Sell treatment? No way!
I was speaking with a dentist recently who’s employed in a corporate practice and they’re feeling under stress.
The reason is that the dentist has to meet quotas and they’re feeling pressure to sell treatment to patients. It’s not nice when you feel the need to do that. It gets in the way of a good relationship with your patients.
This dentist’s feeling of being under pressure to sell is based on a misunderstanding of what their role is.
To analyse that, let’s take one step back and ask a question: Can you practice dentistry without selling? I believe that the answer to that question is yes, and what it takes is a shift in your attitude.
The selling mindset says that you have a reluctant patient and you need to convince them to look after their teeth. When you’re in that mindset the pressure is on you to come up with smart things to say that force the patient to buy. The alternative mindset, the one that I prefer, is that it’s your job to fairly and honestly give treatment options to patients and then let them make their own decisions. Whether they choose to fix their teeth or not is totally up to them.
The selling mindset leads to stress and pressure. It often also leads to attempts to push or manipulate patients. The alternative mindset takes the pressure off.
But, here’s the magical part of this. The more you let patients make up their own mind without pressure or attempts at selling, the more likely they are to opt for good treatment.
Conversely, the more you try to push and sell to patients, the more likely they are to resist and go home to “think about it”. The phenomenon has been studied in psychology and it is called “reactance”.
This is so counter-intuitive that you might not believe it until you try it.
But surely you can relate to this. At some time you must have had an experience with a sales person who was pushy. Did you find yourself resisting? Of course you did. It’s the same with dentistry.
The best thing to do is to stop selling and relax. Present options then let the patient decide. It’s less stress for you, less stress for the patient and your acceptance rate will go up.
