TURN YOUR MEDSPA INTO A SALES MACHINE
by
Brad Desaulniers
We hear this all day long from our clients, “I need a P.A. with 5 years injectables experience who “can sell!” For so many Aesthetics practices this is like asking for a golden horned unicorn! But it doesn’t need to be so hard. Here are a few tips on how to turn your clinical staff into the best sales people you know.
Start by shifting the conversation away from sales and onto the Customer Experience. By and large, people who get into nursing or a medical career don’t do so to learn how to sell. They are intrinsically geared towards “helping people” and often have a distinct impression of sales people as the worst kind of used car salesman. So, the mere mention of sales can draw out a fear-based response making it hard for you to train revenue generating behaviors.
Here’s how to energize and empower your team with money making talents – Work towards training your team to be awesome client service people. You want the experience of your patients to be world class. You want them to feel heard and understood by a skincare professional that they can trust to make the right recommendation for them to achieve the results they desire. At its core, this “IS” what sales is about.
If you can make this simple shift and begin to infuse your staff with awesome client service skills, you will see the results on your bottom line and you’ll have happier, more productive and loyal staff.
So how do you implement?
If you can teach your staff how to do a great consult, ask open ended “what” and “why” questions until they feel they have really got to the customers’ motivation and clearly understood their desires, that’s the first step. Remember, we have 2 ears and 1 mouth – listen twice as much as you talk.
Once the true goals of the customer are understood, your team can then rely on their “professional experience” to recommend the very best solution. This is easy and natural for health care trained professionals – we all enjoy being recognized as a truly helpful expert in our field.
One great way to communicate and build team experience and culture is to have short 15 minute stand up meetings every couple of days and have a team member describe real life examples of how they got to a patient’s true desires and motivation, the recommendations that followed and how the client reacted. Think of it like a peer review of caseloads in a hospital. Let the team feedback and keep them focused on the customer experience so everyone begins to think the same way.
Here’s the tough part…The money.
This is always the hardest part for a non-sales professional to overcome. Perhaps the easiest way to help people who are uncomfortable asking for the sale / the money, is to develop a price list that can be put on the table between your team member and the client to generate a shared conversation about pricing. De-personalizing this part of the discussion is critical. By putting a price sheet on the table, the client’s focus will naturally shift to the paper diffusing the tension that is normal at this stage of a consult. Your staff should focus attention on no more than two solutions while at the same time telling the client which solution they recommend based on their expertise and their understanding of the patient’s goals, and why they feel it is the best solution.