A pragmatic approach to sales: How Dr Daniel Bai helped businesses from the oppressed chiropractic industry get noticed and scale | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur — step into the spotlight.

A pragmatic approach to sales: How Dr Daniel Bai helped businesses from the oppressed chiropractic industry get noticed and scale

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur .

Dr Daniel Bai has a business called CloseForChiro . It’s a niche consultancy he built over the last decade where he’s helping the oppressed race of chiropractors make more money without trying to find more clients.

In the recent episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about how he helps chiropractors around the world grow their practice (he has clients in the Middle East, Tennessee, and Asia). He also discussed how he, as an entrepreneur, has been building his own business.

Helping Chiropractors Close Sales

CloseForChiro is a business-to-business (B2B) consultancy specifically for the chiropractic industry.

It’s an unlikely industry that most people talk about. It’s an industry that people don’t see as a business leader worldwide.

However, there’s a tremendous amount of altruistic practitioners out there who struggle in building a brand and a business after a certain point. And it’s very frustrating for them because they have so much talent, knowledge, and altruism — and they just get wasted.

Dr Daniel helps these particular practitioners scale up their businesses and practices with the least amount of stress, avoiding the same pitfalls that other small businesses have struggled with throughout the decades in any industry for that matter.

At CloseForChiro, they focus on patient onboarding because they believe that onboarding is the key to this whole thing. If you don’t know how to sell and present what you do effectively — from the perspective of your clients or patients — you will get sunk.

The consultancy has been doing this for the last 12 years.

A Pragmatic by Nature

For Dr Daniel, how you do things is just as important, if not more important, than what you do.

He himself is a product of a lot of failed consulting. He’s spent over a quarter million dollars trying to learn what he needed to do to serve more people and increase his business. He believes he failed because he started off with a mindset.

It isn’t to say that mindset is bad. It just didn’t work in his case because he’s a pragmatist by the core. He’s an engineer of things. When he was 12, he pulled apart a floppy disc drive because he wanted to know how it worked.

So, when helping chiropractor clients, his approach is to keep things very pragmatic. This is what you do. Step one, step two, and step three.

However, teaching steps is not just where it ends. He has to tell them why they should be doing those steps.

He helps make these things as comprehensive and cohesive as possible so that the people he’s teaching can easily understand. They will know that sales isn’t as sleazy and browbeating as they thought. Sales is actually about having an appropriate conversation where the centre of the conversation is based on the person in front of them — not their product, not their solution yet, and certainly not them personally.

An Oppressed Industry

Dr Daniel considers the chiropractic industry an oppressed industry. For the past hundred years, things, people, places, and other industries have been trying to snuff out this industry since the very beginning.

The history of chiropractic is made for TV drama. We’re talking about people being jailed for practising “without a licence.” We’re talking about a huge antitrust lawsuit in the ’70s ( Wilk vs American Medical Association ), in which the chiropractors persevered and won.

Nonetheless, the brand equity of the industry has suffered because of all this.

If there’s any other industry that came under the same scrutiny and attacks as chiropractic did for the past hundred years, they would not be in existence. Yet, somehow, chiropractic has survived and is now still thriving.

Why is that? Maybe because the practice of chiropractic itself is legitimate. Maybe because they’re providing a service and a solution to people that other industries cannot touch or want to touch.

The results speak for themselves. However, those are certainly not where the industry wants them to be after a hundred years. Currently, the industry only sees less than a single-digit percentage of the population.

It’s certainly one of the best healthcare products in the world, along with others, and there’s no reason why you should be stifled that way.

The industry itself acts like an oppressed society. And like any other oppressed society in history, they’re very insecure. They always want to prove themselves when they don’t need to prove themselves. So practitioners make a lot of these business mistakes, which actually have an effect on their overall business.

Part of Dr Daniel’s job is to “de-program” them from this oppressed state and this poverty mentality of them getting cheated every single time. For some reason, chiropractic professionals do not embrace finances; they shy away from it. And this is something that he and his business are trying to help the industry with.

The 80/20 Rule

The number one problem that chiropractors (and other industries) face is the concept of STFU or Shut the f*** up.

People tend to talk too much. And it’s understandable because you can be very excited about what you do. You’re on this new venture, and you’re doing great. It’s very exciting to talk about it. It makes you think that if other people are equally excited, they will buy what you offer.

However, this is far from the truth.

One of the things is not about what you should do. One of the biggest lessons right up front is what you should do.

At CloseForChiro, they have an 80/20 rule. When someone comes in — a client, a new patient, a lead — their job is to make someone talk to them and answer their questions at a ratio of 80% them and 20% CloseForChiro.

If you have a business and if that ratio is flipped, you’re already behind the eight ball. You’re not going to get much, you’re not going to get anywhere.

An analogy for it will be dating. If you want a second date, there is no way you’ll get it if you did all the talking. It’s a relationship fundamental that people somehow lose when they go into business.

If you want a second date, you will ask questions that are pretty much open-ended. You have to have the other party tell you things and open up, and just let it ride. The more they can speak, the more rapport they build with you because they’re sharing something.

It’s not only a mentality; it’s also a strategy. You have to train that skill because you’re only on the opposite end of the spectrum.

To Scale, Focus on Onboarding

The typical business mentality on growing is to have more new business — more leads, more new patients, more customers, more clients. But Dr Daniel disagrees with that.

The typical business has more than enough leads right now (unless you’re first starting out). What the problem is if you’re not onboarding each one of those clients with maximum value. You will be what he calls “new client drunk.”

If you think about it, many people out there go from one marketing venture to another, looking for the next group of new clients to serve. Clients will give them a call; then they will have a consultation. Yet, at the end of the day, less than 50% of those clients say “yes” to them at their best recommendations and fees. It means that they’re working twice as hard.

But how about you take the same number of new clients. Then you onboard 75 to 80% of them effectively so they understand what you provide, the solution to the problem, and your fees. Doing that takes the pressure off of marketing.

You will never scale to the level you want and never get noticed in what you’re doing and the talents you’re providing if you’re constantly struggling and trying to figure out where your next new lead is coming from. This is never going to happen, especially if you’re a solopreneur, because it’s too much stress.

Now, what do you do? Number one is you have to get more people to say “yes” with the least amount of stress. This is the bottom line of scalability.

Once you get a certain volume, you’ll have another set of problems he calls “closer problems.”

You might struggle with having too much volume. It’s easy to deal with because now we just have to invest more time, hands, or money to increase capacity. It happens naturally. But what doesn’t happen naturally is gaining the same number of new leads to say “yes” to your solution, product, and service at the highest level possible — then repeat, rinse, and recycle week by week.

To address it, the essence is to get people to come to you. As you will listen to them, they will be closing because they feel taken care of.

Many service and product providers blow the sale right up front because they make major mistakes. The thing is if you run a business, you’re a consumer before you are a salesperson.

You know what it feels like as a consumer. You know if something doesn’t feel right — like when you’re buying a car, and you know there’s just no way you’re getting a car from this or that facility. It’s the same product, but you won’t buy it for some reason because they broke all the sales rules. And as a consumer, you subconsciously feel that.

From a sales perspective, you have to have that same level of sensitivity.

Vital Lessons on Sales

Marketing is a subset of sales. All the rules of marketing come from the rules of sales. Ultimately, that is, Can you get into the perspective of the person and your audience that you are wishing to serve?

If you don’t have that mentality and you don’t have those skills, all your marketing — podcasts, print ads, and Facebook ads — will never be in the perspective of whom you’re trying to serve.

In sales, one of the cardinal rules is knowing what your audience wants and how you can provide it for them. What is their problem, and do you have a solution for them? If you follow this rule, any marketing you do will be focused on that.

For example, you’re selling a table lamp. A typical person who is not trained in the art of sales will say, “This is a great light. It has 45 watts. It can change the temperature from 2,000 Kelvin to 6,000 Kelvin. It has been inspected by X, Y, and Z. It went to a certain someone’s office in order for it to be stamped for approval. Now it’s on sale for $49.99.” It’s very technical. It’s a very general non-sales way to market a product instead of understanding who would be using this particular product and how you can phrase it so that it is a solution to a very specific problem.

If you can phrase it that way, then your front-end marketing could go through the roof because you’re not getting swiped by. You’re becoming noticed because you’re specifically talking about a problem. And this is a sales lesson, not a marketing lesson.

Getting CloseForChiro Noticed

Dr Daniel has built CloseForChiro over the last decade. One of the biggest factors in terms of getting his own business noticed is staying focused.

It’s very easy for entrepreneurs to diversify their offerings because, on paper, it sounds right. If you have a whole list and suite of services, people can choose exactly what they want. If you do that, you’ll increase the number of leads that want something you offer.

However, it’s not how it works.

Staying focused on a very specific need, want, desire, or problem is one of the hardest things to do. You can easily be swayed by selling another product instead of focusing on one thing.

At CloseForChiro, they focus on how to get a chiropractor with more than five years in practice. It’s very specific.

Then, their offering is to get these chiropractors’ patients to say “yes” to them up to 90% of the time with their best recommendations and fees so they can scale their practices and businesses. It’s also very specific, and they’ve done that for the past 12 years.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint, you may also face the big challenge of going unnoticed. And for those people out there who are feeling this way, his advice is to be patient.

In his case, when he walks into a trade show or a state association, he’s noticed because he’s not afraid to offend. He’s not afraid to be provocative.

Even the name of his company, CloseForChiro is very bold and polarising. Sometimes, they even get hate mail saying that doctors shouldn’t sell. But, you have to withstand such things.

One way they’ve withstood is they made it content. They know that nothing attracts more eyeballs than looking at a train wreck. So they leveraged and exploited that. And that’s how they survived.

A lot of the people out there are so afraid to engage the things that they think people will be offended by. But if you think about it, they’ll never be your clients anyway. However, the people who want, need, and desire your things will look at that and see how you handle it.

This and staying focused are the top things that they had to figure out really quickly for them to get noticed.

With Care and Preparation

To get noticed, keep in mind that every interaction you’re having — whether it be online or in person; about what you do or what you can do for them — must be done with the utmost care. This is the most fundamental of fundamentals. This is the grassroots of what you do.

You need a plan. When you are faced with a new client or a new lead on a Zoom call or face-to-face, you can’t wing it. You have to have a plan of action on how the conversation will go and what the end product will be.

A lot of people think sales is this enigmatic, nebulous thing that doesn’t really have any technicalities. But that is wrong. It’s a very technical thing, and you need to learn it, and you need to have some type of template at least, and be prepared.

You would never play in a piano recital without preparing for it. You’re going to learn the notes and the bars. You’re going to practise and practise because you certainly don’t want to screw up on stage. And like that, sales has to be treated with much respect.

To learn more about CloseForChiro, visit https://closeforchiro.com .

The UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast is sponsored byProwly, the all-in-one software for leveraging PR activities. Boost the media relations game for your business — get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.

Originally published at https://theunnoticed.cc on February 20, 2023.