Brooke Hawley (back row, second from right as you look at photo) with her practice team. Hawley says there are simple, but impactful, actions she took to increase eyewear and contact lens sales.
Optical dispensary profitability strategies for optometry practices
By Brooke Hawley
Sept. 25, 2024
The optical dispensary in most optometry practices is the most important driver of profitability.
Here are the actions we took in our practice to better serve patients and increase that profitability.
Goal/Coaching System for All Employees Who Work with Patients to Provide Care & Sell Eyewear
We decided to create a system of deliberate, goal-oriented training because we noticed stagnation in optical sales.
We scheduled regular bi-weekly meetings with opticians to create goals based on their most recent sales numbers. We discussed both their wins and continuing challenges.
For managers, these meetings can be time-consuming as they need to find time to go off the floor to meet with employees. We found, however, that the benefit outweighed the lost work time.
Over time, the meetings evolved to include training to address the areas we identified as needing improvement.
Results: Our new goal/coaching system provided time for managers to coach opticians on obstacles they face in their sales. Creating goals together made the opticians feel engaged in the process. It gave us a chance to note and celebrate their wins, and patients are now better educated.
In addition, our team is better able to match products with patients’ visual needs.
We continue to grow our sales each month. Our newer opticians grew their sales ability significantly and our veteran opticians were able to find-tune their craft.
Documents that Detail Policies on Insurance, Promotions & Other Information
This documentation serves as on-demand reference material for our opticians.
We created this documentation to ensure consistency. We want to ensure all of our patients have the same experience in our office.
We noticed inconsistencies in discounts and how our team members provided services. We created forms and reference documents to ensure that each employee and patient understood our store policies.
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We also wanted to create independence so opticians had something to reference before coming to a manager. It helped us to streamline the sales process.
We identified the biggest areas where we noticed inconsistencies and created clear directions. We provided these for our team members to access in binders that were unique to them so that they could reference the right way to perform all the functions of their jobs.
It took dedicated time to create the policies and documents, but now the time is minimal, as we only have to update the binders.
We explained the policies and procedures in the binders individually to each employee so they would feel comfortable asking questions.
We ensured that our managers continually followed-up to make sure that the work processes outlined in the binders were done correctly, and that staff felt supported in the changes we made.
Results: Our patients are fully informed, and they get the same experience with anyone they work with in our office. Our customers consistently comment on how “we know what we are doing” and how they appreciate how knowledgeable our staff is.
Our opticians continually grow their sales because they do not have to think about how to do the tasks that comprise their jobs. Their biweekly sales have gone from $15,000 to $20,000 +.
Added Stock of Daily Trials to our Exam Rooms
We wanted to grow the number of patients who were prescribed, and purchased, daily disposable contact lenses in our office.
We worked with our contact lens vendors to get trial sets of daily disposables for each of our exam rooms.
I met with the doctors to discuss increasing daily sales by trialing the patients’ usual brand of contacts and a daily disposable lens – leaving it to the patient to choose.
I also spoke with our support staff about the benefits of daily disposables, so they could reinforce the doctor’s messaging.
Results: The daily disposable contact lens trials were easily accessible to the doctor, so they could hand it right to the patient. This resulted in patients being able to try something they may not have before.
Our daily disposable sales increased from 35 percent to 45 percent.
Brooke Hawley is the general manager/owner of Maple Grove Pearle Vision in Maple Grove, Minn. To contact her: Brooke@pearlemg.com
This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.
