Turns out, selling abortion isn’t all that different from hawking used cars. Whether it’s moving a four-door sedan off the lot or removing a four-pound baby girl from the womb, the ABCs of sales don’t change.
New testimony shows how the Planned Parenthood’s sales strategy relies on incentives, goals and quotas, explicitly prioritizing the company’s bottom line over the well-being of women. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood officials know to Always Be Closing.
That’s a sharp contrast with Cecile Richard’s talking points. The Planned Parenthood president is fond of telling lawmakers that abortion makes up just 3 percent of the company’s services. But while that makes for good testimony, Sue Thayer understands it’s a lousy sales pitch for women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy.
Thayer’s a former Planned Parenthood manager from Storm Lake, Iowa, and she knows the importance of motivating and training a sales team. “I trained my staff the way that I was trained,” Thayer explains in a new Live Action video, “which was to really encourage women to choose abortion; to have it at Planned Parenthood, because it counts towards our goal.”
To make that happen, her clinic relied on a simple pitch. When a mother walked in the door, Thayer worked to create a sense of urgency to drive demand and ultimately close the sale. So while the company’s market strategy emphasizes affordable healthcare for women, Thayer deliberately focuses on cost, pushing pregnant mothers to pay up front for services:
If they’d say, ‘I’m not able to pay [my bill] today,’ then we would say something like, ‘Well, if you can’t pay $10 today, how are you going to take care of a baby? Have you priced diapers? Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? Where would you go for help? There’s no place in Storm Lake (or whatever town they were in), you know, where you can get help as a pregnant mom. So really, don’t you think your smartest choice is termination?’
But either sales data for mammograms, STD tests, and routine checkups weren’t kept or they just didn’t matter. The only figure of significance was the number of abortions scheduled. “If we hit our goal, our line was green. If it we were five percent under, it was yellow,” Thayer explains, “and if we were 10 percent under, it was red and when we needed to have a corrective action.” For making rate, Thayer says employees could expect rewards like paid time off or even free pizza.
And it worked. In 2015 alone, Planned Parenthood performed more than 300,000 abortions. But the business model could soon face new challenges. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, they plan on pulling federal funding of the abortion giant. If they lose taxpayer funding, the company will have to rely entirely on their sales team.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
