Clinic sales funnel
The patient’s path from first enquiry to paying for treatment, split into stages: enquiry, booking, visit, consultation, treatment plan, payment. Some people drop out at every stage.
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The stages of the funnel
In a private clinic the funnel usually looks like this:
- Enquiry: a call, a message, a website form.
- First reply and booking a first consultation.
- Visit: the patient turns up rather than disappearing.
- Consultation and treatment plan.
- Decision and payment.
- Repeat visits and referrals.
Advertising only affects the top of the funnel. Everything below it depends on the front desk, the clinician and how the clinic looks after the patient once the consultation is over. That is why a bigger ad budget often brings no extra revenue: more people come in at the top, but they are lost in the same places as before.
How to see your own funnel
Pick a period and count the people at each stage: how many enquiries, bookings, visits, treatment plans presented and payments there were. Then calculate conversion between neighbouring stages. The sharpest drop is the first place to work on.
- The funnel does not exist on paper: calls, messages and bookings live in different places and nobody sees the whole picture.
- Nobody owns the ‘treatment plan, no decision’ stage, so the patient simply never gets a follow-up call.
- No-shows and cancellations are not counted as losses.
- Every stage is judged by one final revenue figure.
I build the month-long enquiry → booking → visit → payment funnel in the front-desk audit. You can start with a free express check: a few mystery-patient contacts show how the first stages really work, not how they look in a report. You can get a quick picture of your own front desk with the self-check.