I called every MFT supervisor in Arkansas in order to get more clients and it failed.
As you (probably) know, my business partner and I run Private Practice Incubator (PPI). We’re a small consulting firm dedicated to helping therapists and counselors go from never having a practice to having a full solo practice with a plan for reaching financial independence.
One of the things we teach in PPI is a simple strategy for getting new clients. While our strategy takes a lot of work to set up, on the back end it's pretty hands off. It's pretty great.
But we’ve been looking for alternatives.
If our strategy is so great why look for alternatives?
Because of AI. Our strategy is a local SEO strategy through Google. Over the past year we’ve seen Google's AI start to make personalized recommendations when you search. Which, obviously, would change everything.
You've probably seen AI recommendations, they look like this.
So we’ve been testing out a new strategy for helping our PPI mentees get clients: Cold calling supervisors.
I’d heard from marketing guru Alex Hormozi that cold calling potential referral sources was a good idea. So I cold called every MFT supervisor in the state of Arkansas.
Now I know you're thinking, "of course this failed. It's a dumb idea."
You're right.
Still, we did it because we were hoping to learn something new.
Our plan to use cold calling to market a psychotherapy practice.
Our plan was simple. We'd call supervisors and offer free training to help them and their supervisees. We'd hoped this would build goodwill. We were literally giving away our best material for free, surely people would jump at the offer!
Well it turns out simply getting people on the phone is nearly impossible. Many of the supervisors didn’t have an online presence. So even though we had their name from the state registry, we had no way of contacting them.
Of the ones we did have contact information for, many of them didn’t answer the phone.
This is to be expected, after all most supervisors are also clinicians, so they probably were in session. But I think the problem is worse than that. Many clinicians are really bad at returning client phone calls in general. Supervisors may be the same. I left messages as often as I could, but in the end only 2 or 3 actually called me back.
When we did get people on the phone most people dismissed us outright. They just weren’t interested. In fact the only people who didn’t dismiss us outright were people we’d already had some sort of connection to. For instance, one guy and I had been to a bunch of trainings together. Another lady had come to speak to my graduate program years ago.
Finally, even though we got a handful of supervisors (approx 5) who said they’d talk to their supervisees about our training, so far, none of them have taken us up on it. I started calling people mid December and I’m writing this on Dec 20th right before I go on Christmas break. If they haven’t signed up for our training by now I suspect they won’t.
So why did our experiment fail?
A few different reasons.
What we learned about marketing for psychotherapy practices.
First, we had a bad offer.
One of the things people said when they turned us down was, “we don’t have time to set this up right now.” We’re offering to work for them for free, but to get the training set up would cost them time, time they weren’t willing to spend. So the time cost relative to perceived value didn’t make sense for them.
This is actually a reaffirmation of a lesson we preach regularly in PPI. Even when you have something really good to offer, if people can’t perceive the value, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve spent over a decade working with the best therapist and researchers to learn how to become a better therapist. The things I’ve learned are the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge of the field. So I know the training we’re offering is top notch. Everyone who goes through our training generally agrees. But, the average therapist on the street doesn’t know that. So to them it's not valuable.
If we were to try this again we’d probably do something like offer 3 hours of ethics, it’s not sexy, but it’s probably an easier sell, because people have to have it. It’s lower quality than what we were offering but the value is more obvious.
Honestly though, we could probably be even less structured, as long as it doesn't cost the other person very much. A friend of mine built a network by calling clinicians she found on psychology today and inviting them to coffee. That's probably also a better offer.
Second, cold calling is mentally very hard to do.
As I called the supervisors I had a lot of internal resistance. I didn’t think I would, but something about calling people, unsolicited, felt very wrong. We were offering them two free services, a free CE training and a free clinical skills assessment. We’re literally just bribing them with free stuff in order to get them to talk with us. Logically, if you're just giving away free stuff you shouldn’t feel anxious about it. But I did.
This means cold calling is not a good strategy for marketing a psychotherapy practice. If it's hard for me, it's probably too hard for our mentees. However, this isn’t just my experience. We’ve seen something similar when we’ve asked mentees to do other cold calling tasks. People really struggle to do it.
Third, cold calling is very time consuming.
It took 1 hour to call every 10 supervisors. Now that wasn’t just calling people. We had to find their phone numbers online and then document what happened after each call, plus battle all the inner resistance. Still, that’s pretty time consuming.
As a solo practice owner, time is money, so you don't have a lot of extra free time to do stuff. This is a high-effort-brute-force type of approach. Which is probably not feasible for most solo practice clinicians.
Our big takeaway for marketing your psychotherapy practice?
The big thing we learned was there are two types of marketing strategies. You can either market through brute force numbers or through trust.
If you’re cold calling or running ads to market your psychotherapy practice, then it’s really just a numbers game. You want 1000 people to see your service so 10 of them will call you and 1 of them will book.
Otherwise marketing is all about trust. The people most likely to answer or return our calls were the people who had some level of connection to us. Or, to say it another way, they'd had some level of trust with us because they’d had prior experience with us.
I think this is why some clinicians launch their practices and things go really well and some launch their practices and struggle to get clients. The ones who launch their practices and do well probably already have an informal network of clinicians and other referral sources who send them a stream of clients, and because it’s informal it’s very hard to replicate.
Worse, when you ask them "how do you get clients" they can't tell you their strategy, because they never had one. They just had a network of friends and colleagues who liked them.
Because of this, we’re pivoting and exploring a new way to help clinicians build trust through community building.
I’ll update you here once we see how it goes.
Next steps with Private Practice Incubator
Our mission at Private Practice Incubator is two fold:
to help clinicians help more clients and
to help clinicians make more money.
If you'd like to book an info session with us and learn more about our program click the button below.
Best,
Jordan (the counselor).
Best,
Jordan (the counselor).
If you liked this post, consider reading this next. It's more about marketing your psychotherapy practice.
Jordan Harris, Ph.D., LMFT-S, LPC-S, received his Doctor of Philosophy in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Louisiana Monroe. He is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist in the state of Arkansas, USA. In his clinical work, he enjoys working with couples. He also runs a blog on deliberate practice for therapists and counselors at Jordanthecounselor.com
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