What to do when Callers Decline to Schedule that GUARANTEES They’ll Ultimately BUY FROM YOU
Shannon and Kay share their secret recipe to guaranteeing patients who call you but don’t schedule with you initially, will buy from YOU ultimately.
The show notes go even deeper and are located here:
Read Full TranscriptOn telephone calls, your Phone Team’s ultimate goal should always be to end each and every call with an appointment. But callers are not always ready to make an appointment. They may be sincerely searching for a solution and may be truly interested in what you offer them, but they are not ready to buy or many times, not even ready to come in and learn more.
So what can you do with these patients? You can’t just lose them.
In this episode, we’re going to tell you exactly how to handle these calls and what to do after you hang up. We’ll provide you with actionable plans so you know how to follow and nurture them every step of the way…until they are ready to schedule with you. And if you do these things, and do them right, you can be sure they WILL be your patient one day.
Let’s start with reviewing the Key Critical Information your Phone Team must capture from every call, NO exceptions.
The patient’s first and last name
The patient’s email address
The patient’s cell phone number
This is critical information because these patients are lost to you if you cannot reach them to follow up.
Next, you must understand the basics stages all customers go through before making a purchase, any kind of a purchase. This is true for body contouring services as well.
It’s generally referred to as The Customer Buying Cycle.
There are 3 Stages to The Customer Buying Cycle.
Awareness, Consideration and Purchase
Let’s break down The Customer Buying Cycle;:
Awareness is that time period that the customer is becoming aware of his/her need or problem. Some event has occurred, in body contouring it’s usually some emotionally charged event such as disgust with not being able to button her pants or anxiety about a class reunion, that sparks the acknowledgment of the need to act – to search for solutions. It may be insidious and gradual in onset or it may be sudden and urgent. The time period varies depending on the person, his/her needs and the sense of urgency.
The next stage, Consideration, is that period of time when the customer starts evaluating the solutions that could possibly meet his/her needs or solve his/her problem. Depending on the patient’s personality, traits and habits, how pragmatic, cautious, obsessive, skeptical, trusting, etc. they are, combined with a sense of urgency or a lack of a sense of urgency, will dictate the amount of time a patient will spend in this stage.
Finally, they move to the Purchase stage, the time they are ready to at least “try” if not “purchase.” Patients just need to be ready to “try” to come in for a Consultation. It’s your Team’s job to get them to “ready to buy” once they’re present in your office.
To illustrate this, think of the last time you went to the department store to look at shoes. You weren’t really looking for a particular type of shoe, you just thought it’d be nice to have a new pair of shoes. When asked by the clerk if you needed help, more than likely you replied that you were “just looking.” You were in the Awareness stage. You just thought you’d like a new pair of shoes.
Compare with the last time you needed to get a particular type of shoe to go with a particular outfit to a particular event. You went to the same department store. The same clerk asked if you needed help. You said, yes. You described the type of shoe you were shopping for. You had gone through the Awareness stage and into the Consideration stage ready to enter the Purchase stage as long as the clerk showed you shoes to “solve you problem”, to find the perfect shoes for your outfit.
You can see how your callers may be at various points of these stages.
So what do you do when they aren’t in the last part of Consideration or in the Purchase stage? You win them over by meeting all the elements of a good phone conversation (which we discussed in our previous episodes), get the key critical information (name, email, phone number) and stay in touch after the call….until they do reach the right stage to buy.
Studies show that it takes AN AVERAGE of 10 touches before a patient is ready to schedule.
So you must follow up with them with (1) frequent contacts
PLUS
(2) you must nurture them by sending them valuable information periodically and reliably.
Frequent Contact
So let’s talk first about Frequent Contacts. You’ll need to stay in touch with these patients. Contact them more frequently immediately after the phone call, then stay in touch but at less frequent intervals later. We recommend a simple, easy to follow protocol we developed. It’s called the Prospect Attempt Protocol. We gave it that name because it represents the very thought-out and planned-out scheduled attempts to contact the these patients. You follow this protocol until they do schedule or until they tell you they are no longer interested – which is rare, but it does happen.
We provide the protocol we developed (and still use) at our medical spa, which we provide in our body contouring courses. It goes like this:
Send email the day of the call.
Contact the patient 3-5 days later.
Contact again 5-6 days later.
And contact one more time 5-6 days later. That takes you to about Day 17.
After that, contact the patient on a Tri-Monthly basis, every three months.
Of course, you will need to make adjustments depending on the details of your conversations.
Nurturing
In addition to the Prospect Attempt Protocol, you need to nurture these patients. You do this with providing them with valuable information, Nurturing Email Protocol. The information you provide is only “valuable” if
it’s something they’re interested in and
if it’s not salesy.
So you prepare short emails, no more than 200 words, about subjects related to their problem.
You send these every 3-4 weeks, frequent enough to stay top of mind but not so often as to be perceived as a pest.
These emails work! We’ve had many patients actually hit reply to these emails asking for more information or requesting an appointment to come in and get started. If done right, nurturing emails help to move patients along through the buying cycle.
If you need help with Nurturing Emails or in developing your Prospect Attempt Protocol, enroll in one of our courses. We can help you.
So you learned you must use the critical key information you get on your phone calls to stay in touch. You learned how to do just that with the Prospect Attempt Protocol and the Nurturing Email Protocol.
Your Action Step. Take the information you learned and create calendars and spreadsheets to schedule your actions, then track your actions. Do this for both the Prospect Attempt Protocol and the Nurturing Email Protocol. Then stay in touch with each and every caller until they become your patient. And they will if you do this correctly!
That’s it for today’s episode.
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Bye for now from Shannon and Kay at the Body Contouring Academy’s Proven Profits Podcast.