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How much does it cost, Doc?
How often have you heard this question? Does it still strike fear in your heart, or do you simply launch into your practiced, rehearsed strategy for dealing with it effectively? I’m not going to get into how to do that…
Continue Reading »How Many Marketing Strategies Do You Really Need?
Just yesterday I was stepping out of an elevator in a client’s building when my cell phone rang. The lady on the other end was hesitant – and asked if I was the gentleman who ran the ‘marketing seminars’ 7…
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Team Attitude to the Economy
Is the recession over? Can anyone turn on the evening news without some pundit or another going on about who said we were ‘out of the woods’ – or did the market make another ‘correction’? Why is a ‘correction’ usually somehow negative?
Your team members are wage earners, tax payers, and ‘just plain folk’. They are equally as susceptible to the media and all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy. Perhaps they have a spouse either laid off or fearful for their job. If part of their job description is treatment case presentation – and a patient says that a $6,000 treatment plan is expensive and they have to ‘think about it’ – do you find your team member silently agreeing with them?
We worked with a very high end practice, and did job shadowing with the relatively new treatment case coordinator. She looked professional and had all the buzz words. After a short time the specialist couldn’t understand the extremely low rate of case acceptance. In this case, the average treatment fee was $13,000. Nobody had ever sat in on her ‘closing’. After all, she was supposedly experienced.
Her close went like this – ‘This work will cost you $13,000. Now I know that sounds expensive, and if you find someone else who will do it cheaper I can always come down on my price and match it.’ I was thunderstruck. When the patient went home to ‘think about it’ – we did a de-briefing to see what went right and wrong. When asked about this price match volunteering before any patient had actually expressed any resistance to the fee – she said: ‘Look – I make good money and I could never afford that treatment. How do you think this woman could ever afford it?’
She was tossing landmines out of her mouth, and waiting for the prospective patient to grab one and send it back – confirming her attitude that the treatment was expensive and very few people could afford it. This same patient who was ‘thinking’ about it might just as easily stopped by the big box electronic store that weekend and ‘invested’ $7,000 in a home entertainment system on the 90 day no pay no interest program. Or worse yet – her husband may have dropped by the car show and showed up at home in a shiny new red truck worth $50,000 with the cheerful announcement – ‘Hey Honey – look what we just bought? He had no intention of buying anything, but with bi-weekly payments, 0% interest, and instant credit how could he ever turn this great deal down?
Financial ‘attitude’ is contagious. Better make sure your team don’t have a bad case of it – because it will cost you dearly.
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