YOU’RE IN YOUR optical office just working away when you overhear a conversation between a team member and a patient. The patient asks a question, so you curiously lean in to hear the response. You’re excited! This question is perfectly teed up for a beautiful reply. But when you hear it … you have to fight the urge to crawl under your desk. Your team member says the most cringe-worthy grouping of words, which makes you wonder if they even realize how bad that foot-in-mouth response was?
Understanding we are all human, you later address your teammate and have a conversation that is best summed up by, “Let’s try to avoid that in the future.” Then, you get back to work and pray that it won’t happen again.
These sorts of conversations and responses happen all the time. During a visit to a Spexy member office, I decided to pay closer attention to the conversations happening throughout the patient journey. These were all conversations I’d heard before, but this time I was listening with a different objective: to see how the sale is affected during the entire patient journey with every team member, not just the post-handoff conversation.
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I realized that every team member is unknowingly killing sales before the patient even gets to the optical. We have all overheard these conversations and tell our teammates what not to do, yet we never teach them the right thing to say, let alone how to go the extra step to capitalize on the conversation. Up to that point, I had coached team members based on position. We would advise how that position could improve their verbiage for better communication. Coaching geared toward sales was mainly for the opticians.
My revelation was that I needed to create a resource that would give each team member the tools and training to avoid foot-in-mouth scenarios and to turn uncomfortable conversations into ones that set the stage for the purchase of eyewear. The result is an incredible training course every optical needs. Scan the QR code to watch a video about how I did it and get a sneak peek at the result.
Here are the steps I took to equip every position in the optical to sell:
- Listen in on conversations. Refrain from nitpicking; you are listening to learn. Hear what the patient is saying and the conversation around it. Identify the point the patient is trying to make.
- Document conversations and group by topic. You’ll find consistencies. Common conversations were, “Can I just get my Rx? I am going to buy them online.” Or “I just want what my insurance covers.”
- Categorize each conversation as an objection or a question.
- Create ideal responses or comebacks for the grouped conversations.
- Review and refine the comebacks and responses. Writing a response down, you will often realize it can be adapted to be made less harsh or more direct.
- Present the tools to your team.
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Giving your team the tools to create powerful responses to difficult questions will boost eyewear purchases and confidence. The capture rate results our members are getting are fabulous. No one likes hearing “no’’ or that a patient is taking their business elsewhere.
Equipping every position in your office with powerful responses eliminates capture rate killer conversations. Avoid them and increase optical sales like you’ve never imagined.
Watch the Behind the Scenes video:
