A (3:05)

Well, hello my beautiful friend. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. This episode is a coaching hotline and episode. These might be my favorite episodes. These are where I take listener submitted questions or questions that I've received in the DMS or from clients or team members that I'm coaching that I think will be useful to bring to you guys to discuss and expand on in the podcast. So the first question is one that I get asked all the time. How do I get my team to lead better consultations without me constantly micromanaging them? This is a multifaceted question and it involves really creating a system around how you are able to train an ongoing training and also onboarding team members when they're new too. One thing I would say is that many of you don't really have clarity on how you want the consultations to go. And, and this is true for any sort of team training. When you're bringing somebody on and you need to train them, you do not give an adequate amount of time. You underestimate how much training will actually be needed in order for your team to be able to effectively do something. This is across the board, not just with consultations. And now with consultations. Add into the fact that this is a more intermediate, advanced thing that we want our team members to do, right? We expect them to be a certain level of an expert and you all have different, you have different levels of how much of an expert your team members are. So regardless of whether somebody's new or they've been with you for a long time, she didn't really give many details on what specifically her team members were actually struggling with. But what we often see is that team members have been, let's take folks that have been with you for a while. So they have done it a certain way where oftentimes the expectations weren't very clear or the expectations were just very low. What I mean by this is that the expectation was that yes, there was gonna be initial consultation where you're gonna talk about you kind of high level. Give them the idea that yes, we wanna make sure we go through the intake with them. We wanna talk to them about their needs and all of that jazz. Now, one thing I'm gonna just give a shameless plug for here is I have a brand new freebie guide that if you have not opt into yet, I will put into the show notes. It's called the Intake to Income guide. Okay. It's a free guide where I give you the One simple shift and walk through it with you that you can make to your intake that is going to make consultations so much easier for your team members and that if you're not doing it, you're leaving thousands on the table every single week. So definitely grab that. But I bring this up and when you go and you take a look at that, you look at the guide you watch, there's like a 20 something minute training along with the guide that you can watch too. But this is one little piece of the consultation process. And I bring this up because you can see how clear we can get with our consultations. This is one small piece, right, of a, of the consultation puzzle. And I bring this up to say that, like, we tend to be very broad or general or vague sometimes when we're trying to coach team members on consultations. And the more broad or vague that you are, the less likely your team is going to be able to actually do a consultation effectively. That's when it really ends up being that you have some team members who are really good and some team members who aren't. But it's just innately the team members that are really good naturally know how to make big recommendations and walk patients through, you know, comprehensive plans. And those folks are more rare, right? One thing that I love about our annual consultation system is it means that your team is going to be doing consultations that much more often, right? It means, like, believe it or not, like, it's sometimes easier for a lot of team members to really, after they've built rapport with somebody for a year and then they do the annual consultation again to actually be able to sell them more or to like, get them to commit to more, because they have more confidence and conviction and comfort with the folk, with the person that they've just spent the last year developing a relationship with. Now, there are times where the opposite is true, where they've heard this background story of this person and now they have all these stories in their head about that they're projecting the reasons why they wouldn't want a big recommendation or something, that can happen too. But either way, if they're doing the consultations every single year, they're going to get better at them. Assuming you have a system for actually giving a feedback loop in your consultation. So what I mean by this is that you don't want to micromanage your team when it comes to consultations, but you do want to have a system in play where you can continually give them feedback, right? And so oftentimes this means that you will need to have team members. If you have a really dynamo team member who's like rocking consultations, how can we get that team member, like, shadowed by the other team members who aren't doing as well. How can we get that team member that's that Dynamo Rockstar1 actually observing other team members too? Because I promise you that this is not micromanaging like coming in and observing consultations. I guarantee you, you will be able to effectively help them 10 times quicker and uncover any sort of problems that much faster when you just observe what they're doing and making it not in defense to somebody's underperformance. Right? Making it a standard operating procedure that, you know, this many times a year, every team member gets a shadow, right? Or shadows somebody else. Because then it's not, oh, I'm doing poorly now you're micromanage me. Since this is the concern that this person asked about, it's, oh, hey, like once a quarter or twice a year or whatever it might be. Everybody gets shadowed. It's just part of the process. Or everybody shadows the rockstar person, whether that's you or you have like a lead injector esthetician. Right? Therefore, it isn't micromanagement when it's just part of the training process. Right. And the ongoing training process as well. Too many of you don't have that in place. Like, it's like you're underwater yourself because you're spending so much time delivering, seeing patients, what have you, that you haven't set aside enough time to do this effectively. And I was talking with a private client recently who has worked her way completely out of seeing patients. She does see patients for trainings that they do because they have a training part of their business as well too. But she has so much more time now to actually spend coaching the team. And so what happens is that you guys oftentimes don't have that system in play. It won't feel like micromanagement when you have decided ahead of time. This is the process in the system that every single team member is going to experience for the lifetime of their work with us.

B (11:21)

Right?

A (11:22)

And then it's just like, oh, this is the expectation, if you will. Great question. Okay, so how do we build recurring revenue without feeling like we're just pushing memberships? And not just. She wrote Churn and Burn Monthly Deals. Okay, so here's what I would say about recurring revenue and memberships and my philosophy overall. First of all, I love memberships. I love recurring revenue. I would love for you all to have tons of recurring revenue. The problem is, is that for many of you, if you. It's my philosophy that you should not double down on memberships first unless your business model is going to be that you have a lot of volume of folks, you have a really large customer list and you are going to be a higher volume place. So I really like focusing first on, okay, what are the big signature plans and clinical protocols that we're going to make into packages and programs that are going to deliver really big transformations and then how can our membership complement those things, right? Like, how can our membership actually help our lifer patients and clients get better results, get more committed to their maintenance? That is going to help elongate their results and all of those things most of the time. Like this whole idea, and this is honestly in the coaching and course industry, it's the same thing in the esthetics industry. This idea that, oh, memberships are so great because it's recurring revenue and, and it's just going to stabilize your income and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is sort of a pipe dream in, in and of itself. And I've just seen the numbers so many times when I've worked with folks who've spent years like selling their entire patient base into memberships. And I look at their average visit value and I look at their lifetime value and I'm like, we could make this so much higher by not just giving like making the membership the lighthouse. I don't want the membership to be the lighthouse. I don't want the membership to be the lead superstar right of the show. I want it to have a supporting role. And I found that when you do that, memberships will create a lot of recurring revenue. I mean, if you just think of it, if you have like a $300 a month membership, which many of you unfortunately have memberships that are less than that. But even that, like, if you have 100 patients on that, that's $30,000 a month in recurring revenue, which is fine, but I just know the, we work with our clients and they really double down on packages and programs and annual consults and have a membership, be a supporting cast, not the star of the show. We can, like get to, you know, many, many more than just extra $30,000 a month in revenue really quickly and then we can build the recurring revenue alongside of it. And so I don't like, you know, the, the angle of this question is that the idea that you should be pushing memberships a lot and I think that if you have a really good membership that Helps actually do something and you have it thought, thought it through like, oh, hey, most of our patients need this ongoing regardless of what they get, right? Like, regardless if they get a brightening package, a contour package, you know, peptide, weight loss package, whatever it might be. We want them to be on this to help elongate their results, to help them with their maintenance, to help them get even better outcomes over time. With us then it's just like, oh, everybody should be recommended the membership. And the membership doesn't cannibalize your other things as well too. And the one like other little thing about memberships is most of the time y' all need to raise your prices before you launch a membership. So just a hot tip there. I've worked with so many of you that do not raise your prices before you launch a membership. And it's like, unfortunately, like the prices are not high enough to constitute like a 10 to 20% discount across the board. And I've worked with so many clients who have successful memberships that are actually not profitable at all. And now they have hundreds of people on a membership that they're hard to sell into other things sometimes depending on how you structured the membership and what have you too. So we do want to be thoughtful on, on how we structure our membership. Not all memberships are created equal and not all. A membership isn't like, you know, the lifesaver that you think it is going to be. I've just seen so many other things and FYI, I have memberships, right? Like I've had a membership before. I was once, for a number of years, my entire business model was a membership. So I'm very familiar with how it works, the behind the scenes, how to make them profitable, all that jazz. And I love memberships. I mean, I have one right now. Ask Heather. AI is a membership, right? And that really makes sense as a membership model too. I didn't decide, oh, I want to create a membership. What can I make in a membership? I decided, oh, this is going to serve a need in my community. And this definitely is makes sense. It's an ongoing tool that you can use. This makes sense to have in a membership model. So what should we. Here's the next one. What should we actually be tracking in our practice when it comes to sales with our team members to drive sales and retention? Okay, so this is a great question. First of all, if you did not listen to last week's episode where we talked about 10 things to do to like really drive lifetime customer value, I definitely recommend going back to that one and listening to it, especially on the retention front. But what's interesting is that tracking is one of those things and there is a balance here. Ideally, we could give every team member like infinite things to track and that they would improve on all of those things. Right. But I have found that there is a tipping point where it becomes too much. Meaning, like it becomes too much. Especially if you're going from not really asking your team members to track anything and then you're like jumping in to ask him to track like seven different things. It can feel like a lot because it's the equivalent of like making somebody who wants to train for a marathon or some other fitness thing and you're asking them to run too many miles at once. We have to like work your team members up. So there's a lot of things you can track that I have seen be effective. You're not gonna wanna track them or add them at once because of the very nature of the humans you're working with and what their capacity will be for, for tracking. I really like tracking the consultations and the things around the consultations first when it comes to team members. And it's simply because if we can get your team really closing in their consults, really getting your patients on transformative long term game plans, committing to, you know, packages and protocols and treatment plans that you've built built into your signature menu of packages and programs, you will see a dramatic increase in revenue. And you've heard me talk about it a lot, that like every single month I talk to people who implement our systems and they tell me how incredibly quickly they're able to see a big jump in their revenue. And that is because they're paying attention to the consultations and the details. Right. And so I would start with really picking three, maybe three core things that you want to track. It can be actually tracking the offers that are made to patients. Okay, now, on the surface this doesn't sound like a big deal, but it actually is, because believe it or not, I've worked with hundreds of you at this point now, intimately, right, Where I'm like actually meeting your team members too. And most of the time what's happening behind the closed door isn't what you think is happening. And so we need to find out are they making the offers to begin with. And you'd be so surprised that the majority of the time they may not be. And so actually tracking what's getting recommended to whom and when would be the core thing that I would focus on at first, especially if you have not been tracking anything else. Okay, now there's other things we can track with, like your front desk and patient coordinators for rebooking. Rebooking can be something that you can track with providers too, especially if they are like, you know, co conspirator with the people who are actually checking them out, collaborating. If you couldn't understand co conspirating, which I think is a word, but you never know because sometimes I make up words, you know, y'. All. So if you can, if you would focus on just that, then from there, like once we track their offers of what's presented to whom and when tracking the actual sales, right, Tracking how many packages have been sold, how many. You know, it might be memberships and other things like we've talked about, but what I would say is, is that people will track the. They'll jump to tracking the sales first and not track the offers that have been made. And I know this sounds like, well, why? I mean, if they're gonna sell a lot, then obviously they've made the offers. But it will be eye opening to find out that your folks just aren't even presenting the offers. Right? Like, they have all the excuses in the world. They're terrified to do it, or they don't want to do it, they want to keep doing what they've been doing, or they're just behind. Because the reason why I say this is that if you can track the offers, then when we know that they're consistently actually doing the consultations the way you want them to do, and giving people annual roadmaps and following through on that, then we can track the sales and what have you. You can do that both at the same time, too. We do that with a lot of the team members that we work with. But if I track sales and their sales suck and they're not paying attention to how many times they offered and I ask them to, at the end of a week or a month, nine times out of 10, they are not going to give me the real numbers there because they're not going to remember correctly. They're going to remember the handful of times that they did make the offer that might be only like 5% of the time. And they're gonna remember the no's that they heard and then they're gonna make a grand sweeping conclusion that everybody's on a budget right now, the economy's horrible and nobody wants to buy comprehensive things. And you're gonna be like, you put yourself in a position where it makes it harder, where instead you're gonna say, hey, you're gonna shelve all of that for now and we're just gonna commit to making this annual roadmap and making the offers and we're gonna track how many times you're actually presenting these things. When you focus on that automatically. I've done this time and time again. The sales should increase and if they don't or you get a lot of pushback from team members on not doing this, I would really consider whether or not those team members are good long term fits. And I mean, no progress, right? Like, I'm not talking about the fact that they're not doing it perfectly or their sales don't go from 5,000 to, you know, a hundred thousand or something crazy. I'm not suggesting that, but I've worked with some clients where they have team members where it's like 00, 0 increase, if you will. They're just not doing it. And I've worked with enough practices clinics and med spas right now to know that you are leaving so much money on the table. If you have team members who are not coachable, who are not open to changing how they're doing things, who are really not open to really working in a clinic that wants to be 1000% all in on creating transformative results and being the like, general contractor, interior designer type of approach, expert authority that really holds the line when it comes to, to being an evangelist for transformational results. You probably know whether or not some of your team members, right even now, are a good fit for that. Now, some of you might suspect this and you haven't actually put in the system to track, to give them support, to coach them and all that jazz. You haven't been very clear with them. That's your first step, is actually putting clarity in putting in the measurements that you want to see, the tracking that you want to see, giving them the support that they need. And then of course, over time, if we're months in and we're still seeing that these folks are not, you know, good fits, then that's a different conversation. But for a lot of your team members, they just need some support. They need clarity. They need to really buy into that idea because when they do, man, it can be gangbusters. All right, my friends, that is what we have for you in today's episode of Coaching Hotline at the medspa CEO. I hope you loved it. I will see y' all next week. Take care.

B (25:58)

That's it for today on the MedSpa CEO podcast. If this show's been valuable to you. The best way to say thank you is to leave a quick rating and review you. It means the absolute world to me. I read every single one. And it helps more women like you find the support they need to grow something they're proud of. I'm so glad you're here.