How to make your consultations convert better - a conversation with Dr Kamran Amjed
- Jul 26
- 5 min read
A guide for aesthetic practitioners, dentists, dermatologists and plastic surgeons
When bookings slow down, marketing gets the blame. The content isn't landing, the reels aren't reaching anyone, the agency isn't delivering. Sometimes that's the issue. Often it isn't, because the marketing is doing its job, people are booking consultations, and something goes wrong once they're in the room.
I talked about this recently with Dr Kamran Amjed, who spent a decade in the NHS as an emergency medicine doctor before moving into aesthetics in 2018. He's since launched four clinics, worked as a medical director and CQC registered manager, and built Consultation Catalyst, the first CPD-approved sales training programme in the industry. He converts around 92% of his own consultations, and the clinics he trains don't drop below an 85% team average.
The interesting part isn't the numbers. It's where he found the gap when he went looking for it.
The gap wasn't skill, and it wasn't effort
When he opened his first clinic in Manchester and hired a team, their conversions were nowhere near his own. These were good practitioners doing careful work, so he sat in on their consultations to work out what he was doing differently.
They weren't rushing. They were spending proper time with patients. What they weren't doing was gathering enough information, which meant they never got themselves into a position where they could build a treatment plan and stand behind it.
His line on this is that medicine is an information-gathering game and the practitioner with the most information wins. In A&E, winning meant keeping someone alive, and every extra source of information improved his odds. A verbal history on its own tells you something. Add bloods, an X-ray, a physical examination, observations, the ambulance report, and you're working with a completely different picture.
The same applies in a consultation room, and there is far more information available than most practitioners use. There's what she tells you. There's what you can see, if you've been trained to look for it rather than past it. There's imaging. And there's actually examining the tissue you're proposing to treat, which he was surprised to find plenty of practitioners skip entirely.
He put it this way: if you went to A&E with chest pain and the doctor never listened to your heart, never touched you, and told you what you needed based on a chat, you wouldn't believe a word of it. So why would a patient trust a plan for her face when nobody has examined her skin?
Which is why you can stop asking patients what they want
Most aesthetic consultations still open with some version of what were you thinking, how many areas, how much filler. Kamran's argument is that this is backwards, and the contradiction is difficult to get around once you've seen it.
Practitioners advertise themselves as doctor-led. Medical aesthetics. The insurance, the level seven, the registration. Then they run the consultation like a menu. You would never walk into a cardiologist's office and ask for two stents. He examines you, sends you for the scans, and then tells you that you need three, because that's what the outcome you came in for actually requires.
Nobody wants three stents. They want a heart that doesn't hurt. Your patient doesn't want a specific number of mls of filler either; she wants a particular result, and telling her what will get her there is the job.
There's a clinical case for this as well as a commercial one. If something goes wrong, the patient doesn't take half the complication home with her. The responsibility sits entirely with you, and if you're carrying all of the risk, it should be your plan. You get better outcomes, fewer disappointing results, and if a complication does occur you're far better placed to manage it because you designed the plan in the first place.
Commercially, it's very hard to grow a business when every treatment plan depends on how the patient happens to feel that afternoon. Plans built around results can be forecast. Plans built around requests can't.
None of this means overriding what she wants. The plan still has to work with her budget, her diary, her travel and her family. But you build it, and you back yourself, and the only way to do that with any confidence is to have gathered enough information to know you're right.
Objections are usually a question you forgot to ask
If the consultation is structured properly, objections become rare, because you've already built something that fits her life. When one does come up, his view is that the answer is sitting in your notes as a question you never asked.
Maybe she's a single parent who can't manage weekly appointments and needs a protocol with fewer visits. Maybe the sticking point is pain rather than money. The response should be more questions, because an objection is just the part of the plan that doesn't fit her yet.
He doesn't try to close on the day
Given the conversion rate, this one surprised me. He doesn't close in the room and doesn't ask his team to.
His measure is a conversion on the day or within seven days, and he was clear about why the definition matters. Conversion is a vague word, so if you're going to track it, you have to decide what counts and over what window, because you can only improve what you measure. Seven days gives someone time to process a lot of information without the metric losing meaning.
Inside that window, his clinics follow up three times, which sounds like a lot until you factor in that every consultation runs a full hour. Chasing someone after a ten minute chat feels like being sold to. Checking in after an hour of real conversation doesn't, and he's never had a complaint about it. If she reaches day seven and still wants to think, they thank her, tell her they'd love to see her when the time is right, and leave it alone.
He won't pressure his team to convert on the day either, because pressure is impossible to hide. He's trained clinics where staff are pushed to close in the room, and patients can feel it, which undoes the hour you just spent building trust.
Sitting underneath all of it is something I agree with completely, which is that you can't sell to everyone and shouldn't want to. Treating someone who doesn't need it leads to underwhelming results, complaints and complications, and every minute spent managing those is a minute not spent on a patient who did need you.
Where this leaves you
None of this needs new equipment or a bigger marketing budget. It sits in the space between the enquiry and the booking, which is the part of the business almost nobody trains for and where most clinics are losing money without realising it.
If you want somewhere to start, he'd say practise your introduction until you'd believe in yourself if you were the patient hearing it, write down the information you genuinely need from someone before you can help her properly, and make sure your team asks for all of it every time.
Want the full breakdown?
Dr Kamran Amjed came on Beyond the Needle: The Aesthetics Business Podcast to talk through all of this in far more detail, along with charging for consultations and why a drop in enquiries is a good sign, how he uses AI in clinic and where he won't let it near, what to say when a patient turns up with a treatment list from ChatGPT, and the systems that let him step back from four sites without any of them going quiet. Have a listen, and follow the podcast for more conversations like this one.
