Sales Cycle: Roles for Techs and Physicians

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Sales Cycle Roles for Techs and
Physicians Looking to increase sales of the eye
care products and services your practice offers?
If so, dont be fooled into thinking that you
need to make big, sweeping changes to see an
increase in your bottom line. There are a number
of small changes and tweaks that every staff
member in your practicefrom the front desk to
physicianscan make to your sales cycle that will
help achieve sustainable growth. A Word on
Techs In this series of posts, weve discussed
the roles of front desk staffers and the patient
coordinator in your sales cycle. Today, well
discuss the role of your techs and
physicians. Your techs are an important part of
the sales cycle because they get facetime with
patients before the physician does. This is a
crucial period because they can educate patients
on your practice, physicians, and procedures, all
while working up patients and moving them along
in their visit. Techs can also gather medical
history information about patients and discuss
possible treatment options (although a tech
should never mention a diagnosis to a
patient). Again, only physicians make formal
medical recommendations, but techs have an
opportunity to tell patients about the variety of
procedures that may work for them. Your tech
might say, Dr. Smith can tell you
which procedure is right for you, but our
cataract patients have had great outcomes with x,
y, z surgery. If a practice does not have a
formal patient coordinator, techs can partially
play that role, notes Ed Syring III, Vice
President of Miami-based healthcare marketing and
consulting company Yellow Telescope, who
conducted a session at the 2017 ASCRSASOA Annual
Meeting. What About Physicians? Theres some
debate in the eye care space about whether
physicians should discuss money with patients.
Syrings stance on this is a resounding no!
Docs never want to come across as someone whos
just trying to make money off of their patients.
They tend to feel guilty about charging too much
for their services, so theyre terrible about
protecting their own fees. Thats why having a
patient coordinator is so important, he says.
Physicians should only handle clinical
objections, such as length of
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recovery time or side effects. A patient
coordinator or front desk staff should handle the
cost objections. The other part of a physicians
role in increasing sales? Empower the staff
members who do handle pricing so that patients
feel comfortable with spending money on your
practice. If patients raise cost objections to
the physician, Syring recommends that physicians
respond with something along these lines While
I dont have anything to do with the cost, if you
were my mother/brother/relative, I would
absolutely perform this procedure with the
multi-focal lens. We can do a standard procedure,
but with that said, if we can help you make it
happen, the multi-focal is the strongest
approach. Susie, our patient coordinator (or
analogous staff member) is great. Shell go
through the details with you. Physicians should
put their patient coordinator and other staff
members who handle patient payments on a
pedestal, Syring recommends. Put them on a
pedestal as patient experts. They have the
ability to get patients the resources they need
to make a decision.