Referral Outreach That Doesn't Read Like a Form Letter

You're listening to Podiatry Marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome back to this week's episode of Podiatry Marketing. With me, as he always is every week with a big smile on his face, it is big Jim Mac. How are doing today, Jim?

Tyson, things are good. No complaints here in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. So, no, loving life.

I tell you, Cairns at the moment is just... It is just absolutely perfect. We've we've finished our harsh winter of... Actually, it wasn't harsh. I live in the tropics.

And... But now we're we're sort of... You pass winter, you're into what we call our spring. Starting to warm up. This is this is, like, probably the perfect time of the year to be in the tropics because we haven't really hit that summer where it's just...

Really starts to hurt. It's it's still nice to be a subbed, super warm swim in the pool. It's great.

At some point in time, have to come out to... Yeah. Have to come out there sometime in October, November in in Cairns just to come visit sometime. Definitely get away from... I I like fall here in Canada, but once we get to get...

Getting too cold, it... Definitely a nice little escape to Australia would be nice.

Yeah. Well, my travel recommendation, Jim, would be for you who are coming from a slightly cooler climate, you want to be here June, July, August. You wanna be here in our winter.

Okay.

In our our harsh extremes of waking up in the morning and it's 16 degrees Celsius. We got hoodies on and we're complaining about the cold. Yeah. Yeah. One morning, it hit nine degrees Celsius.

Oh, man. That's a rough day. It was was

on the news. It was front page of the paper. Cairns. And everyone's complaining about the the changing environment. But anyway, enough about the weather.

What are we talking about today?

Yeah. So in the past we talked about different types of referrals, but, know, speaking with some of my clients recently, trying to help them nail down kind of a workflow and a system around referrals. What we're gonna talk about today is referral outreach that doesn't read like a form letter, right? I think there's urgent clinics around your area that every day or so they get a twisted ankle that comes into their urgent care clinic. When the provider there needs to send the patient somewhere to follow-up, your name probably isn't one that they write down.

So how can you be that kind of go to referral partner for these groups? Especially in The United States, these urgent care centers are kind of exploding because no one wants to wait two or three hours in an emergency room with people that are really sick. So what we're gonna talk about today is this referral outreach and kind of how it works. Just sometimes it takes a long time, if someone, you had a, it took a long time in the past, but if someone had to build a list, and look up like the phone number or the demographics or the address, write the letters, address the envelopes and chase maybe like a lunch and learn or a way to get to know somebody. So most practices did it once and they mailed maybe the same dear colleague letter, you know, we're pleased to announce x y z.

Really doesn't, you know, make people that interested. But now with AI, it can kind of change up some of those slow parts or those kind of nondescript generic parts of of Outreach. So, you know, the research and personalization that's used used to eat up kind of a month of time to get this list and to get this stuff out there. Yeah. It can now fit into maybe an afternoon or a couple of days of work.

So that's what we're gonna dive into today.

Okay, looking forward to it. So where do we start or where does everybody start?

Yeah, so the first is kind of your best referral resources, know, they don't know what you treat, right? They need to know you're a foot doctor, but they don't know those three to five or maybe just that one thing you really wanna have come into the practice. So, you know, most doctors outside the world think podiatry means... Sometimes they think it means toenails and diabetic feet, and that's about it. The urgent care PA doesn't know that you see an ankle sprain in, like, like, the same day or the day after.

The pediatrician doesn't know that you treat, you know, 11 year old with a soccer player with heel pain. The dermatologist doesn't know that, you know, you treat plantar's warts that they just haven't been able to take good care of. These aren't doctors that decided not to refer to you. They just didn't know what they could send you and what you treat. So getting out there and being seen for the type of care you wanna provide requires some action to make sure that you're seen.

But it's like anything, If you don't tell people what you do, you can't just expect people to automatically know everything that a podiatrist does. And especially if you have an interest in a particular area, I remember when I set up my MacKay clinic, and we went down there with the focus that all we were gonna do was biomechanics. Biomechanics orthotics. We weren't doing anything else. And so we went around to every single doctor, pharmacy, everybody that we thought would...

Who would listen to us to let them know, when you see our sign go up, don't send us routine foot care patients because we're not set up for that. That's not what we're going to be doing. So because we went out of our way to tell them exactly what we did, every time we got a referral, it was always spot on to exactly what we told them we were chasing.

No. Absolutely. That's a great point. You you need to educate them about the types of care you wanna provide. And and that starts with really kind of who...

Understanding who your current referrals are. You When's know, the last time you reached out to them? Do you have a list of those current referrers? Do you maintain consistent contact with them? So you don't have to start from scratch.

I mean, there's already people that trust you there, but they just need to know more about what you do and how you can help them out. And then like I talked about, there's other types of care and other types of providers in your local area that you can reach out to. Sometimes that is that urgent care clinic, right? If they seen an ingrown toenail, they're not the expert. They're not gonna know.

They might, you know, give the the parents antibiotics for the kid. They don't know, you know, the right way to take care of a... An ingrown toenail permanently. So if they know you take care of this, then you become an option. Also, dermatologists.

A lot of dermatologists don't wanna work with, like, you know, fungal nails, for example, they wanna do their biopsies, their kind of continuous like follow ups on people, but they don't necessarily wanna treat onychomycosis. So, you know, getting in contact with those folks, that's something you really value. If you wanna see more pediatric patients, make sure you reach out to those types of groups and the people that take care of them. So whether it's primary care, sometimes it's internal medicine, endocrinology, if you wanna get into wound care, maybe it's physical therapists, you wanna treat more like sports and injuries, things of that nature, or maybe it's orthopedic providers that there's groups that they don't really care about foot and ankle, or they don't have the expertise and they're looking for someone to send somebody to. You don't really want to chase all of these people.

You want to know what you want to do and then maybe going after two or three of these kind of different providers with a very clear offering about who you are and what you do. You don't want to say you do like 50 diagnosis and 50 treatments because you'll just kind of get, it'll just kind of like wash over them. They won't still really know what you do. So make it either one really clear diagnosis or treatment that you do or just a couple so they don't get too confused. But that's a great way.

It's like kinda identify the type of care you wanna provide and see who other... You know, what other providers out there seeing it that may not wanna be seeing it themselves.

Yeah. And I wanna go back a step too when you mentioned about keeping your database up to date, who you've seen, who's there. We used to... I think it was every February, because February used to be one of the slightly quieter months. January used to be flat out, and then February just start to die down.

So we go in February, March. We used to send a a letter to every practice manager that we had on our database, and we'd say to them, we go, oh, just updating our database, our records this year. This is who we have listed, and we'd list everybody that was at their their medical practice. Can you cross off anyone who's no longer there and add names down the bottom of the... And we'd leave space there to fill in the names, the email address, just the details.

And can you update this so we can put it in our records? Oh, by the way, this is who's now at our podiatry clinic, and this is their interest. So it just reminded them, and we'd we'd send it with a self stamp, yeah, address envelope back to ourselves. Every time we sent them out, 90% of them we get back without any problems. And the ones we didn't get back, we'd then phone up just to keep our database up to date.

And it was another contact point with with each of those practices. Absolutely. That leads perfectly into the next point I wanted to

make is that the list used to take a long time, right? Like it used to be one of those things where you had to, you know, if you're going to prospect and try to look for new providers, maybe it's 20 miles away or a 20 mile radius around your clinic, you really had to, you know, basically kind of build out that referral base yourself. But the nice thing these days is with things like Chat, GPT and Claude is that you can say things like it can draw names from like an NPI registry, which is like the national providers, like index in The United States. You can have it look through Google business profiles. You can have it look through Google Maps.

You'll be able to find rich demographic information, name, their address, what group they're in, and just kind of using AI to kind of clean up this list. Then it'll take, you know, fifteen to twenty minutes just to get that initial list of people. And maybe, maybe there's certain people that won't kind of fit the criteria, whether they're already kind of in a protected multi specialty group and they're unlikely to refer to other people outside of that group. But there might be groups of, you know, pediatric specialists that are not associated with a hospital group who would love to send you all their ingrown toenails. So it's a matter of just like when you have these powerful tools like clot and chat GPT, knowing the right questions to ask it and how to prompt it in a way that could basically build this list for you in fifteen or twenty minutes that would have taken weeks in the past to do.

Once you create this particular list, are you then taking that information and, like, saving it, of course, but then reusing it six, twelve months later and saying, hey. Is there anything that needs to be changed? Using AI again to keep that that list updated?

No. Absolutely. And, like, that's a that's a wonderful thing. I think Claude and some of these connectors that Claude has. So for example, like you could make that list and have it output like a document, right?

So like a eight or 10 page list of all the different clinics and all the different referral potential referral sources. And then, you know, as you kind of like work with it, either you can print it out or you can look at your screen and say, you know, take this one off because I know they only refer internally, you know, you can do those types of things, but just even, you know, by talking into a voice notes app and then uploading that audio file, There's very quick and cost effective, you know, time effective ways of building out that list and refining that list. Maybe, you know, as you get responses from people, either through an email or a mail out that you send, you can say like, Doctor. Smith and his clinic responded positively. So you can update that kind of database or update that, you know, either spreadsheet or document where you kind of created that list of folks.

So yeah, it's a... This is a way to kind of create a living database or living document that really requires very little time to update as opposed to like having a piece of paper somewhere or trying to kind of like update the spreadsheet somewhere yourself. You can just talk directly to the chat GPT or talk directly to Claude and it'll do it for you.

Okay, that's fantastic. So what's next after that?

Yeah, so like, I think there can be benefits, you know, like I said, you want to verify these things, you want to keep the list small, but the next step really is how you create that message that you wanna send out. And like we talked about, generic is gonna get recycled and kind of thrown away, but specific is gonna get read. So, you know, every referring office gets, you know, if they get the same letter, Dear doctor, we're pleased to welcome this, you know, Doctor. Smith to the practice, that's going to straight into the recycling. What gets read is a letter that obviously knows who it's going to, you know, to the urgent care clinic, you know, being specific about you're willing to see their ankle sprains or their ingrown toenails within twenty four or forty eight hours and email us the same day.

You know, we'll email you the note the same day after we see them or we'll contact you to the pediatrician. That's like, you know, when there's flat feet to look at, you know, we're available. So just speaking directly to them with some of the types of problems and the kind of challenges they have in their clinic and how you can make their lives easier is gonna be a much better way than just sending, you know, generic, letters out and you can craft those utilizing things like ChatGPT and Claude to really speak to those different providers.

And if you haven't got something written yourself already that you've previously used, and I have done this myself where I've had... Even where there's been an article or maybe something I've put on my website, some information about something I do. You can then still take what you've already written, put it into one of the AI programs and say, this is what I'm trying to do. This is the outcome that I wanna achieve. Is there anything you would add or change or that I'm missing?

And it's surprising. I've always found how surprising it is, whether it's chat or gem... All of them, where they find holes in everything that you've done. And I say, have you thought about adding this? Have you thought about adding that?

And you've got, nah. Thank you very much. And then it helps rewrite it. So I could see if you've already got some really good stuff that you think has worked in the past and even if it's working well, it still goes through this process to refine it and make it better.

Yeah. The refinement process is super important because it helps you become more specific and speak more to them. So like I said, it's, you what you wanna make sure you mention, you know, what condition you're helping them with, how fast you'll see the patient, what you'll send back to them and kind of give them a general sense of how long that's going to take. And then one detail about their office, about what their teams cover or a provider who just joined, some things like that just to kind of tie it in that you're paying attention to them as well, because they want to know that you're potentially sending patients their way as well. It can be a two way situation and vice versa.

So, like I talked about, AI workflow is pretty simple. You know, give your practice facts once, you know, target the practices website, ask for like a one page, you you want to ask the LLM or like, so like ChatGPT or Claude for just a one page, you know, a link letter in plain language. And then you edit it up. Like I said, if you have previous letters similar to, you know, what you wanna do, it's a great way to clean up. It's a great baseline to start off with.

And then you'll just... You know, you'll send that out. You'll have it work on that. Like I said, you wanna make sure you have some guardrails in place. You want to, you know, make sure you read over it.

You're editing it. It's not kind of hallucinating. I think the the models that are currently out there are pretty good, but at the same time, you don't you don't want to just assume that it did the job perfectly. Right? So it's just...

It's really, really important that that happens. So, you know, AI does the research in the first draft and it's your judgment, you know, before you put your name on it that it's accurate and that it really speaks in the voice that you want to, you know, show those potential referring physicians.

I think it's so important. Anything that AI produces for you, you must read it and make sure it's correct. Because sometimes it does just... It just makes stuff up. I don't know if I mentioned it on the podcast, previous episode.

There was somewhere where the show was dedicated to a particular person. And I thought, oh, that must have died. I wonder who that person was. What's the relationship to the show? So I said to him in episode...

Yeah. Season this episode that who was the person that they dedicated to? And he said, it was this person. And I'm like, I know that was wrong because I don't remember the name, but I knew it was like a Spanish sounding name. It wasn't that one.

I ended up hunting through, found the answer. I went back to AI and said, you were wrong. This is who it actually was. I went, oh, yeah. You're right.

Yeah. You're right. I made a mistake. I was completely wrong. I made that up.

But it's like, at least it it admitted it sometimes just makes things up if it's not sure of the answer instead of you saying I don't know.

Yeah. It's always gonna put something in there. It's never gonna say it doesn't know.

So, yeah, I think anything it's reducing, read it. But I honestly think read it and modify it to make sure make sure it still sounds like you on how you

would normally write. Absolutely. I think the personalization is not only that you're writing for them, but it sounds like you and your values and the way you would want to speak to a potential refer.

Okay. What's next after that?

Next is about kind of, you know, avoiding just doing one offs. You know, I think this is something that people, you know, I'll just give you that one thing and then let it rest. But, you know, whether it's a letter, a postcard, and then kind of asking for, you know, maybe it's a coffee or like teaching their team or doing a lunch and learn with a team. You know, one letter doesn't really build a referral relationship. You know, a sequence and consistency can, though.

So maybe it's week one, a personalized letter with your, you know, Podiatry information to them. You know, week three is a postcard with one message that maybe you see like ankle sprains within twenty four or forty eight hours and maybe week four or five, it's a reach reaching out to them to see, you know, would it be possible for you to come in and speak to them about a specific type of diagnosis or treatment they do that you think would benefit their practice. So like I said, it's one of those things where I think a lot of people get, oh, this is a great idea. I'm gonna send a letter. Fantastic.

But I think for it to really work and for it to sink in, I think there's studies that show out there, especially in like, I don't know, b to b marketing, which is kinda like business to business marketing, which is kind of when one clinic is trying to build a relationship... Business relationship with another with another clinic, you know, could take somewhere like seven to 10 different touch points or, you know, somewhere in that ballpark to know for them to know that you exist and for it to build trust with you. And I've I've seen numbers where it sometimes takes, you know, almost a year to win business or to win, you know, patients from other clinics because you just have to build up trust over a long period of time. So, you know, doing more than one thing I think is important. That sequence can be different depending on who you are, but, you know, not just these these one offs are generally pretty unsuccessful.

If you just send one random thing, you know, once every five years, you're probably not going to get much throughput and much relationship building there. But if you're a little bit more consistent, not in an annoying or invasive way, but just in a way letting them know you're there to help their patients and help them, I think they'll be much more receptive.

Yeah. I call it the spray and pray method when you're just sending one letter or one post or whatever. You're sending it out to everybody, and then you're sitting back on your hands and knees going, please god, let somebody respond this time. It's... You have to do it multiple times.

I was only talking to a friend of mine this morning, actually. And we were talking about recall sequences and where some people would just send out one recall letter. Oh, jeez. I'm like, yeah, patients aren't responding. I don't think recalls work.

This is a waste of time. And then I realized where you've just gotta have multiple ways of contacting people and you've gotta do it over a period of time and this is no different. Until they tell you to stop annoying them, you're not annoying them. And it... And I know myself, but I might receive a letter.

It might be an email from somewhere. And I I actually really mean to take action on it. Life is busy. All of sudden, I receive that email. Yep.

I need to do something about that. Oh, hang on. I just gotta talk to big Jim first. We're do the podcast. I finish the deal, then you're talking to a coaching client.

And all of sudden, that thing that you were going to take action on, I need them to follow it up because I I need a reminder. These people are no different.

Absolutely. You know, like there's so much stuff coming at us all the time. So in order to to break through the noise, you have to be consistently providing value and showing that you care. And like that's, you know, having, you know, more than one touch point is is critical. Otherwise, you know, people will just fall through the cracks and they won't...

They don't know who you are or what you do.

Yeah. And some people too, they just... Some podiatrists are just tight. They'll send an email, but they don't wanna do anything else because it costs money to put a stamp on an envelope or to send out a postcard. But in the big scheme of things, what it costs you to send something out to what you can get back in return is is absolutely insignificant.

Absolutely. Where to from here?

Yeah. So to wrap things up, the last point is really, really important to track this because like we talked about in the past, if you don't measure, you know, what you're doing, it's really kind of you're just kind of shooting into the dark and hoping things happen. And most referral outreach kind of dies in the same way, you know, burst of letters or a couple of lunches, and then nobody checks whether it worked, Right? So you don't really know what... What's benefiting the practice.

So six months later, nobody remembers, you know, what happened. But two things fix that. Ask every new patient who sent them. And we talked about in the past, like, why did you choose us over somebody else is a good question as well. Well, doctor Smith sent me, so that's that's why I came to see you.

And make sure the answer lands. It's something you can report on and you write it down. And then kinda close the loop with the referring office every single time. You know, consult note back within a day is the best marketing you'll ever send to another doctor. So it's really really important that you know you're asking the patients where they come from and don't just accept like I found you on Google because like that that could be one of about 30 different things.

Is it Google Ads? Is it go... Google local search? Is it a regular search? Is it on Google Maps?

Was it... You know, so you don't have to pry if they they don't feel like telling you, like, obviously, respect that. But, you know, people are usually happy to to hear... To tell you where you... They heard about you and where they came from.

It it helps you to understand what's really working. So make sure you ask patients that and you close the loop with a really good consult note that thanks that referral because that's gonna mean just a a greater way of building that relationship that'll lead to other patients in the future.

Yeah. No. I definitely agree with the... Like, digging a little bit deeper when a patient tells you how they found out to be. And I used to say that with patients.

If they write down Google search, I'd go, so you were sitting there at home. Also, you went, I need to see a podiatrist. And you went podiatrist in Cairns. And they were, well, no. No.

No. I was at my... Yeah. I was at the rheumatologist. And the rheumatologist said to me, you need to see a podiatrist.

They're on Mulgrave Road. I can't remember the name, but that's where you need to go. I'm going, okay. So the rheumatologist has actually sent you. One, we need to thank them, but we need to remind them what our business name is.

And it's just by asking that one extra question, you get all this additional information that then helps you in the future when you're when you're doing more planning or more marketing.

No, absolutely. There's something called that last click attribution or last kind of a touch point attribution where, you know, maybe they saw you, you sponsored the baseball team and then they, the rheumatologist said that, podiatrist on XYZ Street, right? And then... But they don't remember what your name was, so they Google it. And then if they happen to click on an ad, then like that Google ad caused the conversion, right?

But it was the last click that kind of gets the attribution and not the kind of the lead up and those other touch points that happened along the way.

That's why you need to have multiple ways of communicating with professional referrers, multiple ways of marketing to patients, multiple ways of getting recalls and reactivations. You can never just rely on one method because it's it's all those touch points that people need to see before sometimes they actually take any action.

No, absolutely. And it's a kind of recap, know, the main points of today, I'd say is that number one, your best referral sources, they don't know like what you like to treat the most, you know, and, you know, how fast you'll be able to see it for them. So whether it's an urgent care clinic or a pediatrician or dermatologist, you know, they need to be educated about this. And number two is that that referral list, you know, it's only gonna take like an afternoon to complete. You know there's so many good data sources out there available on the internet and utilizing things like Clot and ChatGPT can really help clean it up and help you create a really good either spreadsheet or a Google Doc that you can really utilize and kind of keep up to date with with kind of, you know, what you think is those opportunities based off the types of patients you want to see.

I'd say number three is that specific letters get read and generic ones get recycled. So utilize AI and maybe some like Tyson mentioned utilizing some older, you know, referral letters that you sent... You've used in the past as kind of a baseline, but utilize that really, really important. And then obviously edit it to make sure that it's it's in your voice and the the kind of way you wanna speaking to potential referrers. Number four is, like I said, don't just do one offs like a letter, a postcard, a lunch or coffee invitation with the doctor or the staff is a huge thing.

And last but not least is that track every referral and close the loop. Right? So ask the patient where... How they heard about you, and don't be afraid to go a couple layers deeper than just I found you on Google or, you know, I found you on Google after doctor Franklin, you know, or referred me or something like that. So it's super important, but then also close the loop with podiatrist or not the podiatrist, but referring physician to make sure that they understand what you did for the patient and they feel like, you know, you thank them and they're kind of in the loop as far as what's going on with the patient they sent your way.

So like I said, really important to keep track of that stuff because if you don't know where it's coming from, you won't know how to keep improving it. But this week, would really recommend that people take a little bit of time, try to see if clot or chattypd can kind of help them create this list, identify diagnosis procedure they want to do more of, and then kind of work through this workflow. If you have questions or it doesn't make sense or there's little details that you want to understand better, then reach out to Tyson and myself. We're always happy to provide information about what we talk about on the podcast. We're here to service our fellow podiatrists and I think this will be a way to help you differentiate yourself from others out there and a really great way to help continue to build your practice and sometimes an environment and a time of year that can be a little tricky for different podiatrists as we're kind of wrapping up 2026.

It's all really, really good advice. This is a good topic. Well, it's a good topic because it's one of these things that we talk about our professional referrers and who we who we want sending us certain patients. But I think getting AI involved more to help tidy everything up, focus on what it is that you really wanna do, talking to like urgent care providers. It's just, it's a really good reminder for everyone.

No. It's one of those things like, so once you have this kind of list built out, it's something you can kinda go back to each quarter. Right? Like, it's not like you have to, oh my gosh, like I have to do eight pieces of mail in the next like eight weeks. No, that's not what we're talking about.

It's like, I'd say every quarter if you're doing something for your first, you know, three or four times during that quarter, and then you'll see how it it pans out. You can speak to the LLM or send information into it. And then what are you gonna do in the following quarter? What worked and what didn't work? What was successful?

And you know, who is interacting with and who isn't? And then it helps you really have more of a roadmap about how to kind of take action because we're always talking about, oh you know internal refers, external refers, but having a workflow that's going to help you achieve that and kind of have some accountability about what's working not working is super important.

Couldn't agree more. Anything else before we wrap up? No. I think we're good, Tyson. Okay.

And if anybody has any questions, your email address is if they wanna reach out to you directly.

Sure. Jim@PodiatryGrowth.com. And you are?

Tf@TysonFranklin.com. So hard to remember that one. For sure. Okay. Big Jim, I look forward to talking to you next week.

That sounds great, Tyson. Okay. See you later. Bye. Bye now.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.