This week on the Future Ear Radio podcast, I’m joined by Erik Sorenson, Co-Founder of HearWorks. Prior to co-founding HearWorks, Erik spent his early career in the ad-agency industry which culminated into Erik starting and then eventually selling his own ad agency. During his time working in advertising, Erik was exposed to the hearing health industry via one of his clients. Upon selling his agency and through a series of serendipitous events, Erik circled back to the hearing health industry and became a multi-clinic owner.
Through his experience as a practice owner, and his background in advertising, Erik realized there was an opportunity within the hearing health industry to deploy some of the tactics familiar to him from his advertising days that were non-existent within hearing health. One of the most obvious areas that hearing health was lacking was around marketing automation, which now serves as one of the key differentiators of HearWorks.
As has been the theme during the past year on the podcast, this conversation ties into the broader conversation revolving around differentiation. Rather than focusing on ways to differentiate inside the clinic, as has been the topic of many of my recent episodes, this conversation focuses on the battle for customers being waged outside the clinic.
In today’s day and age, customers are becoming increasingly savvy with the way they gather information that shapes their purchasing decisions. Therefore, it’s paramount that hearing professionals recognize the importance of being present online in a myriad of ways to help influence prospective patients as to why the patient should come through their doors and see them.
Erik and I discuss big and small tactics and strategies that practice owners and hearing professionals can begin to implement online as part of their patient acquisition and retention strategies. From content marketing, to soliciting reviews, to maximizing and utilizing one’s patient database, Erik lays out a number of real-world ideas that professionals might want to consider thinking about, and shares how HearWorks supports these type of initiatives.
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp:
Hi, I’m your host, Dave Kemp, and this is Future Ear Radio. Each episode, we’re breaking down one new thing, one cool new finding that’s happening in the world of hearables, the world of voice technology. How are these worlds starting to intersect? How are these worlds starting to collide? What cool things are going to come from this intersection of technology? Without further ado, let’s get on with the show.
Dave Kemp:
Okay, everybody. And welcome back to the Future Ear Radio Podcast. I’m joined by an awesome guest today. Erik Sorenson. Erik, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Erik Sorenson:
Thanks, Dave. I appreciate being here. I am the co-founder of HearWorks. And as you all know, you face, at least in private practice, they face so many more threats than ever before. And that’s really why we exist, is to help practices grow like they were growing before, to bring private pay business and to help combat some of those threats that they’re fighting from, online competition, third party, managed care, those types of things. And that’s why we exist through marketing and automation programs that are vastly different from what most people are used to. So that’s what we do.
Dave Kemp:
Awesome. Well, it’s great to have you here today. As we were discussing before we started recording, this falls in line with the series of conversations that I’ve been having lately, which as you just alluded to there, this idea of, in this tumultuous time, I guess you would say, for the hearing care professional where there’s all kinds of new, external threats, whether it be some of the ones that have been little incumbent in the industry now for a little while, like some of these big box retailers that are crowding ever more into the space. And then now with the advent of the OTC channel coming online, everything that’s happening with managed care, I think that now is really the time to figure out, how can you differentiate in this market that’s increasingly becoming more and more crowded?
Dave Kemp:
So I was really excited when I had the chance to bring you on, because I do think at what you all do at HearWorks is very interesting. I think it falls along the same lines of ways in which you can differentiate. And so I wanted to just start though with your background, because I know as an outsider to the industry, you certainly have a different perspective. And I would love to just go back to the start of your career in advertising and just walk us through how you even got to this industry, which is sort of this tucked away niche of a niche. So it’s always interesting to hear how people find their way into this industry.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah, for me, it was completely, completely by accident. None of my experience for at least the first 15 years or so in my career was in hearing healthcare. I didn’t know anything about hearing healthcare. I had an ad agency for about 15 years and I had one healthcare client, which was Intermountain Healthcare in… Well, they’re a very big company, but didn’t deal at all with hearing healthcare, audiology, etc. So my journey was very, very nontraditional. And I’m really only at this point about four, four and a half years into the space. My background was essentially in marketing and advertising.
Erik Sorenson:
In college, I started working for the newspaper, if you guys remember what that was back in the day, and loved it. I loved being able to work with clients and helped them positively grow their business. It just became a passion of mine. And I started working with ad agencies, and I loved the fact that an ad agency could positively influence a client from really 360 degrees, whereas the newspaper, I was only able to help just a little bit at the time. And so after college, I walked away from my good paying job and started an ad agency. Very little experience, very little knowledge, college, which you know doesn’t really teach you everything you need to know about running a business or how to market or anything like that.
Erik Sorenson:
But I did have two things. One, I was very, very resourceful. Number two, I was very, very hungry to find the answers that would help my clients be successful. And we got one client and grew from there. So it was a really a fun experience being the CEO of a company, being the marketing director, the creative director, the graphic artist and the janitor all at the same time. You probably understand when I’m coming from when it comes to that, David.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah, been there. I’ve worked every role within Oaktree. Being a family company, my first job in the summers when I would work here was as the janitor and then working in the warehouse. Anyway, go on.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah. Well, one of the things that we were really good at, because of the fact that we were very small to begin with, literally started with no clients and got one. That’s a meager place to start a business, it’s not like we bought into a new business. And so I ended up hiring employees and started growing. One of the things that we noticed in the ad agency world, it was sort of like a law firm set up back in the day, where if you called your ad agency, you’d get a $200 bill, if you sent a fax to them or whatever, faxes, obviously don’t even exist anymore, but in my early career, they did, you would get a charge.
Erik Sorenson:
And so they would nickel and dime them. And we didn’t want that. We wanted to be able to say, “Hey, our goal is to help you grow, create campaigns that will help you thrive. And we’re not going to nickel and dime you. Here’s the price. Here’s what it is. Boom.” And clients loved it, because they’re like, “Okay, basically, I have unlimited services for the same price.” And I was sort of the yes guy in the sense that I had to say yes to everything. In fact, my voicemail at the time said, “Hi, you’ve reached a phone of Erik Sorenson. If you’re a client, whatever the question is, the answer is yes.” That was literally my voicemail because we wanted to be perceived as we’ll find a way, even if we don’t know.
Erik Sorenson:
I knew newspaper, I didn’t know radio, I didn’t know TV, I didn’t know billboards, I didn’t know digital marketing, any of those things, we had to learn them, be so forceful and figure it out. So when a client would call and say, “Hey, can you do this for us?” And we had a client had us wrap 385 or so vans across several states, literally wrapped them with vinyl and signage, etc, you know exactly what I’m talking about when you see a telecom van or like a Comcast van drive by, we did that. And I’m like, “Absolutely.” We figured it out, had the project done at about two and a half months. It was insane.
Erik Sorenson:
Because of that though, doing that year over year, we ended up learning every aspect of the business, from TV, to radio. Of course I actually did work in radio for a small amount of time, I forgot to mention that. But one thing really changed. When you’re young and I had some kids at the time, growing a family, you’re always thinking about, “Okay, I’ve got to make money, I’ve got to support my family, etc.” And then we had something that really, really changed my life and changed my complete outlook on how I view what I do today. And that is, we got an opportunity with a telecom client. This would’ve been probably around 2012 or so, maybe 2011. And this company had been hit massively by the 2008 recession.
Erik Sorenson:
And if you remember, for those of you that went through that, it didn’t last just a year, it staggered into the all the way to 2012, 2013, before things really started to hum. And they were almost bankrupt. This investment company had bought this telecom company, which is basically cable, internet and TV, and what they did was they bought it for about $80 million, and the valuation was under $20 million at the time when they hired us. They went back to their investors and said, “Hey, give us a little bit of money. We think we can turn this around.” And as I mentioned, they hired us and did a few other things.
Erik Sorenson:
Well, long story short, four or five years later, they sold for $267 million. And when they announced to the public, how did it happen? How did this turnaround happen? They issued a press release and we were listed as the number three reason why they were able to do that by hiring our agency. And as you can imagine, we got hired everywhere across the country. We had clients where… our biggest client, had seven million in marketing advertising. They hired us, they managed all 42 of their states. And we got hired by all kinds of companies, we started working with the FBI, the US Air Force, KIA Motors, Disney hired us for a couple of projects as well. And so all of a sudden this little guy sort of became big and we started growing significantly.
Erik Sorenson:
Well, here was the cool thing about that experience for me. The cool thing was when I got a call from the owner of that company after they had sold for 267 million, profusely thanking me how we changed lives, their employees lives, their management company, the ownership’s lives. And all of a sudden, it stopped being about the paycheck. I started getting more excited about the ability to improve or change a life than I did get a paycheck. And so everything changed. I stopped focusing on money and I started focusing on making a difference in people’s lives and making a difference friends in business owners lives, essentially, and grow companies, and everything changed.
Erik Sorenson:
And our company quadrupled just in a matter of several months by doing that, well, not to mention when you’re getting calls from people that have multimillion dollar budgets, it’s pretty easy to quadruple. And we had a lot of success. Well, oddly enough, I went through some crazy life changes at about the end of 2016, and I had a call out of the blue saying, “Hey, I want to buy your ad agency.” And I wasn’t interested because it was my baby. But then all these life changes and challenges that I was facing at the time, it made sense, and I actually said yes, and I ended up selling it. That was a cool experience. It was really, really exciting for maybe three minutes, and then I was like, “Okay, I have no purpose, I have no plan, I have no job. I have nothing to do. What am I going to do?”
Erik Sorenson:
And it was at about that time, I got a call from somebody in hearing healthcare who knew me in my hometown saying, “Hey, I know what you do. Would you help us with your marketing?” So I did for a little bit just on my own. And then they said, “We’re going to build the first marketing automation system in hearing healthcare, will you help us with that? And I said, “Sure, let’s do this.” And that was my entry to hearing healthcare. Anyway, I don’t know if that was what you’re looking for, but I wanted to give just at least some brief synopsis on how I got into hearing healthcare. And clearly, I ended up staying.
Dave Kemp:
No, I appreciate you going through that. I think it adds some flavor to the conversation. It makes this a whole lot more interesting to understand where you came from. What I’m really curious to know about is, okay, so here we are in this industry, which is by all accounts, probably a little bit of a laggard in terms of adopting the most cutting edge tactics as it relates to marketing and all these kinds of things. So I’m curious, as you started to immerse yourself in this world, and I know that you actually were a clinic owner, so I would love to hear a little bit about that, but what were the things that you saw early on in terms of like the gaps within this particular industry that you knew to be things that were being addressed in other industries that were real obvious to you? I guess in other words, not to be too cliche, what was the low-hanging fruit?
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah. It was actually really easy to see what the low-hanging fruit was in the very, very beginning because, again, I knew how to grow businesses, I knew how to market across multiple mediums, I knew how to really take a business and help it thrive. But I had never, ever worked, one, with hearing healthcare clinic owners. And two, I’d never really focused on that 55, 65-plus crowd. That’s a very unique niche. And there are a lot of businesses that service that industry, but we weren’t one of them. So I had to really understand the patient journey, understand the industry. And I’ll never forget. I went to one of the industry’s events, and I don’t don’t recall which one it was, and I went to every marketing breakout session end/or main session that I possibly could because I wanted to understand what was going on and some of the tactics and strategies that were used in hearing healthcare.
Erik Sorenson:
And I’ll never forget the first breakout session I went to, and it was a marketing company and I think it still exist today. And they were talking about the website and SEO strategies as well as digital marketing strategies. And I sat back there and listened to this. Nothing against this company, but there were tactics and strategies that I had heard in conferences, four, five, six years prior, which had vastly changed. And I realized that some of these strategies I was using in my ad agency having to be really forced to be competitive, because if I’m going to get a Walt Disney project from them, I’ve got to be at Walt Disney level. We had to be resourceful to be able to compete at that level.
Erik Sorenson:
And when we got hired by Fortune 1000 companies, for example, I had to be at the level that could help grow a Fortune 1000 company. So as I’m listening to this, I’m like, “Wow,” because a lot of the strategies we implemented for our clients to be competitive and be right on the edge of any innovations that will help a business grow, I knew those things would be revolutionary in hearing healthcare. The only thing I didn’t understand was, how can I really understand a patient journey? How do I message to them? What would resonate with them? Why does it take seven years on average for a patient from the time they have measurable hearing loss at the time they actually take action about it?
Erik Sorenson:
So I did what most people would do, and I bought seven practices in Phoenix.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. Totally normal.
Erik Sorenson:
Why not? Right? Yes. I’m the crazy guy that bought practices for the sole reason of understanding the patient journey and understanding how to market a practice and get realtime feedback, raw, real truthful data from a practice that I own and had complete transparency, complete exposure to. We ended up essentially shutting down five of the offices initially because they were losing quite a bit of money and we kept two. So that was a very good decision. But buying these practices and being a practice owner really changed the game for me because I was able to spend really probably three years straight becoming a psychologist, understanding patient behavior, what drives them? What doesn’t drive them? Why does it take them seven years to take action? And at that seventh year on average, of course, what’s the trigger?
Erik Sorenson:
Because if I what the trigger was, I knew that would be the goal, then you can reverse engineer that into a message that would help people take action. One, of the marketing principles I live by is you have to enter the conversation that’s already happening in your consumer’s mind, that’s already happening in the mind of your patients. And when you do that, they’re like, “How did he know what I was thinking? How did this client know exactly what I was thinking?” It’s awesome. And there are tools that we use now to understand, not just from listening to the patients, but in addition to get some real raw data on what they’re actually thinking. And we use that at as a message.
Erik Sorenson:
So it was invaluable, it was definitely a Harvard education, for sure, because it allowed me to get complete transparency on that patient journey and test and prove automations and marketing tactics and strategies in real time, get real time feedback and truly understand what works. And it was great, we grew the practice 62% on the first 90 days, and ended up growing substantially more after that. So it was really an awesome experience to be able to go through all of that and learn exactly what it took. Now, mind you, I didn’t have any experience in hearing healthcare, I didn’t have any experience working with patients, I didn’t know how to read an audiogram. I certainly didn’t know how to take a patient through an evaluation, but I didn’t actually need to know those, I had who’s for all of those things.
Erik Sorenson:
What I needed to know was really, I heard it said by Jay Abraham, that there’s two major function of a business. One is marketing, and one is innovation. In other words, what you do inside of your practice to be able to grow and innovate and help treat patients in a way that you’ll solve their problem. Obviously, my expertise was in marketing. And so it was invaluable to be able to get that lesson.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I find that to be really a cool part of your story, is that you do have the hands-on experience. And I know that through that period and that process, I’m sure that you probably were able to… a lot of your assumptions probably fell by the wayside. And I also find this really interesting that you obviously had this career leading into part of your life and into this part of your career that was largely around marketing, digital marketing, all these different things, but you were catering to younger demographics. And I do think that because of the nature of the beast of this industry being so heavily skewed toward older demographics, it is a little bit of a paradigm because as much as you want to use all of these new cutting edge tactics, you have to be cognizant of who’s ultimately the target audience? And are they even in these channels that you’re…
Dave Kemp:
Like for example, five, 10 years ago, was Facebook a really good channel for you to market, even with all of the really sophisticated tools that Facebook provided you in terms of targeting? Now, you can say that like to an extent, it’s pretty good because a lot of the older generations are on there, but there was that period where you had to wait for the adoption to catch up. So it is a little paradoxical in that regard, but I do think it’s interesting that you were able to come in and see, have like full transparency into, “Here is what a practice owner actually struggles with, and here are some of the ways that I can help them.” So I guess let’s now flash forward a little bit to where HearWorks came from.
Erik Sorenson:
Yes. So that first marketing company that I was involved with, it wasn’t the right fit. The partners essentially had different visions and I ended up walking away from that. After walking away from that, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, that’s when I met Tucker Worster who had started AuDStandard at that time, I want to say it was three or four years prior to that. And it was a buying group, of course. Essentially we clicked, and so we essentially merged our two organizations into one and changed the name to HearWorks. So that’s how we ended up meeting. We ended up meeting from a mutual relationship that we had, and this person had called Tucker and said, “Hey, you need to talk to Erik Sorenson, he’s doing some crazy and innovative things and owns practices and these other things,” at the time.
Erik Sorenson:
And so it worked out really, really well. One of the things that we were able to do was to take a buying group side of things with its existing clients and new world type of strategies to combat the threats that private practice was facing at the time, and still even more so now, and be able to create this in incredible strategic growth company, to be able to help practices grow and thrive like they used to before the threats existed. Now, one of the things that was really important for me, because the cause was so important to me, because I saw so many practice owners struggle, I heard the stories. I’ve heard them give me the feedback that they’ve given me of why they’re not growing.
Erik Sorenson:
And one of the things that was really important to me is to say, “Hey, if we’re going to have a buying group component, we need to allow essentially those be separate.” Somebody wants to buy units? Great, but we still want everybody to have access to our marketing, our automation programs and platinum partnerships, which we can talk about if you want to, which is really coaching training, helping practice to solve the problems that they’re facing inside of their practice, and we’re doing it on the outside as well, essentially is what that effort is. And I needed those to be separate. In other words, I didn’t want people to have to buy units in order to do our marketing programs. So that’s how that works.
Erik Sorenson:
And so it’s opened up the world for us to have a significant amount of marketing clients and automation clients due to the fact that that happens. Now, a lot of them do buy units from us, but it allowed me to be able to work on the cause, which was help a practice owner really open their eyes to new opportunities that are out there that they didn’t know existed, and help them grow their practice without having them to take too much time and too much effort and sacrifice to put into marketing. Because let’s be honest, most practice owners are not marketing people.
Dave Kemp:
These aren’t marketers per se. These are hearing professionals that want to spend their time with their patients. And I think, again, this gets at where I think a lot of the opportunity lies, which is, look, at the end of the day as a practice owner, as a practicing professional, that’s what your focus really wants. That’s what you want to spend your time doing, is time with your patient. And so I think that having vendors like you come along that have this real deep understanding and expertise, not only of the subject matter that you are obviously an expert in, but also as a company, you have industry experience.
Dave Kemp:
So it’s a nice combination, it seems like where you are able to both bring to the table these cutting edge solutions, along with a pretty deep understanding of what it is that your clientele, what their day to day actually looks like and ways that you can support them. And so I’m curious to learn more about this though, like in terms of the automation piece. And I think it’s cool that you’ve identified that, “Look, we are both a holistic member network in the sense that we have this buying group and buying power that we bring to the table. But more importantly, the thing that really differentiates us is all of this different automation and ways in which we can use these tools to help you to basically maximize your current patient database, but also bring more people into the funnel.”
Dave Kemp:
So this would probably be a good time to start talking about some of the ways in which your tools lend themselves to those two separate things, both I guess, patient retention and patient maximization, and then also patient acquisition.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s important to understand from a foundational standpoint that I think one of the biggest struggles we have today is not the battle that we’re facing inside of our practices. That’s important, but most practice owners are very, very good at diagnosing patients, they’re very good at their treatment plans. I don’t think there’s any other organization in all of hearing healthcare that does a better job than private practice owners, really. They’re incredible at what they do, they create an incredible experience, but we tend to focus so much on what’s happening inside the practice because it’s what we know, we’re familiar with, we’re familiar with that patient process once they show up, we know exactly what to do, etc.
Erik Sorenson:
It doesn’t mean it’s not challenging, but the real battle that we’re facing right now is the war that we’re fighting outside of the practice. In fact, I saw post this morning on one of the audiology pages, for example, that was listing the Bose hearing aids and had bone conduction and things like that. And I don’t remember exactly the type of post, but essentially it said, “Oh, great, another people eating into our share of the market.” And yeah, absolutely, they are. It’s crazy and it’s difficult to see these things coming out and this new technology that could push our patients away from us. The real battle, I believe that we are fighting today as practice owners is the battle that’s happening outside of our practice.
Erik Sorenson:
But here’s the good news, you actually have the ability to influence your patients more outside of your practice than you do inside of your practice. Now, I know when a lot of people hear that, they’re like, “Wait a minute, what are you talking about? No, that’s not true, because we do an incredible job inside of our practice?” And that’s absolutely true, but they don’t spend most of their time with you. In fact, the average practice sees a patient an hour and a half to two hours a year, at least after the first year of treatment. That is not a lot of time to build a lot of unbreakable loyalty.
Erik Sorenson:
When you have powerful tools like automation and even free channels like social media or options to really influence your patients, you have more opportunity to influence them outside of your practice than you do, at least from a frequency standpoint and even a reach standpoint. And that’s really what we focus on, is, you’ve got the brick and mortar, we focus on the virtual practice because the brick and mortar is part of it, but a bigger part of the equation is making sure number one, you acquire new patients, number two, making sure that they’re not leaving you after they are your patients and upgrade with somebody else or get pulled in by third parties or those types of things.
Erik Sorenson:
And so that’s where our programs are here to provide solutions. From the outset, when we say marketing and automation, everyone’s like, “Okay, well, everyone does that.” Well, there’s a very, very, very big difference in how we do them. And a just a quick explanation on how we do that. There’s three real main pillars of what our goal was. Influence, which I’ll talk a little bit about. Impact, which you have the ability, I think, to impact the patient more inside of your practice because you’re changing their life, you’re treating them and you’re breathing new life back into them that they had lost because of what hearing loss to them over the years.
Erik Sorenson:
And then income as well. Obviously, the more income your practice makes, the more impact you’re able to have, and the more you’re able to leverage tools to influence your patients outside of your practice. And that’s really the difference. So our tools essentially are two major things. Well, three component of our business, which is marketing, which we call journey influence marketing, automation, which is automated patient care. No, not a reminder system. It seems like everybody has automations now, most of the practice management systems, Counselor Blueprint, etc, have some automations, but they’re mainly reminders.
Erik Sorenson:
When I say automation. I’m not saying a reminder system. Yes, there’s components built into remind patients, which is important. I’m talking about an influence system, something that builds unbreakable loyalty and raving fans with your patients by reaching out to them, generating touch points, nurturing them, educating them over the course of their entire journey from the time that they first hear about you to the time they’re three or four years down the road and they’re upgrade eligible. One of the major shifts in that is, number one, I believe that treatment does not start when somebody shows up to your practice, or at least it shouldn’t.
Erik Sorenson:
Because you really have an hour or so to build enough trust and rapport and influence, etc, to be able to get somebody to spend five, six, $7,000 with you. That’s not a lot of time. And so our treatment rates as an industry are 40 to 50% when it comes to that scenario. I believe that treatment should start with the very first touch point because you have the ability to influence a patient’s mindset to overcome objection like the stigma of hearing devices, for example, or the perceptions that they have that are not true. You have the ability to correct them. You have the ability to build trust throughout that journey and deliver touch points so that when they show up, they haven’t just heard of you once, you’ve had conversations with them automatically three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times. So they’re much, much more ready to take action on the things that you want them to do that you know will change their life.
Erik Sorenson:
And so that’s really one component is, if you want, Dave, you tell me, I can go into marketing and that I can dive a little bit more into automation and talk a little bit about raving fans as well. You tell me whatever you think would be more helpful to your audience, I will certainly go there. Wait, I don’t mind giving you the whole playbook.
Dave Kemp:
No, I love this. I just want to take a step back really quick and just say that I think what you’re actually saying though is really profound. The new battleground is what’s happening outside the clinic. That is so spot on. It’s actually, you can see this becoming more… there’s an awareness that’s bubbling up that is taking place right now amongst the professionals, I think, where they’re starting to really understand this. And there’s lots of different ways that you can see that. At the end of 2021, I went to a number of different trade shows. And a lot of the focus now are around these things that used to be dismissed and were novel at the time, for example, reviews.
Dave Kemp:
I remember I saw a talk when I first joined the industry around 2016, it was like a real sparsely attended show. And I can’t remember who the presenter was, but they were really talking about the importance of really trying to solicit and generate reviews. And you look at the landscape today. Well, how does the whole patient journey even begin? More times than not, people are… they’re so much more resourceful now in terms of how they go and they acquire their information and they start to begin that whole buying process. And again, we’re talking about, what is this? Like the third largest out of pocket expense most people will have in their life next to a house and a car, is a set of hearing aids.
Dave Kemp:
So of course, there’s going to be a lot of research poured into this. Then you see everything that’s happening with people like Cliff Folsom. I think he’s been a huge revelation in this regard where he’s really captured, I think, people’s attention of helping them to begin, again, that knowledge acquisition of, “Where do I even begin to understand what my options are?” Chances are where 10 years ago, for example, a lot of people, they’d be coming into your clinic and they were almost like a blank canvas, they were a blank slate, they weren’t really all that well informed.
Dave Kemp:
Now, today, you have people that they know what different procedures you should be operating in terms of best practice like, do you perform really your measurement? And they have a pretty good understanding of the bells and whistles that go along with different feature sets to different hearing aids. And so my point is that, you can’t just assume that you are going to be able to influence the person from scratch when they walk in your doors, you have to be out there in a myriad of ways, really, like you said, those three eyes, influencing them and helping to make them aware of what your value proposition is, why they should come see you, why you are different than all of the other providers like you, not to mention now Costco and all these different brick and mortar, big box retailers that are getting into this space, the online channel that’s really starting to emerge and will continue to emerge self fit and all these different things.
Dave Kemp:
So this is, again, where I think that we are at this really important inflection point as an industry, for professionals to put a flag in the ground and to say, “This is what makes me different. And this is why I am,” for whatever different reasons, “This is why I am the most suitable place for you to come and see me. And this is why.” And so I just really wanted to take a step back and I wanted to expand on that point, because I do think it’s really, really important to understand that so much of the patient journey now begins before you even have a chance to see them that first time.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah. I’ll never forget, I had a conversation at an industry event that I spoke at a couple of years ago and a practice owner had approached me and said, “I’m struggling with third party and I’m just struggling with all of these things, and they’re really taking over my market.” And I said, “Well, how much are they controlling the conversation? How much are they out there?” She’s like, “Our online searches, they’re everywhere.” I said, “Well, how much are you out there?” She’s like, “Well, we’re not.” And I’m like, “Well, who’s going to win? Because they’re the only person that’s talking in your market.” And I get it, for most practice owners, it’s really hard to shift to marketing and be like, “Oh I’m going to close the videos online.”
Erik Sorenson:
It’s just not usually in most of their nature. Some of them are really good at that, but the far majority that I talk to, they’re really scared to pick up a camera and I get it the first time I did it, I was scared and I totally sucked at it too. So it just takes time and reps to do that, but you’re right, the real battleground and the war is actually outside of your practice. And this is something we must do. I believe that the threats we are facing and including things like COVID, give leaders an opportunity to rise to who they really can be because without these threats, we probably would just be going through the motions like we did for years and years, because we had plenty of patients coming in and we have essentially a product that has a cost of goods low enough that can help us have healthy organization.
Erik Sorenson:
And so it’s not like we need to fit 300 people in a month to be successful. No. So most practices, 10, 20, 30 people, and they’re doing really well. But you have to be able to be a part of the conversation. A lot of practice owners talk about brand and how important brand is, but I think more important is relevancy. Are you actually relevant when that conversation comes up in the consumer’s mind, in your patient’s mind of, okay, I have this problem, I need to solve it. I’m struggling in speech and noise, for example, where do I go? Do you actually pop up? And you mentioned differentiation.
Erik Sorenson:
Well, here’s one of the problems and here’s a nugget that I will give you that I think is really powerful to remember. I’m always told, and I saw that in my practice that the number one objection to star team treatment is price. Everyone says it’s always price, price, price, price. Well, here’s why, if you think about it, there is very little differentiation in most clinics across the country. In other words, how do you differentiate yourself when you basically carry the same products and/or same services as everyone else across the country? And in the mind of the consumer, here’s the nugget, if they don’t know the difference, they always default to price because that’s what they understand.
Erik Sorenson:
So we blame them sometimes, we’re like, “Well, it’s not really about the price, but the value you’re getting and all that we’re providing and three years of care. And we’re going to hold your hand through the process and we’re going to make sure that you are successful with your treatment,” which you guys do a better job at that than anyone else, private practice owners do, but they don’t know the difference. So when price is an objection, you haven’t shown enough value, and at least haven’t created a positioning in the mind of your patient of why you are different, because in a world where we’ve commoditized, essentially hearing healthcare, the patients will always, always default to price.
Erik Sorenson:
So when you think about that, if price is a big objection, that is a big indicator that they don’t know the difference. So you have got to start differentiating. And frankly, especially automation, it’s a major differentiating factor. Imagine like the traditional model is as you put an ad on Facebook or a direct mail or wherever, and you’re putting on AdWords or ad on Facebook or Google or whatever, they have two options, they can click through to your website or they can essentially call you. Well, the best place for a click to die is on the homepage of the average hearing healthcare website, because the patient cares about the one thing that’s important to them, and when they go there, they’re trying to find it, and there’s so much information on it, they end up bouncing and you end up generating all of these clicks and impressions.
Erik Sorenson:
And your marketing company will say, “Oh, look, we got like 3,000 clicks and 10,000 impressions or whatever. Look at these great numbers.” And you’re like, “Well, wait a minute. I can’t live off of clicks and impressions. I can only live off of appointments.” And by the way, if it works, that is the one metric we judge ourselves on is how many actual appointments we got. I don’t care about clicks, I don’t care about impressions, frankly, I don’t care about Facebook, Google, AdWords, direct mail newspaper. I care about actual results. I care about the medium that will help me get the result that I need from my client to be successful, that will actually get them appointments. Outside of that, I don’t care about any of that because the one thing that I will be hired for or fired for is how many appointments that I actually generate.
Erik Sorenson:
And then we take it a step further by helping training, coaching, etc, on how to convert those patients into treatments and how to run a practice that is incredible and thriving. That’s what our Platinum Partnership program is all about. So this changed to me, Dave, when I was a practice owner, and I’ll never forget, it shifted for me when I got a letter and I still have the letter. I wonder if I have it in my drawer here. I got a letter from a patient thanking me for changing her life. And I read this, I don’t even know how many times, is probably three years ago that I got the letter, and I realized, “Wait a minute, that is what it’s all about.”
Erik Sorenson:
All the clutter, all the noise, at the end of the day, we want to create that in every patient. They were literally thanking me for allowing them to spend $6,000 with me so that they could change their life. That’s just a weird thought, but it turned into what I realized what that was is because we had done so much work on the front end, nurtured a patient, finally brought them in and then created an incredible experience, so they had an incredible experience throughout. I realized we were creating a raving fan. And your goal is to create raving fans of your patients, which you can do as much outside of your practice as you can inside of your practice, if not more so outside really.
Erik Sorenson:
And raving fans do four things that just normal patients don’t do. And we call it the four Rs. They’re much more likely to review you. They’re much more likely to refer you. They’re much, much more likely to be retained by you. And they’re much more likely to repurchase at three or four years down the road. And that is the goal is you want to create a raving fan. So we’ve created tools, strategies, and tactics and things that massively differentiate practices that most people are not doing. And frankly, most people sometimes fail to see the value in it until they see the case studies that we provide and like, “Look, this is what’s happening. This is how we’re creating raving fans.”
Erik Sorenson:
And I’ll never forget we done doubled the reviews of a client, sorry, we didn’t even double. I think they had seven or eight reviews when we started with them and a month later they had 82, five-star reviews. It was crazy. That changed their practice entirely, real reviews, real patients because of automation, processes, and systems. And I want you to know when I say automation, I don’t mean like robots, I mean, our goal is to make automation as if you are literally picking up the phone and calling a patient, as if you are literally typing an email or sending a text, or sending them a package, or something like that. We’re trying to make it completely emotional, completely humanized as if you’re having a conversation with a patient.
Erik Sorenson:
So there’s so many, two rules and so much things that you can do to leverage so that you don’t have to spend more time, but can get massive impact, massive influence, and frankly, create raving fans. And that is essentially at the core of what we do.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I think that’s such a great line of thinking too, the four Rs, Review, refer, repurchase, retain. I think that it’s really interesting that we’re having this conversation because literally the last episode that I had was with Amyn Amlani, Dr. Amlani, and the whole theme of the conversation was enhancing the value proposition of the hearing professional. And it’s very much along the same lines, which is, you’re right, there has been this commoditization. In a commoditized market, what happens is you get a price for, and then there really is like this race at the bottom.
Dave Kemp:
And so you really do have to figure out how do you reposition your entire value proposition in such a way that is defensible. And this is where the whole opportunity lies for the providers is for them to recapture the whole reason why people are coming to see you. And again, what Amyn and I discussed was that people aren’t really coming in your clinic to get fit with hearing aids, for example, what they’re coming for is that they have these quality of life deficiencies that they’re looking to an expert to help them alleviate. And I think that if you really think about like, what is at the absolute core of what you as a provider are bringing to the table since you are a provision of knowledgeable expertise.
Dave Kemp:
And there’s so many different facets of this, you have all of the different ways in which you facilitate care around helping people to amplify and helping to do the things in which you are amplifying those situations for, so that you can get back to enjoy dinner time conversation again, you can hear people at the table. It’s not because I’m coming to see you because I really want to get fit with hearing aids, it’s I’m coming to see you because I can’t enjoy a dinner anymore with my friends.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah. 100%. There are certain things that we did to make things really simple because we talk about these things. And I think one of the most practice think, “Oh, influencing outside of my practice, oh my gosh, I don’t have the time. I don’t even have time in the day.” We get two major pieces of feedback of what practices struggle, we get all of them, but the two major ones are, I need more private pay patients and I don’t have enough time in the day. And we solve those things, but we’re not here to create an improvement upon what’s already out in hearing healthcare in terms of marketing services and automation services.
Erik Sorenson:
We came in to create a totally new opportunity. For example, you want to know how to have more influence in the market, we have an exact framework of exactly how to do that. We created hearing healthcare’s very first value ladder. If you don’t know what a ladder is, a value ladder is well, in hearing healthcare, there’s really one. It’s like, you come in for an appointment and you spend six or $7,000, and you go from nothing to that. And that’s where treatment rates are so low. How many times have you bought a very expensive product without first being conditioned over time to get to the point where you’re willing to spend $10,000 for something or $15,000?
Erik Sorenson:
Most companies in the world will have a value ladder where they’ll bring them in at a very low type of a thing, I don’t mean price, I mean, for example, have you ever thought of creating a Facebook group in your own community to influence and impact and educate your own consumers? Think like AudBoss group or what’s it called, Audiology Happy Hour, those types of community pages for our industry, can you think about that for your own community where you’re educating on hearing healthcare and nurturing, etc, that would be the bottom of a value ladder, where you can start building trust and rapport by giving.
Erik Sorenson:
I truly believe your life will change today when you focus on what you can give rather than what you can get. And when you serve first, it is a powerful model for building trust and rapport. Our goal is to serve first. We push out so much free content and trainings and education, etc, including things like this, because we know we want to truly serve and whether or not we get anything out of it, we don’t care, our goal is to serve first. And if you created something like that, that could be the bottom of your value ladder. Then you take them up to the next point, and then to the next point.
Erik Sorenson:
And then you bring them up to the point where they’re finally able to come in and they’re much more willing to hand over a check. Dr. Cliff’s a friend of mine, I’ve looked at his model for a while, I’ve had deep conversations with him before. And part of the reason why he’s so successful in his practice is because he spent three or four years serving, like his content or not, like his content. You can’t argue with the results of having, what is it, over 100,000 followers and tons of views on his think. And he will have people from across the country fly in because they want to be treated by him, because he served them and educated them, and didn’t really ask for anything back.
Erik Sorenson:
And it works. And that is a great example of the bottom of the value ladder, where he’s building rapport and educating, and then he can bring them to the next level and the next level, and then ultimately treat them and create raving fans. So there’s a lot of things you can do too without expanding so much to time, which is why we’ve created all these frameworks to show you exactly how to do it.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I like that whole idea of creating a community because I think that sometimes, maybe there’s a knee jerk reaction of like, I need to start doing more to do what they’re saying, “I need to be more present outside of my clinic and helping to shape the minds and win the hearts and minds of my patients before they even come and see me, but I don’t even know where to I begin.” And then it becomes paralysis because it just seems so daunting. And so that’s why I think it’s important to note that like, look, nobody’s saying that you need to become like Cliff and be like this massive YouTuber. There’s really small, simple things that you can do that are in line with what you want to do.
Dave Kemp:
Just creating a community where your patients can communicate with one another and they can share their stories and their experiences. We all know this to be probably one of the most word of mouth driven sales of anything out there, because that all plays into the stigma and in the seven-year gap and all of this. So you really are like, people get up, it’s like going and Bungee jumping, you’re standing at the edge and nobody’s willing to jump until you start to see other people doing it. And you start to hear…
Dave Kemp:
I can watch videos until I’m blue in the face of all these different things of the benefits and the features of the technology and all these great things, but until I see somebody that I identify with that, I’m like, “Hey, look this is a person that looks like me. They’re saying that they all the same challenges. I can’t hear my grandkids or whatever it might be. And they’re talking about how this changed their life.” That’s way, way, way more powerful for them. So it’s a matter of, how do you actually then facilitate that and foster that environment? And it doesn’t have to be anything that’s like earth shattering and it’s all encompassing of your time, it can be small little bay, these steps.
Dave Kemp:
But again, it goes back to what you were saying before, which is, let your patients go to bat for you and empower them to do such and foster that community where it’s something where they’re all engaging one another. I think that there’s so much power to that.
Erik Sorenson:
Well, here’s just a quick, easy way to do something like creating your Facebook group and engaging your community. And it’s really just a simple steps and it will take you literally five minutes a week. That’s it, five minutes. And here’s all you do. You take 10 minutes to start, go create a group on Facebook. Don’t call it the name of your practice by the way, because then they’re going to be like, “Oh, well, they’re just trying to sell me.” Create something that sounds like it’s an educational page or surrounding hearing healthcare in your community, create it, go to Canva, create some graphics.
Erik Sorenson:
Literally, Canva’s so easy, you can create a Facebook cover and there’s templates for it. And just put your picture on there and your name or the name of the group. And then tell post and tell people, “Hey, I’m going to go live Tuesdays at 5:00 PM,” or whatever once a week. And Tuesdays at 5:00 PM, grab your camera, go live on Facebook, talk for five minutes-
Dave Kemp:
Ask me anything.
Erik Sorenson:
Or you could do that too. And people are like, “Well, what am I going to say? What content?” Here’s the cool thing. You already have the content. You have more content than you ever thought possible. Why? Because every question a patient’s ever asked and every problem that they’ve ever told you, turn those in how-tos. Questions are, I’m nailing a problem, and then sometimes they’ll just tell you the problem. Just what are the top 10 problems my patients tell me they’re having with their hearing healthcare? And all you do is turn that into how-to. So literally at 5:00 PM on Tuesday or whatever the time is, you just go live.
Erik Sorenson:
And I know cameras, it’s terrible, but being on a camera, honestly, is the same thing as being in front of a person. It may seem like awkward, but for some reason, we become really stiff because there’s a camera there, not because there’s a person, but just talk to them like they’re people and be like, “Hey, and the name is, how to,” state the problem, most of your, how to solve this. And really easy. And then go and talk about it for five minutes. And when you start talking, you’ll be blown away that you could talk about it for two hours, if you wanted to. And do that once a week. That’s it. And start again.
Erik Sorenson:
And your customers will start engaging, have your PCC monitor the page and maybe post one engaging question a week, which will take three minutes. So literally in 10 minutes of time, you can do this. Now, there’s that, do I need a professional camera? No. Just start with your iPhone, people are used to it. Some of the biggest pages I’ve ever seen, people are literally on their iPhone, just okay. That’s it. Start there and start building a community and you’ll be blown away. And then tell your patients about it, “Hey, by the way, go to our community here. Join here, here’s a QR code, scan it, and join our community.”
Erik Sorenson:
And get your current patients there too because then it will reinforce like, “Hey, I knew I chose them for a reason. They’re the guru, they’re the guide, they’re the expert. Look at these guys, and I’m so glad I was with them.” And it also reinforces why they made the decision to treat their hearing loss with you. That is so, so easy, but a lot of us just put these mental blocks in our mind like, “That’s going to be hard.” Literally will take that long, every week. That’s it.
Dave Kemp:
I love that whole bit there because you’re right, first of all, do not let the perfection, don’t let perfection be an impediment to you getting started. I think that’s number one. I think number two is just like you said, where you are the expert with the stuff. If that’s another part of the paralysis, if you will is, I don’t know what I’m going to be talking about, you’re right, think through like, “Well, what are some of those daily things that come up within my conversations in the clinic?” It’s like the whole adage of like, if one person has a question, a lot of people probably have that same question.
Dave Kemp:
And I just think I like these concrete examples though, because I think it really does highlight, again, it’s like the whole name of the game right now is you have this amazing differentiator and it’s a matter of starting to use it and wield it. And again, that differentiator is you, it’s your expertise. You can guarantee that a lot of these competitors that are coming online are not going to be interested in doing this kind of stuff. They’re strictly interested in high volume sales, and they want this to be as commoditized as possible. They want this to be, get in, get out, be on your way, and maybe I’ll never see you again. Maybe there’s going to be a little bit of a follow up visit.
Dave Kemp:
So take the deficiencies of these new competitors. Yeah, they’re good at some things, they have marketing budgets because they’re backed by these multimillion or multibillion dollar companies. So yeah, you’re not going to necessarily be able to beat them on the production value of the commercials that they’re running in your network, but you know where you can beat them? Is the ways in which you engage your community, and you do these kinds of really simple, easy to do things where all it is like, hey, making the patients aware of, “Hey, I have this Facebook page, the whole thing’s designed for you and all of our other patients to get together and talk about some of those commonly held issues that you run into, ways that maybe we can use some new techniques to circumvent some of these challenges, watching the TV, all of the Zoom calls that you do throughout the day, maybe there’s some ways that we can optimize these things.”
Erik Sorenson:
One quick point that you said that I think is really powerful, is that word perfection, and at the risk of maybe offending somebody, I will tell you that perfection is actually the lowest standard you should shoot for, not the highest. The reason why is because have you ever met a perfect person? Have you ever had a perfect evaluation? Have you ever had a perfect delivery on anything? I haven’t. Perfection is the lowest standard. And so when you understand that, it frees those of us that are perfectionists from realizing, “Oh, guess what, at first I’m probably going to suck, but then again, so did Babe Ruth, when he started.”
Erik Sorenson:
There’s no person that’s ever gone to a high level of success without being super bad at it at first and without failing time and time again. I put videos out there and I watch them, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that was so bad.” But then it inspires me to do the next one better, and then the next one. I just do it so much that it becomes second nature and you become really good at it, but your patients aren’t expecting you to be perfect, what they are expecting is for you to be you. I can guarantee you that not doing this will not get you the result.
Erik Sorenson:
I can’t guarantee that it will completely get you the result, but I can tell you if you’re not authentic, then people will see through that. Just simply be yourself, be yourself on camera, just like you are in front of a patient. And don’t worry about perfection because it’s really is the lowest standard.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. Could not agree more. As we come to the close here, share with us, maybe one example of a client who is using your services to the fullest and the success that they’re having. And then maybe as it relates to the audience here, somebody that’s just getting started. And for those that might be in that same boat where it’s like, “I know I need to do something and I’m looking to figure out what it is that I’m even going to do,” it would be great to hear, I guess, the spectrum of success that you’re seeing.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah. I’ll give you an example. I had a client that asked me to come and speak to her organization a few weeks ago, which I don’t do very often, but spent a few hours with them and spoke to them. And it was incredible day. And we were talking about the success she’s had now. She is a marketing automation-only client. She does her automation system, which helps nurture and educate her patients and help her grow from the inside out. And she contributed 29% of her growth last year, meaning she grew 29% since starting the automation system to what automation was able to do for hear, which is really, really powerful.
Erik Sorenson:
We had a full service client that started in November a couple of years ago. And sometimes it takes a little bit of time for things to get rolling, but by week three of January was breaking records every week and every week I would get a text, “Oh, we hit another record, we hit another record, another record week, another record week.” And it’s just incredible to see that. To me, that’s the paycheck. Getting that text from a client is the paycheck for me. That’s what I love, that’s what we love to do. Now, I’ll give an example of Platinum Partners. And by the way, Platinum Partners essentially is not necessarily an easy program to get into because you have to apply to get into it where we literally walk only a limited number of clinic owners.
Erik Sorenson:
We literally walk them or help walk them to the finish line, meaning, here’s your goal, here’s where you want to get, and we’re going to dive into every aspect of your business to do it. We only open up applications once a year, which is generally in October. And then we provide high level coaching, training strategy, stuff that you don’t get at AAA or ADA or anything like that, is very, very different from anything else. We bring in some of the best in the world at solving the problems that they need to solve. And it’s just literally life changing, frankly, it’s what I love most because people’s lives change from it. It’s super awesome.
Erik Sorenson:
So that’s another example of a program that we get so much incredible feedback of just things that have changed their practice. Those are few examples, but we have a lot of practices that will start to break their records now because of it. The one thing too, that’s really important is we’re not, again, we’re not loyal to any particular meeting, we’re loyal to results. And I reach outside of our industry to get the strategy that is cutting edge, and then I adapt it for hearing healthcare versus trying to create it from the resources inside of the industry, which has made all the difference in the world.
Erik Sorenson:
And this is not lip service at all, I legitimately spend an hour to two hours every morning, learning and growing and trying to learn from other people that are better than I am at what I do, or social media influencer, you name it, any mastermind program, training I can get my hands on, I spend one or two hours every morning. And it’s how we generate ideas for finding the way to combat the threats, and even if we don’t have the answer, finding the answer and helping a practice really thrive through the challenges they face in their market. So I hope that’s what you’re looking for.
Dave Kemp:
No, absolutely, man. This has been a really awesome conversation, like I said, I just think that I’m so focused right now on this podcast of identifying all the different ways in which a practice owner, a hearing professional can just… I want to look for all the different ammunition that’s available for them, so that they’re armed for what I do feel like is this mounting battle between them and all of these other avenues of care. And you know what, some of those other avenues of care are great, so this isn’t intended to badmouth any of these new things.
Dave Kemp:
I actually think that there’s a lot of real positive things that are happening right now in terms of new ways that we’re going to be able to treat patients and hopefully grow the whole pie of people that aren’t treating their hearing, start to reduce the number of years that it takes for people to take action. But what I do know is that the providers out there need to understand that they don’t necessarily need to just think that, oh, because my competitors are lowering their prices and lowering their prices, that that necessarily is like an indication that that’s the only way to succeed in this market and be viable. There is so much more that can be done around the value.
Dave Kemp:
And I think that’s the whole name of the game is figuring out over the course of this year and into the future is like, what does make you unique? What are the things that you really, like the legs that you have to stand on that you love about your practice? And figuring out, how do you start to decouple those things and make them services that then becomes part of your revenue, that isn’t everything just the end-all-be-all tied to the sale of the hearing aid? And so I think that there’s just a lot of really exciting things on the horizon. And I love all of what you’ve mentioned today of this idea of like, look, sometimes it’s really good to look outside of the industry and see…
Dave Kemp:
We’re always at the tail end of all these new trends, it seems to be, and so in a way, you can use that to your advantage by understanding that, hey, look around, look at some of these adjacent industries, what’s going on in dental? What’s going on in optometry? Start to educate yourself on that space or go to the people that are educating them and start to understand like, where are some of these new services and tools, what can I be doing to help to maximize my current practice? So I just think that there’s a lot that can be done right now in preparation as a way to just continue to differentiate yourself, not just in your own mind, but in the mind of all of the prospective patients out there that really do understand the difference between you and any of these other avenues of care.
Erik Sorenson:
Yeah, absolutely. And reaching out has helped us create some new program. For example, we discovered a new program, a new opportunity, maybe two or three weeks ago and tested it on a client. And granted, they have a lot of locations, it generated 500 leads in one day. It was crazy. We were like, “Oh my gosh.” We were like, “Okay, how could we duplicate that? And how could we improve that?” And now the clients even wants, “Okay, we need to do this twice a month.” And it was really, really cool strategy, but those are the types of things by reaching out you can really find a way to increase your private pay business for sure.
Dave Kemp:
Awesome, Erik. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here today.
Erik Sorenson:
Thank you.
Dave Kemp:
And we will chat with you next time.
Dave Kemp:
Thanks for tuning in today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future Ear Radio. For more content like this, just head over to futureear.co, where you can read all the articles that I’ve been writing these past few years on the worlds of voice technology and hearables and how the two are beginning to intersect. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll chat with you next time.
