Steve: So the total cost of the procedure, including hospital and surgeon fees for a non-insured patient, is $12,500. What do you think about this?
Huyen: Umm, let me check with my partner and get back to you!
Welcome to OMD TV the place to be to grow and scale your practice.
How many times have you heard that reply from your prospects? I’m guessing literally every single day…
No matter what services you’re selling this objection is typically going to be one of the most dominant objections that keeps coming up, especially if you are dealing with self-referring patients and you are selling high valued procedures. But being able to handle this objection will help you to improve your new patient conversion rate dramatically.
In this video, I’m going to show you how to handle this objection cleverly. This will be an essential part of your team’s patient enquiry handling process, so I suggest that you pass on this video to the person who takes charge of this at your practice.
What I’m going to show you is how to handle those “I need to talk to my partner about this” objections. How to isolate them and handle them, so that you can move onto the next step in your selling cycle.
When it comes to high valued procedures, there is typically a third party involved. It could be a husband or wife – it doesn’t really matter; it is whoever that 3rd party is that your prospect keeps referring to when they say something like; “I’m going to need to speak with my partner about this.”.
As part of our screening process, we’ve discussed that you need to unearth the 4 key elements of the purchasing decision by using the N.B.A.T (Needs – Budget – Authority – Time) method.
Now…Authority is one of the key elements that you need to determine, to see if your prospect needs to talk to a partner, or any other individual, about a procedure they are considering.
This will help you to determine who is the main decision maker for moving ahead with a procedure, as you want to be selling directly to that main decision maker. If the prospect is the main decision maker, this will help save you a lot of time from having to address the partner objection.
But if you do need to address the partner objection as there will be 3rd party involvement when it comes to deciding to move forward or not; here’s your game plan.
Typically, for a high valued procedure, a prospect will need to check with a partner or respected individual for getting their perspective or even approval.
It is best for you to get this other individual on any call or in the discussion that you are having with the prospect, instead of you relying on your information being passed through the original prospect.
If for some reason, that individual is not available to be included in your conversations, then you will need to have a structured way to handle this objection.
The best way to handle this objection is to say, “Okay, sure, what part of this do you need to speak to your partner about?‘”.
What we’re trying to do here, is we’re probing for a hidden objection, as they obviously know their partner better than we do, and there is a sense that the prospect knows this 3rd party well enough that there might be an existing objection from them against the prospect proceeding.
We want to know what specific part of your discussions do they need to speak to their partner about, and then when they say what that is, then you will want to address that objection right then and there.
Now…If it is a price objection, please check out this additional video that we created for you, which show you how to handle price objections more cleverly.
But no matter what objection it is, we can already imagine what will happen when you and your prospect finish your discussion, and they go back and talk to their objecting partner.
Your prospect will try to recreate what you’ve just told them to their partner in a much less persuasive way, perhaps not even establishing the value in the right way, and they will make a less convincing case, which will allow for the partner to easily provide a negative reason for the prospect to not go forward.
That is why we want to future pace here, and find out what the prospect believes the partner’s objections could be.
We need to openly listen to what this prospect has to say, and then you want to address that objection right then and there.
Start by adding… “Are there any other questions that you think your partner would have?”. .. As we always want to make sure that we have the complete picture, and avoid allowing for more objections later on.
One strategy for addressing partner objections that we can use, is to get the partner involved immediately. “Why don’t we get your partner on the phone right now and I can kind of give them a quick summary of everything that we’ve discussed?”.
There’s nothing more powerful than getting both decision makers involved at the same time to hash out those objections.
However, if that’s not an option, you need make sure that you address every single objection with the prospect and arm them with everything that they need to go and get your point across to that partner.
And then after giving them all of that ammunition, you can explore their partner objections even more by saying… “Look, obviously you know your partner better than I do, so if they were here talking to us right now and they heard this whole process, how do you think they would feel about you doing something like this knowing full well that the outcome is exactly what you are trying to achieve?”.
They will already know what their partner is thinking, they knew from the moment that you started talking.
Them letting you know that they need to talk to someone is more about them buying some time to go and speak with their partner.
You can take it further… “What are the points that you think that they might have a problem with?”, or “What are the things that you think would interest them the most?”.
And if you felt ready to ultimately fast-forward the discussion, and future pacing to control the situation. Here’s a look at how discussions of this nature could proceed.
You can say to them…
You: “What happens if your partner says no? I’d rather address this here with you now, rather than on a call later
Prospect: “If my partner says no, then I guess we’ll have to leave it”.
You: “Okay, sure. So, if your partner says no, what are you two going to do to get to your desired outcome?”, or, “What are your other options for solving this problem that you’re trying to solve right now?”
On the flip side…
You: “Okay, if your partner says yes, are you a yes?”
Prospect: “Yeah look, I’m all good. I just simply want to chat with my partner to see if he’s good, then we’re good to go”
You: “Okay cool. So, if we speak to your partner and they are all fine, then you are good to go? Because you know that if they are a 10 and you’re not a 10, then that’s going to be a waste of time, so I just want to get on the same page with you. If they’re all good, we can get this done for you?”
Prospect: “Yes, definitely, we can get it done.”
But if they still aren’t ready to say yes, it is most likely that there is another objection holding them back, and you need to address those hidden objections to avoid wasting more of your time.
You: “Okay cool. No problem, it is totally fine. Look, I’ll leave it with you. Before you go, could you please just do me a favor and shoot me straight. I speak to a lot of people. If this works for you, great, if it doesn’t work for you, that’s fine too. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being that you wouldn’t go ahead no matter what I offered you, and 10 being that you’re ready to go right now… where are you sitting?”
Typically, a prospect is going to say that they are a 6 or a 7. No matter what that number is, after they’ve offered their number, you can say something like… “Okay great, what do I need to do to get you to a 10?”.
Now, before you end the discussion so that they can go speak to their partner, you want to get a read on the prospect and do a final temperature check to find out where this prospect’s thinking is at, and you want to provide them an opportunity to allow them to walk out that door with no pressure.
This is an opportunity for you to address any final objections that might be still holding them back.
To recap; we’ve explored how to deal with a 3rd party or partner objection, and there’s a lot of ways that this conversation can go down. But if you utilize these different scenarios, exploring them with your prospect, you will be able to unearth everything that you need to know, and everything that you need to address, with someone who is telling you that they need to speak to their partner before deciding.
We’ve provided comprehensive sales training for your team, showing you how to address all sorts of different objections, and even how to qualify prospects before they come and see you, in our special sales guide called the “7 Figure Samurai Sword Sales Guide For Clinics”. We have both electronic and audio versions for you, so check it out and apply what you will learn to see your new patient conversion rate improve immediately. Check it out!
No Comments
Add Comment