All posts relating to handling patients in consultations, at appointment or during face-to-face sales interactions (not case studies)
This post shares an example of a powerful confirmation statement that can be used after getting your prospects needs, that links the prospect's life priorities to the product that you're offering.
Advertisers do this all the time, for example: have you ever found yourself driving down the road, perfectly content, until the moment you see the picture of a double-cheeseburger and chips on a billboard you just passed. All of a sudden, you realise that you haven't had anything to eat for hours, and start feeling the hunger in your stomach. Like Pavlov's dog, you may even notice that you begin to salivate a little, because you've been conditioned to respond to visual stimuli that foreshadows a savoury meal. Here's how to do the same thing during your healthcare consultations...
Sometimes you can do everything right, but still find yourself in front of a customer that either blocks you, or resists your attempts at understanding their needs. When this happens, you can either think on your feet, or have a plan of options that you can use when you're dealing with a tough customer. In this post, we share our four methods to deal with the tough customer in the sales presentation.
I often get the opportunity to meet with my training clients after training, and I often ask what challenges they had experienced in implementing the sales process I had taught their staff in the Consultations Skills and Teamwork Training course. A few years ago, I started to see a pattern that troubled me: Manager after manager was telling me that the most challenging part of the consultation was the information confirmation. Strangely, I've witnessed countless health care sales people drop the information confirmation as easily as they might brush dust off their suit jacket lapels. As I heard this, I began to think about how much better their results could have been, if they had only mandatorily enforced the inclusion of this critical component of the sales process.
The information confirmation statement represents the pivotal point in the sales presentation. It is that transitional step between listening and selling. It marks the shift between being attentive to our prospect’s feelings and confirming them. It gains us the right of passage from uncovering a problem to earning the right to solve it. In short, if a confirmation statement is done correctly, the sale is almost made before we even begin selling. It’s just that simple.
The time to uncover objections is not after we make a proposal and ask for the sale. At this point, the prospect must justify their objection with evidence (which are often holes in your proposal), and you spend the remainder of your selling time justifying your price. Instead, I suggest you uncover objections early in the consultation, before it's too late.
What are the four conditions that always must be satisfied to make a sale? Some people call these conditions the 4 whys. Low investment or straight re-buy products and services (like a bottle of water on a hot day or going for an annual dental exam) require only a perfunctory approach to answering these conditions. High-investment products and services (such as elective health care) may require a considerably more thorough approach to answering the four whys. This an illuminating part of our consultation skills and teamwork training course so pay close attention to what is revealed here, because it can really help you understand what your patients are thinking during a medical consultation.
To elicit strong dominant buying motives, or emotional responses from our consultation prospects, we need ask powerful questions. in this post, we share the questions that consistently generate the information we need from prospects, after over the past ten years of experimentation.
Finding out the emotional or Dominant Buying Motives of our prospects is sometimes not enough to make a sale. We must not only discover why our prospects would purchase, but what would prevent them from becoming a patient as well.
Healthcare Consultation: How to ask questions that reveal why people buy Why do people buy elective healthcare services? They are buying it because they hope to gain something, or to avoid continued pain. Most people are in strong agreement that the reasons we listed are very powerful emotional [...]
