In a minute, I’ll share an effective “mindset shift” to help any underperforming consult schedulers to up their conversions. But first…
My oldest son (Cannon) hit his first grand slam last weekend. #prouddad moment for sure.
As you know if you follow baseball, a Grand Slam happens when the bases are loaded and the batter hits a home run, scoring 4 runs with 1 swing of the bat.
In this particular instance, Cannon came to the plate with 1 out, bases loaded (obviously) and the opposing team had just put in a new pitcher. He nuked this kid’s first pitch over the left-centerfield fence.
What does this have to do with booking more consults? Once I tell you what Cannon’s “job” was, it’ll all make sense.
Depending on the situation, score, outs and other factors in a baseball game, a hitter has different jobs. And you’ll hear us as coaches say, “Do a job here!” to the batter.
A few examples:
The lead-off batter (the one who hits first in the lineup), has a job of getting on base. Get a base hit, get walked, get hit by a pitch. But get on base so we can move you around to score.
There’s also a play called a hit-and-run. This is where the base runner steals, and the batter’s job is to hit a grounder ideally behind the runner into a gap, so we can advance more bases and get more runners around the bases.
Aaaaaaand when there’s a runner on third with less than 2 outs (like Cannon’s situation) – your job at the plate is to smoke a ball to the outfield. Because even if it’s a fly ball that’s caught for an out, the runner on third can “tag up” and go score. And now you have another run on the board.
So to be an effective hitter, you must know “your job” in any given scenario. And the same goes with every role in your practice.
Challenges arise when you have folks on your team who don’t know their job.
Baseball is more complicated than booking consults. Because in the latter, you really only have one job. And what we often see is that consult schedulers underperform first and foremost because they don’t know what that job is.
So what is the ONE job we have to do in consult scheduling? It’s to lead the prospect make the right decision for them.
Every time, regardless of the situation.
And in 99% of the cases, that “right decision” is to come in for a consultation.
But we sometimes get confused about the job. To be clear, the job is NOT:
- To answer every random question a prospect asks
- To continue inviting questions and stay on the phone forever, getting into the weeds
- To “not be pushy” and wait for the prospect to ask to schedule a consult
- To tell the prospect “When you want to book a consultation, just give us a call” and leave the call without actually asking for the business
None of these are THE job the prospect needs you to do.
And it’s not uncommon for us to ask a new client to self-assess a call in which they answered 10 out of 10 questions correctly… but the prospect got off the phone without even a mention of the consultation.
- “How was that call?”
- “It was great.”
- “What makes it great?”
- “I was able to answer all their questions.”
Yes, you did. But the prospect is gone and we didn’t actually help them move forward. The prospect loses, which means we lose.
Your ONE job in consult scheduling is simple, but doesn’t mean it’s easy. Which is why we focus a lot on the psychology of this, the mental approach, scripting, objections, all kinds of scenarios in our coaching programs.
But an easy assessment you can do is to listen to a few call recordings, or secret shop your practice, and get a sense of whether or not your consult schedulers know what the job actually is.
If they don’t, now you know what you need to work on, and you can start to right the ship.
And while the spring/summer baseball season is coming to a close in a few weeks, we’re actually just heating up for our Summer Camp Experience in our Green Room coaching community for refractive and cataract scheduling teams. We have new trainings, fun challenges, prizes and more coming down the pipe for June, July and Aug.
So if you want to book more consults and more surgeries, get your team’s communication skills dialed in, or you just need an injection of energy and positivity for your folks, this is perfect timing for you.
We have 1more spot open for June, so reply to this email or shoot me a text message for more details.
Talk soon,
Troy “Do a Job” Cole
PS – The Zeiss webinar we hosted Tuesday was a BANGER. Sorry if you couldn’t make it. I don’t think they’re sharing a recording (I’ll let you know if they do). But here’s a copy to the study we covered, in case you haven’t seen it yet. Download it here
PPS – If you want to see the Grand Slam, check out the video here.