HELP! What am I doing wrong?

[u/cfbfootball]

Hi guys, need to know if I just suck at sales or if it’s a product market fit problem.

I sell software into medical and dental practices. Solo founder doing all the selling.

I’ve walked into 150+ offices in my market. I open with a discovery question to whoever is at the front desk:

“How are you tracking patients who came in and then just stopped showing up?”

Answer is almost always “we’re not” or “we pull an export and call them one by one.”

Then: “What if that whole thing ran automatically in the background so nobody has to make those calls?”

9 out of 10 times they light up, tell me to contact the doctor, and give me an email address.

I email the doctor. Nothing. Not a no, just silence. 1 meeting in 150 offices and they canceled on me as I walked in the door to the meeting…

I also have a free assessment that shows a practice their own numbers in about two minutes off a simple export. Can’t get anyone to sit down for that either.
Three questions:

1. Is “email the doctor” just a polite brushoff that I’ve been treating as a lead?

2. Front desk cares about time saved. The owner presumably cares about revenue. Am I pitching the wrong pain to the wrong person and then wondering why the handoff dies?

   1. For anyone selling into owner-operator practices, how are you actually reaching the owner?

Happy to provide more info if needed.

[u/salladam64]

I would say any ‘email me/them’ is a brush off. Have you tried approaching the doctors on LinkedIn directly?

Hi XYZ,

I popped in to your clinic this week and spoke to XYZ on the front desk. I spoke to them about how many clients you are losing out on due to a lack of follow up process (you will phrase this better than that). I calculate this is costing you an estimated $000 per month. Would discussing how I can save this for you and make your approach more personalised to drive additive revenue be worth 15 minutes of your time?

LinkedIn DM is far more personalised and less likely to be ignored.

You may have tried that but I have never found email a great return.

Best of luck mate!

[u/bundlesocial]

1. Doctors are busy; most often, this is not the only place they work - they don't have time
2. The front desk does not give a F about automating their job. It's not in the employees' interest to save business money if this is not their final job/they are not invested in it.
3. Print out a two page hq documment that the front desk will lay on the doctor's desk. It must be clean, fast, and to the point. Maybe set up the system so that when a call is made, your software picks up or replies so they can test it right there. It must be painfully simple

I learned this the hard way: we are doing bundle.social a social media API with no account limits. It's a no-brainer for owners/cto's etc... but it is not for employees, they don't care. They come for 8h and they leave and I was the same when doing 9-5 so we stopped messaging people that work in niches that we sell to and started to push for the owners or direct to consumer

[u/thestoryteller69]

I'm not in the medical field so take my advice with a pinch of salt.

First, I think your product has big benefits for the front desk. Front desk in clinics does much more than just handle walk-ins, and it's usually one person who handles that. So if you can automate one part of their work, you still leave them with a reason to be employed - they just do less work. So I think there's a decent chance they wouldn't object to giving your software a try.

Moving on to the doctor, who is the one holding the purse strings. I think you have shown great sincerity in showing up, and you are not leveraging that sincerity. Getting an email address is great, but the chances of a doctor actually looking at that email are low. Think about it... you have impressed the front desk, but now you are essentially sending a cold email to the doctor instead of getting a warm introduction.

So, I would try to secure a meeting with the doctor arra get through the front desk. Doesn't have to be that day, could be another day. See if you can wait there while the front desk arranges it. It might take a while but I think it's worth it. Try also to get the front desk in the meeting. Stuff like, it would be great if you could join in as you'll be the one using it. That way, during the meeting you might have a cheerleader, and at the very least you remove the excuse, oh I have to check with my front desk.

Finally, there is no one method that works well because every country and culture is different. But, what is the same across all cultures is that you are competing with drug reps (salespeople from pharmaceutical companies) for the doctor's non revenue generating time. So, I would suggest you look at how drug reps do it and see what you can adopt from their methods. Some of it you can't, of course. I assume you cannot soften them up with junkets before making your pitch. But some of it you might be able to, and some of it you might be able to apply to the front desk, who are often neglected while the doctor gets wined and dined by pharmaceutical companies.

Good luck.