Dr. David Turer, Live at The Aesthetic Meeting 2023

Max Baybak

Hello, hello out there. Max here, co-founder and chief growth officer at Influx Marketing, and today we're at the Aesthetic Society meeting here at the Miami Beach Convention Center. This is the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Every year I walk the aisles and I end up spending most of my time chatting with industry peers and marketing-minded physicians, and I always walk away really feeling like I have my finger on the pulse of what's happening in our space.

So this year I thought it'd be fun to take it a step further and have those same discussions that I always find myself having, but do it in a podcast format so that I can bring them to you at home. So if you're like me and you want to be dialed in on what's happening within the world of patient acquisition and digital marketing for aesthetic practices, follow along, and I hope to bring you some valuable insights through these conversations that you can use to take your practice to the next level.

Can't take myself seriously. All right, let's roll with it.

All right, so I'm here now with Dr. Dave Turer of New Jersey Plastic Surgery, who also happens to be a wonderful client of Influx Marketing. Dr. Turer, thank you so much for joining us. This is great.

Dr. David Turer

I appreciate you having me here.

Max Baybak

No, thank you very much for spending your time. I know you're busy here at these things. But I would love it if you would help start out by just telling us — having our — telling our audience a little bit about your background and kind of what you're doing at New Jersey Plastic Surgery.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm pretty new into practice. I've been in practice for a year and a half, so I'm in my second year of practice. I was lucky, I did the UT Southwestern Aesthetic Surgery fellowship, and then I joined New Jersey Plastic Surgery. I do all aesthetic surgery, and, you know, I'm really excited to be able to share some of our experiences with building a young practice and joining a more experienced practice.

Max Baybak

That's exactly what I want to pick your brain about. I find it really interesting to get the perspective of the younger surgeons who are coming in, because they have a different vantage point. They grew up oftentime — or predominantly — in a digital environment, and so when it pertains, it's actually sometimes really quite useful and quite a pleasure to work with a younger surgeon who's coming in who kind of speaks that language a little bit more.

Dr. David Turer

Sure.

Max Baybak

So for those of you who don't know, New Jersey Plastic Surgery is the practice you joined, which is the practice of Dr. Barry DiBernardo, who's been a client of ours for years. A wonderful man, really a lovely client to work with, and he's been, you know, very kind to give us a lot of credit for helping to get things kind of the way he had always wanted them in his marketing, as I—

Dr. David Turer

Absolutely.

Max Baybak

—would say. Absolutely. And you joined the practice — now, how long has it been?

Dr. David Turer

I joined in October of '22 — or, no, excuse me, August of '22, so it's been about a year and a half.

Max Baybak

Okay, awesome. Okay, so this is what we kind of remember. '21?

Dr. David Turer

Yeah, right, '21.

Max Baybak

Yes.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah, year and a half.

Max Baybak

Yeah, that's right. Sorry, I didn't catch that either.

So this podcast is about marketing, right? So, and I'm certainly not qualified to sit here and ask you clinical questions. Like, what I think is really interesting when I get a chance to speak with a surgeon is, we spend all day, every day thinking about marketing, and trying to spend some portion of that time thinking about what's coming and staying ahead. But I think it's very important for us to not forget to talk to the person on the ground, so to speak — whether that's the practice manager, front desk, and of course the surgeon themselves.

So I'd love to pick the brain of surgeons, especially those who are working with — to kind of see what they're — we always tell our account executives, it's great to look at the numbers, but also just ask what they're seeing. And then we match that, and if it matches, great. If it sort of seems to fit — but if there's a misalignment, you go and we look deeper in the numbers and we go, oh, I see, there's something here that we can tweak, right? And so it's a collaborative effort. It's always really valuable to hear what's happening on the ground.

Now, myself and yourself and our president, Erica Crawford, were just chatting about — in fact, you guys gave a talk to the fellows here, that's right, two days ago — but we were just talking about what you've been doing in terms of increasing lead conversion. And I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. David Turer

Sure. So obviously, I don't — I came into practice, I didn't have a reputation, nobody knew me, and so new leads were really critical for me to start my practice, for me to build my practice. I was fortunate to be in a situation with Dr. D and with the rest of New Jersey Plastic Surgery where it's not an office here, it's really kind of a group practice, and so they were committed to helping me get busy.

Obviously, early on there were some ups and downs, times that were busier, times that were not. You know, my background's in engineering, so I'm a numbers guy, just like you said. So you feel it, and then I started to dive into, well, what the heck is going on? Why am I busy sometimes, why am I not? What's happening?

And so we work with MyMedLeads as our CRM, and I started looking at the data and found that our conversion rate was quite low. So you guys are doing an excellent job, you know, between the website, now with Google Ads, with our social media, of bringing new leads in. Where we were struggling is to convert those leads into consults.

Max Baybak

And so I think a lot of practices don't even have that data. They don't even know that they're struggling.

Dr. David Turer

Some still don't.

Max Baybak

Yeah, right.

Dr. David Turer

So we looked at that and we started to analyze and say, well, why are we not converting these people? What's happening? Well, you know, maybe sometimes we weren't answering the phone, or sometimes, you know, somebody wasn't getting back to the patient or to the lead quickly enough. And so even in the last month we've been able to almost double our conversion rate since identifying this problem and putting people in place to address it.

Max Baybak

That's huge. Well, you do — okay, that's huge. So you kind of just answered the question I was going to ask, which is that you put people in place to address — I was going to ask you, how did you resolve it? Will you tell us a little bit more about that, and the response times you were seeing versus now?

Dr. David Turer

Sure. So I mean, sometimes it would be hours, or, you know, I mean sometimes some of the leads wouldn't even get answered, right? But then once we understood that problem, we've added — and we're continuing, this is an ongoing process, right?

Max Baybak

Always is an ongoing process.

Dr. David Turer

But we started to add people, dedicated people, to answer those leads. So as soon as that lead comes in, there's somebody to get back to that potential patient. And, you know, I think the old teaching was get back to them, you know, in 24 hours. And then maybe the teaching was, well, you know, don't go to lunch before you answer the leads, or don't leave for the day without answering the leads. And then it was, you know, don't let an hour go by. And then it was, you know, I think it's basically, if you don't answer that person instantaneously, you're not going to get that person. I mean, some people you will, but I mean, we all know how this goes, right? You're going down a list of practices on Google, you send a request for information, you wait five seconds for someone to send you that text back — if it doesn't come, you move on to the next one.

Max Baybak

Yep.

Dr. David Turer

So that immediate response — and we've gotten feedback from new patients that said, you know, we asked them, why did you come here? And they said, we found you on Google and you guys got back to me right away. And it's as simple as that. I mean, obviously, you know, you've got to be good for the patient in terms of what you offer and your services and your pricing and the vibe of your practice, but they're never going to know that if someone isn't there to talk.

Max Baybak

It's so — you, I mean, you already have — something like you said, there's so many things that need to line up. It would be terrible to lose it on just not responding. You already had so many factors, so just make sure that foundational aspect is there in place.

Dr. David Turer

You know, MyMed— I mean, I'm not going to take credit for this concept. MyMedLeads shows that the life cycle of a lead to a patient is a funnel, right? So, you know, in part at least thanks to you guys, the top of the funnel is huge, there's tons and tons of leads coming in. But then if it's filtering down to this tiny little hole, there's just a drip coming through it, and then every funnel underneath is going to filter out even more. So each step of that funnel, you have to open that up wide to just keep the flow going.

Max Baybak

Absolutely. So what did you say again? I got that it's ongoing, but yeah, share them with me again, the numbers that you've seen — or do you have a sense of what those are?

Dr. David Turer

We — in the last, even the last couple months, we've doubled our lead completion.

Max Baybak

Wow.

Dr. David Turer

So, and that's — and the primary change is just putting someone there, having a dedicated person to answer leads.

Max Baybak

Amazing. And so, really got it. And so it's a dedicated person for web forms, chats, calls—

Dr. David Turer

And calls.

Max Baybak

And it's one person's doing all three of those things?

Dr. David Turer

Basically, for the moment.

Max Baybak

But which I think is totally fine, depending on — and it kind of goes to my next question: does this person do anything else in the practice? Are they also—

Dr. David Turer

It's a great question. At the moment, no. No.

I think every practice is different, of course. So a lot of practices will have a front desk with three or four people sitting there. Someone can greet a patient that comes in, someone can answer the phone, someone can check somebody out. Physically, we're not set up that way. So our receptionist for some period of time was the one that was answering a lot of those calls, right? But there's only one person there, so she was having to greet the patients coming in, help them fill their forms out, but also answer the phone and have you do that. It's too much.

So we put someone in almost a call center, if you want to think about it that way — it is, it's a one-person call center, right, for the moment — to answer those leads. And that's been the biggest change that we've seen, is just having someone dedicated to do that.

Max Baybak

It's huge. I definitely agree with you. We are conditioned at this point in time to have things on demand, and if we don't get it, we move on to the next. And the worst is when you're paying — when you're paying for that lead via an ad, right?

I had something that I needed done on my house, and I called the place, and I clicked the ad — which I'm actually really mindful, since we run ads, most, and see if I can, if there's same listings down here organically, I'll save them a couple bucks, I'll try to be nice. But I clicked the ad, I called — I don't remember what happened, but I actually called, no one answered, and I just went to the next one. And I thought, well, they would have easily closed me, but I'm doing this right now, I'm not doing this later, right? I'm finding something, I'm going to book the appointment to get them to come out to my house.

Dr. David Turer

Exactly. And, you know, I want to make another point, right? Because obviously guys like Dr. D have been in practice for 30 years, so he has a reputation, people refer to him. I mean, I'm starting to get some of that, but for me these new leads, kind of the more digital leads, are I think even more important in my practice, because I'm new, right? I don't have that set of older patients and a reputation and people referring to me. So when we don't do that well, I think I feel it a lot more than my partners do.

Max Baybak

So of course. And we sort of teach that, that in the beginning you're going to be more reliant on paid revenue sources, or paid lead sources, and even organic SEO, but that takes a little bit more time to build up. And over time, hopefully via SEO and reputation, you're reducing your dependence. You may still choose to spend money on ads, but you're reducing your dependence on—

Dr. David Turer

Exactly, exactly.

Max Baybak

Let me ask you this. An interesting topic — I think it's really important to be transparent about this — is, as an agency, there's always a conversation about, when getting a lot of these, they're not converting, there's always potentially a contentious conversation of, you know, the practice saying, well, that's because the leads are not good, and the agency saying, that's because their conversion is not good, right, your follow-up is not good.

We learned long ago that opinions do not matter in this circumstance, and we need to look at data. Let's just look at data together, and then let's be willing to improve if there's something we need to improve, and hopefully the practice is willing to improve if there's something that they need to improve. And that's a great partnership, right? Sometimes that data is squishy, it's murky.

Dr. David Turer

Of course. There's a lot of confounding—

Max Baybak

Yeah.

Dr. David Turer

—variables with all of this, right? You're never going to just get a totally clean data set that says, oh, this is the reason I'm not doing this. It can be very hard to do that, especially if there is any kind of bias involved in saying, no, I think it's not us. You're going to find something to confirm that, right?

Max Baybak

Right. But that's fine. I mean, again, we really — we just want the practice to succeed. I'm just curious from your perspective: did it go through your head, you know, are these leads any good? And what did you come out feeling like after doing this? I'm sure movement on the — I mean, it's still kind of early to assess that.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah. I think that it's kind of hard, because if your conversion rate is very low, you know that there has to be at least some issues internally. But I think that once you kind of max that out, then maybe you have a better sense as to how many of those leads are good.

So I think there's definitely some leads that are not qualified, right? For example, we don't take insurance in our practice, so when someone calls and wants insurance to pay for a breast reduction, we're not a good candidate for that. Or, you know, they have breast cancer and they want breast reconstruction — obviously we're not a good candidate for that patient. So those leads are not good leads.

But if someone is interested in a tummy tuck or a breast augmentation, then, like you said, it's a lot more muddy. We don't really know if they're — you know, are they too price conscious? Then maybe we're not the right practice for them. Or do we not offer the service that they want? I mean, we offer most things, so that's typically not the case. So then I think if their interest is aligned with something that we offer, then there's probably some component of both as to whether the lead is good or whether it's the practice that's a problem.

And I mean, I think we know that if you train your staff better and they have more experience in selling, you're going to get higher lead conversion, of course. So, you know, again, in our practice this is an ongoing development. And so I think that as people that are answering the phones, that are answering the leads, gain more experience, I see them getting better, I see their conversion rates going up. So I don't know, I mean, I think that probably you'll hit sort of a cap once you have a really good system in place where all those leads are getting the attention that they need, and then you can look at what proportion of those leads are actually good.

Max Baybak

I think that's a great way to put it. And I think, because kind of the — as I'm reflecting on situations where we've gone through this with clients, I'm realizing that as long as both people really feel they're coming to the table in good faith, the best thing to do is just eliminate variables. So let's eliminate the variables. You said it great: we know that if you train your front desk, your front office, give them more resources, support and training, and ideally really let them dedicate attention to this and not be spread all over the place, you're going to get improvement.

A great example — you said insurance. You don't do insurance, so this is an exact reason why a marketing company needs to be in lockstep with the practice. Hey, we're getting a sudden, you know, jump in insurance leads, we made it and we go look, come on, why is that? Okay, let's make sure this landing page or this procedure page makes it clear, so we can kind of filter those down, right? And we kind of chip away at it from both ends until we have the best stuff trading in the middle. And I think that's the best way to go about it.

Dr. David Turer

I mean, I think obviously a lot of patients are price conscious, and so there's a limit to how much I think you want to put out there about what your prices are.

Max Baybak

Yes.

Dr. David Turer

You know, I think if the patients call, maybe you can give them a general idea, but you never want to quote anybody, because then they come in and inevitably they need a different procedure, I need something different.

Max Baybak

Yeah.

Dr. David Turer

We charge our patients a console fee, which I think is good at weeding out the people that are not terribly interested.

Max Baybak

Yes. And I mean, let's be honest, right? Like, the leads may not be bad, they may just not be the right leads for your practice. Well, and that's exactly what the marketing company needs to understand, right? There could be good leads to someone else, but we need to make sure you're getting the leads that—

Dr. David Turer

That's right.

Max Baybak

Right. I mean, these people are all their leads, they're interested in whatever it is that you're trying to sell.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah.

Max Baybak

It just may be that they're not. But it's also a delicate balance, because also you don't want to choke it down too much to where you don't — you want every opportunity, every lead. You know, another word you see in a lot of these software systems for "lead" is "opportunity." It's an opportunity for you. And if we choke it down too much — sometimes it is okay to keep that top of the funnel wider and realize there's some waste, but you have more opportunities, right?

Dr. David Turer

I think, you know, again, if I was booked out two years, it'd be a different story. But I'm so early in practice that, you know, I'm willing to take the bigger pile.

Max Baybak

Yeah. You know, and then as your practice grows, you can become more selective.

Dr. David Turer

You — absolutely. So I think, you know, you have to be a little bit introspective as a young guy, like, don't be too picky, you're not quite there yet.

Max Baybak

Sure. Yeah, no, I agree. And I've given a talk on kind of finding your niche as a surgeon, and I only look at it from the marketing perspective — again, I don't have the experience that you do from the clinical side whatsoever — but I have noticed that people will shape their career and they'll shape their practice over time, but they need to be a little more kind of open to everything in the beginning, and then—

Dr. David Turer

Right.

Max Baybak

—whittle it down. And your marketing, I think, increases exponentially in its efficacy when you really do start to hone in on a procedure, but even more so on a particular area of practice. But it's not a luxury you have in the beginning.

Dr. David Turer

Sure.

Max Baybak

I kind of like to look at it as playing the game of Hearts, where you can either try to get no hearts or collect them all, which is shooting the moon, right? I don't know if this analogy is going to pan out here. My point: you really want to, as soon as you start seeing you're getting a lot of one thing, you go, you know what, I'm gonna go all in on this, right? That's when you collect all the hearts. Anyway, my analogy didn't work, but I'll break it down for people another time.

Let me ask you two other questions, and I know you're a busy man, I want to get you out of here.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah.

Max Baybak

Do you have a perspective yet — or if not, I'd be curious to just touch base with you again on this in the future—

Dr. David Turer

Sure.

Max Baybak

—on the difference between — are we looking at, in the leads that you've increased the response time on, are we looking at some non-surgical? I know there's a big non-surgical component of the practice. Have you been focusing on non-surgical, or both?

Dr. David Turer

Everything.

Max Baybak

Okay. So I'd be curious, as you continue to do this experiment, if we can look at the results broken into those two cohorts or buckets, because it's dramatically different in my experience, and I want to see what your experience is in terms of quality of lead—

Dr. David Turer

Okay.

Max Baybak

—and conversion rate broken into those two buckets.

Dr. David Turer

That's a great perspective. Yeah, I haven't thought to break down the analysis that way, but that's something that we could easily do.

Max Baybak

Okay, so I would definitely be interested in seeing that.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah.

Max Baybak

Okay, good. And then the other thing I want to talk about, you brought up when you were speaking with Erica on stage the other day to the fellows here about, you know, making sure you actually have marketing budget coming to you, right? And I've worked with a lot of practices where there's new surgeons joining the practice, and I see them making sure now — and sometimes realizing later — that they should have structured a deal that really lets them be a focal point, get marketing dollars allocated to them, get really integrated into the website. You're right, I think that's so important, versus just sort of being thrown the scraps, if you will.

Dr. David Turer

Sure.

Max Baybak

Well, you know, speak to that.

Dr. David Turer

I mean, I've been very fortunate in that my senior partner has been very accommodating in helping me get busy. So we didn't discuss all of this up front — in retrospect I wish I had, because it might have smoothed things out in the beginning. But no, I think you're absolutely right, I think it's very important that you are prominently featured as part of the practice, you're not just an also-ran.

And frankly, from the practice perspective, you know, you're coming out as a well-trained surgeon, you're going to be financially a benefit to the practice, right? The busier you get, the more money everyone's gonna make. And so I think that the practice should see the young surgeon as an investment and not as a burden. And I think sometimes the egos get in the way, or there's any of a million things to get in the way in these plastic surgery marriages that fail.

So, you know, just having a good open line of communication with your boss and saying, look, I'm feeling like, you know, I'm not getting as many leads as I want, the marketing isn't working, I'm not as busy as I want to be, how can we make the pie bigger for both of us or for all of us — as opposed to saying, you know, give me, give me, give me, how can I get more of the pie — is really important. And those are the conversations that Dr. D and I have had, and, you know, it's taken us time to get there, but I mean, I'm very fortunate to be in a practice that's been willing to work through that and figure out where the issues are and how to help me get busy.

Max Baybak

I love that. As in any partnership, you need to—

Dr. David Turer

Sure.

Max Baybak

It's great. And it's best if you've managed to think of anything in advance, but the best partnerships are willing to say, hey, let's talk about this anyway, we should, okay, we didn't know, we overlooked this. And I've watched the partnership, I've seen how Barry really tries to prop you up and support you, and I've seen how you're a team player in the practice, and it's beautiful. So I think we could do a whole other episode on this subject, because it's something we could talk about a lot, asked a lot about with younger surgeons.

Dr. David Turer

Yeah.

Max Baybak

But I know you're busy now, so I'm gonna let you go. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. I would love to stay in touch on this experiment, if you will, on these conversion rates and follow-up, and we'll follow the story and see how it goes. But thank you so much for your time.

Dr. David Turer

No, I appreciate you having me here. This is great.

Max Baybak

My pleasure.