How to see growth in your practice in 100 days… Guaranteed!

Patients say NO all the time. They say NO for the wrong reasons. Patients don't understand that most dental problems are preventable (but not reversible). Patients don't understand that most dental problems are asymptomatic and by the time the feel pain or experience bleeding, the problem is likely to have gone beyond prevention. Patients are SCARED. They are afraid of pain, bleeding, time for treatments, time for healing, discomfort during healing time and potential infection. Patients are even more afraid of dentists post COVID for fear of aerosol and other things they read about on the internet. To make the matters worse, the dentist is not the best sales person or the most eloquent communicator. The dentist wants compliant patients who pay, stay and refer... and the only thing the doctor wants to talk about is bone and budget. There is a massive communication failure between dentist and patients.

Your patients ARE grateful. You will notice the respect in their eyes, their body language, their tone and their attitude towards you.  Some of them will be very vocal and express their gratitude in words, in hugs, in gifts and in thank you letters... but most can't. Most Americans fail to express gratitude. So, you have to ask how they feel about you. You got to get them expressive about their gratitude. When they are in that expressive state of gratitude, you need to ask them to share their story and their feelings with their friends, peers, coworkers, relatives and friends in the neighborhood. You have to coach them on how to look for a family that is ideal patient for you and you have to coach them on how to make a warm introductions. You have to give them tools that make referrals easy (like a shock and awe package, a book that the dentist wrote or simply 'I recommend Dr. __' card).

Appointment No-Show and Appointment No-Sale (unaccepted treatment plans) is a real problem in dentistry. Unfortunately, COVID made this problem worse. Now, consumers are irrationally cancelling or not showing up for scheduled appointments out of the fear of everything (COVID, Dentistry, Aerosol, Fiscal concerns) and unless they are in severe pain or experiencing symptoms they avoid the appointment. In Q2-2020 a large number of appointments got cancelled without re-booking which not only caused the immediate impact on revenues of Q2-2020, but those patients who would have returned to practice for routine care in Q4-2020 are not automatically re-booked. Holes in the hygiene schedule is going to remain a problem for rest of 2020 and beyond and as a result, diagnosis and treatment plan generation will go down as well. American Dental Association or your state and local dental association is not going to do grass root marketing promoting dentistry so you will need to re-establish connections with your internal patient database. Now more than ever you need to remain in communications with them with Dental Patient Newsletters, in-office and on-line patient seminars/webinars and outreach marketing discussing the REAL dangers of not seeing the dentist periodically.