Consultation skills training: Evoking trust by showing you are listening

2021-10-15T14:02:42+01:00Closing First Appointments|

I often get the opportunity to meet with my training clients after training, and I often ask what challenges they had experienced in implementing the sales process I had taught their staff in the Consultations Skills and Teamwork Training course. A few years ago, I started to see a pattern that troubled me: Manager after manager was telling me that the most challenging part of the consultation was the information confirmation. Strangely, I've witnessed countless health care sales people drop the information confirmation as easily as they might brush dust off their suit jacket lapels. As I heard this, I began to think about how much better their results could have been, if they had only mandatorily enforced the inclusion of this critical component of the sales process.

Healthcare consultation skills: The information confirmation

2021-10-15T14:02:42+01:00Closing First Appointments|

The information confirmation statement represents the pivotal point in the sales presentation. It is that transitional step between listening and selling. It marks the shift between being attentive to our prospect’s feelings and confirming them. It gains us the right of passage from uncovering a problem to earning the right to solve it. In short, if a confirmation statement is done correctly, the sale is almost made before we even begin selling. It’s just that simple.

Healthcare consultation skills: Uncovering your prospects objections before it is too late

2021-10-15T14:02:42+01:00Closing First Appointments|

The time to uncover objections is not after we make a proposal and ask for the sale. At this point, the prospect must justify their objection with evidence (which are often holes in your proposal), and you spend the remainder of your selling time justifying your price. Instead, I suggest you uncover objections early in the consultation, before it's too late.

Healthcare consultation skills: The 4 whys required to make a sale

2021-10-15T14:02:42+01:00Closing First Appointments|

What are the four conditions that always must be satisfied to make a sale? Some people call these conditions the 4 whys. Low investment or straight re-buy products and services (like a bottle of water on a hot day or going for an annual dental exam) require only a perfunctory approach to answering these conditions. High-investment products and services (such as elective health care) may require a considerably more thorough approach to answering the four whys. This an illuminating part of our consultation skills and teamwork training course so pay close attention to what is revealed here, because it can really help you understand what your patients are thinking during a medical consultation.

Healthcare consultation: asking questions in healthcare consultations

2021-10-15T14:02:42+01:00Closing First Appointments|

We're just getting started into our discussion of the discovery - the part of the consultation where you ask your prospect the right questions to elicit their motives, concerns, criteria and timing. So far, we've covered why listening is so important, the 4 goals of the discovery, and what must be present so that sale can happen. If you missed these posts, I'd recommend reading the earlier posts to understand why we need to employ the subject of today's post: Asking deeper and deeper questions.

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