Why the First Phone Call is Critical for Cash-Based Clinics

One of the biggest mistakes cash-based clinic owners make is underestimating the power of the first phone call. Whether you’re taking these calls yourself or have a front desk team handling them, how you communicate in that first interaction determines whether a patient books—or walks away.

In this post, we’ll break down why this call is so important, how founders convert better, and how you can train your team to handle these calls effectively while avoiding the biggest mistakes that drive patients away.

Sell the Destination, Not the Journey

Many clinicians make the mistake of selling their features instead of focusing on what the patient actually cares about.

Patients don’t care about your certifications, your dry needling skills, or your advanced training. They care about one thing: getting back to the activities they love without pain.

Think of it like this:

🌴 When selling a vacation, you don’t talk about the 10-hour flight or the 6-hour time zone change.
🍹 You sell the beach, the tropical breeze, the Mai Tai at sunset.

The same concept applies to your clinic. Patients don’t want to hear about manual therapy, corrective exercises, or treatment plans. They want to know:

✅ Can you get them back to running?
✅ Will they be able to play with their kids again?
✅ Can they return to lifting, hiking, or training pain-free?

If you sell the journey (your features), it feels like work.
If you sell the destination (their outcome), they’re excited to sign up.

Why Founders Convert Better Than Front Desk Staff

If you’re the owner of your clinic, you should be taking inbound calls—at least in the beginning. Here’s why:

📞 Founders typically convert 80-90% of calls.
📞 Front desk staff convert around 60-70% (at best).

That 20% difference could mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue every month.

The reason? You have conviction. You understand the value of your services better than anyone else. You’ve seen the success stories firsthand, and you can communicate with confidence when a patient asks, “Can you really help me?”

A founder says:
“Absolutely! I worked with three people this week who had the same issue, and we have a proven process to get you back to doing what you love.”

A front desk staffer might say:
“I think we can help, let me check…”

That confidence alone removes price sensitivity and makes it easier for a patient to say yes, even without using insurance.

How to Train Your Front Desk to Convert More Patients

If you’re planning to hand off calls to an office manager or admin, you need to train them properly. Otherwise, you’re losing money on every missed conversion.

Here’s how to get them up to speed:

1. Have Them Sit In on Evaluations

Your front desk needs to understand how you talk to patients in the clinic. Have them sit in on evaluations so they can see:

✔ The questions you ask to uncover patient concerns
✔ The language you use to explain treatment
✔ The way you build trust with patients

2. Role-Play Common Scenarios

Practice mock phone calls with your team, especially for tough questions like:

• “Do you take my insurance?”
• “Why is your clinic more expensive?”
• “I can go somewhere else for cheaper, why should I come to you?”

The key is to avoid getting defensive and instead redirect the conversation back to the patient’s goals.

3. Share Patient Success Stories Regularly

One of the best ways to build confidence and conviction in your team is by sharing real wins from your patients.

🔹 A runner who returned after knee pain
🔹 A CrossFitter who hit a new PR after rehab
🔹 A busy parent who can now pick up their kids without pain

When your staff sees the impact your clinic has, they’ll speak with more confidence—and confidence converts patients.

Why Patients Will Pay Out of Pocket (If You Frame It Right)

Many clinic owners worry about insurance—but the truth is, most patients have huge deductibles anyway. Whether they go to an in-network clinic or your cash-based clinic, they’re paying a significant amount out of pocket.

So the real question isn’t “Do you take my insurance?”
It’s “Is this worth my money?”

If they believe you’re the best option, they’ll pay for quality care. That’s why the first phone call matters—it sets the tone for trust, confidence, and conversion.

Takeaways: Optimize Your First Call for More Bookings

If you want to increase patient conversions and grow your cash-based practice, remember these key points:

✔ Sell the destination, not the journey – Focus on what they want to get back to, not clinical jargon.
✔ Founders convert better – If possible, take these calls yourself to maximize bookings.
✔ Train your staff properly – Role-play, listen to evaluations, and teach them how to communicate value.
✔ Confidence beats price sensitivity – Patients will pay more if they trust you can get them results.

Want to grow your practice faster? We can help.

💡 Try Clare AI for free → MeetClaire.ai

📞 Book a free strategy call at physicaltherapybiz.com to learn how to optimize your sales process and get more patients in the door!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Look, we know burnout in our profession is a problem. And one of the bigger contributing factors to burnout is the amount of documentation and paperwork we have to do just to be able to do our job. And we're now able to help offset a lot of the time that you spend writing your notes through. AI. We created a tool called Claire and Claire listens in the background while you work with your patients and it writes your notes for you.

How awesome is that? It is literally a game changer. It's going to save you what we see four to eight hours a week in our testing and our training as we've actually built this up and train this specifically for physical therapists. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time. You could be. working out.

It's a lot of time. You could be hanging with your family. That's a lot of time that you could be seeing more patients. If you need more productivity it's huge and it gets you a ton of time back doing something that we know nobody really wants to do, but we have to do in order to cover on bots as clinicians.

So if you want to test this out, get 10 free notes to see how this works for you in your clinic, go to me, claire. ai, sign up and get 10 free notes. To test it out and see how we can help save you 40 hours a week as well. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time And financial freedom for yourself and your family if so, you're in the right spot My name is Danny Matta, over the last 15 years. I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff pt. I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice I've sold that cash practice And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Doc Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast And thank you so much for listening and for watching this if you're watching this on YouTube If you're listening on the podcast and you want to watch the video version of this head over to YouTube to our PT biz channel Today what I want to do is talk about the importance of the first phone call and why this is such a key area That you really need to dial in and you need to really have your staff dialed in if you're going to hand this off To somebody as well as should you hand this off to somebody because of how important this is So we know that the first interaction we have with somebody leaves a very, good or bad first impression and one of the challenges when it comes to running a cash based clinic is the fact that We can't have people just call in, schedule a time.

Here's my insurance. We deal with it whenever they get there. This can actually create a pretty bad customer experience. If any of you have ever been there, I have, I've had people show up, I do their visits and then they hand me their blue cross card. Like it's a credit card. And I have to then explain to them like, Hey, this is not really how this clinic works.

And then I'm the bad guy at that point. And this is what actually happened to us very early on because we didn't understand that we needed to have better communication with many variables, including insurance, whenever we first started to work with people. So when you have a chance to talk to somebody, it's very important.

Number one, that you establish the fact that Your clinic is not in network with insurance companies, but you don't want to start with that, right? Because that's not necessarily a great way to start a conversation either. So there's two paths that we tend to see this happen. Okay. One is either a direct call that's then answered.

This usually is actually by like an office manager, somebody at the front desk. Or this is either, a way where they can get on your call schedule, and that could potentially be a contact form that then gets followed up by a staff member to then book a time to chat with you. Or it could be an auto scheduler, right?

But either way, having that interaction is really important. If you have a front desk that can handle inbound calls. Great. But you do need to train them on this exact same flow. Otherwise they're going to end up converting really poorly and that can negatively hurt your business. So when we look at the importance of the first call and why it's actually, in most cases, better for founders.

To take these calls it's because you're going to convert so much better and you're able to articulate Many things that are valuable in your clinic better than almost anybody else can plus there's some founder authority there. That's hard to beat but the key when we have these conversations is not to make the conversations about features and Insurance and all these other things.

It's about understanding what problem they're trying to solve and why that problem is important for them to resolve and what they're looking to get back to, right? There's this concept of, you don't sell the nine hour flight and six hour time zone change when going to Hawaii from the East Coast.

You sell the beach, right? You sell the tropical breeze, the Mai Tai you're holding while you're at the hotel pool or the beautiful hike you get to go on and, enjoy this amazing place. You're selling them on the tropical island. You're not selling them on the shit they have to do to get there, which is obviously.

And for us, one of the big mistakes that we make is we sell everybody on what we think is important, which is that you dry needle and that you have advanced orthopedic certifications and your staff is residency trained and you spend an hour with people and all these features. which are essentially not something that they care so much about.

Maybe a little bit if they're looking for certain things, but what they really care about is they don't want their knee to hurt anymore. And what you need to understand is why don't they want their knee to hurt anymore? Because not only does this allow us to have better buy in from a a patient compliance standpoint, but it allows us to have much, a much better understanding of What it is that's important to them to get back to so that we can reiterate that in the process of our sales process So if somebody let's say their knee hurts we want to know okay.

What's that stopping you from doing? Okay, it's stopping you from running. All right How long you've been running, i've been running for a couple years Why did you get into running like why pick that training methodology? Why is running important to you? You know what you might find out is you know, hey, this is a I've lost a good bit of weight doing this.

I want to keep it down. I have a social group that I train with and we try to do a couple races a year. It's a way that we can then go and travel. It's like a community thing for them at this point. So now all of a sudden we understand it's not just, it's not the knee. It's the fact that they've been taken out of their community and they're worried about putting weight back on.

They're worried about putting weight back on, not being able to hang out with their friends. That's a very different conversation to have versus you have IT man friction syndrome or whatever the diagnosis might be of their knee. And we have those conversations. It allows us. To then really put ourself in a position of authority to help them get there because we actually understand that and we actually have Taken the time to understand what they want versus there's just a number in a waiting room and all it is about their diagnosis You're not treating the human being in front of you and this dramatically helps with your sales process because if you can have that conversation Price sensitivity goes down.

Like them using their insurance or wanting to use their insurance. That starts to smooth out quite a bit, including the fact that most people have these massive deductibles. They've got a lot of skin in the game either way. So that conversation is way easier, but it allows you to move away from that more and really focus on solving the problem because in the end.

Here's the reality. If somebody could get their problem solved, unless it was guaranteed, do you think they would care if insurance actually reimbursed them or not? Versus going somewhere where they're just going to be a number or they're going to be seen with multiple other people at the same time.

And no one's going to have the time to actually listen to them or understand what's going on. Like many people take that exchange. Any day of the week, which is why we see so much growth in these cash based clinics that are focusing on the people in front of them. But if you answer the phone, and the first thing you do is you talk about features and this and that, and we do these specialized corrective exercises.

That's like saying, yeah, we have a 10 hour flight, and our plane has all this technology and whatever else. And you get, TSA pre check helps you get through. Security faster but you still get, make sure you get there two hours early because you don't want to miss your flight.

You're selling them features and this sounds like work. It's hard. You don't want to sell them on that. You want to sell them on why they're doing it. So they'll have better compliance and they'll understand why you would be a good fit to work with them if you specialize in whatever it is that you help them with.

So with founders in particular, they do such a good job of this because they have a lot of conviction around their ability to actually help people and they understand these conversations. They have them all the time. If you have a front desk member that's answering these questions, what's really helpful for them is to understand how you're framing conversations to sit in with you on evaluations and understand how you're talking to people and to role play with them about how to actually have these conversations, ask the right questions, and make sure you're actually understanding why people are reaching out to work with us and not necessarily.

Do you take my insurance or do you treat knee pain like these very superficial things? We don't necessarily want to talk about that And the last thing I would say is the conviction side of things is incredibly helpful with this first conversation One of the best ways you can improve conviction is to just highlight wins Of the patients that are coming in to see you the things you're getting back to the things they're saying in the office The things are saying to your office manager, you know share that with your team These are wins and these wins motivate people to have conviction that what we do actually does help people in a meaningful way and that is very motivating.

And that conviction alone, people can feel that. People can feel that and they look for clinicians that have conviction in the fact that they can help them get back to what they want to do. And just think of yourself. Would you want to work with a clinician that was like, yeah, I don't know. Like I think we can help you.

Let's give it a shot. Or do you want to work with somebody that's yeah, I just worked with three people. The same problem you have this week. This is what we specialize in. I talked to people all over the country that work with us on this problem. Like we would love to help you out. We have a very high success rate with this type of injury.

That is someone who's highly convicted that has experience in whatever that type of injury is versus somebody that is like. Not sure right and you don't want that You want somebody that has conviction the fact they can help you and people are looking for that and they'll pay for that And they're way less price sensitive if you understand what's going on and you have high conviction the fact you can help them So that first phone call is your opportunity to establish rapport to establish you understand what's going on And to show them that you have conviction, they're in the right spot and that you can help them.

And if you need a staff member to have that conversation, your office manager can always transfer somebody over to them. But if you are a founder, I highly recommend that you take these inbound calls because from what we see, our numbers that we track, If you have an office manager that's converting 60 to 70%, like that's really good.

Like an admin converting 67%, fantastic. Most founders are going to convert somewhere between 80 and 90%, like very high. And that delta of that 20 percent is very worth it for you to take the those calls, especially if they're coming from somewhere like ads, which maybe they're a bit colder traffic.

And that's going to help your ROI or your return on investment of the money you're investing in marketing turn around and actually be ROI positive in many cases. So maybe something for you to hold onto, but eventually you can obviously hand that off with the right amount of training. So hope this helps.

It's a crucial part of the sales process. Please don't sell features, sell the vacation, sell Hawaii. Don't sell the 10 hour flight and don't sell the features of all the stuff that you do that you think is awesome. It is awesome, but they don't really care and or know what the heck you're talking about.

They just want their need to not hurt. So hope this helps as always. Thanks for watching and we'll catch you next time.

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