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Hello
Everybody welcome. I’m Dr. Nicole Lindsey, your host on today’s show, Empowering Women in Chiropractic. Thank you, ChiroSecure for putting on this show for so many years now, putting out great information for the chiropractic profession and their staff members to grow, learn, and do all the wonderful things that they do in their offices. Every day. Let’s jump right into the slides here. My topic is mastering the up, sell. I am the founder of dominatechiromarketing, where I teach chiropractors, how to build relationships with MDs. That is what most of my shows are about. However, today we’re going to touch on another topic that I have mastered in my office that I want to share with you. Five tips to add to your bottom line. There is an old adage in business that goes this way. There are three ways to grow your revenue. One is to get more new patients.
Two is to speed up the frequency of people buying from you. And number three is to increase the average amount customers purchase per visit with you or per sale. So there, there are other things that you can do, but th these are the three main ways to grow your revenue. Now as a profession, um, we have mostly been focusing on, uh, or focused on getting new patients, um, that has always been the focus of our chiropractic office and the way that we grow our numbers, uh, to see more people to make more collections at the end of the month, it’s always been about new patients, and I know this I’ve been doing it for 20 years, and this is one of the reasons why I teach the MD connection course, uh, and to, to develop this stream of marketing so that you can keep a steady stream, an influx of new patients come into your office.
However, it is not the only way to increase revenue. And boy, did we see this over the past 12 months exactly a year ago today, things came to a screeching halt. Uh, if you haven’t been living in a bubble, right, when it comes to marketing, um, we pretty much didn’t have the ability to go out and market the way we were doing workshops out, out at different businesses and a lot of businesses shut down. So we had to do more of this online presence, right? We had to make sure our presence was very strong. We had to maybe bump up the amount of Google ads we’re doing, or maybe put more money into that. We had maybe put out our first Facebook ad, the N D education and campaigns. We had to move that to mail, to fax, to zoom. We had to do more Facebook lives, maybe put out a podcast and more episodes.
And then we had to really beef up our internal promotions and referrals. And, and we did this in my office and I’m sure many of you did. So, you know, the, the silver lining for me over the past year is that this time allowed us to focus more on the inside of our practice instead of the outside. And, and we did that in two ways. Number one, we really concentrated on our patient base and we tried to find more ways to serve them. How could we show them that we really appreciated them and add value to their care charge for it, right. And help them more to boot. And I am glad to say that that is exactly what we did. And we were able to do this by upselling some of our products and services that ultimately ended up increasing our profit over the past year, which offset the lack of marketing that we were not able to do on the outside.
And as a result, we had one of the busiest years in practice over the past year, despite the pandemic. So we’re really proud of that. And that’s what I want to share with you today. So I want to ask you this question. Do you have products right now on your shelves on display that you do sell, but maybe some patients don’t purchase them. Maybe some patients don’t even know that, uh, what they do, what they can potentially do for the patient or how they can benefit the patient throughout their care. Um, I know that I had this myself. I had a nice display. I had some awesome supplements that I take myself and products that I use, but I really didn’t spend the time educating my patients about these products because we were focused on the outside and bringing new patients in, right? If we ways to educate the patients and show them that these products are there, can we increase the sales, um, overall in our practice?
And, uh, the answer to that is, yes, absolutely. You can do that. And that’s called upselling. Upselling is the practice of getting your existing patients to purchase more from you. And this is a sales technique where you invite your patients to purchase more expensive items, upgrades to what you’re already doing or other ad-ons things that may not have been your original care plan. That is what upselling is about. Now, how important is upselling for your business? Well, two main reasons I’m going to give you today that you need to start upselling. If you’re not number one is it’s easier than acquiring new patients from scratch. I mean, it is, you already have the relationship with this patient in front of you. So establishing a new stream of marketing can take time. It can take work. Building new relationships in the community can take time and work.
And some of you may be challenged wherever you are in the, in the, in the world right now because of the pandemic. But think about all the steps that are involved. When you establish new relationships with people out in the community, it can be a lot of work. So upselling to your already patients is much easier. Number two, upselling cost less than marketing for new patients. Once again, your existing patients, they already trust you. They already know you. The hard work is done. So now you just have to expose them to your products, to what you sell, what you offer. And according to Harvard business review, the cost of acquiring a new customer is approximately five to 25 times more expensive than selling to an existing customer. So this is how important upselling is to your business. Is it profitable? How much more additional income could upselling bring to your practice?
Well, let me break down to you what I’ve done and, you know, the bottom line is the more you upsell and succeed at it, the less marketing dollars you need to spend on the outside. Here’s an example of something that we did in our office. And this came out of, um, the pandemic, um, my associate and I, we created what we call our spinal hygiene kit. There are certain exercises and stretches and things that we found that we were constantly giving, uh, our new patients during the first acute phase of their care. So we said, well, let’s just make this a kit. And this was an idea we had a couple of years ago and we just never had the time to do it. Well, the pandemic brought us some time in the beginning. So we took our, our free time and we created this amazing spinal hygiene kit.
We charge a hundred dollars for it, the cost of the kit for the products in it, which has things like a foam roller in it, a wobble disk, a TheraBand, um, things like that. We created a course with PDFs and videos on how to use this and broke it down to show the patients how they can do their own spinal hygiene every day for 10 minutes a day, and supplement their care at home. And we factored this care plan, this high spinal hygiene kit into every care plan moving forward. So on average, if we see two 25 new patients per month that are signing on for care, that’s an additional $2,500 of additional income. When we take out the cost of the kit, we profited 1750, just from that spinal hygiene kit. It was that easy. And it’s something that can serve the patient well and really help them.
Another thing that we’ve done in our office is adding different services. This is another way to upsell. I added cold laser to my practice, which is amazing. At $50 a session, we added 12 laser sessions to every new care plan. So that was $600. Again, 25 new patients, that’s an additional $15,000 a month. And this is a no-brainer because this in and of itself, it just takes, requires you’re already staff to apply the laser. So it didn’t cost us more overhead, but doing this over the course of a year, enabled us to add an additional $100,000 to our practice in one year. So is upselling profitable. Yes, it is. Now, do you have to go out and buy all this additional stuff? I mean, if you don’t have a laser, do you want to buy one? Well, I would say yes, it was a smart investment for us, but the thing you can do today is to use what you have use what’s already on your shelves and use your services that can be upsold.
So some of the products that may be on your shelf, that you’re not really doing a great job at upselling, it might be Biofreeze, cervical pillows, orthotics supplements, cleanses 10 day detoxes. Some of the other services that you can up sell laser decompression, chair, massage, dry needle services, nutrition consultations, and these are all services that we upsell in my office right now. But oftentimes you’ll find you don’t need to go out and add a bunch of new stuff. You just have to expose your patients to these products and services that you already have. And I’m going to show you how to do that. This is where education comes in and creating systems to plant the seeds. So how do you upsell, I’m going to give you five tips. These are things that I’ve mastered over the past year. Again, the silver lining in the pandemic.
It gave me time to really put these systems together and they work. The first tip is to create a team education system is what I call it. Yes. I still use travel cards in my office. I use them for this very reason to educate the patients and to create a system that my whole team can follow. What we did is we made a list of topics that we typically educate our patients on and products that we routinely suggest that patients buy. Then we made a key, a key code as well, and we wrote that code on the travel card so that every single day of the patient’s care for the first 90 days, we had a code that we could follow that all of us as a team could plant a seed and educate the patient on this product. It might be the cervical pillow, you know, what are you using to sleep with at night?
It could be pH. We check patient’s pH is in the beginning of care. Sometimes we don’t always get the opportunity to go over it on day two, because we’re, we’re going over everything with the x-rays and getting them to commit to the care. So we want to make sure that we’re covering everything throughout the 90 days of their care. This has been amazing at helping us upsell different products to our patients. The second tip is our new patient folder. We created a folder that we give to all new patients on day three of their care. And in this folder is a list of different things. It’s going to be their schedule for the whole 90 days. Um, we also put in there a list of all the additional services that we offer that they may not be in their care plan that they may not be getting, but we do want to expose them to this in the event that they want to try this service at a later time, or to just plant a seed that we offer, that we offer physical therapy in our office.
Not every patient gets Cairo in PT, some do some don’t. So we’re definitely going to put information about physical therapy in there, so that that chiropractic patient knows if they have a fall and they have a knee injury, they may want to see our physical therapist for that. We also created this great guide. We have so many wonderful things that we’ve, we’ve developed over the, over the years in the office, um, eBooks and courses, podcasts, uh, tons of things, resources for patients to utilize. So we created this sheet that we put in the new patient folder, giving them the links to find all of these eBooks. We have a foam rolling. You ebook a trigger point, um, ebook. We have adrenal protocol ebook. We have so many of these and more that we want to expose the patient to because ultimately there’s going to be a product or something that the patient may want to purchase.
In addition to reading that ebook, and here’s a bonus tip for you, you can create coupons for some of the products and put them in your folders as well. The third tip is to host a podcast and educate your patients on the products and services that you offer. This has been a lot of fun for us creating this podcast. Our podcast is called balanced life on the go, and we have it on iTunes, Spotify. Um, we have it on our website, check it out yourself and see it. I put it together myself. I created it, the music, everything. We have some amazing episodes on there. And on day three, when we give the patient their new folder, we give them a card that has every single episode of our podcasts on there. And what’s really cool and helps us to upsell products is we don’t always have the time to educate the patients from visit, to visit on all the different things that we want them to know about.
So the podcast is an amazing way to get them more information. Uh, for example, I love helping patients with adrenal exhaustion and recovery, and I think so many people, mostly women can benefit from it and they’ve, they’ve never paid attention to their adrenal glands. So we did a podcast on it called adrenal exhaustion and recovery. And in that podcast, we explain a protocol of supplements that I carry in my office and through standard process that we have found great success in treating and managing and helping people recover from adrenal exhaustion. So when I want to steer a patient in that direction, when I suspect they’re dealing with adrenal exhaustion, I will tell them to listen to that podcast episode. And if it resonates with them, let’s talk more. Oftentimes they’ll come back in the next day and they’re buying the supplements already. They’re ready because they’ve educated themselves.
It resonated with them. They know that they have the adrenal exhaustion and they want to be recovered. You can do that with all of your products and just steer the patients to your podcast. Our podcasts now has 4,500 downloads over 4,500 downloads. And we’re very proud of it. And we continue to put out episodes every month. So that is a must for you to do, to upsell products in your office. The fourth tip I want to give you is to just factor some of these additional services and products that you offer into your care plans. Just go ahead and do it. If you have orthotics that you sometimes check arches sometimes not. Um, you can go ahead and factor that in and know that every patient is going to benefit from a pair of orthotics. If there are some supplements that you recommend all new patients take, go ahead and factor that in there, add it in upsell it.
Um, in our office, we have the spinal hygiene kit. We also offer dry needling. Our physical therapist does that. And what a game changer that is. And we started bundling four visits of dry needling into all care plans as well. Um, we charged $50 a session for dry needling. So that’s, that’s just a cash service and it helps the patients. It helps them get out of these acute muscle spasms that they’re in and helps us get better adjustments so we can get to our desired result quicker. So that is something you can do. If you have courses, we have a 10 day self-improvement plan. We created a sort of a course at the start of the pandemic because we needed help, uh, improving our, getting our mind right ourselves. So we just created a 10 day course and that we can factor in as well and give that as an upsell in care plans. So there’s so many ways that you can factor the services and products and courses and things into your care plans that you already have. You just need to charge for it and add it in
The fifth tip
We happenings, I call them. These are things that we do every month that we educate patients on through various channels. We typically will pick a topic and we’ll stick with that topic for our marketing, for our internal marketing promos for our Facebook lives for a podcast episode, for products that we sell in the office, we’ll offer a discount for videos that we put out weekly. We tie it all in to this topic, and this has been a great way to upsell these various products and services in our office as well. Uh, it’s a great way for me to continue learning, to inspire my patients and my staff to learn about that topic as well, and to sell products and services that we offer that align with this topic. Um, we have done this month, we are talking about pH, um, we’ve done epigenetics in the past.
We’ve done, uh, heart health and cholesterol clarity. Um, there’s so many different things that you can do here, and it’s a lot of fun as well. And you can put out flyers, put this on your website, but you just want to let your patients know that you’re doing this stuff and that you have products that align with that. And you’ll find that you’ll start upselling these products to your patients. So as you can see, there are so many ways to upsell products and services in your practice. And this is exactly what I do day in and day out. And this is how I have mastered upselling and had managed to add a lot of extra profit to my practice by doing so. Uh, I love this quote by Brian Tracy. He says, approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.
And that’s what I want to leave you with today. That upselling doesn’t have to be all about making more money. Of course your business. Of course, you have to keep your eye on the bottom line and you have to continue generating more income so you can pay yourself and you can pay your staff and you can give raises and bonuses. But if you come from this place of serving and that you want to solve their problems, you want to help them achieve a goal, not just sell them additional stuff that they don’t need. I guarantee that the products and services in your office on your shelves can help your patients more. So consider using some of these tips and strategies in your practice so that you can not only increase your revenue, but you can increase your patient retention and their happiness to boot. Thank you all for listening. If I can help you in any way on upselling or MD marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to me@dominatechiromarketing.com for more information in two weeks, make sure you tune in to our show where Dr. Cathy Wendland-Colby will be bringing us her expertise. Thank you for watching everybody
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