Field Note 016: Discovery Call Doesn't Discover
Most discovery calls discover nothing, because the practitioner is too busy talking to notice the caller has already told them everything.
Most discovery calls discover nothing, because the practitioner is too busy talking to notice the caller has already told them everything.
You are running the call wrong A caller rings up hoping to be asked a question, and gets a small lecture on your qualifications and your parking situation. Fix the call, and the booking sorts itself out.
Half your callers say they'll think about it. You file that under manners, the way you'd file a declined second helping of trifle.
It isn't manners. It's a caller who reached the end of the call without being asked what they wanted to change.
They came in hoping for a question about their life. They left with a summary of your clinic hours.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
"I'll think about it" is what a caller says when nobody asked what they were hoping for.
You spend the first ten minutes on your qualifications, your training, the courses in Leeds, the letters after your name.
The caller spends the same ten minutes deciding something else entirely.
They're deciding whether you're listening. That job doesn't finish when the CV recital does.
You can be immensely qualified and still fail this. It's a very well-ironed shirt on a practice that hasn't looked up from its phone.
Try this on your next three calls. Count your questions against your answers.
Most practices come out closer to a vending machine than a diagnostician, dispensing information nobody asked for yet, like a very keen aunt with a leaflet.
A diagnostician asks first. A vending machine drops the crisps whether the caller wanted prawn cocktail or not.
Weigh your own call against it. The practice with more answers than questions is the one losing bookings.
UK physiotherapy practices earn £52,596 on average, turning over anywhere from £35,000 to £300,000.
The difference between the smallest and largest figure isn't luck, or location, or the size of the car park.
Somewhere inside it sits a great many calls spent reassuring people who were never going to book, the way you might polish a doorknob nobody touches.
You can spend an afternoon reassuring the wrong caller, or ten minutes discovering the right one. Both cost the same afternoon, only one of them pays for itself.
A caller mentions their bad knee twice in one sentence.
Weather is small talk. Asking after somebody's mother is small talk. This isn't either.
That's the whole appointment, handed to you early, wrapped and left on the step like a parcel from a neighbour.
Most scripts sail past it, on to the bit about opening hours, the way you'd step over a cat to get to the kettle.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Notice the knee, and the booking notices itself.
Word of mouth still sends you callers who trust you before you've said a word. They heard about you from a client whose back you fixed in March.
That trust arrives at your door like a well-behaved dog. What happens next is entirely up to you.
The call is where that trust gets used properly, or buried under a recital of your clinic's Tuesday hours.
You've been handed something. Best not leave it on the mat.
You can build your own discovery process. Recorded calls, transcripts, an afternoon spent picking apart your own tone of voice like a jumper you're not sure you like.
That's a proper way to do it. Nobody's stopping you.
Or you hand the dissecting to a team whose whole week is built around it, the way you'd hand your accounts to an accountant and stop wrestling the spreadsheet yourself.
Either way is a real trade-off, not a shortcut. Choose it on purpose, before exhaustion chooses it for you.
A caller rings about back pain. You talk for six minutes about the equipment, the plinth, the new machine that does something clever with heat.
Next time, try staying silent for the thirty seconds after they finish a sentence.
Notice what they tell you in that silence. The equipment was never going to say it for them.
Thirty seconds feels enormous on the phone. It's shorter than the ad break you sit through without complaint.
See exactly where your calls lose the booking, and what to ask instead. Reframe your discovery calls
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