Baktari MD
Jonathan Baktari MD is the CEO of eNational Testing, e7 Health, & US Drug Test Centers. Jonathan Baktari MD brings over 20 years of clinical, administrative, and entrepreneurial experience. He has been a triple board-certified physician specializing in internal medicine, pulmonary, and critical care medicine.
Jonathan Baktari is a preeminent, national business thought leader interviewed in The Washington Post, USA Today, Forbes, Barron’s, and many other national publications. He is also an opinion writer for The Hill and the Toronto Star.
He is the host of a highly-rated podcast Baktari MD as well as a guest on over 70 podcasts. Jonathan Baktari MD was formerly the Medical Director of The Valley Health Systems, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Culinary Health Fund. He also served as clinical faculty for several medical schools, including the University of Nevada and Touro University.
Baktari MD
Triple Your Sales Without Spending More Money (2023)
Did you miss us? Baktari MD is back with episode 15 of Season 2s' Crash CEO School where we talk about how to grow sales WITHOUT spending your money! Don't invest money into your marketing budget until you have maximized the efficiency of your first touch process!
All of the tips and tricks that you need to have the most efficient first touch process and increase your sales naturally are right here! What does "First Touch" mean? How can I gain more sales without reaching more people with marketing? Find out all of this and more in the full episode!
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So if you doubt and before you double your marketing budget, my strong recommendation is you record your calls and listen to them.
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Hi. Welcome to another episode of Baktari MD. As you know, this season, we're going to be doing
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Crash CEO School, where we go over topics that any leader or CEO of any organization could use to help grow their organization.
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Our goal with this is, of course, is that we you don't have to make the same mistakes that other people have made and learn from those.
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So you can incorporate some of these ideas and strategies to help your company grow without making the mistakes.
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So today we're going to be talking about really the cheapest way I know of to drive growth in your company.
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In essence, you know, what can you do besides throwing more marketing money at the world out there to grow growth in your company?
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And what I think is probably the cheapest way to invest in your company and have results in terms of growth is what I call investing in developing and improving what happens when people first come into contact with your company? As I call it, the first touch.
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Now, for different companies, the first touch looks different. The first touch for some companies,
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if you own a pizza shop, is often when people may walk into your store or if you have an online business. The first touch is when they go online and see your website.
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For others, it's they may email or use some other form of internet or social media contact to get in touch with your business.
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But whatever that way is, is really important to invest in that.
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And I think people often forget that whoever is going to be the person that first touches that client or customer will dramatically impact their view of that company. They may not seem such a big deal, but often I think people don't understand that, you know, your clients that come to you are maybe big and small, but if they all have a bad experience or some of them have a bad experience or not a top notch experience with that first touch with your company, that could dramatically impact your business.
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I'll give you an example. Recently,
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you know, I checked into a hotel, you know, way after midnight, and it was basically to somebody at the front desk, you know, who has obviously working the grave graveyard shift. And I tried to check in and there was a problem with the reservations, things happen. But what I noticed is the person actually didn't get up from their seat.
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They actually just sat there. Now, that may be okay because I'm just one client coming in. But let's say, you know, I was there to maybe look at the operations of that company to maybe purchase that hotel or whatever.
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A bad experience for a random client, you know, is bad. But you also never know when that bad random experience may be with a potential client
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that may be a huge client for you.
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So that's why I think a lot of people think, well, you know, so we lose a few customers if we have bad customer service occasionally or or we don't come off in the best light. But you never know when that phone call or that person that walks in may be a huge potential client or may have a lot to offer you.
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So I think investing in the processes and education and training in the person that's going to have the first possible touch with the outside world is huge.
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And a lot of that involves training, processes, policies, procedures. But I'm going to go over some of the key things that you really need to invest in that persons or persons or or even website.
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That will be the first exposure.
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But let's mainly focus on people because I think technology is this whole separate conversation. Whoever the first person that someone is going to come in contact with, it's very important that they understand your products and your services. So even if the person answering the phone at a law firm is not a lawyer and probably, you know, is not going to be able to advise someone if what they're you know, if they're calling about a certain case, if they have a good case or not.
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But there is a level of knowledge that they can hand- have where they can say, yes, we handle these kind of cases. Yes. Well, you know, I can get you an appointment with someone. So understanding the products and or services is really important. Nothing is more off putting when you call someone or a company about a service that you need and immediately you don't have confidence from the person who handles that call that this is something that's in their wheelhouse, that they're the subject matter experts on this, that they see this all day long.
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And so it's really important to invest time in training your initial staff in that process.
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Also it’s very important to train your staff to understand not only are they supposed to know about the products and services, but there is a product where even though they're the person just initially interacting with them, that they take some time out and understand what the client wants.
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We call that process
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know your client.
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So even the first person interacting with them should have a process to understand, you know, if you have five or six different types of clients that approach you, what category they fall in, what are their broad issues and what are their concerns and understand who they are,
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are they the HR Director of a company? Is this someone that's a private person? Is it someone who's representing a company, what their needs and wants are? And that really goes to yes. Making sure that first person understands what their needs and wants are. Now for different businesses, this will be different, but it's very, very important that before you just blab about rates or products that you have, understand what they're trying to accomplish, what they're trying to do, understand what their needs and wants are.
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Next step after that is to explain your process. A lot of times people don't know
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if the if it's their first time using a service like yours or a product like yours, what's the next step? How does it work? And even if they are familiar, different organizations do things differently. So you need to actually train your staff to explain the process.
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Like, well, the first of what we do is we book an appointment to see one of our consultants who will go over this and this then after that will generate a report and [FILLER]. So I think you get the point and you have to visually paint the picture for the person for what they're about to experience and go through.
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If they go through everything with you.
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The other thing is, you know, that is really helpful beyond everything I've already talked about is if your staff can understand, for example, who are your competitors, how are you different than your competitors? How do you differentiate what services you have that they don't have? What hours are you open that they're not open?
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And if you're not spending a little time familiarizing yourself with the other options the caller has, it puts you in a difficult situation and what I have found is the more you understand about your industry, the more you understand about the other competitors and their other services and how they compare to yours, you'll be able to honestly differentiate, hopefully, how you are better.
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And often what I have found is the fact that somebody knows the competitors, even positive things about their competitors. It does show that they're involved in industry. They're subject matter experts in that industry.
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Now, I know what we did in our companies is, for example, when it came to answering the phone, we used to let you know, we gave people some training.
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We used to have them answer the phone based on some general information about our business. What we found is that the average person in in our business could book about 30% of all the phone calls that came in for an appointment. But this also applies for sales too. What then we did many years ago is we developed a very intensive program to educate and coach people who answered our phone calls and gave them this information like explained all our products and services and not not excruciating detail that they themselves would be providing that service, but enough that a reasonable person would assume they understood the service or product.
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We also conveyed to them how to speak to the person, to how to get to know their clients, how to understand who they are, how to understand their needs and want, needs and wants, and how how to show them how we can help them meet or match their needs and wants. Believe it or not, this is an entire process.
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So we actually created an internal course
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many years ago, which we've refined to teach people who answer our calls, whether it's for an appointment or for a sale, how to convey that we are the subject matter experts that they have called the right place. So you actually minimize people giving you objections because I think people only give objections if they really feel like they don't understand the value of what you're providing or they're not convinced that you are the subject matter experts.
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So we created a 6 to 10 hour course for that. We've actually recently put it up in Kajabi. I'll put a link there if you're interested in looking at that. But more importantly, however you go about it too, for you to go ahead and invest some time and energy to create a process for for people who are going to be the initial interaction.
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By the way, let me pause here and I'm going to just have a few words from our course that I was mentioning so you can get an overview of what that's all about.
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Hi, my name is Ashlee Arnold, and our team of inspirational leaders have created a comprehensive phone training course to help others grow their businesses. We know how frustrating it is to spend all that time, money and effort to generate inbound calls for your business, only to end up with little to no revenue. Here at High Call Converting headquarters, we have taken countless courses, read every book on phone sales and tried and tested all of our learnings on several startups we've had over the years to find out what works and what doesn't.
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Today we have a bullet proof system that helps us close up to 80% of those inbound calls. Our High Converting Call Class will teach you how to demonstrate your authority quickly without being pushy. Imagine empowering the caller to come to the realization on their own that you are the best person in the industry to meet their wants and needs.
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In just a few minutes. We believe that many businesses out there can benefit from this, and we promise to help you achieve your revenue goals by converting more of your incoming calls into actual sales. For more information, please visit our website at HighConvertingCallClass.com or sign up on our website for more information. Stop waiting for the sales to come to you.
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Put your revenue into your hands.
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You know, one of the examples I can give you is, for example, let's take an attorney.
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You may have the world's best attorney. He may able to win every case. He may be able to, you know, understand the nuances of any, you know, legal issue within a certain field of law.
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But if the person answering the phone comes off as someone who is not someone who is heavily involved in that industry, can’t answer the most basic questions about, you know, what kind of what are the breadth of services that you offer within that industry.
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You may lose a client because basically they're judging you whether your firm or company are subject matter experts, not by the actual people, let's say on the back end who are going to be doing the work. So you may go to an IT company and they may have the best IT persons that really are top notch and the best in the industry.
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But if the person answering the phone is unable to convey that, you know, they've called the right place and you are the subject matter experts, you can only imagine what would happen. Right. So always, you know, sometimes having the best staff, having the best talent,
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if that's not conveyed somehow in that initial touch, it almost doesn't really matter.
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Right? It doesn't matter how good these people are. If the person who answers the phone is unable to take them through a process
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that conveys not only that they've called the right place, but that you've also asked them enough questions to understand their needs and wants to show what a professional you are and how good your company really is.
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Really, really, really taking time to invest in that persons or persons that have that initial touch can pay a lot of dividends. A lot of times, you know, I hear people say, well,
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you know, we need to get more clients, we need to get more business. Why don't we double our Google ads budget or why don't we double our marketing budget or why don't we hire, you know, a whole new crew of marketers?
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Well, I mean, that's one approach. You can always improve your marketing budget, right? So let's say you're trying to double the number of phone calls you get or the number of sales you get. Okay? You can make an argument to double your marketing budget, right? So let's say your budget marketing budget is, you know, $20,000 a month and you're not happy with the amount of sales or appointments you're getting.
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And so someone said, well, you know what? What why don't we just double our marketing budget to $40,000?
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That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is why not instead of doubling your marketing budget, double the number of people who buy or sign up that are calling.
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So let's say you're getting, you know, 100 calls a week and yeah, 30 of them are signing up or booking an appointment.
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Well, you could double your marketing budget to whatever. And instead of getting 100, you're getting 200, but you're still getting 30%. So now you've got 60. Or you could take the 100 that are coming in. Okay. And double the number of people that actually book an appointment or buy. And so until you have maxed out
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by the proper training,
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the number of people that convert that who do call
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it doesn't really make sense to have more people call.
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So you fail at booking appointments with more people, right? So if 100 people call and you're booking 30 appointments,
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okay, So you can have 200 people call and book 60 appointments, I guess that's one strategy. But without spending that extra marketing money, how about investing in having the people who do call become your clients? And that makes a lot of sense.
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Now, once you've maxed that out and you've perfected this process of answering the phones properly, conveying you're the subject matter experts, getting to know your clients, understanding their needs and wants.
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Once you've perfected that and you think you've maxed that out, then I think the argument could be made to say, Hey, why don't we then increase our marketing budget?
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Because, you know, we're getting 60, 70% of the people call to become our clients. So I think we're ready for more clients, in which case then that ROI and that additional marketing money makes sense. So I'm of the philosophy don't increase your marketing budget until you have maximized
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the number of people that sign up who are interested or do show up.
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think I'm going to leave with one last fallacy and I think people think that they already are doing a good job of interacting with people who call them. I would say if you think your staff is doing a great job of answering the phones, booking, appointment, making sales, I my strongest recommendation is to invest
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a phone system that records the phone calls.
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Obviously it'll disclose that to both people on the phone. But, you know, this call will be recorded for quality assurance. I think if you really want to get a wake up call, listen to your calls.
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You will be shocked most often to some of the babble that goes on. And you can see why if you were the caller, there's you wouldn't be signing up with your own company.
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I think there's a sense to that feel like, well, you know, we gave someone an hour in service and what we do and will have them answer the calls, answering the phone call. It's not a soft skill. It's not a skill that people are natural at. It requires training and understanding of what the goals are and understanding how to do it.
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So if you doubt and before you double your marketing budget, my strong recommendation is you record your calls and listen to them.
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After listening to enough phone calls, I think it'll become crystal clear that before you invest in increasing your marketing budget to get even more phone calls, that people that then will not translate into enough business may be the way to do it is to take the calls that you're getting or the walk ins you're getting and maximize those first.
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And once you feel like you've maximized them to the fullest, then I think it's appropriate to then say, you know what, let’s increase our marketing budget.
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Okay, So I hope that helps. Please comment like and subscribe if you like this episode. Also, I'm going to put a link down there to our course if you're interested in looking at that.
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Thank you so much.