Price Resistance means you don’t understand enough

If someone was holding a loved one hostage and you had to get a millions dollars to get them out, would you try to get criminals to lower their price?  Of course not, you would do everything you could to come up with the money.

This highly emotional situation is a great example of receiving a benefit for a cost, no matter what that cost is.  They could have said ten million or even a hundred million and you wouldn’t have said anything about price, you would do whatever it took to get it.

In daily practice the same dynamic holds true just on a much smaller scale.  When you are talking to your patients about their problems, if you don’t get them to assess their problems on an emotional level, you will likely encounter price resistance.

In other words, if a patient brings up price as an objection, you haven’t done a good job of connecting their problems on an emotional level.  They don’t understand the real effects their problem is having on their life, family, finances, and social activities.  They are still emotionally detached and you need to make them aware of the real consequences if they don’t take the appropriate actions.

This might sound like manipulation to some, but your job as a healthcare provider is to give the whole story and then let them decide to follow through or not.  If you only tell them about the intellectual side of the problem and only look at their issues from a cortical level, they’ll usually take the band aid approach to relief care.

Once you paint the long-term picture of their health and the effects it has on their loved ones, the entire dynamic of the consultation can change.  Instinctually, we all want to do what is best for our family and friends and will go to great lengths to help them.  But your patients have to realize the best way to help them is to help them self first.

So the next time someone asks you about price step back and ask yourself how well you have addressed the emotional side of your patient’s complaint.  Price resistance is a natural default response for people who want to get to the root of their problem but really don’t know how.

Your job is to recognize this and help them get to the next level of health by providing the best healthy lifestyle care possible.  I know you can do that.