How to Sell with Trust and Integrity as a Physiotherapist

Picture this… you’ve just received another initial consultation.

If you do your job right, that’s a life-time value of $600-700 for most standard cases.

Your patient walks in, you spend 45 minutes understanding their problem…

And just as you’re about to pitch them your treatment plan,

You start feeling internal resistance,

You stutter,

You um and ah,

And your patient says ‘I’ll let you know for next session…’

But of course, they never let you know. They disappear. Into the abyss.

Sound familiar?

It’s not your fault. As a physiotherapist, I am almost certain that you never received any sales training.

And why would you? After all, are sales and health even supposed to go together?

That’s a topic for another time.

The reality is, if you’re in private practice – then you need to be hitting a certain number of consults a week to justify your salary.

And if you’re the clinic owner… it’s even worse seeing a new patient being referred to your team… only for them to never come back. And you need them to come back… so your business stays afloat.

But above all that – I believe all of us entered the health industry because we want to make money by helping people with their health. And if your patient never rebooks with you… you’re not really helping them, are you?

So why haven’t you spent time refining your sales skills?

Let me hazard a guess – it might be because you think sales is deceptive and scammy.

The bad news is – it can be.

The good news is – it doesn’t have to be. Because after selling health services for the last 10 years, I’ve learnt that selling with trust and integrity is by FAR the best method to sell.

And in this video, I break down how to do it. But if you don’t want to watch the whole video – let me break down the steps for you in writing (I prefer reading for speed purposes anyway).

I teach and follow a 7-step framework (but it can really be condensed to 4) that helps me close a sale almost every time. And the entire framework is focused on one thing only – building MAXIMUM trust so the patient says the easiest yes of their life.

These are the 7 steps:

1. Meet, Greet and Acknowledge
2. Identify their Problems
3. Demonstrate Understanding of their Problems
4. Make a meaningful change
5. Create the roadmap(s) to success
6. Pitch and Close
7. Objection Handling

Let’s break it down what each step means.

Step 1 – Meet, Greet and Acknowledge

You only have 5 seconds to make a trustworthy impression. The goal here is to tap into their subconscious trust system by learning about your voice and body language. Ideally, your patient will ‘feel’ a certain trust toward you – even if they’re not aware of it yet.

Step 2 – Identify their Problems

In this step, your job is to identify all their problems. But it’s not enough to identify what they come to you with. You also need to learn how to identify what they haven’t even thought of yet. This is a POWERFUL demonstration of your expertise that sets you up as an authority.

Step 3 – Demonstrate Understanding

Once you’ve taken the time to understand their problem, you need to convey that you understand… back to them. Using techniques like paraphrasing, you’ll show your patient that you know exactly what’s going on.

Step 4 – Make a meaningful change

Most physiotherapists are already fantastic at this. This is where you show them that you can make a significant difference to their symptoms right away.

Step 5 – Clarify the Roadmap(s) to Success

After you’ve shown them the difference you can make, it’s time to describe the best treatment plans to them. The artform here is to become very educational and personal in your approach, but remaining professional.

Step 6 – Pitch and Close

This is the climax of the consultation – when you confidently pitch your treatment plan to them so they say yes. This is also the part where most physiotherapists lose their patients. Because they don’t know HOW to pitch their service well.

Step 7 – Objection Handling

Should your patient say no, this is the part that you have to learn to overcome unknown problems.

This is just a brief summary, but each step has several skills that you need to learn in order to perform it correctly.

Using these steps, I’ve sold physiotherapy sessions for $200/session, personal training packages upwards of $10000, retreats for $2000 per ticket... and much more.

If you’d like to learn these for yourself, or teach these for your team – I do a free strategy call where we can breakdown where you may be struggling, and I’ll show you how to get out.

Just book in a time here and let’s chat. Otherwise, thanks for reading and see you on the next blog!

Phil