15 - The 2 Biggest Problems with Price Shoppers

What is up, my friends? It's your boy, Troy. Welcome to a spanking new episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule. We have another in the Wild episode today. Last week's episode was really well received. Wanted to do this again for you. I just wrapped a client training call. I'm about to head into my bootcamp workout for the afternoon. But I wanted to record this for you quickly before I got to that. This particular call with the client was with one of their phone team members. And one of the things that we do is we have our clients record their calls. We'll go through those, pull out any issues that we see, any challenges that we find the phone team members facing and, and then jump on the horn, do calls with them and work through those. Whether that's developing scripting or word tracks or even it's a lot of mindset development as well to help the phone team overcome challenges they face when they're on the calls and turn more of their prospects into booked consults. And it works really, really well. So I'm just talking with a client and we're going over a call where a prospect asked about lasik starting at $250 an eye. Now if you're listening to this and you're not in the vision correction field, let me give you a little bit of background here. There are some chain places, Lasik places, who are in different markets across the country. A lot of my clients have these people in their markets and they advertise lasik starting at $250 an eye. And the scam behind this is that the parameters for who can actually have $250 Lasik are so strict that really the only folks who could even have it are people who probably don't even need any kind of vision correction in the first place. And so if you fall outside of those parameters, the price can go up 5 or 10x what they are advertising. So it's really, it's a bait and switch type of an approach. I don't like it. It causes, you know, and it causes these kinds of questions to come up for my clients because these chains are out there advertising in these markets. And so I want share with you really the two biggest problems I see with price shoppers and how you can overcome them to win them over really and to book them onto your consult schedule. Alright, number one is that when somebody calls and they're asking you if you do 250 and I lasik or they're asking you a bunch of price questions. They're coming at it from a standpoint of they see you as a commodity. All right, let me tell you a quick, quick story. I'm over at the Apple Store last week and I made the mistake of running over there on the day that they're launching a new iPhone. So there's lines out the door, there's people everywhere. It was a disaster. But I'm sitting there watching folks come in and trade in their good phones that are still working and functioning fine for a new, arguably better iPhone. Alright, and why are they doing that? Why are they spending all that money to go in and buy something that they already have a functioning use of with their current phones? They don't see the new iPhone as a commodity, right? They look at it and they like the way that they feel owning the new iPhone. They want the extra features of, of the new iPhone and they're willing to pay a premium price to do it. Even though you can make a case that a lot of folks don't even need to do it, but they do it anyway. All right? The new iPhone is not considered a commodity and it's certainly not priced as a commodity. It's one of the most expensive phones that you can buy. Contrast that with, let's say you're at the grocery store and you're going to go buy some hot dog buns because you're going out to a barbecue with some of your church friends, all right? And you look and you see the name brand hot dog buns and then you see the store brand hot dog buns that are a couple bucks cheaper. Well, all things pretty much equal, you might buy those store brand hot dog buns, save a few bucks, all right? It gets, hey, it gets people fed. They look pretty good, all right? There's not a huge difference in between them. That's a commodity type of a purchase. Okay? People are comparing price because there's not much else to compare it to and they really don't care. They just need some hot dog buns and they gotta go. So what I'm saying is if people are asking you about price, then they're coming at it from a position of I need Lasik or I need Botox or whatever it is that you're doing. I need Lasik and there are people around town who do Lasik. So I'm going to see how much these people charge and then I'll pick someone to do my Lasik. The problem is that they're not comparing all the other factors that go into the procedure. They're just looking at price because they see it as a commodity. This is a result of a lack of education on the prospect's part. And that brings me to point number two, which is that price shoppers and really any patient that's calling in, so this, this kind of applies to everyone. They don't have a framework for making this decision. When you think about it, people calling in to your LASIK practice, for example, haven't made this decision before. And so they don't have a good framework for how to make this decision. They don't know what to compare, they don't know what to look for, they don't know what to ask, they don't know what's better. And the result is that a lot of times they'll default to something that they do know. Well, I do know that I can compare things by price, so I guess I'll just ask about that. So don't take someone's pricing questions as if they're just a price shopper and you're never going to convert them because you charge premium prices. No, they don't have a solid framework for making the decision, which means, again, we have to educate them. This is a result of a lack of education. And so they need to know the importance of meeting with your surgeon before the procedure. They need to understand the importance of all the different scans that you do, of having lasers that are calibrated every single day, of having the advanced technology, of having all inclusive pricing that includes pre ops and post ops. And there's not going to be any surprises there along the way. Once somebody knows those, all the different facets of the LASIK decision, if you will, they are much more equipped to make a decision based not on price. And they are able to justify that to themselves and to others around them. Why would you spend 1500 extra dollars on this procedure? That sounds like a lot. Well, it kind of does sound like a lot. But let me tell you everything that goes into this and why. I have much more peace of mind spending that money with these guys than just trying to go the cheapest route. All right, one more thing to remember on this is that of the, let's just say 10 differentiators, right? 10 different cases that you can make for, why your procedures and your offering is better than anyone else in town, if that's the angle that you're going for, is that folks are going to cling onto maybe one, two, three of those reasons. And they're going to own those. Okay, if we go out and buy a Suburban, right? You might buy a Suburban because it seats eight people comfortably. I might buy a Suburban because I got four young kids and I want to make sure that it's a safe vehicle for them. All right, those are both fine reasons for buying a Suburban, but your main reason or the thing that you're saying, you know, here's why this car is the one for me is different than mine. So we've got to make sure that we set the table with enough of these reasons that people can dive into the ones that make the most sense for them and say, yeah, this is, this is a great reason for me to pay this premium price at this amazing practice. All right, that's it. The two biggest problems that you encounter with price shoppers, both of them rooted in a lack of education, which means that you need to educate these folks not just on the call, but also through your follow up emails, through the content that you share with them, through the videos on your website. It is our job to educate the patient on why they should spend their hard earned money with us. Because fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, somebody is going to educate them. Someone is going to build that decision framework. Is it going to be the guy down the street who has cut rate Lasik with inferior lasers who says, you know what, this is good enough, we'll take good care of you, and by the way, we're the cheapest in town, so pick us. If we let that happen, then we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage and that's the framework that the patient will use. Okay? So we've got to be proactive in building that decision framework for the patient and really setting the parameters for them to then say, okay, here's how I'm going to make this decision. I'm going to use the education that was provided by you, the premium practice, not by the guy that was down the street. All right? So be proactive in that. Create the content that you need for it, get everything out there and educating the patients. The more education that you can do, the easier it's going to be to turn people who come across as price shoppers into patients. All right, thanks for listening. If you love this show, if you're getting value out of it, I'd really appreciate if you go over to itunes, leave us a five star review, leave us a couple comments. Means a lot to us and it helps us get the show out to more people. And if you want some free resources, to help grow your practice, head over to troycole.com, t r o y c o l e dot com, hit that free Resources tab at the top of the page, and I've got some things that you can download there and use for your practice. I'll send them over to you. And yeah, I want to see you just be super successful. All right? And I hope this episode helps with that. Keep charging your premium prices, educate your patients on why that is important, and we'll see you on the next show.