The pushback trap
Years ago I was looking for ways to make my practice more successful. I flew to the United States to see a dentist who I believed was a leader in the profession.
I wanted to know how they presented treatment to patients and so I attended their one-day seminar on the topic. The method they taught was high-pressure; sort of like selling used cars.
But, I justified it to myself: This dentist is famous and successful so they must know what they’re doing. Based on that, I brought the technique back to my practice and tried it. The results were catastrophic. Not just bad, catastrophic.
The more I applied the high-pressure techniques the lower was my success rate. I got to do a few cases but most patients declined.
That wasn’t the worst thing however. I started haemorrhaging patients out of the practice. At the end of one of my consultations a patient would say: “I’ll go home and think about it.” Then, the patient would disappear out the front door, never to be seen again.
It felt terrible. The double-whammy of low acceptance rates and lost patients made me give up on this dentist’s method after a month. Pondering the horrible result led me to discover something useful, that I call “The pushback trap”. It goes like this:
The harder you push, the more resistance you’ll meet.
The converse is also true:
“The less you push, the less resistance you’ll meet.”
The conclusion from this is that presenting treatment options to patients in a gentle, low-stress manner leads to greater success than attempting to pressure them. The moment you try to push the patient in a certain direction all sorts of resistance appears. Pushing patients is counter-productive.
The reason I lost so many patients with a high-pressure approach is that people want a dentist they can trust. If they sense that you’re trying to sell them something, trust evaporates like water on a hot stone.
This doesn’t just apply to dentistry. One of my regular readers (not a dentist) sent me an informative email:
“I used to run an options trading course. Part of my role was to sell people more courses. Early on there were people from head office who did a high-pressure sales pitch at the end of the course. In contrast, I used a low-key approach: Present the facts and trust peoples’ ability to make their own decisions. My sales were consistently over double what the head office guys did and eventually I took over and did all the selling.”
It’s nice to see that what I discovered doesn’t only apply to healthcare. Even in an industry such as investing, where you’d think that people would be less sensitive to pressure, the same still applies.
If you pressure patients you’ll have some successes but you’ll have more successes if you don’t apply pressure. Never pressure patients. It’s bad for them, it’s bad for you and it doesn’t work as well as the alternative.
