Transcript
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So, I want to start off this episode with a confession. So, a few years ago back when I was first trying to take something that I knew and actually sell it to other doctors, I had an offer that I was pretty proud of. I'd tested it. I knew it worked.

I had testimonials from people that it had helped. But, I could not close deals to save my life. I would get on a call with a physician who had literally told me in writing that they wanted help. And by the end of the call, I had somehow talked them out of it.

I would give them so much free information on the call that they'd walk away thinking that they could do it themselves. I would leave with the caveats. I would explain every edge case before they even asked. I would answer the question you hadn't asked yet.

And at the end, I would sort of trail off like I was embarrassed to bring up money. I lost deal after deal after deal. Not because the offer was bad, not because the buyer wasn't interested, but because I was doing the one thing I had been trained to do for over a decade. And it was the exact wrong thing in a sales conversation.

What I was doing is I was being a doctor, and that was the problem. So, I'm Dr. Mike Woo Ming. I am a 20-plus year physician entrepreneur.

And today we're going to talk about something that I see every single week when I discuss it with my clients. Smart doctors who cannot sell. And I want to be careful with that sentence because this is not an episode where I make fun of physicians being bad at business. That's not true.

The doctors I work with are some of the sharpest operators I've ever met. They run departments. They diagnose things that three other specialists missed. They read the literature.

They can hold an enormous amount of complexity in their head and make a decision with the real consequences in under 60 seconds. They are not unintelligent, and their work is not without value. But, why do so many of them, the really smart ones, the ones with a genuine good offer, struggle to actually sell it? And that's what I want to unpack today.

I'm going to give you five reasons, and all five of them are fixable. And I'm going to tell you exactly what you do after each one. All right, the first one. I want you to reset.

Selling is not scamming. So, before we get into it, we got to do something first. We have to reset what the word selling means. Because if we don't, then this rest of the episode won't work for you.

A lot of physicians have a weird internal resistance to sales. And when you dig into it, it's almost always the same thing underneath. Selling. What do you think of when you hear that?

Maybe manipulation, hype, self-promotion, being that guy. You know the one I'm talking about. The guy that you see on Facebook with the headshot and he's in front of his private jet. The one who posts, "Most people won't understand this." Followed by like the most obvious advice you've ever read.

We don't want you to be that. I don't want to be that. You don't want to be that. That's not why we got into medicine.

So, let me offer a different definition. And that's selling is helping someone make a decision. And that's it. That's the whole thing.

Selling, if it's done well, is not convincing people to buy something they don't need. It's helping someone who already has a problem recognizing that you can solve it and take action before the problems get worse. And that's not manipulation. That's the exact same thing you do in clinic every single day.

You find out what's wrong. You explain them what's happening. You recommend a treatment, and you ask them to commit to it. And if they don't, the problem doesn't go away.

It usually gets worse. So, listen to me. Here's the part that I think you need to hear. If you have a real solution to a real problem, avoiding sales does not make you more ethical.

It just makes you less effective. And the person you were supposed to help stays stuck. Now, I had to hear that about 10 times before it actually sank in. So, I'm going to say it one more time.

Refusing to sell a solution you believe in is not humility. It's a failure to help. All right. With that frame in place, let's talk about why smart doctors still struggle.

Okay. So, reason number one is overvaluing information and undervaluing your packaging. Here's the assumption I see all the time, and it goes something like this. "If my expertise is strong, people will buy.

If my method works, that should be enough. If I just explain it clearly, the right people will say yes." Now, these sentences, they sound reasonable. Every one of them is wrong, though. Buyers do not buy raw expertise.

I know we want them to. We spent a decade and a half accumulating expertise. We paid for it in our 20s. We would love for that to be the deciding factor.

But, it isn't. What do buyers buy? They buy clarity. They buy relevance.

They buy confidence. They buy trust. They buy the feeling that this thing, whatever it is you're selling, is specifically for them. So, the problem is almost never the knowledge.

The problem is the packaging of the knowledge. And a lot of doctors who are entrepreneurs are trying to sell a pile of knowledge instead of a clear transformation. So, let me give you a difference. A pile of knowledge sounds like, "I teach physicians about financial planning, tax strategy, retirement structures, practice ownership, and investing." But, a clear transformation sounds like, "I help mid-career physicians stop overpaying the IRS and keep an extra 20 to 50,000 dollars a year." It's the same expertise, but it's a totally different sale.

The first one I gave you is a menu, but the second one is a result. And when you're the buyer, you're tired, you're busy, you're skeptical, you're not sitting there reading a menu and assembling your own sandwich. You want someone to hand you the sandwich. So, if you got a real method and it's not selling, before you go rewrite the method, look at the packaging.

Nine times out of 10, that's where the problem is. Reason number two. Most doctors are way too broad. Now, this one is everywhere.

I see it every single week. A physician comes to me with an offer, and when he asks who's it for, the answer is some version of everybody. [clears throat] All physicians. Anybody who wants to feel better.

Anybody interested in building a side income. And I get it. When you're starting out, narrowing feels like you're leaving money on the table. It feels like the math is bigger audience equals more customers.

It's not. The math actually works the other way. If you sell to everyone, it's urgent to nobody. Specificity sells.

It always has. It always will. Think about it from the buyer's side. Imagine you're a 42-year-old emergency room physician.

You're burnt out. Your contract is up in 8 months, and you're trying to figure out what you want your life to look like in the next 5 years. You open up LinkedIn. You see two posts.

The first one says, "I help physicians explore their career options." The second post says, "I help mid-career ER docs build a non-clinical revenue stream before their next contract renewal." So, which one as an ER doc are you clicking on? Of course, it's the second one. Because the second one sees you. It understands you.

The first one is just a billboard. The second one is a conversation. I go over this with my mastermind. It's called the eye contact test.

When your ideal buyer reads your offer, do they feel like you're making eye contact with them or like you're talking to a room? If it's the room, you're too broad. Pick a person. Pick the specialty.

Pick the career stage. Pick the specific pain. Pick one. And I know narrowing it, I know you feel like it's going to close doors, but what's actually happening is you're finally opening the right door.

Reason three. Doctors educate when they should be persuading. Now, this one is so typical of a physician. And I say that with love cuz I did this for years.

We were trained to explain. It's literally our job. A patient asks a question, we give them the answer. You give them the context.

You give them the caveats. You give them the differential. You give them the nuance. In the clinic, that's excellent care.

But, in a sales conversation, that's a lost deal. Here's what it actually looked like. A potential client asks you some question, something like, "Hey, can this help me?" And you, the well-trained, thorough, conscientious physician that you are, you launch into, "Well, it depends. It depends where you are in your career, and whether you're employed or you're 1099, and what your goals are over the next 3 to 5 years.

Of course, there are some situations where this approach wouldn't be appropriate. For example, if you're already doing X or Y, it's true for you. And I should mention that individual results can vary. And well, you get it.

Meanwhile, the person who asked the question has already checked out somewhere around when you said it depends. Look, nuance is a virtue. In medicine, it can save people. But, in a sales conversation, it kills the action.

So, doctor often answers the question too thoroughly before the buyer has even decided that they care enough to keep listening. So, let me give you a reframe. Persuasion is not the opposite of education. It's just education in a different order.

In medicine, we educate first and recommend last. That's how we build trust over years of relationship. In sales, you recommend first. Then you educate just enough to handle the real question they have, not every possible question.

The real question. In medicine, we do a differential, a workup, a diagnosis, and a plan. But, in sales, it's plan and then only the parts of the workup that they're actually asking about. So, flip the order, your closure rate will increase incrementally.

Reason number four. And I'm being real here, a lot of us doctors, we get deeply uncomfortable with the subject of money. And this one runs deep, and it's not always rational. I see physicians who will look at a spreadsheet for a hospital budget meeting and confidently recommend a seven-figure capital expenditure.

That same physician, 1 hour later, will be on a call with their own ideal client and can't bring themselves to say the number they want to charge for the coaching program out loud. Hey, that muscle works fine in the hospital. The muscle breaks down the second it's attached to your own name. Now, why is this?

Because in medicine, we have a very specific culture on money. We don't talk about it. We were trained not to. There's an unspoken rule that the clinical work should be above all of that.

That taking care of patients and talking about money are two separate conversations, and mixing them is somehow unseemly. So, here we are, physicians. We have spent 15 years absorbing the message that money is something other people can handle, and now we're trying to run a business where money is the entire point. And how does this show up?

It's very predictable. We charge less than what we should. We devalue what we bring to the community. We feel awkward asking about money outside the clinical setting.

We worry that making a direct offer makes us look opportunistic. We underprice because we want to seem helpful, but what we're actually doing is making the offer easier to dismiss. Low prices do not make you helpful. They often make you invisible.

So, here's the thing nobody tells you. When you underprice, three things happen then, and all of them are bad. One, you attract the wrong clients. People who can't afford much will always be your hardest clients.

Not because they're bad people, but they're anxious about about spending money. Two, you resent the work. You will look at your calendar one day and realize you're doing $200 worth of work for free because the original price was too low to begin with. And three, you signal uncertainty.

A low price tells the buyer you don't quite believe in what you're selling. And the buyer picks up on that every single time. Listen to what I said, cuz this is so true. A low price tells the buyer you don't quite believe in what you're selling.

Let me tell you what happened what helped me. And this isn't a quick fix, but it's real. Stop thinking about your price as what the buyer has to give up. Start thinking about your price as what the buyer gets to keep after you've solved the problem.

If your offer saves a physician $20,000 a year in taxes, and you charge $5,000 to help set them up, you're not taking their $5,000. You're handing them $15,000 they didn't have. That reframe doesn't make the discomfort disappear overnight, but it puts the discomfort, I think, in the right place. Because the awkward thing is at the price, the awkward thing is letting someone walk away without the solution you could have given them.

Reason number five, fear of being pushy. Doctors are terrified of being pushy. And this one is so universal that when I bring it up to my clients, I see every head in the room nod at the same time. We don't want to push.

We don't want to pressure. We don't want to be the person in somebody's inbox asking again if they're ready. So, what do we do? We ask once, and then we wait.

Forever. We spend a beautifully thought out, well-crafted proposal, and then we sit on our hands and hope they come back. They almost never come back. Not because they weren't interested, but because life happened.

Their colleague got sick, and they had to take over. Their kid got the flu. A partner needs help. The proposal got buried under 30 other emails.

And that well-meaning physician entrepreneur waits politely for the reply, reads the silence as rejection, and then moves on. There's a massive difference between pushy and persistent, and most physicians are being afraid of the first that they never do the second. Pushy is, you know, "Why haven't you responded? I've emailed you three times." Persistence is, "Hey, I know things can get busy, and I wanted to bump this to the top of your inbox in case you didn't see it." Pushy is, "Hey, this offer expires tomorrow.

You need to act now." Persistence is, "Hey, just checking in one more time before I close this cohort. No pressure if the timing isn't right. I totally understand." It's the same action, completely different energy. So, here's a simple rule that I follow.

Follow up at least three times, spaced out over two or three weeks for any serious lead. If they tell you to stop, you stop. If they say, "Not now," you circle back in 90 days. If they don't respond at all, you follow up respectfully until you either get a yes, a no, or just a staying silence.

Most physicians quit after the first email. The deals go to the people willing to send the second, third, or even fourth email. Follow up is not being rude. It's a service.

If you're thinking actually help them, getting a real answer out of them is part of the help. All right. So, let's tie all this together. The five reasons smart doctors struggle to sell.

One, they overvalue information and undervalue packaging. Two, they're way too broad. Three, they educate when they should persuade. Fourth, they're uncomfortable with money.

And fifth, they're terrified of being pushy. Now, every one of those, if you look closely, is just a side effect of being good at the job we were trained to do. The same traits that make you a good doctor gets in the way of making you a good seller. That's not a character flaw.

That's a translation problem. And here's the thing that I want you to walk away from this. Selling is a skill, and you've learned much harder skills than this. You've learned to put in a central line.

You've learned to read an EKG. You've learned to read a CAT scan and catch the one thing that would have killed somebody. You learned how to tell a family that the outcome wasn't what they're hoping for, and you do it with grace. Compared to that, learning to make a clear offer to a specific person and ask them to commit to it, that's not above your pay grade, not even close.

And the reason I feel it's so hard is not because it is hard, it's because nobody ever taught you. You were taught to be the diagnostician and the deliverer. You're never taught to be the closer. And that's all this is.

It's just a skill gap. It's not a character gap. And a skill gap closes fast once you decide to close them. All right.

So, here is your prescription for this episode. I want you to do five things in the next 2 weeks, one for each reason. Number one, repackage. Take your current offer and rewrite it.

Delete the list of features. Replace it with a single sentence that says, "I help specific person for a specific outcome in a specific time frame." If you can't write that, then that's your real problem. That's something I've talked about again and again and again. Two, narrow your focus.

Pick one person, one specialty, one career stage, one pain. I don't care if your offer technically serves more people than that, your marketing cannot. Marketing only works when it speaks to a person. Three, flip the order.

On your next sales conversation, lead with the recommendation, not the explanation. Here's what I think you should do, and here's why. Now, let me answer your questions. Stop treating every call like it's grand rounds.

Fourth, say the price out loud. Right now, wherever you are, say your full price out loud with no discount, no apology, and no softening. Get used to hearing yourself say it. If you can't say it to an empty room, you will definitely not be saying it to a buyer.

And five, every lead sitting in your inbox right now that went silent, send that respectful second email this week. Not tomorrow, this week. You're not bothering them. You're just doing your job.

Okay. Remember, guys, you can have ups and downs as a physician entrepreneurs. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals, and keep moving forward.