t want to scare them. But yes, you’re part of it. You do put in, you know, here’s a like the schedule we offer virtual or in office, you know, whatever you’re more comfortable with to try to butter them up to schedule their exam.

Charlie: That’s really interesting. Like, I don’t think I don’t think many people have the philosophy you just described. They’re just like, we have a league, call them, book them, get them, ask them to come in, suggest the appointment. But you guys are asking questions to have the person talk about why they’re thinking about it and so forth before you’re like, Well, listen, here’s what the process is like.

And it sounds like it would be beneficial for you to come in. How long? Like if I if I submitted something on the website, let’s just say it’s during business hours, I get a text, I engage and I’m I’m texting with your team member. Is it just like, at what point are they going to start bringing up the appointment and how far do they go and sort of qualifying me.

Dallas: We hope we try to go pretty fast, but like I said, you know, we don’t know how high in the funnel they are, right? So if they’ll say, Oh, I’ve never thought about it, or I just wanted pricing, you know, a lot of times will jump to, well, we can’t give you pricing over the phone. Why don’t we have you come in for an exam Like, you know, you can kind of educate that.

Charlie: Situation a little bit. Yeah.

Dallas: Yes, Yes, a little bit. I mean, the goal is always to get them in for an exam. That’s number one goal. But how we do it, and especially the auto text, is not a human. It starts with some nicer questions to warm them up. And by the time they get to a human, we can have a real conversation about scheduling and why you should schedule.

Charlie: Did you architect that messaging or who figured that out?

Dallas: I might have had something to do with that.

Charlie: Baller Baller, have you ever brought anything in like, you know, to name a company name? But is there any piece of software or like a concept that people you feel like people are like, ooh, we should have that, that you’ve tried and you’re like, And that’s just not really doesn’t really do anything. Maybe the interest.

Dallas: So I tried to adopt video messages.

Charlie: Right?

Dallas: I very quickly after we adopted you guys and it was too early and now I’m rethinking like instead of sending a text from Emily, what if it was a short video from a team member too?

Charlie: Or like, like patients weren’t ready to get that from a business yet. Yeah. Or health care related. Yeah. Interesting.

Dallas: But now we know. I mean, there’s enough statistics on TikTok. People like to watch more than they like to read. So I’m thinking it’s about time to try it again and see how it turns out.

Charlie: Yeah. Plus, if you use more video than other countries that will remain nameless can like infiltrate our headspace and figure out who we want to vote for and things like that. So that’s good.

Dallas: Yeah, we’re working on it. I just want them to vote for us. ClearSight.

Ken: Yes, that’s right.

Charlie: Yeah. We’ve been thinking about getting more video. I don’t know if I’ve talked to you about this Ken but in our sales process, in messaging as well, I think that’s important.

Ken: We’ve talked about a little bit. Yeah, we got to do it. What about after the booking is on the schedule? Are you doing like patient reminders or referral programs?

Dallas: So I have patient reminders set up weirdly ours book anywhere between 24 hours and two weeks ish in advance. So we have a one week, 48 hour if they and it turns them off so you don’t get all of them. And if you confirm and then a 24 hour and then a two hour before, you can’t turn off, just like a little reminder to come in.

And of course, we’ve really, really worked hard on that. During COVID, we had all those rules of practice and change those a million times. And I feel like I have a good system now and we only text we used to email and text reminders mixed and matched, and now it’s just text reminders. We also offer them the ability, depending on the appointment type, to cancel, reschedule on their own because this platform’s pretty cool.

They can reschedule some appointments on their own or to ask for help and then we call and reschedule them.

Ken: And are there automated touchpoints beyond that? Like once they’ve had an exam or even had a procedure.

Dallas: So I have a very strict follow up process. That’s probably what I’m best known for, is if we don’t convert, which know the goal is to convert an office, but you don’t convert 100% of the time. So if we don’t convert an office, it is a personal follow up call. 48 hours after one week, after two weeks after, and then every month they’re following for 14 months.

Well if it’s. Yeah, if the patient is a texter and they prefer texts, they can swap from calling to text. But we really like that personal touch of, Hey, last time we talked, this is what you said. I just wanted to follow up with you. How can I help? And those patients are also if they don’t convert and we know what they’re a candidate for, at that point, they go into an automatic drip email campaign based on the procedure they’re a candidate for.

So, you know, if they’re a candidate for LASIK, all their emails will then be formatted about Lasik and kind of taking them back through the process of why it’s important versus one of the other procedures.

Charlie: This is going to be a hard question. So if let’s say somebody who has a practice is listening and they’re like, my God, my I have zero process for measuring managing leads to get them to schedule a consult. Maybe they’ve got reminders and stuff, but postcards or they have nothing. They’re just like, Oh my God, we didn’t get them to move forward.

If you had to choose one of those two, the post consult, follow up and then the lead and consult process to optimize for or do anything about first, what do you go with.

Dallas: If you have to pick? I’d pick following up with your exams that didn’t schedule an office because those are what I would call a hot lead that took time under control. Yeah.

Charlie: Tough, tough question. I told you.

Ken: Can I ask about your emails? Is this is this more like educational content around the procedures in general, or is this more like following up like, hey, here’s why you should call us back.

Dallas: Yes. Nope. Because that’s what the team’s doing. They’re saying, Hey, call me back, schedule you. Emails are like, Why is Lasik important? Don’t listen to us. What’s the other patients our what would your procedure be like? What what do people say about us? Like there’s a variety pack of them that kind of go through different, you know, educational and referrals to help them move forward in the process.

Charlie: It’s a good, good combo with that. I think a lot of people don’t think that way with the email and the emails do and you should schedule the text is doing the you should schedule, the people are calling, hey, you should schedule a console and it’s just like, good gosh, this is, this feels salesy whereas you can use the email.

Nurture is like this foundation of you’re making an impression of educating and all that. It’s got to be done the right way. Sounds like the text is kind of similar. Well, actually, the text is like, why do you want to do this? And have you thought about this before? And then the calls are just like, Come on.

Dallas: And they’re educational. We do. I know some of our pricing is so high and we want to make sure the patient understands what they’re coming in for because everyone takes their candidate for Lasik. I’m sure that’s the same way with most options. And so we want to educate them what could be a candidate for and give them the price range so they’re not shocked when they arrive.

So we call even if you schedule online at midnight, we’re going to call you the next day and talk to you about your exam.

Charlie: Do you guys find that and meaning some more information about how you figure out what they’re a candidate for? And maybe you kind of bucket it based on age or other stuff in that initial call and then price range?

Dallas: Yes, definitely. So that initial calls, you know, like what’s bothering you? How can we help you? Have you looked into this before and then? Yeah, we know based on age and I can’t see up close, I can’t see a far away. I’ve been told I’m not a candidate. How we can kind of discuss that conversation little further in depth and then we but I will say we may ask it under we just want to let you know, expect when you come in for your exam, it’s going to be this many minutes long.

This is what’s going to happen. So by the way, tell me about your vision and that you’ve built up a little bit of trust before you start. Yeah, throwing money around.

Charlie: Totally love it.

Ken: Awesome. Yeah, I think we should probably wrap because we tend to go long, but any final thoughts or questions that.

Charlie: Dallas and I aren’t done catching up. What’s your problem?

Ken: That’ll be the next episode.

Dallas: He’s used to chasing you around, Charlie. He knows the rules.

Charlie: That’s right.

Ken: Hey, uh, very cool, Dallas. Anything you want to plug or tell people where they can find you guys?

Dallas: Yeah, well, if you are interested in refractive surgery or getting out of your glasses or contacts, we have an office in Oklahoma City, and one in Plano, Texas. You can check us out at www dot clearsight dot com.

Ken: Very cool and Charlie?

Charlie: Best in the business, man. Let me tell you something about what we said today. There is no more complex and and meaning in a good way an effective lead management process. I’ve seen in any specialty you heard that today with what now said so real deal stuff here and they’ve got not only the best conversion rates, but you can tell what the length of time they’re nurturing people.

They have people coming in that are serious about getting a procedure done, and that’s what they’re doing so well. So thanks for being on, Dallas.

Dallas: Thanks, Charlie. Appreciate it.