E557 | How To Add Scarcity Into Your Sales and Marketing

Scarcity is one of the strongest techniques you can use in your marketing and in your sales to drive people to take action. Most people will naturally drag their feet unless given a real reason for why they should take action. Today, I give real examples of what I did and what I see others continue to do within their businesses. Enjoy!

• Marketing to prior customers
• Letting them know the scarcity of your schedule
• Using psychological elements

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, which we know will dramatically improve your business, is to have clear lines of communication with your clients. And that's something that can be really hard with these multiple channels between email and text. And what you really need is to centralize that in one place.

And that's something that we've been able to do as we switched over to PT everywhere within our client's accounts. We can actually message right back and forth with them. They can manage their home exercise plan within there, and it allows us to really compartmentalize the communication. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, with them.

And for us, it's made a really big difference. It helps make our staff more efficient. It helps us not miss things as much with the volume of people that we're working with. And it's a really smart way of really compartmentalizing your communication with your clients so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the channels.

You have communication with family and friends and things like that. So I think it'd be. Huge for your practice to centralize it the way we have. Head over to pt everywhere.com. Check out what our friends are doing over there. I think it's really cool and I think you really like it. So here's the question.

How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about? This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about scarcity, how you can start to engineer a bit of scarcity into your marketing and even into your day-to-day schedule. So scarcity, when we look at variables of marketing, scarcity is one of the strongest techniques you can use in your marketing and in your sales to really drive people to take action.

Most people, yourself, probably included, will drag your feet unless there is a real reason why you need to take action. If you're thinking to yourself, man, I need to buy a new car. And let's say you've decided I gotta get a. A Toyota Tacoma. All right, I'm gonna go get a Tacoma. I just don't, I don't know if now's the right time or not the right time.

And you go to the dealer and your test drive, you're like, yeah, I think I could maybe hold out another six months with my car and then, maybe I'll wait till then. And he says, that's fine. You know if that's the right time for you to do it. And he says we have one Tacoma left and it's the last one that we're gonna get.

In the next year. So if you wanna wait, it's probably gonna be a year. But you can get this one today. It's the last one. That's true. Scarcity. The likelihood that you're like, okay, I'll take it, is very high because we are driven by scarcity. It's funny psychologically how strong of a desire it is to To acquire scarce things and I don't know what is, what it is exactly, maybe it's self-preservation and and, but deep psychology of why we make decisions and buy things.

Scarcity is a huge predictor of that. So if we're looking at scarcity within our own businesses, there's a couple things you can do. Number one, if you're running a marketing campaign, which many people in our mastermind. Have just finished running a marketing campaign that's basically remarketing to, to prior customers to get them back in the door.

And one of the recommendations we have is always accept a number. Of people that you're, that truly can work with. It's not like you can take on an unlimited number of people, right? Because let's say a hundred people showed up, new patients showed up. You wouldn't even be able to fulfill that, right? You wouldn't even have the capacity to do that.

So set a number and let people know, Hey, this is how many people I can work with. That's it. And when those are gone it's gone. And in your marketing highlight the scarcity of how many you have, how many are gone, how many are left. And that right there will drive people to want to make a buying decision much more than knowing that, yeah, I can just do this whenever there's an unlimited number.

So it doesn't really matter whether they do it or not, but if you say Hey, I've got 10 of these like special package offers, and. Once we hit 10, like we're done. So if you're interested, get signed up here and actually truly having, a scarce number is important to, to stick to as well.

You can do this in marketing if you're doing structuring structured marketing campaigns, but you can also do this within your own schedule. And this is advice that I got early on from a friend of mine actually, that I used to teach with for at the Time Mobility Ward, which is called the Ready State now.

And I remember it was her and her husband. It's Teresa Larson is her name and her husband per Larson. And they're awesome. They own a movement RX in San Diego. They actually live, I believe in Colorado now. But anyway, she's great. And her husband's r really smart. On the business side as well.

They both are, and I remember I had a conversation with them when I was starting my practice. They had started theirs in San Diego, I guess it was like probably six or 12 months before I started mine. And I remember pair her husband, he said, don't have all your schedule open all the time, make it just a couple days.

That way it fills up your slots, fill up faster, you have more scarcity and available appointments. And I always thought that was interesting. And I did it. And so I had two days open a week and he was totally right because. It was like, yeah, I can see you Thursday at 6:00 AM or next Tuesday at 12.

Either of those work, like instead of giving somebody all these times, I, those are really the only times that I would have, cause I only had two days open. I didn't tell them that. But I had scarcity, inherent scarcity in my schedule, which actually helped people book on my schedule more. So you can think of doing something like that if you're just getting started, especially if it's a side hustle.

So you have true times scarcity. Also, if you are growing your schedule and like you can only. Accommodate bringing on X number of new patients per week, let's say, you can let people know that, let's say you're at a workshop and you're, you get done teaching it, you're talking to somebody afterward and you let 'em know yeah, I only, I really can only take on five new patients.

A week, so if you're interested, let me know. Cuz I don't have a unlimited amount of capacity to be able to bring on new patients. It just requires a lot more time and energy. And so we limit that. And so that's still a lot though, in a practice, let's say if you're bringing on 20 new patients yourself a month, like that's a considerable amount for a cash-based practice.

And yeah, maybe you could work with more than that, but give yourself an idea of ballpark, what would be right for you. And then you can just break that up, be like, yeah, we've got. I can only take on five new patients this week. So if you're interested let me know. Cause we'll have limited, limited availability for that.

Again, cuz it's just, it's harder to work with new people and it takes a lot more time and energy. It's really onboarding a new patient. It's very time intensive. So letting people know some scarcity that you have in your schedule, help them make a decision. Drive them to make a decision.

Because again, think about it, it is our nature to delay to, we don't wanna make a mistake. That's the thing. You don't wanna have buyer's remorse or make a mistake and you wasted your time and your money. And also you gotta keep in mind that people that are coming in into work with us they have to do work.

It's not like they come to us and we, we scratch their back and then again, then all their problems are gone. If you could do that, you would be a billionaire. If you could literally, somebody could come in, they had chronic back pain, you scratch their back. It feels good.

For 20 minutes and all of a sudden their problem is gone. Like you, you would never, you could charge so much money for that. That's not reality though, right? Like we have to do a lot of things that are uncomfortable and they require actually putting out effort and making some habitual lifestyle changes.

So you gotta sell somebody into that, which is really hard to do. So keep in mind that. When you are selling somebody into what you're doing, they don't really want to do it. So you gotta be on top of your game and add in as many psychological elements of sales and marketing that you possibly can to get them to make a decision.

Because if you can do that, then you can actually get them in your office and help them change their life. That's the truth. We're not doing this just to make a buck. We're doing this so that we can help people make a true long-term change in their health and wellness, to get over an injury, to stopping them from doing the things they like to do with their friends and their family.

And then when we can do that, then they'll look back as it's the best decision they've ever made. So if you can use things like scarcity to help drive them to make these different buying decisions, that's awesome. That's exactly what you're gonna need to do. So limit your schedule. Limit the number of people that you can bring on at least in your.

Positioning of how you're working with people, because even that little bit of scarcity will help push people, across the line just enough to be able to start to work with you and really make those long-term changes that you know they need to. So hope this helps add some scarcity into what you're doing.

As always, guys, talk to you next week.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to. Replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

We even show you all the sales and marketing systems that we teach within our Mastermind for people that are scaling to multiple clinicians, past themselves that you need to have in your business to be able to go full-time. And the last thing is we help you create a one page business plan.

This is a plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and drive action. That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge.

Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go through it. Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one-way channel.

I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about. 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.