That was the price back in 2001, now a Hermes Birkin bag’s price can range from $US 40,000 to $US 500,000.
As that phrase suggests, a Birkin is not a bag, it’s something in its own category. The Birkin is a statement maker, and that statement is a loud “I’ve arrived!”, a status symbol of wealth and unlimited disposable income.
The question is how do companies like Hermes, whose bags are highly overpriced, get away with increasing prices year over year by an averagely of 14% without experiencing the slightest drop in demand?
I think they’ve mastered the art of increasing their customers’ perceived value on their products.
Hi there, It’s Huyen here and welcome to OMD TV & Podcast show, the place to be to grow and scale your practice.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about 4 Essential Ways to Improve The Patients’ Perceived Value of Your Practice.
First of all, just talk quickly about the benefits of increasing patients’ perceived value;
The higher the perceived value, the more ready patients are to spend and the more revenue you will generate. You will be also able to convert more prospects into patients and don’t have to spend as much time following up with prospects to convert them.
So, it’s better to work on increasing the patients’ perceived value rather than providing discounts on your products and services.
Why Do Customers Buy A Product/Service?
Simply put, customers buy an item when their perceived benefit is equal to or more than the price tag. It means that they feel they are getting good value for their money.
Customers do not buy items solely for their features. In reality, product features are merely a way of delivering what a client truly desires: benefit.
This is how it works… your patient’s perceived value about your clinic equals Patient Received Benefit MINUS Treatment Cost.
When a patient asks, “How much does it cost?”, replying immediately over email or by phone call will lose you the opportunity to build up the Patient Perceived Benefit and all they can see from their end is the Treatment cost. Therefore, you will have a negative Patient Perceived Value meaning you will lose this prospective patient.
“How much does it cost?”. I got to deal with this question a lot throughout my career from both, running my own agency and also from other clinics that we work with.
Price is always a factor in a prospect’s objections. You will want to think about the prices you charge, and how can you build value around the price point that you’re asking for because a transaction only occurs when benefits exceed the price.
In your pitch to a prospect, you want to be building the benefits of your services or procedures; thereby addressing the price point objection before it is even raised.
Once you do this, you will minimize the main objections that come up about pricing. While I’m pretty sure that you’ll still get these queries, however, they will come up much less frequently in your sales process.
How to Increase Perceived Value to Convert More Patients?
Any marketing campaign’s ultimate purpose is to increase sales. Revenue powers the practice and its activities. So, if you are not earning much you should understand what gets in the way of your revenue-making.
Here are some ideas to help you increase new patient conversion by improving the perceived value of your practice.
1. Work on Your Branding to Increase Perceived Value
Mainly, the purpose of marketing and advertising is to increase the perceived value of your practice. That’s why we have a marketing budget to demonstrate to your patients why your products and services are valuable.
Marketing experts’ goal is to shape and increase the value of the products or services offered. The higher the perceived value, the more ready patients are to spend and the more money you will earn.
So, it’s better to work on the patient’s perceived value rather than providing discounts on your products and services.
Take the time to look at your branding from physical clinic design to website, brochure…anything that patients see and interact to see if there is any room for improvement to maximise your perceived value.
You may provide great services or products, but if your clinic and online presence look unprofessional, your patients may not see past it to the actual value you provide.
Similarly, practices need to ensure that user interfaces and the aesthetics of your websites and social media presence convey the level of professionalism and expertise expected of your practice.
If potential patients find your business via a web search and open a site that looks like it was built on Squarespace or Wix they’ll likely be turned off.
Whether you have enough traffic is one thing, and if you can convert the incoming traffic is another important issue.
Sometimes great traffic coming to your site is not enough. When your conversion rate is low you don’t convert from the incoming visitors. Therefore, you need to find ways to increase it.
If your website isn’t converting, one way is to increase perceived value through the revamp of the website, use a professional designer who has experience with the medical industry to make this happen. The investment is well worth it.
2. Leverage Online Reviews and Media Mentions
Perceived value can come from your past patient reviews, so if you want to generate more positive reviews for your practice, I’d highly recommend you check out our latest webinar on 8 Creative Ways To Generate Position Reviews For Your Clinics, I’ll leave the link in the show note so you can check it out.
If your business is unlucky enough to be buried under a troublesome history, complete with lots of bad reviews, it may be worth it to consider re-branding. Patient emotions play a big role in their stickiness, so sometimes taking lessons learned from past failures and moving forward with a new face gives a practice another chance at success.
Getting more positive media mentions also helps in establishing you as the trusted expert in the industry, increasing trust and patients’ perceived value of your practice.
That’s the power of social proof.
3. Build up the Reputation and Experience of the Surgeon or Doctor and Clinic Before the Consultation
This is a very important part of building up the Patient Perceived Benefit so that the value of your procedure will exceed the price. The patient coordinator’s job is to increase the prospects’ perceived value of the doctor, surgeon, and the clinic’s pre and post-surgery experience.
What you need to do is to position the doctor or surgeon as the best one in the field by creating a bio page highlighting all the relevant experience and qualifications in the area that the prospect is interested in. For example, you can see on the screen the graph outlining the number of years of training, media mentions, qualifications, and doing hundreds or thousands of similar procedures.
With a statement such as less than 5% of all surgeons out there in the area can match the skills of the surgeon (he is in the top 5), you can guarantee interest.
4. Raise Perceived Value by Creating an Emotional Connection With Patients
There is a saying that I’ve heard a number of times in patient/client experience enhancement training events …“Keep in mind that people forget the words you say to them, but remember how you have made them feel.”
Harvard professor says 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.
Surprisingly enough, emotion is what really drives the purchasing behaviours, and also, decision making in general.
Humans are driven by feelings. So, if you want the patient to remember your service or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your practice.
Good marketers utilize this concept all the time, and examples of emotion-based campaigns are everywhere. Think for a moment, what is actually being sold in most marketing campaigns.
If you know how to engage, build rapport with prospects or patients face to face or over the phone and make them feel special whenever they interact with you, they will listen to you more and it will be much easier to convince them to take the next step with you.
This method seems obvious, but not all practices succeed at it. It can be hard to understand why patients don’t see the value you see in the service or product you’ve poured your heart and soul into.
If you are selling a high-value procedure or treatment (even if it’s not), you need to have a proper training in dealing with enquiries. Remember, every single new enquiry that the patient coordinator is dealing with, depending what is the value of your procedure or treatment, is a potential additional $10K revenue to your clinic. You need to have a proven process in place.
There is a lot to cover if I want to talk about every single step of the sales process for medical practice, that’s why my team and I wrote a guide called 7 Figure Samurai Sword Sales Guide For Clinics that shows you everything you need to have a proper sales process in place and help you improve your new patient conversion rate.
If you want us to help you improve patient’s perceived values through your digital presence using the above ways, we’d like to invite you to take the next step which is to book a 15 min discovery call with us so we can learn more about you and to see if we can help you.
Thanks for listening and hope to talk to you in our discovery call soon.
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