How to Sell with Confidence

In my last blog, I went through how to overcome your fear of selling and why we should sell our services and our time. If you've not read it, have a read here first.

Today, I will go through how to sell with confidence. To remind you, I have a service-based consultancy specialising in working with primary care networks and providing them interim network management. I also provide business coaching and consultancy to healthcare entrepreneurs or clinical leads to work through any challenges they are experiencing to help them achieve their next goals. To date we have banked £930k in sales.

So how did I bank these sales?

Getting Organised

1. Define and refine your offer for your ideal community or client. You need to be able to tell people what you do and what you can help them achieve.

2. You need to agree your price - whether that is hourly or a package price - people need to know how much you charge. And you need to keep it consistent.

3. Showcase your credentials and expertise (See last week’s blog).

Many of us do these things on their website, via social media and a newsletter. I really do recommend building your website as your place to send people. This is your shop window that you own. It should detail your services, show off your personality and house a repository of resources.

Self-belief

When I have total belief in how I can help someone, I really don’t have any fears or doubts in promoting or selling my offer.

I love my job, I love working directly with people and I love the challenge.

My current client Dr Jas Chana who is a Co-Clinical Director at Cranbrook PCN said to me: “when I have a problem, I pick up the phone and say HELP!!! and you sort it out”. My job is to make my clients life easier and I want to do more of this.

I am fulfilling a need.

So, I invite you to consider the level of belief you have in your service. Do you need to build up your self-belief a little? If you are going to run a successful business then I suggest this is an area you invest in, perhaps in the form of a coach to help you see how amazing you really are.

I have spent a lot of time on this exact area with my own coach. It has helped me build a business that I love, one coach even helped me set up The Business of Healthcare Podcast, and now over 100 episodes later I'm so proud of what we've achieved.

How to Ask for the Sale?

Notice I do not say ‘pitch’! I do not pitch to potential clients - we just talk. I’ll ask them how they are, what they are struggling with and what they have tried in the past.

I will ask them if it’s OK if I share a little of what we do and how I think we can help them.

When It comes to pricing, I am very up front and say is it OK if we talk about costs? And then I share how much we charge.

Sometimes they say yes on the spot. Sometimes they say no on the spot.

Sometimes they will sit on this decision for AGES!!! But I am quietly persistent, and I have won and retained some of our biggest clients by just friendly following up and saying ‘hey, I’m still here if you need help’.

The only sales trick I use is the scarcity technique.

Every year in the last quarter, before we put our prices up, we will let our current and potential clients know that our prices will be increasing so to buy now if they want to stay on the current price plan.

Or sometimes we will have just one slot for a client opening up. I will contact past and potential clients to let them know we have the capacity to work with one more client and if they know of anyone to please point them in my direction.

Simple, easy, not salesy and it works.

Dealing with Rejection

Sales is a numbers game. The more people you have in your network, community, your funnel, your pipeline, the more opportunities you have for people to say yes.

So, you need to get out there and ask in a way that feels good to you and maintain this energy when people say no.

When someone says no, try to find out why they said no and try and keep the door open to any potential future opportunities.

Remember: people will say no and that’s OK.

Reflect on the call, your preparation, the client and their situation. These insights will provide tremendous learning for the next sales call, tender or proposal.

Could you have done anything differently?

Visualise Success

To finish off I have a little exercise for you:

• Close your eyes and visualise doing your job and loving it.

• Or visualise a moment when a client has praised you for the work you have done together.

Savour that feeling. That is the energy you must hold and embody when you go to make your next call or email. That energy has so much power to bring you clients quickly. Use it.

Work with me

If this blog resonated with you, and you are a healthcare professional requiring some dedicated time to help you work through some of the challenges around building your business and selling your services, I would love to help you. Click here to work with me or email me at admin@thcprimarycare.co.uk.