Getting Prepared

Stage II: The Initial Office Call

An office call is a visit to the office of a prospect. In-person visits with your prospects are the backbone for developing referral relationships and there is no substitute that can replace them.

Each office call should be made at the same time on the same day of each month, every month. There are multiple reasons for this. First, if you make your office calls like clockwork, they will be telling the prospect that you are reliable, steady, and punctual. Communicating these messages is nearly half the battle. Second, if you enter an office and have a nice visit with the staff, there is a good chance that you have come across them on a good day and time. Office busy-ness goes in cycles and when you catch them at a good time you should come back at that good time the following office call. If you catch them at a bad time, make adjustments early on in the call cycle until you find something that works.

Going on an office call may feel weird to you at first. But do not worry, you will get used to it. Just remember, this system of marketing is used by thousands of medical representatives around the country every day. The average doctor’s office in the US sees between 10 and 20 pharma reps each week. What might feel new and strange to you is simply everyday business for your prospect.

When you show up to a prospect’s office, you will not be focused on selling. You will be focused on finding out whether or not the people in that office can benefit from what you have to offer. If they can benefit from your services, then all you have to do is find out what is the best way to help them. If they cannot benefit from your services, then you will be moving on, wasting no one’s time.

Let us take a look now at the best steps to take while in the second stage, The Initial Office Call.

Step 1: Getting Prepared

Preparation for an initial office call is essential. If you are not prepared, you can expect that your office call will go poorly. Of course, preparation will not guarantee that the call goes well, however it will help you when a goal cannot be reached or a curveball is thrown at you (which will happen every single day). Let us take a look right now at what is required when making office calls.

Attire

The first thing you might be wondering about making an office call to a doctor is “What should I wear?”

This answer is simple but it may require you to step outside of your comfort zone as a massage therapist. Your attire in nearly all cases should be business. The rule of thumb in sales is to dress one level up from your prospects, who in this case will be in business casual if they are not wearing scrubs. Few doctors show up to work wearing true business attire, but if they are, it is not necessary to dress at a semi-formal level.

Business attire will work just fine for your first visits. If you discover that you are dressing more than one level up from the offices you visit, tone your attire back one level to business casual after you have been into an office at least once. But always dress in business attire for the first visit.

Initial Materials

Next, you will want to gather some basic material. A few of these things might take a little time to get just right, so it is best to get on the task of getting these right away. There is room for some variation in these items, but the essence of each of these must remain the same as I outline them here.

A business card

Your business card should be sturdy and professional. Do not use the self-printed kind that you can print from your computer and pop out around a perforated edge. It is better to show up without a card than to leave one of these behind (and showing up without a card is already a bad idea). Even a free card with a printer’s advertising on the back is better than a computer-printed one. But the best choice is to spend a few bucks and get a great business card done right.

When developing your card, do not feel that it has to be full of bright colorful logos and designs. Use color sparingly and with purpose. Remember, this is the medical world and concepts of quality are not the same as in the consumer world. If you cannot afford a graphic designer to create a logo image for you, then do not use a logo image at all. Use only a logo type. A logo type can simply be a font that you always use to distinguish your business name. By far, the feel of the card in the person’s hand is much more important than the image of the card in their eye.

The second most important thing about your business card is the information that you include on it. It should be legible, neat, and informative. Include your name, your license number, your title, your phone number, the address of your office, your fax number for referrals, and nothing else.

Some people feel that your title is worth a good amount of discussion. I personally have not vested much time or energy in perfecting the title of my position and the Frameworks System does not depend on it. But for the sake of thoroughness, let us consider what title you might want to put on your business card.

Remember, when you show up in the office of your prospects, you are not there to sell anything. You are there to develop relationships. So all of your words and actions should be geared at cultivating a relationship with the people in this office, not at selling them products and services. If your words say “Relationships” but your card says “Sales” then you will be undermining your own efforts with that title. “Massage Therapist” is perhaps a bit too obvious (your license number will specify that you are one) and while it does not undermine your efforts of developing relationships, it does not do much to support it, either.

The very best title to put after your name on your card is “Community Liaison.” This title will help your prospects immediately understand that you are someone who is there for them. That your first job is to be a point of connection. If you are also the therapist at your clinic, then you can explain that you also do the therapy and treatments at the clinic, but the lasting image will be one of outreach.

As long as your title does not undermine your efforts at making relationships, whatever you decide to call yourself should be just fine. Once you have all the details down, order your cards and get them ready for your first call. The card described here is written out in full on the business card spec.

A folder

Even if you are using a mobile CRM, it is important to have a nice business folder (think leather, not a bright paper one from the grocery store) that you can carry with you on office visits. Beyond providing an aesthetic element that complements your business attire, it also serves some practical purposes. It will hold extra business cards for you in case an office asks you for a stack of them. It can hold a scratch pad to make notes, which I find makes you more approachable than having a lit-up tablet screen in front of your face. It can hold flyers or other marketing material, so make sure it is at least big enough for a full sheet of paper. And it can keep emergency mints or gum for those days that you realize you need it.

Spend some time and some money and get a nice folder.

An initial flyer

This flyer might take a bit of design talent. If you find that you do not have the ability to design your own flyers, then hire a graphic designer to make them for you. There is a flyer spec here for you to look at. The purpose of the flyer is to give the office what is called a “leave behind” — something that they will look at after you are gone and that will remind them of you and your service.

This flyer should not contain anything too dense. And by too dense I mean anything that takes more than three to five seconds to read. The general guidelines for this flyer are as follows:

• Your logo image and/or logo type
• Your location
• One line about what you do (pulled from your elevator pitch in the next section)
• Clear indications about which insurance or insurances you take
• How they can make a referral to you (by fax, phone, homing pigeon, etc.)

That is it. Anything more than that is too much for your first visit. Anyway, there is a very small likelihood that this office will refer to you on your first visit, so there is no sense in leaving behind a fancy and expensive brochure. Keep it simple. Keep it clean. And leave yourself a reason to return again to fill them in a little more on what you do.

A pen

This goes without saying… but I am going to say it anyway. Keep a pen in the folder. In fact, keep three. Under no circumstances do you want to ask your prospects if you can borrow a pen or admit to them that you cannot write something down because you do not have a pen with you. Talk about sending the wrong message.

Elevator Pitch

The next thing you will want to do is spend some time — plenty of it — developing a solid elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is something that concisely tells the person you are talking to what you do and why they should care about what you have to offer.

When you show up at the prospect’s office, you will most likely be greeted by someone at the front desk. He will ask something like, “Can I help you?” And you will now have no more than 15 seconds, and in some cases as little as five, to speak with this person before a phone rings, another staff member approaches him, a patient needs attention, or the person simply feigns boredom to get you to leave him alone.

What do you think you should say in these precious few seconds? Think about it a little bit before going on.

Your elevator pitch is of utmost importance. You should have a distinct script, yet be flexible enough that you can deviate from it as needed. I have a script that I follow on nearly every single first office call — MyoScrip, named in it, was my own medical massage clinic at the time — and the “core” of it goes like this:

“I run a medical massage clinic called MyoScrip. We specialize in prescription referrals for patients with muscular conditions.”

In front of this core you will use a greeting, and at the end of it you will add a question. Your entire pitch needs to be concise. If you could not tell someone the entire thing in an elevator ride (a very short elevator ride), then it is probably too long. Somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds is perfect.

Your entire pitch should:

• Include your name and business name, if different
• Tell what you do
• Tell them why they should care
• And describe a patient profile

A patient profile is a description of the type of patient that would benefit from your services. If you are having trouble getting a concise pitch that sounds natural, try first developing a 60-second one. Include as much information into this one as you can, and then start trimming away the information that is not an essential bullet point from above.

Your pitch is not intended to be a verbal brochure. In other words, do not simply stand there and talk at the person. Your pitch is intended to be an ice breaker which opens up dialogue and conversation. For this reason, your first elevator pitch should also include one more element: a close-ended qualifying question.

A qualifying question is a question to help you gather information. A qualifying question can sometimes be answered with a yes or no (close-ended) but other times it will require your prospects to talk at length (open-ended). For your initial office visit, prepare a pitch that ends in a close-ended qualifying question. For example:

“Does the doctor see work comp or motor vehicle patients?”

We will discuss this a bit more in the following sections. But for now, prepare a couple of close-ended qualifying questions that you can add to the end of your elevator pitch to help you find out which prospects are worth visiting regularly.

The whole pitch, assembled piece by piece, is on the elevator pitch page.

Create A Pre-Call

Before you show up in a prospect’s office, take a few minutes to plan your actual visit. This process is called the “pre-call” and doing it right can make or break your visit. A pre-call for a first-time office call consists of three basic parts. You should include a written version of a pre-call for each office call in your CRM under the notes section for each prospect. The title of the note should be “Office Call [date]” and you should include a subheading called “Pre-Call.”

Let us cover the elements of a first-time pre-call now and we will tackle the return visit later.

Goals

The first part of your pre-call is establishing goals. This ensures that your visit has a direction and a purpose. Each visit should have no more than two or three goals depending on how time-intensive each goal will be. A goal of pitching to the doctor will take much more time and effort than a goal of finding out who does referral coordination. You will definitely want to attain both of these goals with all of your prospects, however you would probably not want to make both of these a goal in any one of your single visits. If you find that your visits are starting to feel like a burden on your prospects, analyze your goals and make sure that you are not trying to accomplish too much in one visit.

Here is a list of goals that you will want to achieve, more or less in order. The only one that you will find is constantly overlapping the others is the goal of gathering information. Information gathering is an important and ongoing part of developing a referral relationship and even after the prospect begins to refer to you, you will still have a need for gathering some information from them.

1. Meet and introduce yourself or new team member to staff.
2. Gather some information. Do they see your patient profile? Does your prospect currently have someone they already refer to? Who are the decision makers at the office or clinic? Who handles referral coordination for therapy referrals? What preferences does the referral coordinator have when making a referral? Does the doctor have any concerns or questions about using massage therapy with her patients? Why has the prospect stopped referring to you? Is there a platform that is convenient to meet several doctors for a large clinic? How often does your prospect refer patients for massage therapy?
3. Update your prospect on office or policy changes.
4. Discuss elements of referral coordination (with the right person).
5. Meet and pitch to the doctor.
6. Discuss patient progress with appropriate staff member or doctor.

For first-time visits, you should add goal 1 and goal 2 (the first and second questions) to your CRM under the pre-call subheading like this:

Office Call [date]

Pre-call

GOALS: 1) Introduce. 2) Qualify. 3) Competition?

After a certain point, your relationship with doctors will become so natural that a manual like this cannot offer you advice on which goals to use. Until that point, use these goals to help give your visits purpose and direction and to help move your referral relationships forward.

Position points

Position points are distinct messages that you are trying to relay to your prospects that position you as distinct from other possible options for the doctor to use. For example, if you are trying to distinguish yourself from other massage therapy places, your position point might be:

“We specialize in medical conditions rather than massage modalities.”

This helps position you in the mind of the prospect as a distinct service. In addition, you might try suggesting that your service can be added onto current standard treatment plans that the doctor already commonly uses. So one of your position points might be:

“Our therapy helps mitigate flare up from PT.”

Your position points should be short one-sentence points that you will repeat throughout your visit to ensure that the entire office gets the same message. But use position points appropriately based on your goals for the call. For example, if your goal is to speak to the receptionist about scheduling a meeting with the doctor, a position point might be:

“I keep my physician visits short because I know how busy doctors are.”

Or if your goal is to discuss referral coordination with the office manager, then your position point might be:

“We make referring easy by providing completed treatment plans for sign off.”

You can stray slightly from your position points, but the bulk of your talking should be aimed at them, and small talk should be used to nest your position points in a comfortable conversation. In addition to establishing your position, position points work as engines to reach your goals. For example, if one of your goals is:

1. Discuss referral coordination with RN.

Then two of your position points might be:

1. We work closely with the referral coordinator to make referring as simple as possible.
2. We can obtain our own approvals if that is what your referral coordinator prefers.

Position points allow you to drive the conversation in goal-oriented directions with everyone that you encounter in an office. After communicating the above two points to a receptionist, it would be natural to ask to speak with the RN about those topics.

For your first visit, your position points should be what you specialize in and one benefit of massage therapy for your patient profile. Add position points to your CRM under the same pre-call section in the notes field, like this:

Office Call [date]

Pre-call

GOALS: 1) Introduce. 2) Qualify. 3) Competition?

PP.: 1) We specialize in medical conditions 2) MT reduces pain
     from myofascial trigger points.

Questions

Everyone loves to be talked at endlessly while trying to get their work done. Just kidding!

If you really want to see your relationships develop, you will need to use something other than just talking while making your office calls. You will need to listen. And in order to use this other relationship-building technique called listening, you will want to use strategic questions to get your prospects talking.

Questions are powerful. Use them frequently and with purpose. In order to effectively use your listening skills, you will need to get your prospects answering questions and get them speaking to you comfortably.

There are two kinds of questions that you can ask. These different types will need to be used at different times in order to get the desired results. Spend some time before entering an office planning which questions you will ask.

A close-ended question is a question that can be definitively answered, often with a “yes” or a “no.” Close-ended questions can also include things like:

Close-ended questions have their place in the office call but they do not elicit as much dialogue as their counterpart, open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions are the other type of question you can use. They do not have a definitive answer and will elicit longer answers than close-ended questions. They can be useful in gathering information as well as in building trust and developing a bond between you and the person you are talking to. A typical open-ended question that I frequently use is:

“How does the doctor usually treat [most common injury]?”

These questions give you a chance to show them that you are trustworthy and receptive to what they have to say. How you respond to their answer is extremely important but it is very hard for me to give you a black and white rule to follow. A general guideline for responding is to do more listening and digesting of information than pouncing and exploiting of opportunities to sell yourself.

Let us look at an extended example scenario to get a better understanding of how this works. If you ask:

“How does the doctor usually treat lumbar sprains?”

Your prospect might answer:

“Well, she usually starts off with 1 to 2 weeks of pain medication and if there is not a great amount of improvement, she might prescribe physical therapy.”

You might be tempted to respond to this with a sales pitch about the benefits of massage on low back pain. But do not do this. I have seen enough people recoil after using a question to lead into a sales pitch to know that there are better ways of developing relationships. It makes them hesitant to answer your questions in the future.

Instead of responding with a sales pitch, try responding with something like:

“Does she find that patients usually respond well to pain medication in the first two weeks, or are you frequently sending people to physical therapy?”

And again just let him answer. He might say something like:

“Well, sometimes it will clear up in the first two weeks. But you know how patients with back injuries can be. Some of them live with it forever.”

At this point, you have really got your prospect talking and if you have done your job well, he has even forgotten that you are there for a specific purpose. It will be just like he is chatting with a co-worker.

Let us continue with this example scenario to see how it might play out.

This is the way that questioning can move your visit toward your goals. You now have an invitation to bring material by on what you do and you are beginning an ongoing dialogue with this RN. Your prospects will be much more receptive to dialogues than monologues, and questions are the tool that make dialogue happen.

In addition, by asking questions and paying attention to the response, you will be getting clues and ideas about how to interact with that person in the future. Did the nurse roll his eyes when he said “Some of them live with it forever” as if these patients are a lost cause? Or did he say it with a sad face as if he sympathizes with them? This kind of detail is extremely important to notice and respond to appropriately.

Finish off your pre-call section in your CRM by sketching some questions that might be useful to reach your goals and that might elicit some information that will help you deliver your position points. A bank of them, sorted by what you are trying to find out, is on the qualifying questions page.

To complete your first pre-call, add the following questions:

Office Call [date]

Pre-call

GOALS: 1) Introduce. 2) Qualify. 3) Competition?

PP.: 1) We specialize in medical conditions 2) MT reduces pain
     from myofascial trigger points.

Q's: 1) Does the doctor see patients with injuries or complaints
        of pain?
     2) Does the doctor have someone that she refers to for
        massage?

Note that the first question might be different if you work with other populations besides the injured. Now that you have your first pre-call taken care of, it is time to go into the prospect’s office and perform your first office call.