Your patient doesn’t want to buy crowns and veneers. Your patient wants to buy YOU.
Once a patient likes you, trusts you, believes in you, and knows you are REALLY concerned about them, they will want to accept your recommendations. The commonly used term today is “patient engagement”. Subtle educational information always produces a better sales result than hard sell. Nearly everyone runs and hides after the first scent of commercialism. When you present useful and interesting information people will want to follow you. Let them see you as a knowledgeable and helpful authority. This is true in the Social Media and especially true in the dental office. The concept is known as “controlled responding” (Shiffrin and Schneider, 1977) and Influence (Robert Cialdini, 1988)
Try my ALF Principle-
Ask questions,
Listen carefully,
Give Feedback
When you ASK the right questions the patient will arrive at a self-diagnosis. Once that happens, your patient has “bought into” their problem and will be ready to accept your treatment solutions. Repeat or closely paraphrase what you heard so your patient understands that YOU understand.
Switch from making forceful, tightly scripted sales pitches to acting more like a friendly knowledgeable care-giver.
Draw marketing lessons from how Disney keeps families coming to its amusement parks. Eli Lilly Pharma held its most recent national sales meeting at Disney’s business training institute in Florida in February. It was devoted to customer service, not product training. Sales representatives watched how Animal Kingdom workers greeted families at the gate and answered questions around the attractions. (Read article in The Wall Street Journal (“Drug Sales Reps Soften Pitches“).
Get your patients to believe that you are REALLY concerned about them, from the first phone call, thru all the contacts, and in an end-of-visit debriefing (recap). They want to know that everyone on the TEAM really cares. After that, everything else falls into place.
For more on this subject see my blog article: http://wp.me/p1OXM3-5R
…and follow my blog. https://adental.wordpress.com/
Advance! Dental Consulting 