Do you have your aesthetic consultation procedure down pat, yet you’re still struggling with conversion rates from noncommittal patients?
If you’ve laid the groundwork well in this first appointment, then patients should be enthusiastic about committing to the next step. Wondering why your prospective patient is hesitant to commit? Follow these four tips to connect with an indecisive patient and ensure they book an appointment for their first procedure before leaving your office.
Avoid the Hard Sell
Some people are naturally hesitant when making an important decision, meaning your prospective patient’s unwillingness to opt in at the first chance is only natural. Your job is to understand and address their reservations. While some aesthetic practitioners fear this phase may veer toward a hard sell, focus on ensuring you offer the patient the right services for their needs, and that you provide them with appropriate personalized care.
As a patient-centered practitioner, you owe it to the patient in front of you to understand any reasons they may have for holding back. If this hesitation stems from a misunderstanding or inadequate information, you can address it and calm their concerns. While your prospective patient may ultimately decide that the treatment is not right for them, it should be for a good reason, not driven by inaccurate or incomplete understanding. Listen to the patient’s concerns and address them specifically, but don’t apply undue pressure; if patients perceive your passion as a play for a sale, it could cause their trust in you to dip.
Gain Insight with Active Listening
One key way to ensure you’re best serving your patient is by re-employing your active listening skills. Earlier in the consultation, you listened to the prospective patient’s aesthetic concerns and goals, helping you ascertain an appropriate treatment strategy. Through your efforts to build rapport with the prospective patient as a person, you should have a good idea at this stage about why the patient is seeking treatment.
Using this insight, explore their concerns even more thoroughly and help them work through each separately. Use reflective listening and careful questions to get them to discuss their reservations more fully before offering a clear statement of how your proposed treatment plan will address their concerns.
Discuss Life-Changing Impacts
The emotional involvement interchange is similar to the discussion between you and the prospective patient at the beginning of the consultation. If they are hesitating, revisit how having the procedure will improve their life. At this time, listen carefully for any irrational fears or concerns the client may hold as a result of misleading information.
With information so widely available online, patients may fixate on rare cases when treatments may have gone wrong, allowing this information to cloud their judgment and obscure the benefits of the treatment. Consider asking questions like:
- “How do you envision this procedure impacting your life?”
- “What might change if this issue wasn’t bothering you anymore?”
- “How will it feel to no longer be embarrassed by this issue?”
- “What is it worth to you to no longer be self-conscious about this issue?”
These questions will help your prospective patient re-focus on the facts and the benefits, rather than worst-case scenarios.
Employ the Feel, Felt, Found Technique
Finally, the Feel, Felt, Found technique is a longstanding strategy for responding to objections and helping clients move forward. As the name suggests, there are three steps:
- The Feel Step: Communicate to the patient what you heard from them using active listening, and show them that you know and can relate to how they feel.
- The Felt Step: Tell your prospective patient that prior patients have experienced the same feelings as them, suggesting that they can see a positive change, just as your prior patients did.
- The Found Step: Demonstrate how other patients in the past followed the recommendation, despite having similar concerns to this patient, and were very happy with their outcomes. If you are able to point to prior patients who felt the same way prior to committing to their proposed treatment plan in your Before and After gallery, this will strengthen your prospective patient’s ability to visualize their potential outcome.
By following through with active listening and exploring these conversion techniques, you may expect to see a concrete boost in your conversion rate and even more satisfied patients post-treatment.
For more tips and tricks on how to improve your aesthetics consultation process and effectively boost conversions, download our invaluable eBook, “Mastering the Art of the Aesthetic Consult,” today.
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