The Therapy Business Podcast

Leads Down? Here's What To Do.

• Craig Dacy • Episode 59

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We dig into why leads slow down, how to diagnose the real cause, and what to do when nothing obvious is broken. We share a simple follow-up script, the cadence that converts, and how to stabilize cash while you tune your marketing.




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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

SPEAKER_00:

My name is Craig, and I'm the owner of Daisy Financial Coaching. Our team is on a mission to make your therapy practice permanently profitable. If you want a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money, and serves more people. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. Now I know in the mental health industry, the summer slump is a thing. And so we've done a few episodes on combating the summer slump. This is when during summer months, leads tend to drop. People are busy, clients are canceling, business is just down in general. And so if you're listening to this in the summertime, I recommend going and checking out that episode. Because today we're going to be talking more in general about if leads go down. So listen to this first. But if it's summertime after this one, go into the summer slump on where we're going to give you some really specific ideas for summertime and how to combat that. But I want to get into what if leads slow down? What if it's inexplainable, just out of nowhere? Whether it's the economy, whether it's a number of things that could be happening to cause leads to drop. This happens to me throughout the year. Now we have our traditional summer where leads will go down a little bit. And then we also have times of the year where just months here and there where things are down. In fact, usually the months of August and September are really good months for us as far as getting lead intake because what we look at as the second new year, people are back into routine with kids going back to school. And so they are starting to rethink about their finances and get back into that mindset. However, this year, as I'm recording this, our leads have been down these past two months. And I really don't know what the cause is. I don't know how to explain it. I can probably look at the economy, I can look at a bunch of different things happening with uh politics and in the in the country. But at the end of the day, those things are out of my control. What I need to do is find out what I can do as the business owner to make sure that we are getting leads in. There's that saying that it's not by my hand, but in my lap. So maybe the fact that leads not coming in right now, it's not your fault. It's not anything you're doing wrong, but it's still your responsibility. So it's not by your hand, but it is still in your lap. It's still something that you need to take by the horns, you need to figure out, and you need to solve and do what you can to get leads back up. So the first thing I'm gonna guide you through some steps, some things you can be doing to one get to the bottom of it to figure it out to start increasing leads, and then two, some ways you can utilize this time. Maybe if leads are down and you just happen to find that you have some extra time on your calendar, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe your business is in a place where you're going, oh, finally, like I'm not doing consultation calls, I'm not seeing so many clients, like I have some space to focus on scaling and growth. So the first thing we're gonna do is get to the bottom of it. Why are leads slowing down? Kind of what I alluded to before. Is this seasonal? Is this something that we can pinpoint that we can say, okay, that is exactly why that's happening? We want to get to the bottom of what is going on. Is there another cause? Again, is it out of our control? Is our website having issues? Do some investigating. So if it feels like this is unusual, you're going, okay, what is why is this wrong? Start investigating. You can go into your Google Analytics. So look at your Google Analytics to see some website visits. Has traffic been on par with what you would normally see? You can look into Google Search Console. Are people searching? Are they finding you? What is going on? Are your ads performing? If you're paying for ads, are they performing as well as they normally do? Has your social media presence changed? Are your has social media itself changed? So maybe your posts are not getting as much organic reach as they were before. Look into a bunch of different things and see, okay, is there something I can pinpoint that might be part of the reason we are seeing a drop in leads? Now, there's a that's going to be an undertaking of itself. And so again, approach it with curiosity. That's always my my recommendation. Because it can be kind of frustrating, it can be stressful, it can be scary to pull these things up, it can be overwhelming. Just go into it with curiosity. Hmm. Okay, interesting. Our our website traffic is down, or our website traffic is fine, but we're not getting as many visits to our contact page. What's going on there? Go to your website as a potential prospect and browse it. Click around, see what's going on. Maybe referral partners aren't referring as many people to you. We this happened with a client one time where they realized leads were down, and what we discovered was the referral partner who sends them a lot of business hadn't been referring because they were on maternity leave. And so the we I don't think they had realized how important they were for lead generation, but that referral partner was out, and so all of a sudden the leads dried up. When they returned, leads started kicking back up again. And so just keeping in mind that that's kind of the curiosity, the things that we can find is what could be the cause of this. Is this something that we need to change? Or in that case, is it just like, okay, that's just gonna be a temporary pause, but also probably a concern for the bigger picture if we are that dependent on somebody else. So keeping those pieces, going in with curiosity, taking notes, figuring out, okay, what are some areas? We are not doing this to overhaul. We are not going in and overhauling our website. If you go and see our website visits are down, we need to change everything, or no one's visiting our contact page, that's it. I'm gonna go spend 10 grand on a website redesign. That's not always the answer. We're going in just trying to see could this be a piece of the puzzle? And at the end of the day, sometimes people just aren't visiting the contact page. Once again, maybe because they're just stressed and overwhelmed about life and the world, their finances, the economy, all those things can come into play. They get on your website, they see what you charge, and they get scared. So keep all those things in mind as you're looking. Now, a quick tip on this is to track the number of leads per month and create a line graph in Excel. So if you have some capacity, or if you have an admin, if you haven't been tracking leads, go have them go back and just say how many intake forms, so website forms, phone calls, voicemails, emails, how many did we get every month? For we can look, I would say go back two, three years, and that way we can compare. What did if you do a line graph for I'm recording this in 2025 and then you have 2024 and 2023? What we can see is month over month, are we seeing the same trends? Is it spiking around the same time? Is it dropping around the same time? Most likely you're gonna see it drop a little bit in the summertime. You're probably gonna see it spike around the beginning of the year and around September. That's just traditionally what we would see in this industry. So keep that in mind and look and just see is this drop normal? It's also gonna show some anomalies. What we found doing this with a client was it dropped in a month where typically it spikes, and that created an opportunity for some curiosity. What is going on that caused this? What caused the leads to drop all of a sudden right here? So by tracking that and then moving forward, I would just track it. Have your admin at the end of the month, log it in the spreadsheet, line graph will update, and then we can compare year over year. Are we starting to see the trends change? Are we starting to see them shift? Is it and that gives us an opportunity to address it? Now, once we have gotten curious and tried to figure out what's going on, you can make the tweaks if you feel like it is necessary. If you found, oh yeah, it turns out that our contact page was broken and it was sending people to a 404 or the form wasn't working. That's an easy fix. You fix it, leads should hopefully tick back up. If you get to the point where you're going, okay, maybe some minor tweaks, but nothing stood out as crazy, or it turns out that it's it might just be, once again, an economy thing. It might just be a whatever in the world is going on that people are not reaching out nearly as much. Well, then we can go through the next phase, and that is follow-up. This is where you go through your pipeline and you are proactive about seeking people out. We're not cold calling. That's not what I'm recommending here. What I'm recommending is reaching out to the people who reached out to you in the past. I'm willing to bet, unless you are just one of the few who is super good at this, I'm willing to bet that you aren't following up as much as you should. I would say nine out of ten clinicians, therapists, PTs that I meet with, when we talk about their process of when a client reaches out for help, it's maybe they reach out through the website, you have an admin, email them or or call them. And if if you get them on the phone, then maybe you have a conversation and try and get them booked. But if they don't answer, it's an email and it's a voicemail, or or it's a voicemail. Usually it's rare that it's both. And then that's it. And if the person never gets back to you, then that that lead is gone. Maybe they follow up one more time, but what I've found is so many people are falling through the cracks. When I was going through my process of finding a therapist, it was so incredibly overwhelming that I was almost afraid to get on call. I didn't want to call them because I didn't, I didn't want to talk to them. I was I was so overwhelmed with the process, the idea of it, the can I afford it? Uh, what's it gonna be like? Is this it's just kind of a scary thing to be going through. And that's likely what your clients or your prospects are going through. And so when you reach out to them, it's a they see the email response, hey, it's Craig. Um, let's schedule a call to see, blah, blah, blah. Here's my link, book a call now. Like, I'll do that later, right? That overwhelm, that fight or flight. It's the we're gonna push that to the side out of out of mind, and um, I'll I'll circle back whenever I'm in the right headspace. Uh, maybe they reached out in the middle of the night while they were incredibly stressed and anxious, and now they're feeling a little bit better, and they're like, Okay, cool, uh, yeah, I'll get to that when I can. And they just never do. It is in our company, we don't give up on people. That's one of our values. So, what that means for us is if you reach out to us for help, we're not gonna give up on you. Unless you at some point say, We are not interested, we don't need help anymore. Please stop, please stop following up. We're gonna stay on you. And that's because exactly what I just talked about. Somebody may have reached out to us for help at one in the morning when they couldn't sleep because their stomach was in knots because payroll was due the next day and they didn't have enough money to pay it. And then they wake up, they maybe they are able to figure it out, and the pain point is not as prominent, but they're still in trouble. Or maybe they're embarrassed, or maybe they wake up and they just get that clear mind, or they're just the same thing I was talking about, too scared to get on a call. We're not gonna give up on them. They raise their hand saying, I need help. Something needs to change, and it's our responsibility as the people who know how to help them to make sure that they're getting the help, whether that's with us or with somebody else. And that is our main goal. When we get a response from somebody, uh after maybe it's after been a few months and they find like they finally respond like, hey, thank you so much for following up. We actually were able to figure this out, or we hired somebody, or we did X, Y, and Z. Things are a lot better now. That is a win for us. We are thrilled, we celebrate it as a team. It is just that is fantastic. That's what we want. We want them to get the help they want. Now, as a business owner, we obviously want we want to be the ones helping people, but that's kind of the byproduct. Our goal is that people get help, that business owners are no longer stressed about finances, that therapy practices are no longer worried about the money and they can focus on what they want to do, whether that's through us or through someone else. So it's our job not to give up on people. So, what I would recommend is going through your list of old leads. It can be years old. That's okay. Go through that list. And since you just had your admin, go back and, or maybe you yourself, if you're a solo practice owner, went back and counted leads. Now we're gonna take those and we're going to reach out to them. Those people who have been reaching out to us that didn't turn into anything. And you can send out just a simple email and feel free to write it exactly like this. Hey, first name, it's been X days, months, years since you reached out through our website. Have you been able to get some help? If they outlined a pain point, if they outlined something, um, couples therapy, whatever it is, it's it's been six months since you reached out through our website for help with your marriage, whatever. Have you been able to get some help? It's just a simple follow-up. And then moving forward, follow up with them regularly. If you want to let them know you will, I will circle back in a week or two if I haven't heard from you. And then put them in a rhythm of follow-up. We have a whole episode on a follow-up process that I recommend using. Uh, go back through our episodes, find that, listen to it. It's gonna guide you through how to convert more clients just by simply following up. It's better to do this on your next lead. And that's what that episode is gonna help most with is the next time you get a lead, making sure they don't become somebody who just gets dropped to the wayside, that you stay on top of them, and you're gonna start to see a higher conversion rate just by simply following up more. The standard is between eight and twelve touch points before a lead becomes a client. That is the average in sales, the industry average is between eight and twelve touch points. That means you connecting with them in some capacity eight to twelve times. The typical practice does one to three, three being a lot, and that is responding to their email, maybe leaving them a voicemail, and that's usually where it ends. Maybe they follow up one more time. So if you can up that in the first 30 days they reach out to you, if you can talk, try and reach out to them 10 to 12 times in that first 30 days, you're gonna see a drastic, drastic improvement. And I promise you, I know some of you are hearing this going, oh my gosh, that's a lot. I don't want to bug these people, I don't want to bother them. I've found I would much rather annoy 10 people by reaching out too much if one person comes back and says, Thank you so much for not giving up on me, which happens all the time. It's worth it to me. I will annoy some people who just say, Stop contacting me, or who just keep deleting my emails because they don't want to read them. I will risk that in order to get people the help that they want because we don't give up on people. All right. Now, like I said, we're gonna go through, you can revamp your follow-up process. That is episode 15 if you want to go back and find that one. Um, I went through some statistics on what that looks like for the follow-up sequence, but there is a lot of different statistics that I find really, really fascinating in this realm. Um, only 12% of people make more than three attempts. That's what I told you. Uh, most people are under three attempts and following up. Um, 44% of people give up after just one follow-up. And that might be you. That might be your admin team, that might be your clinicians. And so that's something to if you have a team, have a team meeting on this and bring people around. Uh, send the podcast episode to your team and have them listen to it about the value and importance of following up. Um, telephone is significantly outperforms email conversions. So if your admin is getting somebody in, having them call is a lot better than emailing. Um, only 2% of sales are actually made on that first contact. So we're following up, we're checking in, and really just staying on top of them. And then 50% of buyers choose from the person that responds first. So this kind of goes into the making sure that we are being timely with how quickly we're getting back to people. I know I'm I'm breezing through this because this one, if you go to that episode on following up, episode 15, that's gonna give you a lot of information. We're talking today about what to do when leads are down. So, me telling you to try and hurry and respond quickly on new leads, leads are down. That's not the problem we're trying to solve today. Next, we're gonna review our marketing efforts. How much are we spending on ads? This is a great time, again, whether you want to review them to see are they performing right now, or do we want to just take some time because leads are down? We have some time on our plate to go through and to say, okay, what's our ad spend? How are they performing? How is it is that money being the best spent the best way? Do we want to up it? Do we want to decrease it? Do we want to try something different? How many leads have we received from those ads? How many clients have closed? So those are some key metrics that we want to know. From if you're running Facebook ads, you should be knowing these things. I just talked about this with Ross on our last episode when it comes to ads, some things that you should be getting from if you have an ads manager is cost. What are we spending? How many leads have we gotten? So usually it's clicks, how many people have clicked? Uh, if it's Google Ads, how many, how much have we spent? What's the cost per click, or how many people are actually coming to the website, and then how many clients are closing as a result, as best as we can see. Not always as simple as a one-to-one, but typically we can see a at least somewhat how many people are coming directly from those ads and becoming clients. Okay. Um, and then how's our website? How is your website performing? Episode 12, if you go back to that one, it talks about websites that convert and a lot of great, great tips on how to improve your website so that you can get more clients from that avenue, so that when people come to your website, you're speaking to them. It's not just generalized, it's not just all about you, it's about them, their pain points, the thing they're struggling with, and how you and your team can help. That's going to show a huge difference. This would be if you see on Google Analytics that you're getting a lot of traffic, but they're just not converting. Also, it might help with your Google search if people are searching the wrong things. Maybe the people who are landing on your website are looking for couples therapy and you don't provide couples therapy. Or maybe they're looking for a certain type of physical therapy and you don't provide that. And so you're seeing, wow, we got a lot of traffic, but no one's converting. It could be the wrong traffic. And so, really going back and revamping your website is a great use of your time if you have the capacity to do so right now. Psychology Today profile is another one. I have a few episodes, episodes for 17 and 47. We go through on some tips on how to get more clients out of your psychology today profile. Um, so go and listen to those and see are you doing making some of the common mistakes that we see on those profiles, making some of those tweaks, and a lot of them are really easy and quick. By doing those, you can see a huge uptick in some conversions through that website as well. And then finally, during this time, um, you can review your finances and your systems. We can do an expense audit. If leads are down, then you're probably feeling the financial crunch. You might need to temporarily cut back on some spending. There's an easy exercise we call keep cut trim. That's where you create three columns and you put all your expenses in one of the three columns. Keep is this is an expense we have to keep. It can't go anywhere. Cut is one we can get rid of completely, even if it's temporarily. So, what are some expenses that maybe we can just cut out of the books for now? If we need to bring them back, we can. That might be some softwares, that might be some different things, that might be lunches for your team, whatever it is. Uh, that might have to go to the wayside for a bit. And then trim, what are some expenses that maybe we can pull back on? Maybe that's marketing spend, which I know feels kind of counterintuitive with leads being down. Maybe that's finding a lower tier subscription on something. Maybe it's cutting down on what we're spending on coffee for the office, whatever it is, trimming down our spending in certain areas. Sometimes this can be accomplished just by even looking and seeing is there cheaper alternatives to our phone plan, to our billing service, to fill in the blank. You might be able to trim down what you're spending by switching to a different company or switching to a different plan within the same company. All right. And then if you don't have a profit first system set up, episode two, uh, one of our most popular episodes is how to transform your practice with the profit first system. This is a cash management system that you can implement into your business to make sure that when leads are down, when revenue is down, your business is still sustainable, that you still have cash on hand, that you're still able to pay your team, that you're not living in day-to-day stress simply because the revenue is down. So check out that episode. Or if you want some help getting that implemented, getting a system in place so that that can be a reality. In the show notes, always we have a link to talk to one of our coaches, get some help. We would love to talk to you and see how we can help your practice grow and become financially stable. Leads being down can be scary, but let's approach it with curiosity. Let's try some different things and remember it's maybe not your fault, but it's your job, it's your responsibility as the business owner to get to the bottom of it and try and pinpoint a way to increase those leads and grow your business. Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practice owner that you may know. If your practice needs help getting organized with finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help.

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Craig Dacy

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