By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
Why are they coming to your office in the first place? Is the guy there just to get rid of his pain, or does he want to have more quality time with his kid? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to fix a knee or restore his health so he can live a better life?
We could fix his knee. So, the guy’s got a fixed knee, big deal! We could get it fixed very quickly. But, if we’re trying to restore his health, there is a program. The guy could say, “My knee is no longer bothering me, do I keep taking the Ligaplex II?” To that I’d say, “Well, is your body done with it yet? Are you done with the program yet?” Do you see the difference?
You should take the following and put it on your mirror or something, where you’re going to see it every day. As a matter of fact, put it in five different places, so that you can remind yourself. This is how important this is. Never start a treatment program or sell a supplement until you know what the patient needs, and the patient understands and accepts your recommendations, and is committed to doing the program.
Does that mean, “Oh yes, I’ll take the pill”? No, no. What’s the program? What are they committing to? Could you accomplish getting them committed to a full program in the first visit? I couldn’t. Unless I want to spend two hours with the patient. Even then it would be ridiculous. Do you get what I’m saying?
You have to find out what the patient needs, then you need to put it into a form that will communicate to the patient so that the patient will understand what they need. Then you need to make sure that they understand it. Then you need to make sure that they agree with it. And then you make sure they’re actually committed to doing it. Until a patient has met all those requirements, I never sell a supplement.
I discovered this because I would see a patient, they’d come in for their first visit, I’d do a quick check. I’d know exactly what they need. I’d put them on supplements that were right for that patient. And then I never saw them again. Have you ever had that experience? Later they would be telling their friends, “Oh yeah, I went to him, started his program, it didn’t work.” I realized that these people actually thought that I put them on a program. They don’t even know what the program is. But they’re telling other people it doesn’t work.
Now in Glens Falls, New York, you can’t afford to do that. The town isn’t big enough. Everybody knows everybody. And you’d be amazed, even if you live in New York City or Los Angeles, how these people who are coming to you know the other people that are coming to you. I’m telling you, these big cities are just a whole bunch of small communities that have some kind of geographical overlap, but there’s communities. And the word gets around.
So, if you want to have good PR, if you want to have people thinking well of you, what you need to do is avoid the people who are going to be speaking poorly of you. And I’ll tell you, the only people who have ever spoken poorly of me are people who I never took full enough responsibility for getting them onto the program that would get them well, making sure they understood it, getting their commitment to do it, and then getting them to do the program. If I got them to do that, they didn’t speak poorly of me. If I failed to do that, then they failed to stick with me long enough to get the results, and they would say “Oh yeah, I did his program, it didn’t work.” One person out there talking about you, they will talk to twenty or thirty people about how it didn’t work. I wish the people who it worked for would tell that many. They don’t. They only tell five to ten at the most.
So, I found out what it takes to build a long term, self-sustaining referral generation practice, where you get to a point where the patient doesn’t even know which of the five people they should credit with referring them, that’s what I call a referral practice.
“Who referred you?”
“Oh god, everybody I know.”
“Well who’s that?”
“Well, there’s four people where I work, two people where I go to the grocery store, there’s this lady at the dry cleaner, there’s this person over here, and my hairdresser.”
“Gosh, thank you for telling me that, I want to send them all a thank you note!” And I do by the way.
But the point is, in order to build that kind of referral generation machine, you have to keep your environment clean. If I did nothing else but share this one datum with you and say, “Look here, this is it, just do this, and go home and figure out the rest,” you could go home and figure out the rest, perhaps. I mean, I’ve told guys to go figure out the rest, and some of them have. Some have taken two years to do it. That’s why we put the rest of the course together, so you don’t have to spend two years to figure out the rest.
The most important thing, and I’m going to repeat it one more time. Never start a treatment program or sell a supplement until you know what the patient needs, and the patient understands and accepts your recommendations, and is committed to doing the program. Never, never, never, never, never, never, never.
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