Imagine this- you’ve got 7 brand new patients on the books this week. These are people that reached out to you, called in and scheduled an appointment.
So they come in, and you bring each one back for their exam and a consultation.
And you’re excited, because 7 new patients would be a huge thing for your practice.
But, after you present treatment options and discuss a treatment plan, each person says, “Well, I’ll have to think about it,” or “I need to talk with my spouse,”
People are excited to show up for their first adjustment, but for some reason they’re not interested in the longer term treatments or regular wellness plans you present.
This makes you think like there’s something wrong with your marketing, and maybe these people are just deal hoppers looking for one-time adjustments at the cheapest price.
Maybe you think people are objecting to the price, so you adjust and you tend to avoid the conversations around your services and recommendations, hoping people will see the value you provide and want to become a patient.
So how does this make you feel? You have the chance to bring 7 new patients on board this week, but they don’t want to come back after this first consultation.
You feel like your confidence is taking a hit. You really believe that you can help these people, but you don’t get a chance because they act like they don’t want what you have to offer.
It’s hard not to take it personally, right?
It’s like being rejected, and you feel like maybe you don’t have a compelling offer.
You feel like there’s a fundamental problem here, and if you could only figure it out you could get more people into regular treatment, and help more people in pain.
Imagine what it would be like if you knew exactly what to say in the consultation so you could take someone from first time visitor to regular patient.
What if you could close 80 to 85% of your first time consultations every week.
Would that give you more confidence?
Would that give you more freedom in your practice?
Could you grow your practice knowing you had more control over your new patient intake process with your consultations?
Basically turning someone from a complete stranger into a long term patient willing to pay you for regular treatments.
This way you can predictably and reliably close these first time visitors in your consultations.
There are 5 steps to the consultation that we’ll go over right now.
1• Deal strategically with uncertainty by pre-framing the consultation.
Ask them questions to get a baseline understanding of what motivated them to come in, and proactively address any objections and uncertainty they might have- about you, about chiropractic care, or about the investment it might take to get them to wellness.
2• Identify and establish the problem, and where they’re currently at. This is where you get deep. Ask them questions about the problems their pain is causing them right now in their lives. This includes how it’s affecting their job, how it’s affecting their life at home, and impacting their hobbies and things they love to do. Identify the pain, and why solving this pain matters to them right now. Tie this back to their own admission of how the pain is negative ly impacting their life, and the true cost of this pain, and what it would mean if they could reduce or eliminate it from their life. Identify the possibility, and where they want to be. If they could reduce or eliminate their pain, what would their life look like? Could they travel more? Could they perform better at work? Would things be different at home?
3• Explain the path. This is where you talk about the steps involved to move them away from pain, and towards the possibility. Now that they’ve discussed their pain, and how it’s negatively affecting their life, and they’ve discussed their possibility, and what their life would look like without pain… you’re building a bridge between the two. And you are the bridge, and with regular treatment, or your long term wellness plan, you can make their possibility a reality.
4• The pitch. You need to explain the commitment that both you and your patient need to have in order to achieve these goals. This mean that both parties are invested, and that their success comes not from totally relying on you to save them, but that they’ll need some skin in the game with their financial investment and their time– showing up to appointments.
5• Next steps. Once you’ve gained verbal commitment from them in your pitch, you can speak to them in depth about the financial and time commitment involved with them becoming a regular patient. Reinforce their decision by asking them about their commitment to recovery, and challenge them to commit their time, their attention, their action and their finances in a partnership with you. Remind them that you’ll be committing your resources to their recovery too.
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