Don’t we all want to grow our practices? If you’re a working OD, then I have to assume the answer is yes. It is for me, and that’s why I decided to join Essilor Experts™. Essilor Experts is a partnership between my practice and Essilor to help us attract more patients, grow our sales, and keep patients coming back.
I’m not trying to sell you, and I wouldn’t have written this article if the program wasn’t having a positive impact on my practice. Let’s start with the numbers. We added Essilor’s Ultimate Lens Package to our product mix in the fourth quarter of 2017. We saw our Transitions® penetration grow 6 percent from October 1, 2017, through December 31, 2017, versus the same time period in 2016. That is significant growth.
From a revenue standpoint, we made 81 percent more cash from selling Transitions in Q4 2017 than we did in 2016. And overall, we saw a 17 percent increase in revenue when we compare Q4 2017 to Q4 2016. In my opinion, that’s the ultimate measure of a program’s success.
Here are some other benefits of being an Essilor Experts practice:
- The program has provided live, full-day educational training events, which have been fantastic. These in-depth sessions cover topics like optical transactions and customer service, and the Essilor Experts program provides great tools.
- The second piece that’s been awesome for our practice is the online marketing to assist us in attracting new patients. We had a patient call from nearly 30 miles away who was requesting specific products, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that patient found us through the online marketing.
- The third thing is the in-office marketing materials. We have a professional come to our location, walk through the materials with us, determine where to put them, and help us install the materials. They also send us new content to keep it fresh.
No matter where you’re practicing in the world, most of our practices or opticals don’t have the resources to make these things happen on our own. By partnering with Essilor, our practice is seeing the benefits that we always thought were only for our commercial big-box competitors. Marketing experts and professional trainers are now part of my practice. It’s really fantastic.
