#9 Know Thy Therapist (Part II): How to reach and engage with psychologists

plus... the therapist AI that's reached over 5 million people, three fundraising rounds for teen focused startups and all the latest news in mental health innovation

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Hi friends,  

When I joined Wayflyer, we had eight employees and even fewer clients.

If we were going to survive, we had to figure out how to reach our potential customers and convince them to work with us.  

Three years later, we had thousands of customers and a valuation in the billions.

We figured out a way to get in front of our ideal customers, get them interested in us and build the trust needed for them to want to work with us.

If you’re going to build a successful mental health business, you’re going to need to convince a lot of people to get on board with your mission.

Either as employees, partners or customers.

And one of the most important people you’ll need to get on board are psychologists.

But if you’ve tried this, you know it’s not that easy. They can be a really tough bunch to reach and often, you’re left feeling like that old tour guide from Billy Madison, wandering around asking “is anyone listening to me?”.

If you think that’s an obscure reference, trust your instinct…

Last week we talked about the biggest trends in the psychology profession - what their day to day looks like, what motivates them and the challenges they face. This will help you when trying to reach them.

But this week, I want to dive into a step-by-step approach for finding and engaging Psychologists at scale plus my top tips for getting them on board with your organisation.  

This week in The Hemingway Report;

• Know Thy Therapist (Part II): How to reach and engage with psychologists
• Company spotlight on Wysa: The clinically validated AI chatbot that’s reached over 5 million people
• Building for teens: the three startups focused on teen mental health that all just raised rounds
• Plus all the latest news in mental health innovation

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Know Thy Therapist (Part II)

We’re gonna get into the weeds a bit today.

I want to give you a practical, step-by-step guide for how you can find, reach and engage with psychologists at scale. It’s based on everything I’ve learned running campaigns to reach psychologists and best practices from companies in this space.

The steps are actually fairly straightforward.

But most of the value is in the specific tactics. You can use these to get more engagement with psychologists, without having to exert a bunch more effort.

Alright, let’s get into it…

• Step 1: know exactly who you are trying to reach (and why)  
• Step 2: Build your communications plan
• Step 3: Test, learn, iterate

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Step 1: Know exactly who you are trying to reach (and why)

Who exactly are you trying to reach?

Do you need psychologists in community mental health services to adopt your product?

Do you need practice managers at private clinics to pay you for services? Do you need to employ child psychologists who specialise in Autism Spectrum Disorder to provide telehealth care through your business?

These are very different roles and you need to be clear on who it is you need to reach.

Be specific. Building something like an Ideal Customer Profile can be helpful for this - I quite like this free guide from Neil Patel or this paid guide from Lenny’s Newsletter if you want to learn more about ICPs.

This is a short, but very important step that will save you a bunch of time and money later on.

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Step 2: Build your communications plan

Once you've defined who you need to reach and why, you need a way to actually get in touch with them…

To do this, you’ll need some form of communications plan. This is not complicated, it’s just choosing a channel that you will use to reach your ideal personas and then defining the messaging you want to share with them.

There are five communications channels that work best and I’ll share the specific details for how you can start using them.

1. Direct Outbound

The most straightforward way to reach psychologists is to literally just contact them directly. But you need a few things to be able to do this well.

First, you need contact details.

There are tons of free tools that you can use to turn your ICP into a database of emails and phone numbers of relevant psychologists.

Apollo.io is my personal favourite but ZoomInfo is also great.

Once you create an account, use the search function to define the criteria of the person you are looking for (your ICP will be handy here).

For example... "clinical psychologists in the London Area, who work for the NHS, with more than 5 years experience".  

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Once you’re happy with your list, select the contacts and export them. You now have a database of highly relevant psychologists.

Pro tip: When selecting contacts, the free plan of Apollo only allows you to select all instances on that page (maximum 25 contacts), so make sure you go through each page to get all available contacts.

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Another great way to get relevant contact details (especially if you want to reach private practice clinicians) is to use directories. These directories have details of all the private practice clinicians in each country. In the UK the BPS site is great, the APA directory in the US also works well and in Australia, you can use the ACPA website.

Then, you need to actually reach out.

A good cold email can go a long way. I could write an entire post on how to do this but here are the four pieces of advice you need to know to write a great cold email to psychologists;

• Build credibility - why should the recipient trust you? What makes you different from the other cold emails they get? Use whatever you have to communicate that you are credible and trustworthy. Share a link to your LinkedIn so they know you're a real person.
• Have a clear ask - there's nothing worse than a long email with no clear request. If you want to speak to them for thirty minutes about their experience using patient management software, tell them this.
• Be authentic - people respond to authenticity. If you are a student, don't try and hide that fact. Instead, lean into it.
• Show value - How will this help them? You need to tap into the core needs and motivations of people to get them to act. You can use last week’s post to understand the incentives and pain points of psychologists.
• Make it easy for them to say yes - if you want to book time with them, give them a Calendly link or suggest some specific times that they can respond to. You want to limit the mental load for them to say yes to your request.

I typically create an email template and then personalise it based on who I am reaching out to. A polite follow-up is fine but don’t spam people. Response rates will be low, anything more than 10% is amazing, but don't be disheartened if this is the case. Just run the numbers and figure out how many people you will need to contact in order to get the number of positive responses you want.

Here’s an example of an email a colleague of mine used to start a conversation with a prominent clinical psychologist.

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The psychologist reached back out looking for much more information and signals of credibility before he was willing to chat. But once he got these, he booked in a time to speak and we ended up having a great relationship with him.

This email isn’t perfect, we could have shared a lot more context up front and done more to build credibility. But it was concise and had a very clear ask which is what ultimately led it to being successful.

Of course, another option is go old school and just drop by some clinics.

We did this a few times just to put a face to our names and brought a small gift (chocolates are always a win) with a card. We got amazing response rates from this, and built strong relationships with many clinicians.

2. Go through professional organisations

Every psychologist will be part of some professional organisation, if not multiple organisations (e.g. the British Psychological Society or the Australian Psychological Society). They’re very creative with their names…

Going through these organisations is one of the most successful ways to reach psychologists. You borrow the credibility that this organisation has built with their audience and have a direct way to reaching psychologists en masse.

So what should you actually do with these organisations? I’ve got the best results from advertising on their job boards, classified sections or in their newsletters.

Pro tip: Try to develop a relationship with someone working at the organisation (usually the person responsible for advertiser sales). They can help you find the best place to advertise and maximise your response rates.

In general, I've found this a very good value channel. For example, I spent $70 to get a listing on one of Australian Psychologist job boards and had seven psychologists reach out to me from it. $10 per contact is pretty good going!

Just make sure that you write a good ad. Use everything you learned from last week’s post about what is going on in the lives of psychologists. Be transparent, honest and communicate how engaging will add value to the psychologist.

Also, make sure it’s clear what you are asking for - are you asking them to complete a survey, find time with you for a user interview or something else?  

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3. Go to where they hang out

One of the best (and simplest) marketing tips I give to any business is "go where your audience hangs out".  

Why do you think beer brands advertise at half time in sports games? Because that’s where their target audience is already hanging out. Yes, it’s obvious, but I still see so many businesses try and get their audience to come to them.

When you ask yourself the question, “where is my target audience hanging out?”, it gives you a chance of finding channels that are not saturated (hello SEO) or very expensive (hi Meta!).  

So where do psychologists hang out?

There are a BUNCH of Facebook groups for all different categories of the psychology profession.

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There are also industry newsletters and communities, for example Therapists in Tech or r/therapists. These are great mediums for reaching your audience.

Conferences and meetups can also be a great way to meet psychologists.

4. Use your network

I'm part of a few McKinsey Alumni groups so decided to throw a message in there asking if there were any psychologists who would be open to speaking to me (or if anyone knew some people). I got a bunch of introductions from this. To my surprise, a bunch of ex McKinsey folks were working as psychologists. And many more knew someone that they were happy to introduce me to. More likely than not, if you’re genuine, there will be people in your network who will help out.

Use your network and don't be afraid to ask for introductions. People like to feel useful, so are usually happy to help you out.

5. Get referrals from other psychologists

By far and away the easiest way to connect with a psychologist is to get referred by a fellow psychologist. If you've used one of the four tactics above to connect with a psychologist and have built a good relationship with them then you should always ask "hey, do you have any colleagues you would be happy to introduce me to?"

The success rate on this is through the roof.

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Step 3: Test, learn, iterate

You’ve defined who you need to reach and you’ve found a comms channel you think might work.

The bad news is that the channel you choose may not work for you straight away. Every business and every market is different so the best thing to do is take a test and learn approach.

The main things you’ll be testing are (a) the channel and (b) the messaging.

Now I have to say this…. DO NOT SPRAY AND PRAY!

It’s extremely tempting to test multiple channels at once. Surely it’s the quickest way to find the one that works right?

Wrong!

There is one big problem with this that most people don’t anticipate.

If you try to test multiples channels at one time, you will do a half-ass job on all of them.

And so when you get your results, and a channel hasn’t worked, you don’t know if it’s because it’s actually not a good channel for you, or because you just did a poor job at executing on it.

Pick one! Pick one channel and make sure you execute really well in it. Then, you will be able to say for sure whether it works or not.

There are a few other top tips I’ve learned to increase your response rates from Psychologists…

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Top tips

1. Compensate people for their time

Personally, I am happy to contribute to user research for free. I think I'm a bit weird in that. I just really enjoy it.

But I've realised that most people won't give you their time for free, especially in psychology. And I totally respect that.

At the start, we were looking to do thirty minute user interviews with psychologists but were expecting them to do it for free. We got very little response. One psychologist even told me directly that she couldn't be expected to give up her time for free. And fair enough. We learned last week just how overworked and underpaid psychologists are.

So we decided to offer them compensation for their time, offering them a $50 gift voucher for a 30-minute interview. Our response rates went through the roof. Yes, I'm sure people valued the gift voucher, but my hypothesis is that it was much more about making them feel that their time was valued than the utility of the $50.

2. If you aren't a psychologist, partner with one.

Partnering with a psychologist unlocks some valuable doors. First, it gives you access to many of the community groups that are “clinician-only”. Secondly, it will increase your positive response rates - psychologists are simply more likely to respond to outreach from another psychologist.  

3. Every impression counts

Your reputation is on the line. I’ve shared lots of tactics for you to find and engage with psychologists, but you cannot abuse these tactics. You have to respect people’s time and their perspectives, including if they don’t want to work with you. Play the long game. Remember, if you want to get referrals, the best thing you can do is leave a positive impression with everyone that you engage with.    

4. Add value

Nobody minds a cold email if you are giving them something of value. To support our email campaigns, we packaged up a bunch of the research we had done on psychologist burnout and included them as a report in our outbound emails. People really valued it.

What can you to do add value (even if it's in a small way) to the people you’re reaching out to? The reciprocity effect is real and giving value in your outreach will increase response rates.

5. Communicate credibility

Psychologists care about your credibility so use whatever you can to communicate this. Reference your University, your studies or qualifications, the organisation you work for or include links to any research you have done. If you're a psychologist or medical professional yourself, definitely mention that.

6. Tell your story

People respond to stories. Be authentic and tell people the why behind what you are doing. We know that psychologists care deeply about improving patient outcomes and the system as a whole, so if they think you are going to contribute to that, and that they can help you in some small way, then they are more likely to engage with you.  

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OK. We made it. Deep breath.

You now have a clear process for how to reach and engage with psychologists at scale.

It will take a bit of work to find what works and build this capability, but once you do, it will be an extremely helpful muscle for growing your business

If you try out some of the tactics in this post, let me know how you go.

And as always, if you have questions, please just reply to this email and let me know. I’m always happy to answer them.

Company Spotlight: Wysa

• What they do: Clinically-validated AI coach for mental health support
• Headquarters: Boston, United States
• Founders: Jo Aggarwal
• Founded: 2017

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Wysa is an AI therapy chatbot providing users with 24/7 access to clinically-validated mental health support. If you start using Wysa, the first thing you do is anonymously start messaging with an AI chatbot. Wysa is then directs you to one or more of the following based on your needs:

• Continued clinical support from the AI chatbot that guides users through curated CBT programs and on-demand support
• A library of 150+ evidence-based self-help tools for anxiety, sleep, communication and productivity
• Professional messaging support from a human therapist for those with clinical symptoms
• Customised escalation pathways for severe mental health crises, through the Wysa SOS feature

Wysa is recommended by the NHS and has received a 93% rating by NHS’ digital health app evaluation agency, ORCHA. Earlier this year, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded Wysa with a $3.4m grant to develop personalised pathways for people with chronic pain who are also managing their mental health. Their most recent funding round was in 2022, raising $20m in a Series B led by India-based HealthQuad.

Among the plethora of mental health AI chatbots, Wysa is making a claim to be one of the leaders.

Mental Health News

Here’s your roundup of the top news in mental health this week;

• Former Headway founders Jake Sussman and Dan Ross start Marble, offering affordable group therapy for teens and raises $5m in seed funding from Khosla Ventures and more. (TechCrunch)
• Indian mental health-tech startup Mave Health launches a 12-week program to treat depression and anxiety at home, through a brain stimulation wearable device, therapy, guidance and coaching (The Economic Times).
• MEandMine, a children’s mental health tech startup which leverages AI and gamification, raises $4.5m in funding, led by K5 Global. (Cision PRWeb)
• Canary Speech secures $13m Series A funding round led by Cortes Capital, to help healthcare organisations screen for mental wellness and cognitive health (Fierce Healthcare)
• eHealth Ventures announces fast-track pre-Seed investment program for early-stage health tech startups, with selected companies receiving financial investment and joining the incubator (Calcalist Tech)
• Telehealth giant Amwell’s co-CEO Roy Schoenberg steps down to executive vice chairman of the board, and Dr Ido Schoenberg will continue serving as the sole CEO of the company. (BHBusiness)
• Speek, a mental health tech start-up tackling teenage self harm, raises $1m as pre-seed investment. (Zinc VC)
• Mavida Health, virtual mental health provider for parents, introduces new offering for LGBTQ+ patients, including individual, group and couples therapy focused on queer family building. (Fierce Healthcare)

Make it this far? Fair play! Reply to this email and let me know what you thought.

That’s all for this week.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of The Hemingway Group

P.S. feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn