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Today’s question comes from Graham from Western Australia.  He’s an optometrist who asks:

“My most profitable clients are contact lens wearers.  My biggest challenge isn’t the number of clients I get.  Have enough, realistically.  My biggest challenge is justifying how much I charge.

Some clients price shop for contact lenses especially on the internet.  I am looking for ways of value adding whereby I create the apples to oranges comparison.  I have started by giving away travel vouchers with bulk purchases.  I also want to introduce new procedures that are valuable screening tools but need a strategy that justifies the price and conveys value without price being an issue.”

Graham’s in a tough situation.  Frankly, I’d advise against being in any kind of a commodity business.  Meaning, a business where what you’re selling is perceived as a commodity, and so therefore, virtually 100% of your customer’s buying decision is going to be based on low price alone.

To be successful — I don’t care what business you’re in — you’ve got to be able to create a differential in your product.  Unfortunately, when you’re selling contact lenses, the product itself is uniform.  Since you’re a distributor, as opposed to being a manufacturer, assembler, or even a private labeler, you can’t ‘make’ your Brand X lenses any different from the vendor down the street, since he too, is selling the exact same Brand X lenses.

So what usually happens in this situation is… it becomes a race to the bottom.  Whoever’s cheapest gets the sale.  And that’s a bad place to be, business or otherwise.

To overcome this, you have no choice but to create your differential in your process or in the interaction you have with your customer.  If this were me, here’s what I’d do.  I’d focus on three things:

1.  The actual eye exam you’re performing.  Write down every single aspect of your exam.  What you do, how it’s done, the kinds of machines you use and why.  The quality of the craftsmanship used to build the machine — precision, and so on.  Lastly… and this is perhaps more important than anything else you do.. you want to write down every single potential malady your machines and your exam can pick up.  And the big problems you have if these things are ignored.

2. Guarantees – guarantees about the quality and results of the eye exam… the care and patience your patients will get… and product (lens) guarantees as well.

3. Next, in your marketing, you want to scare the crap out of your buyers by letting them know all the health and vision problems your exam detects, which will otherwise have a seriously debilitating impact on their vision and on their health.

And you do this by revealing all the things you’ve uncovered in Step #1, and you give them all the benefits of working with you, related to your process, which you also wrote down in Step #1.

If you’re ambitious, you should even include case studies of people whose very eyesight you might have saved.

Then, you come up with some kind of a proprietary name for your exam, other than “eye exam,” and now you own something VERY unique.  Perhaps you call it an “11 Step Vision Diagnosis” or something like that.  And you say it’s ‘like’ an eye-exam, but only in the same way that a Mercedes is like a car.  It’s far better than an eye exam, because… ordinary eye exams are designed to tell you what kind of glasses or contact lenses you need.  But your special process does… this and that, and then you tell them all the good stuff.

Now you’ve bulletproofed your process and your marketing, and when you do this, you’ve truly created something unusual.  And you don’t need to be Rupert Murdoch to know that when you create something unique and unusual… you can charge a lot more money for it.

Let me know how this works out.  Oh, and Graham… I pulled the magic rabbit out of my special hat for you – now it’s time for you to pull your magic credit card out of your wallet… and order something from me.  I’m sure you’ll agree, I’ve earned it about 100 times over at this point.

Now go sell something, Craig Garber

P.S.  In Chapter 24 of “How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers,” you’ll discover how to put all the information you uncovered, in Steps 1-3 above, into a turn-key highly-effective sales piece, step-by-step.  Check it out here – comes with a LIFETIME guarantee.

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