Brand Your Practice Podcast | How to Build a Powerful Sales Funnel for Your Private Practice

**This is a replay of a previously recorded webinar**

Learn the step-by-step process to build out a sales funnel that attracts your ideal client and positions your business as the #1 trusted private practice in your community.

LINKS for Show:

FREE Sales Funnel Resources -> Click here!
TheraSaaS.com → Level up your intake system.

Get more private pay clients → Private Pay Practice Blueprint.

Resources

🚀 FREE Private Practice Launch Checklist

📈 FREE Marketing for Therapists Guide & Checklist

***All content on the Brand Your Practice Website, Podcast, and other media reflects my own opinions and should NOT be taken as legal advice, financial advice, or investment advice. Please seek out the guidance of professionally trained and licensed individuals before making any decisions. Some links in the description may be affiliate links.

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Creators & Guests

Host

Brent Stutzman

owner of Brand Your Practice, Inc.

What is Brand Your Practice Podcast?

Many mental health professionals open a private practice to help more people and make more $$$. The problem is they lack a clear plan to generate growth and attract new clients.

In this podcast we interview private practice owners and digital marketers to give you business development and marketing strategies to grow your private practice or your caseloads.

At the end of the day, we want you enjoy the freedom of having a pipeline of new clients and becoming the #1 trusted private practice in your community. Because when you build a sustainable & profitable private practice you can create a life you love!

Who is this for?
✔️ Therapists
✔️ Psychologists
✔️ Psychiatrists
✔️ Private Practice Owners

If you're in the people helping profession this podcast is for you!

All right, welcome in, everybody.

Hop on in.

Wait a minute or two as

people are arriving.

Okay, so I'd love for you,

if you are jumping in,

I'll say this once or twice.

Go ahead and put a one in the chat.

If you're a solo practice,

put a two in the chat.

If you are a group practice,

like one to five clinicians

and a three in the chat,

if you have more than five

clinicians and also just

kind of tell me where

you're coming in from,

if you're able to leave a comment in the,

if there's a chat box for that.

Okay, good.

I've seen some ones.

Hi, Annie, Anthony, Maria, Brian.

Great.

Also, yeah,

love to tell me where you're from, too.

One from Michigan.

All right.

Nice.

More Michiganers.

Okay.

Kentucky.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Hey, Pennsylvania.

Wonderful.

I'm originally from Ohio,

but my parents are now in

Pennsylvania by Erie.

They have a beautiful farm

up there that we love to visit.

And California.

Great.

Okay, thank you.

Well,

this is gonna be a pre recorded webinar.

And so I'm going to jump in

because we have a lot to go

over today and how to grow

or how to build a powerful sales funnel.

Hey, Beth, hello.

And so what I'm going to do

here is a couple house

housekeeping things in order here.

So allow me to start going

through the slides.

Uh,

I want group practice owners to know

this.

Um, I am putting all along with my friend,

Nate at navigator bookkeeping, a, uh,

group practice scaling summit.

And the really it's,

it's really kind of like a

Ted talk type conference

for a group practice owner.

So it's going to be jam

packed with great content, but also, um,

leaving space for community

and for conversations.

So if you're struggling with

marketing for your practice,

or you're struggling with

like your finances, like,

I don't know if I'm,

I don't know how to read

that profit and loss sheet

or profitability numbers,

or maybe you're struggling

to create operational

systems like around hiring.

How do you hire the right team members,

onboarding new hires, all those things.

We created this group

practice scaling summer to

help solve some of those

problems that are

that are keeping you stuck

and really from scaling your practice.

So that's going to be in

beautiful Oak Park, Illinois,

just right outside Chicago,

April 23rd and the 24th of this year.

I'm going to put a link in the chat.

You can, we'd love to have you join us.

You can go to,

just go to brandyourpractice.com,

go to the summit link there.

Some of the conversations we'll be having,

I'll be talking about three

essential dashboards,

metrics and dashboards that

every practice owner needs.

We're talking about team

culture to retain

clinicians and grow your brand,

how to create an in-house

training program to scale

your clinical team,

Financial numbers and also

Dr. Kathy Kelly is going to

talk about how to offer

intensive retreats to scale

your practice is like another offering.

OK,

so please check that out if you're a

group practice owner and

wanting some community and

some information around

strategies and how to get

unstuck in those areas that

are preventing you from

growing your practice.

The other thing is today's

webinar is sponsored by Therasas.

This is a CRM just for therapists.

It's really the stage.

It's the software that you

need right before clients

go into your EHR so you can

quickly qualify, connect,

and close client leads and

to kind of organize all

those leads that are coming in.

Post-it notes and scrap

sheets of paper and even convoluted,

complicated Google Sheets don't really...

help clients not fall through the cracks.

It can get very confusing.

So at the end of the webinar,

I'm going to share a little

bit more about TheraSAS and

how it can help organize

that whole upfront intake

process for your practice.

All right.

So let's jump in.

Okay.

So what do practice owners want?

So as a practice owner,

you want a predictable

pipeline of new client

leads coming to your practice,

and you want to invest your

marketing dollars wisely in

the areas that you need it most.

The problem is that we're

looking to at least try to

solve today is that many

practice owners don't have

a sales funnel to

consistently drive client

leads to your practice,

or that they have a sales funnel,

but it's broken and they

don't know how to fix it.

Plus,

it's also just kind of confusing

where to allocate those

precious marketing dollars that you have.

Even worse,

marketing today just isn't easy

for practice owners.

Showing up on the first page

of Google when clients need

your services has been

really a vital channel for

growing a practice these past 20 years.

However...

Private practices face even

more competition from big

directory sites like Psychology Today,

Thriveworks, Good Therapy,

and even telehealth

companies like Better Health, Headspace,

Talkspace, Alma,

and like a half dozen more.

Those big behemoth of

websites tend to push

smaller private practice

websites down on Google's

organic search results.

I've seen it in my own work,

my work with practice owners.

And what this new reality

means is now more than ever,

Practice owners need to have

a powerful sales funnel

that incorporates both a

digital and organic

strategies to be working

for them 24 seven to stand

out from the competition

and attract their ideal client.

So here's the reality for

most practice owners today

is that if you don't have a sales funnel,

you won't grow.

And when I partner with

practice owners to scale up

their businesses,

My ultimate goal for them is

really to become the number

one trusted private

practice in their community

for that particular niche

that they serve.

And I want to do that quickly,

which means I need to build

out a sales funnel.

And today I'm going to give

you an inside look into my

playbook and how I do that.

Okay.

So here we go.

How to create a powerful

sales funnel for your private practice.

And this really kind of

starts about seven years ago.

Um,

Seven years ago,

my wife came home and she

was getting her hours at

the agency she was working at.

She was a she's a therapist.

And as she was kind of

getting towards the end of that journey,

she said,

I want to start my own private practice.

I want to focus on kids and

I want it to be 100 percent private pay.

Now, at the time,

my wife was six months

pregnant with our son,

as you see there in the

tiny little tiny simian there.

She was six months pregnant with him.

We had twin girls who were two years old.

I didn't have a marketing degree.

I never started a business before.

We didn't have money to pay

someone to build us a

website or a sales funnel.

I didn't even know what a

sales funnel was.

We lived in Chicagoland to be near family,

and we couldn't really make

it on my salary alone as

our family was growing.

And we were really just

starting from scratch.

This business was starting from scratch,

but we had to make it work.

So I...

went down the rabbit hole of

branding and marketing and

wake up at four in the

morning with like anxiety,

but having these ideas that

I needed to write down,

like how we can market.

I knew we had to have video

as part of our marketing strategy,

as part of our sales funnel.

So I had to learn video and

cameras and editing and

building websites and SEO and WordPress,

all those things.

And so for several months,

I obsessed over that.

And today,

Um, there's my lovely family.

There's a Christmas card today.

A kid matters.

Counseling has a group is a group practice,

nine clinicians,

a hundred percent private

pay million dollar in

revenue and about 3000 email subscribers.

And that's grown.

I think we're almost up to 4,000 now.

And since then I've gone on to launch, um,

over 12 other private

practices across the

country with other practice owners,

really establishing the sales funnels,

the backbone of scaling their practices.

And my mission, really,

and you're part of that

just being here today,

is my mission is to help launch, grow,

and scale 10,000 private

practices by 2030.

And I do that through a

business called Play Therapy Toolbox,

which is education for play therapists,

FairSass,

which I mentioned at the beginning,

the CRM, private pay practice program,

and then my services side,

Brand Your Practice.

And for myself,

I consider myself really

kind of a full stack marketer.

I've done all the things,

which is why I'm going to

be sharing some of those

strategies in this webinar.

I'm also a full stack content creator.

So I've done YouTube videos, vlogging,

branded newsletters, all the things.

And I hope to bring that to

bear and that information with you today.

And I'm also a certified

story brand guide.

All right.

So the plan is to teach you

the basic elements of a

sales funnel and what you

need to do to get started.

The second half of our time

is we'll do a little bit of Q&A,

but I'm gonna give away a

ton of free resources that

I mentioned in this webinar.

And then the third,

if you wanna stay around,

I'd love to give a live

demo of Therasas and also

offer some special pricing

for those attending this

webinar for the month of February, okay?

So that is the plan.

All right,

let's talk about creating your

sales funnel.

All right,

so the sales funnel is really a

marketing strategy that

guides potential customers

through a series of steps

with the end goal of really

converting them into paying clients.

A sales funnel includes

three major components, curiosity,

enlightenment, and commitment.

The first stage there in the

curiosity stage, your client is asking,

can you solve my problem?

And the alignment stage,

if they move down into the

funnel a little bit, if they answer yes,

they're then going to be asking,

can I trust you?

And if they get down to the

commitment stage, if they say, yes,

I trust you, that they're going to say,

all right,

how do I schedule an appointment?

How do I give you my money, essentially?

So there's really three sales funnel.

I have to dive into this even more.

But the three main sales

funnel assets are a brand message,

a website, at least a homepage,

right on your website, and then a link.

that you use to talk about

the problems you solve for your clients.

And I'll share more about that shortly.

The website is really,

if you have a well-designed,

scannable website talking

about the problems you help

solve and the services you offer,

that's going to do well for

converting clients.

And then of course,

the lead generator and email campaign.

And the lead generator is

really just a free resource

you can give away to

capture somebody's email

address and then nurture

that relationship through some automation,

email automation.

because not everyone's ready

to schedule an appointment

when they visit your website.

All right, so let's jump in here.

Every potential client is

asking when they engage with your brand,

can you solve my problem?

The curiosity stage in the

sales funnel is about

peaking the potential

client's interest by

answering their most

pressing questions about

the problem they are trying to solve.

If you can succinctly and

clearly answer the question,

can you solve my problem?

You've hooked that potential

client and they're gonna

move down in the sales

funnel into the enlightenment stage.

And you'll see here that I

have the website in the middle.

It's like the backbone.

It's the website focus of

your sales funnel.

And then on to the right,

I have marketing channels.

So how you're going to be

driving traffic and

interest over to your website.

But right now,

we're just going to be

focusing on the main part

of the sales funnel, the backbone,

which is like your website.

So let's talk a little bit

about your brand message first.

So what is a brand message?

A brand message is kind of

like a movie script.

No movie is created without a script.

The screenplay or the movie

scripts provide words that

will give directions for the movie.

You know, where's the action?

You know,

is there a mystery or is there

suspense here?

Scripts also detail how many

actors are needed.

They provide guidance and

inspiration on set design,

location shooting, costume design,

what type of lighting might be needed,

even props.

A producer will not hire a director, actor,

set designer, special effects teams,

anybody until they have that script.

Every movie starts with a script.

It's the words that provide

the foundation for a blockbuster hit.

So imagine if you try to

make a movie without a script.

Imagine that.

It'd just be this tremendous

waste of time because you

don't have any guardrails

in place to create a movie.

Your brand message plays the

same part in your marketing

and in your sales funnel.

So many practice owners will

create a website without

having a clear brand message.

And that's why you have so

many confusing therapy

websites out there.

And if you confuse,

this is what Donald Miller

says from StoryBrand, if you confuse,

you will lose.

You're going to lose those

client leads and that potential revenue.

Your brand message is the

script to design a

beautiful website that

actually communicates with

words the problems you

solve and how you can

improve your client's life.

Your brand message is the

basis for your sales funnel

and all of your marketing.

And I have a free resource

on how you can get started

with that brand message at

the end of this webinar.

And if you want to dive

deeper into branding,

I encourage you to take a

look at Building a Story

Brand by Donald Miller.

And I'll have a link to that

resource as well.

Okay, so let's talk about your homepage.

Your homepage will serve as

the main asset for your sales funnel.

So you're going to take your brand message,

those words, right?

And you're going to start populating,

filling out your homepage

with some of the snippets

from your brand message.

And for the curiosity stage in particular,

you need to have a clear

header and at the very top

of your website on your homepage.

And this is where you have

three seconds to answer the

critical question,

can you solve my problem?

And therapists rarely

mention on their header

that they're actually

counselors and therapists.

So let me dive into a little bit here.

We call this the grunt test.

You have three seconds for

that potential client to answer,

can you solve my problem, right?

So you need to have on your header,

you know, can they answer the question?

What does your private practice do?

How you can help your client?

How can the client get help?

And what is that action they

need to take in order to

get started with counseling?

So if you were to kind of

think about your website right now,

right at the very top,

does it clearly state what you do?

Does it clearly state how you can help?

And does it clearly state

how they can get started

with an appointment?

And if you don't answer these questions,

people are gonna leave your website.

You only have like three to

five seconds to do this.

And so you can't have a lot

of gobbledygook.

You have to have a clear and

simple design.

So I'm going to show you

some examples of that.

So this is my wife's website,

Kid Matters Counseling,

right at the very top.

We are child therapists

counseling children ages 2 to 12.

And then how do we help?

We have this little benefit down here,

a little benefit stack.

Less anxiety and worry.

Manage big emotions.

Confidently parent your child.

And then you can see that

there's a call to action

button that says schedule appointment.

Here's another one of my clients,

right at the top.

Counseling for a more connected family.

Experienced family therapist

and counselors.

Schedule an appointment.

You literally have three

seconds because you're like,

you're just basically answering, you know,

when the client comes to your website,

the client lead, like,

am I in the right place?

Right.

Can you help solve my problem?

So having very clear

language at the very top is

going to be really

important for your website on that header,

okay?

So let's talk a little bit

about marketing channels

and how to drive traffic

and client leads to your website.

So there's a ton of choices, but if, again,

when I start launching

or scaling up a practice

with a practice owner,

I'm focusing on these two things,

Google business profile and

word of mouth referrals.

So what do I mean by this?

If it's a new website,

it hasn't been around for a while,

it's gonna take six months

to start showing up on page

one of Google if you do your SEO right.

So one way that you can

leapfrog that is if you

have a strong Google business profile,

because you can start to

rank locally and organically.

So that's going to be really important.

The second one is word of mouth referrals.

You have to have a system in

place to get those word of

mouth referrals,

people referring clients to you.

That's why I think the

organic and the digital

side have to be working together.

A few months ago,

there was a massive drop in

people with new appointment

requests across the country.

A lot of my clients saw

significant drops that were

primarily digital.

If they didn't have a strong

word of mouth referral,

they saw that drastically.

And, you know,

there was a little fear and

trepidation there.

But for those who have a

strong word of mouth referrals,

they've been building those relationships,

building those trusted relationships.

They barely saw the dip

because both were working in tandem.

Okay, so a couple action items here.

Create your brand message.

And the second one is to

update your homepage header.

And I have, I'll show you a couple here.

I have a bunch of resources here.

Here's a free resource I'm

going to give you is brand

script template and a video script.

So this is what I work with

my clients on how to create

a clear brand message using story,

which is a wonderful exercise.

And so I'll be giving you

all a link to all these

resources at the end.

The second one is a homepage

wireframe template.

This is like an

architectural drawing of your homepage.

So you can take that brand message,

start putting the words in

the right places,

and then send it over to

your website designer to

make you a beautiful website.

But again,

it all starts with the brand message.

All right, and then I have updated this,

the ultimate website

checklist for therapists.

So yeah,

just a checklist to make sure

everything's in the right place.

And let's see here.

I'm going to get to

questions in just a minute,

so start lining them up and

I'll take a minute to

answer a couple of questions.

But let's talk about how to

allocate some of your money,

your precious marketing dollars.

I think there's really three

stages to growing a

practice and scaling it.

The first is the child stage.

And that is all about survival.

And so you're focusing on marketing,

getting those client lead numbers up,

getting clients into your

business and getting cash

flow going because cash flow is survival.

And so that's really around

creating awareness and

curiosity about your practice.

So I just put on the side

here kind of like a sales

funnel that might cost you $200.

Again, these are all approximate.

You can spend a lot of money on this.

You can spend a little bit.

And so this is sort of like a baseline.

I'm saying like 500 bucks a month.

You have a couple one time.

costs in there uh but

focusing on networking uh

google ads is going to be

helpful it's not a silver

bullet um but it is helpful

to drive at leads to your

website because if it's a

new website it's going to

take a long time to rank

organically and you need to

get traffic there so and

maybe a psychology today

profile or another

directory site could be helpful

All right,

so since I don't have a webinar

partner to help me with this,

I'm going to jump over to

the chat if there's any questions.

And if you do,

go ahead and throw one in there.

I don't see any at the moment.

But if you have a question,

go ahead and take a second,

and I'll get a little sip of water here.

Throw a question in there for me.

I am not,

either the chat's not updating or

there's just no questions

and I can keep going.

All right,

so let's go ahead and keep going then.

All right,

so let's go to the enlightenment stage.

So this is stage two,

the enlightenment stage.

They are asking, can I trust you?

So far, they're like, hey,

you solved my problem.

I think you can solve my problem.

Now, can I trust you?

So let's talk about some

website assets that can

start building that trust

and then get people down

further into the commitment stage.

Uh, actually I'll take a pause here.

Do you work with coaches too?

Uh, yes and no,

I'll do private one-to-one coaching.

Um,

but this sales funnel will work

absolutely for coaches.

Um, okay.

So the first thing that you

could be thinking about is blog writing.

So we all know blog is a

powerful tool to build

trust with potential clients,

but only if you write about

the problems they are trying to solve,

it positions you as an

authority and trusted guide.

And it's also great for SEO.

Um,

I years ago,

I was trying to earn the

business of a local engineering firm.

And the owner's like, you know, I was like,

hey, let's build out your sales funnel.

And he's like, well,

I already have a newsletter

and I write about my cat.

And he's like,

a lot of people open up the newsletters.

I get a high open rate when

I write about my cat.

And.

I was like, well, I don't think you have,

that might just be your

family members because

people actually don't care

about your cat.

They care about the problems

that you are trying to solve for them.

So if you're going to write

blog posts and even newsletters,

write about the problems that you solve,

you can solve for them.

The next one is having a few

videos on your website to

go a little deeper and how

you can provide therapy and help them.

You could take

the brand message template,

and turn that into a video script.

Video is, I have found,

it is the fastest way for someone to know,

like, and trust you, hands down.

But this is a huge

opportunity for you because

very few therapists and even coaches,

they don't use video.

And so this is an easy way

for you to stand out from

the competition.

Again,

it doesn't have to be high quality

perfection.

It's really the words that

come down that you're

speaking on that video.

So I think you should have

three types of video.

You should have a homepage video,

which is just an overview

and how you guide clients

into mental wellness.

This is essentially your brand message.

Just use that free brand

message script that I mentioned.

I think if you're a group practice,

you should have videos for

individual clinicians

because people shop for

their therapists like they

do Amazon products.

They want to try it on.

So I have a client and they

just hired another clinician.

So I'm going to be flying

out there with all of my

video equipment and filming

some videos with them.

And what we have found is

the established clinicians are there.

People are naming,

I want to work with these

so-and-so people.

It's because they already

have videos on their

website and they haven't

been wanting to work with

this other clinician

because they're consuming

video content and they

trust the ones with the video.

So I'm flying out there

quick to start filming some videos.

I think you should also have

a thank you video.

So after someone raises

their hand and schedules an

appointment with you,

they fill out a form, whatever, you can

Redirect them to another

page on your website and just say, hey,

thank you so much for

taking this courageous step

and seeking help.

Here are the next steps that

you need to be thinking

about as we get ready for

therapy to begin.

Something like that.

Just something very simple,

acknowledging the

courageous step and what to expect next.

Another one is Google reviews.

People, like I said,

people shop for their

therapists like Amazon products.

They want to see five-star reviews.

It's just the way it is.

Social proof builds trust.

Again, they're asking, can I trust you?

And Google reviews will help

answer that question.

Now,

I know you can't ask for Google

reviews from clients.

Um,

for many of you just ethically it's

against your ethic rules,

all those things, right?

So what are you going to do?

Well, you can ask other colleagues,

ask other therapists,

ask people from graduate school.

I don't know people who can

speak to your counseling skills.

Maybe that's friends.

If you're speaking at, uh,

if you're doing a speaking engagement,

ask the host to leave you a Google review,

right?

Just find ways to get Google reviews.

You're going to be really

important in building that trust.

The next one,

let's talk about the email newsletter.

So a lot of you are on this

webinar because you read my

email newsletter in some way, right?

I sent out an email.

So a branded email

newsletter is really just

regular communication sent

to your subscribed audience.

And you can feature blog

posts if you've written.

You could have easy, like,

short tips and tricks around websites

mindfulness or whatever.

You could also introduce new

hires that you've hired, uh,

to your email list and just