The EntreMD Podcast

Hate Selling? Here’s How to Ethically Attract More Patients and Clients

• Dr. Una • Episode 460

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Hate selling?

You’re definitely not alone! Many physicians think that selling is manipulative, that it makes them greedy, and that they’re taking advantage of their patients. But what if I told you that selling is none of those things? 

In fact, it is your ethical duty as a physician to tell people what you do and invite them to work with you to solve their problems. That’s why today, I’ll show you my ethical sales formula and help you attract more patients and clients without the guilt currently stopping you from scaling and helping more people. 

Tune in! 

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Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 02:39 Redefining selling 
  • 03:09 EntreMD ethical sales formula: Step 1
  • 09:45 Step 2 
  • 10:41 Step 3
  • 13:07 Lean into your why 
  • 17:02 Your homework 
  • 17:46 Outro 

Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

Selling is serving. I am serving someone who has a pain and wants a solution and is willing to pay, but they have no idea who to go to. Selling is actually one of the kindest things you can do in your business. It's one of the kindest things you can do for your audience. It's one of the kindest things you can do for the people in your world that don't know what you're doing. Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Imna. If you hate selling, you're not alone. There are so many that hate selling. But what if I told you that selling is not what you think it is? It's not manipulation and it's actually something you already do, and you already do it really well, right? So a lot of doctors think selling is manipulative. It means I'm greedy People I'm selling to actually I'm better off financially than they are, so I'm taking advantage of people. I already make a lot of money and here I am trying to get money. But what if we could look at that differently? And the reason why it's so important that we do this is because if we're not selling, if we're not letting people know what we do, giving them an invitation to work with us, then they're going to do without, and this is the deal. They have the problem. They're willing to pay for the problem to go away. They just don't know. You fixed that problem because no invitations have been made, and I want you to think about it from the patient's perspective, or from the client's perspective. I want you to think about your business for a second and think about what it is you do. Think about the pain your business solves. Think about what life could look like on the other side. Now there are people who wake up in a cold sweat at night thinking about the problem you solve. They wish life could look like the way life looks after people work with you. Some of them don't even know it's possible. Some of them know it's possible but they have no idea who can help them. And so when we don't sell, if you will, then we rob those people of a better life, we rob them of better health, we rob them. And so selling is actually one of the kindest things you can do in your business. It's one of the kindest things you can do for your audience. It's one of the kindest things you can do for the people in your world that don't know what you're doing. Okay, let's talk about this here a little bit. Okay, so we're going to redefine selling. We're going to redefine selling as educating and serving, like selling is serving. I am serving someone who has a pain and wants a solution and is willing to pay, but they have no idea who to go to, and so when I tell them this is what I do, they're like oh, my goodness, I've been looking for someone like you for so long and you're like I'm here. This is literally what you're doing. So let me show you, because the thing is this as a physician, you're already really good at this stuff.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we're going to call this the EntreeMD ethical sales formula. Okay, I ran away from sales because I was like ah, that's what used car salesmen do, and they try to strong arm you into buying whatever. That's not what you're doing. We're talking about ethical sales here. Okay, ethical sales. So what is the formula?

Speaker 1:

Well, the first thing you do is that you find out what the problem is. Okay, you're a doctor, you already do this, right? What do we do when somebody comes in, we don't just sell them something, aka give them a prescription this is the medication you need to take. We first of all dig to find out what the problem is. So we get a history, we do our review of systems, we do our past, medical, family, a social history, we examine and then we come up with a diagnosis. This is the problem, okay, and it's the same thing with selling, right? We have conversations like what is the problem? Because selling is not about giving somebody your stuff and taking their money. Selling is about finding a problem, recognizing you're the person for the job you can fix the problem, and telling the person you have this problem, you want it fixed, I can fix it right.

Speaker 1:

And so the first part of it is identifying what the problem is. What is the problem? And so let's say you are a private practice person. Okay, what is the problem? The problem may be they don't have access to care. They don't have access to good quality care. They are part of a place where they cannot get an appointment for two months, but you can get them in the next day. So the problem is they can't get the appointments they want. The problem may be that they really want a doctor who gets them and they don't want to just be a number. You're an expert, but you're also warm and you're friendly, right, like I want you to. Those are all the problems they have, and if your private practice solves those problems, then by all means hey, you have issues with this. This is what life can look like.

Speaker 1:

I'm the person for the job. That's what they want. I have a business and it's not making the revenue I want or it's not making the profits I want. I can't enroll a great team. I don't have a brand, my online reputation. There's no intentional version of it that exists and I don't know what to do to build that. I don't know how to lead a team. I'm lonely as an entrepreneur. Nobody believes in my vision and all of those things, right. So my business is on paper, it looks great, but I'm so burnt out I want to throw the whole thing away.

Speaker 1:

These are all problems. These are all problems Like. We're identifying the problem, right. So I want you to really lean into this. Like the people who I am best suited to serve, what are the problems they have? You can then show up confidently as someone who's serving because you're solving a problem. So we don't lead the sales conversation with buy my stuff, like nobody wants to be part of your private practice. Nobody wants you as a coach, nobody wants a coach. Nobody wants the Entremet Business School, nobody wants that. They have a pain and they want to get out of it and get a preferred future. Now your business is the vehicle that will get them there. But nobody wants your business Like really nobody wants that.

Speaker 1:

And as long as you think I'm trying to get people to come to my business, it's going to feel like manipulation. It's going to feel like you're taking advantage of people. It's going to feel like you're self-serving. You got to get out of that and lean into the problem. See, I am very aware of the problem my ideal people have. I'm very aware of what that problem is. I'm very aware of the ripple effect of it.

Speaker 1:

For you to take away so many hours a week to be away from your family to run a business and have revenue, but still need to go take another job as an established entrepreneur because your profits, the math is just not mathing. For you to have a team that you're too afraid to lead and because of that you have this really big payroll expense, and it's an expense because you're not getting a return on investment on it at all. To run a business and have no clue what you're doing, that is terrible, that is scary, right, because ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance costs literal dollars, and not little dollars. It costs a lot of dollars, right, I see that.

Speaker 1:

And so because of that, I'm willing to come on social media every day, I'm willing to go live, I'm willing to do the podcast, I'm willing to train and educate and all of that stuff and say, okay, this is the pain, this is a way to solve it. And you want to take this to the next level? Come join me in the Entree MD Business School. So, nobody wants the school, they just want their problems to go away. They want a preferred future. And I'm like, yeah, we have all these doctors who have now built their dream businesses, that are building their dream lives, and that could be you too.

Speaker 1:

So we got to lean into the problem. What is the problem? My people have? Okay, and if you haven't done this before, some of the ways you can do this. Just sit and think about all the things they've told you all these years. Right, you can ask them directly, like if I could make one problem go away, in whatever that is, what would it be Right? But if you've been talking to your clients and your patients, you already know what this stuff is. You just hadn't realized that you lean into the problem.

Speaker 1:

The problem is what will move you to see selling as your ethical obligation? I know these problems don't go away. These problems are really expensive. They'll waste a lot of years of your life. They'll cost you a lot of money. They'll set you up for burnouts. An entrepreneurial burnout is the worst kind of burnout because at least if you're employed, you have someone to blame other than you. Now you're burnt out so you missed out on your family and it's almost like you don't have something to show for it, like it's a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1:

But on the other hand, I know that if you came into this container and got the mentorship, you got the accountability. You got the community on the other side of it right. You can then start seeing the business growth. You can learn how to buy back your time. You can learn how to free up five to 25 hours a week on your schedule. Like you learn how to do that. You will learn how to lead a team. You will learn how to empower your team to run your business. You will learn all of these things. There's so many people that come in for the first time, back to having weekly date nights with my husband, I'm spending time with my kids, we took seven weeks of vacation and all of these things right, so the dream business and dream life can happen. And then the entrepreneur business school is just that vehicle in the middle and I'm like it is my ethical obligation to tell everybody I can find that this is what you need to do and I want you to feel the same way about selling what you do. Okay, but the starting point is tapping into the problem. So I'm trying to ethical sales formula.

Speaker 1:

Point number one identify the problem. Point number two offer the best prescription, offer the best solution. Right, I said prescription because that's what we do, right, we do the HPI, we do the review of systems, we examine the patient, we come up with a diagnosis and then we give them a prescription which could be medication, which could be lifestyle change, which could be whatever, but we give them a prescription. So, when you give them your solution, so it could be, come work with us in our private practice or coaching, or come to our event or whatever. It's not manipulation. This is a problem you have. This is a problem you want to solve. This is the solution for it. Come, do this right. It makes it easier to do, because what did you do? You tapped into the problem.

Speaker 1:

But after tapping into the problem, you do have to give them an invitation. You do have to give them an invitation to work with you, and I'm going to talk about something you could do that can make it even easier. But write the prescription. Tell them what to do. Don't leave them without that. They're not going to know. If they knew, they would have done it already. They're not going to know. If they knew, they would have done it already. They're not going to know.

Speaker 1:

The third thing is give them an opportunity to say yes. Give them an opportunity to say yes. Don't assume that they're going to say no. Does that mean get bent out of shape if they say no? I want to talk about this because I did a workshop recently and I was like okay, so what is the thing that stops you from asking people to work with you? What is it? And they started typing in the chat and most of it was fear, fear of rejection, stuff like that. I said okay, I said so. Let me ask you a question here.

Speaker 1:

If you decided over the next 30 days that you were going to invite 100 people to work with you, 100 people and of the 100 people, 30 people said yes. If you acquire 30 new patients or 30 new clients in the next 30 days, what would the impact be in your business? And so they start typing in the chat oh my goodness, growth, explosive growth, huge impact, profits. That would be $30,000 in revenue for the first, like the first year, not the recurrent stuff. And they went on and on. And so you could see oh, my goodness, 30, that would be amazing. All this stuff I said great.

Speaker 1:

So, in order to get 30, if you need to make a hundred asks and you need to hear 70 no's, but you hear 70 no's, but you still end up with 30. Are you okay with that deal? They're like absolutely, let's go get the no's already, right, and all those things. So you are going to hear no's and chances are this is for most people right. If you make asking a habit, if you make selling a habit, for most people you're going to hear more no's than yes's, but you're going to have enough yeses to turn your life and to turn your business around.

Speaker 1:

I just want you to think about it this way. I'm not going to let the no stop me because the no is the way to the yes. I'm not going to let the no stop me because the no is the way to the yes. I want you to think about it that way. Okay, so no is not a bad thing. They're not rejecting you. They either don't need what you do, or they don't need it right now, or they're not committed enough, meaning the change that your business provides in their life is a good to have, is not a must have. Right, and so for some people, that's what it is and it's okay, right, and so what do we want to do? We want to ask and sell to as many people we need to sell to to get the number of yeses that we want. We don't worry about the no's, we don't even count the no's, we count the yeses. Right, think about it, identify the problem, offer a solution. Give them a chance to say yes. Give them a chance to say yes. Okay, and we're going to talk about this because I want you to, I want you to go try all this, but before we do that, I want to give you a few pointers here, and so the first one is one of the things I do a lot is I lean into my why and I want to invite you to do that as well Like your business.

Speaker 1:

Why did you make it? Why did you create your business? Why must your business thrive? Why must your business grow? Why must your business cross that milestone?

Speaker 1:

And not even looking at the personal side of it, just looking at what my business does, I'll use EntreeMD as an example again. And I started EntreeMD because I wanted to help doctors figure out how to build profitable businesses so they have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on their terms, which is great, and for every individual physician I've touched it's so mind-blowing, it's amazing, because it's them, it's their families, it's their practice, it's their team Like the ripple effect goes through all that, but powerful as that is, at the same time, I also knew that I wanted to help a specific number of physician entrepreneurs, and that number is a hundred thousand. And I tell you that and it's important because the reason I picked a hundred thousand is because I started doing my research. I was like what do we need to do to make this a movement? What do we need to do this to make it a movement of change where, a few years down the line, the narrative for the physician community is completely rewritten and all these things of loss of autonomy and financial instability and being devalued in the space, and all of those things that are just things of the past, where doctors have understood how to build business systems so they have the freedom to do medicine the way they believe it needs to be done, and they have the freedom to do medicine the way they believe it needs to be done and they have the freedom to live life on their terms. If I can touch 10% of the community this is what the research showed If I can touch 10% of the community, the culture would shift. And really, if I touch 10%, which is a hundred thousand, they'll touch the other 900,000, right, so touch all million physicians.

Speaker 1:

And so when I lean into that why, I don't feel bad about selling, because I'm like, oh my goodness, I need to tell so many people To accomplish my why I need to tell so many people, right? My why in my private practice is there was this time when I started it, where there's so many private practices that were cold. This is just medicine is the way it is, and the wait times were really long and people are treated like numbers, especially in the corporate ones. Right, people are treated like numbers, especially in the corporate ones, right, people are treated like numbers. And you know, I want people to be able to come to a place where they get expert care and it's also warm and friendly, like they feel they came to see their aunties and uncles, who happen to be medical professionals, and then the team. That the team is a time of unprecedented growth for them, where, when they talk at the later ages, they can look back and say experienced the most growth.

Speaker 1:

When I was in this practice For parents to get a true partner, because even as a pediatrician, I was so vulnerable Like am I breaking my kid? Do I know what I'm doing? Mom guilt was an all-time high and stuff like that, and I was just like I just want moms to have a person who gets them right. And so, because of that, through the recession of 2008, through of that, through the recession of 2008, through the pandemic of 2020, to whenever, through the great resignation that followed that, through the hyperinflation that followed, that we continue to push forward. Right, because my mission is important. What I'm trying to do is so important, and so I want you to lean into that, because when you do that, selling as your obligation and not just any obligation, but an ethical obligation right? That's the way I feel about selling, that's the way I feel about recruiting team, that's the way I feel about all this. This must be done because of the mission. This must be done because of people who have the pain that I fixed. This must be done, okay. So I want you to lean into that. I want you to lean into the testimonies of people you've already worked for.

Speaker 1:

Because you, because, when you're in your business I say this in the entrepreneur business school all the time, your business is, and will always be, a construction site, so there's always something to fix, there's always something that didn't work the way it's supposed to work. There's always that there's always growth to be had, and when you grow, things break and you have to rebuild for the new phase and all of that stuff, and so sometimes we forget how important our work is, we forget about the real life change that we're creating, right? And so you want to gather those testimonies, you want to look at them for yourself. Of course, you want to feature them. That's great too, but you want to look at it and say, wow, this is what our business does. This is what our business does, okay. So, now that I've given you those two hacks, you can pick one, two, three, four, five.

Speaker 1:

But go make some offers today. Go invite people to work with you your private practice. Invite people to come work with you in your private practice. You're a coach, you're a consultant, you do an event. Invite people to come attend your event. Start practicing. This is the new you.

Speaker 1:

You practice ethical selling, which is moral, which is ethical, which is great, which is a requirement for the mission, which is the best way you serve people. Just go make offers. Okay, you can send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook and you can say hey, dr Una, I made some offers today. Like I, I'm all about ethical, ethical selling, okay, okay, good, I want to leave you with a picture. I want you to think of yourself now as a person who makes offers daily, because you have a mission that you're pushing towards and there are people who have a pain that your business solves and you refuse to let them be in pain. You refuse to let them stay in pain. So you're making offers every single day, and sometimes you're even making them by default, because this is just part of what you do.

Speaker 1:

You take care of people, and one of the ways you take care of people is by selling Okay and you're comfortable in it. You're confident in it. Just the same way You're confident when you go examine a patient. You know, take a history, do all of that stuff and give them a treatment plan. Confident and comfortable doing that. And I want to see you comfortable and confident doing the ethical sales as well. Okay, so I'm rooting for you. Unsubscribe from the lie that says that you can't sell and selling is bad and selling is manipulation, because it's not Bad. Selling is bad, good, selling is good, selling right, and so just go for it. Okay, so rooting for you. Can't wait to see you in my DMs telling me all about it and I'll see you on the next episode.