This rule must become a habit for every employee who rings your patients up at your pharmacy. This is another one that is simple yet, so powerful. At every transaction, yes, every transaction, your employees must offer the patient something to buy.
What should they offer?
Anything. Chapstick, lotion, hand sanitizer, specialty vitamin. At this stage, the “thing” doesn’t matter. It is more about training your employees to ask and getting your patients used to being offered.
Your employees cannot control what patients will or will not buy. However, they can control how many times they ask. Ultimately, sales is a game of numbers. The more you ask, the more yeses you will eventually get, not only because of the law of averages but also because your employees will get better at asking.
How much is this worth to your bottom line?
Let’s do a little paper napkin math. If you fill 200 prescriptions a day, I am going to guess you have at least 50 transactions a day on average. If you can earn $5 in profit per transaction on average, you can add $250 a day in profit for your pharmacy. That equals about $5,500 a month in additional profit!!!
Here is a flow of implementation steps for you.
- Talk to your employees about several products. Tell them why you like that product and how you would recommend it. Who is a good fit for it, and any other pertinent information.
- Have them show you how they would talk about a product back to you. Don’t make them be identical to you! Let them create their own way of talking about what they are comfortable with. For example, some employees will want to avoid medical products and focus on beauty. Let them practice with each other.
- Require they offer something at each transaction. Whatever they are comfortable with. They will become more comfortable with more products as time goes on.
- This is about building a habit.
- Track your sales results.
- Reward them for doing the “ask.” The more consistently they ask, the higher your sales will eventually become.
