I placed an Amazon order for 5,000 sheets of printer paper yesterday. (I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat already…)
As you can imagine, Amazon has hundreds of different printer paper “products” on their site.
Rather than clicking through each one, I did what I normally do when I’m looking for non-brand-specific items on Amazon – I started with Amazon’s Choice.
Anyone who shops Amazon Prime has likely seen the Amazon’s Choice sticker on products. Sometimes it’s on an Amazon product they produce themselves, sometimes it’s from a 3rd party.
Do I always buy Amazon’s Choice? No. But many times I do. Why?
- It’s easier and faster than to try to decipher all the different product descriptions myself
- If it’s their choice, it must be pretty good
- If it’s their choice, that means a bunch of other people are buying it too, so it’s popular = good
Today’s message is not about Amazon.
=============
In so much of what we do, we look for recommendations. Recommendations keep us going in the right direction, they save us time, and they increase our perceived likelihood of success.
“Which of these signature cocktails is the most popular?”
“Does it make more sense for us to get the family zoo pass, or buy the individual tickets?”
“Which is better here, the steak or the fish?”
And that’s when you want the waiter to step in and say, “The Bone-In Ribeye is our specialty, you can’t go wrong with that…”
We want the recommendation.
And these examples are small decisions in the grand scheme of life. Much smaller than the body-altering elective treatments you offer.
As much as we look for recommendations on small decisions… we definitely want them on the big ones too.
=============
The Double-Edged Sword of being a practice that offers an abundance of lens options for cataract surgery… or an armory of advanced laser- and lens-based refractive procedures… or a plethora of cosmetic treatments…
You’re a little like Amazon. (gosh wouldn’t you love to have their level of market domination?)
You have multiple great solutions, right? Awesome. And because of this, you meet patients daily who may be good candidates for more than one procedure.
What do those folks want to know? They want to know Amazon’s Choice.
Just because you have multiple procedures in your arsenal, doesn’t mean they should all be immediately optional to the patient.
Your patients don’t want or need a menu of options. They want a recommendation from someone in the know. i.e. you, Dr. Expert.
“Here’s the procedure I’m recommending for you and why…”
Make sure the other doctors in your practice who do your consultations actually make a recommendation. With conviction. Explain your reasoning. Tie it to the results they want and the concerns they have.
Make it clear that you have thoughtfully considered their situation, and you are telling them the way to get on the other side of it.
=============
You might have people on your team who say, “Well, patients should be in charge of these decisions. They should have a choice.”
Here’s the deal: They do. And they’ve made it.
They chose to reach out to you. They chose to seek help for their chronic condition. They chose to miss work and get dressed and drive across town and come in to see you.
And… AND! The patient already chose their result. They told you their pain points. They told you their ideal destination. It’s your job to recommend the path to get there.
The patient has made their choices. The only choice they have left: NOW or LATER.
If you’re the authority, the expert, the one recommending a certain procedure, explaining the benefits, talking about how popular it is, reassuring the patient it’s the ideal procedure for them…
This instills confidence. Excitement. Momentum. A vision for what the future can be. And as a result, NOW is a much more likely final choice.
On the flip side… if you have people in your practice position themselves as order-takers…
As attendants at the full-service car wash asking me which detail package I would like to purchase…
As baristas at Starbucks who wants to know what they can get started for me…
Well, guess who’s now responsible for “making the right choice”…. The patient is.
And as you already know from your own experiences, that patient is gonna wanna think about it. And do more research. And think about it some more. And weigh the pros and cons. And all that other stuff that gets in the way of your patients getting the results they want and deserve right now.
Worst part of all this is? That patient has no frame of reference for any of this research and decision-making you’re forcing them to do.
We’ve all ordered dinner before. Yesterday wasn’t my first rodeo buying office supplies. I can figure out a meal or printer paper or Zoo tickets fairly easily, even without assistance.
But picking a surgery? Yeah, that’s a new one for 99.99% of your patients. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t know how to research it, they don’t know how to think about it, they don’t know how to be confident in it.
“Here’s a brochure on our procedures, and you give us a call when you decide!” We might as well have said, “Hey just hike through that jungle right there to get to the beach. Just choose your own path, you’ll figure it out. Go get em, Tiger!”
=============
So if your doctors are like our awesome clients, the ones who make strong recommendations for your patients’ procedures, keep it up. You’re stealing patients from every other practice in town just by establishing yourself as the authority.
And if they’re not… if you have doctors telling your patients, “Well, you qualify for X, Y and Z. Which one do you want to do?” I encourage you to end that immediately.
Not only is it hurting their conversions, but it’s a major disservice to your patients.
And to be super candid, they’re f$%#ing better than that.
Make sure they know:
We’re here to help patients. And that means leading them. You’re in charge. Act like it. The patient made their choice. Now we do our job.
Recommend a procedure and prosper. 💪🏻
– Troy “Not Optional” Cole
PS – We have a specific way we coach our clients to make the procedure recommendation – the certain word track, when to do it, how to do it, who to do it in front of, and what needs to happen right after, all of which increase their closing percentages.
If you’d like our cheatsheet on this simple, paint-by-numbers “Recommendation Rx” process, reply “Rec Me!” to this message, and I’ll get it over to you.