“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” – Don Corleone, The Godfather
Had a conversation yesterday with a practice about their marketing, and I asked them “What kind of offers do you guys promote?”
The response: “Oh, we don’t do any discounts.” (which isn’t what I asked, but I understand why they responded that way)
When you start talking about discounts, promos, offers, specials, the water gets murky quickly.
So let’s clear it up today. Because these are not all the same things. 👆
To keep it simple, we’ll talk about Discounts vs. Offers.
What is a discount? No surprise here, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A discount is when you take money off the retail price of your service.
A discount is a “price reduction” to the general public, and a “profit reduction” to you. This is because rarely are you able to cut costs when you discount, so the $$ reduction comes right out of your bottom line.
So that’s a discount, and it’s no surprise some practices don’t want to do them. I’m not a huge fan of discounts on surgery. At the same time, they may be necessary to garner attention in your market depending on competitive activity, etc.
But a “discount” and an “offer” are not the same. In fact, a discount is a type of offer, but there are many others.
An “offer” is simply a presentation of deliverables in exchange for a set investment level.
When your car dealer says he will give you $X for your trade-in, got you X% financing, added a year to your extended warranty and threw in a full tank of gas… he made you an offer. Notice I didn’t say anything about a discount.
Offers can consist of many elements, including:
- Special financing rates
- Upgrade to a specific laser
- Upgrade to a specific lens
- Inclusion of drops / post-op products
- Inclusion of pre- and post-op visits
- Lifetime vision warranty / enhancements for life (or for X years)
- Automatically entered to win X prize when you have surgery
- Package surgery with desirable products, like complimentary designer sunglasses
Now that I’ve given you some examples, you can probably think of more.
“But Troy, we already include some of those in our surgery package.” Great! Break them OUT of the package, and then have your sales team work them back IN as part of the offer. Build the offer in front of the patient.
For example, you would go from “This comes with 2 years of free enhancements”
to “I’m also going to include 2 years of enhancements as part of your surgery package. Normally this would be an additional $X00, but we’re including it at no additional cost to you.”
See the difference? The first one is just listing a line item. The second one is you actually building an offer. And you don’t have to change all your materials to do this, you can simply change your scripting.
(We’re diving more into this in our coaching group this week, so our surgery schedulers have a great feel for how to present the features of surgery packages more like an “offer”)
And if you DON’T already do some of these in your surgery packages, now is a great time to start.
Why use offers in the first place?
- Sets you apart from other practices
- Gives you creative ways to pique your prospective patients’ interest
- You can put time constraints around them, always creating urgency
- Gives you new ways and reasons to reach out to non-converted prospects
- ETC ETC ETC TONS OF REASONS
Cool? So if you haven’t been using offers because you don’t discount, I hope this essay has given you new ways to introduce offers into your practice. And if you’d like to collaborate on creating an offer for your practice, hit reply and get the convo started.
Troy “Offer on the Table” Cole
PS – Speaking of offers, we do have an OFFER right now for one of our E3 coaching programs. This is specifically for practices who KNOW their team would benefit from communications / conversion coaching, but they feel like they need to wait for the “right time” – either too busy, trying to hire someone right now, not sure if their current team is the ideal fit, opening a new office, etc.
If that’s YOU, reply and let me know WHY now is not the right time, and I’ll share more details with you. It’s totally NO pressure, NO obligation. I just know a lot of practices are in this boat right now, so we’re doing something to help them get the coaching they need so they can stop losing consult and surgery opportunities NOW.