Packages are a powerful tool for keeping clients accountable and committed. They’re also a great way to bring in more money. Packages allow you to bundle multiple sessions or services instead of selling them individually, and the benefits for both yourself and your clients make them a no-brainer to use in your practice.
In many/most cases, clients need more than one session to get the results they’re looking for. Even if they just want a meal plan, they should do a follow-up session in case adjustments need to be made. Your recommendations are meant to meet a client where they are now and not typically meant to be followed indefinitely without reevaluating as their health improves.
Since clients will need to work with you for multiple sessions, it’s important to be honest about this up front and let your clients know why you require them to commit to working with you for at least x number of sessions/months. Reinforce that this is a journey that takes guidance and constant tweaking. The reality is, if they could have done this on their own, they wouldn’t be coming to you.
We recommend coming up with a standard timeline for how these sessions will be used and tell your clients about this timeline up front. This helps your clients understand the timeframe in which these sessions will be used and what they’re committing to.
At the end of each session, make sure you take a couple of minutes to book the next session so that your clients don’t have to worry about booking when they leave your session and are distracted by all that’s going on in their lives.
Nutritional and supplemental requirements change based on what’s happening in a client’s life as well as their progress. More frequent sessions allow you to reevaluate and to stay on top of their changing needs so that they can maximize their results.
The very real alternative is that if clients don’t work with you long enough to see the results they’re looking for, they’re less likely to come back and less likely to recommend your services to their friends and family. The results that your clients get are a walking business card for your services.
Getting clients on a package isn’t just beneficial to them, it also means that you can create some sustainability for yourself and your practice. You can take on fewer clients because you know that your clients will work for you for a predetermined amount of time and that you’ll be paid for the entirety of that period of time.
When you’re working with clients for single sessions, it’s hard to know how many of them will become regular clients and how many of them you’ll never see again. This means having to constantly get yourself in front of a higher number of clients ‘just in case’. This isn’t sustainable as it can be difficult to manage during the months when you have a high volume of clients coming in for their single sessions and difficult to make ends meet during the months that too many of them don’t come back. Getting clients to commit to working with you for a longer period of time means that the revolving door is slowed and is more predictable so you can plan accordingly.
In Practice Better, you can bundle multiple service types and sessions together to create packages for your clients. If you’re running group programs and you want to offer additional, one-on-one support, you can include program access and individual sessions as part of the same package so that clients can register and pay for everything at one time.
To make things easier for you and your clients, you can set up payment plans to give your clients the option to either pay for their packages in full, pay a deposit or pay in installments.
From their Client Portal, they’ll be able to see the status of their package, book their remaining sessions, join video sessions, view their program material, track their progress using Journals and communicate securely with you.
Learn more about setting up and working work packages here.
Practice Better is the complete practice management platform for nutritionists, dietitians, and wellness professionals. Streamline your practice and begin your 14-day free trial today.
