Last week, we talked about being on Offense every single day all day long with every individual patient. You simply must be in the mindset of creating ways to help your patients get healthy – through education, awareness, conversation, photographs and real genuine engagement.
You can’t be in a hurry for anything other than that, otherwise you miss the point.
However, when you have offense you must in turn have defense, because without defense you can score all the points you want but if you are losing opportunity, giving points away and being negligent about protecting what you have worked so hard to do, then what really does it matter because you will never make any real progress with your goals.
Defense in Dentistry comes in many shapes and sizes, forms and strategies.
I would write for weeks just about this topic and maybe I should because most never even consider the idea that you actually have control over the outcomes. Truth is, you do not have to leave your results with treatment, with money, with insurance, with time, with patients or anything else up to chance.
You can be in control. In football, you are in control when you have the ball. That means that the defense has to be aggressive, protect the lead and to get the ball back for the offense.
There are four major categories of defense…
Marketing, Competition, New Patients
Treatment Acceptance, Collections
Time Management and Maximizing the Schedule
And my favorite…
Retention of Patients for long term relationships and cultivation of treatment
Of course, you could come up with other concepts of defense but these are the big four.
To start, you have to be protecting your brand whether that are reviews, your website, others’ websites or social media. Remember this: referrals don’t just walk in anymore they google. So even if you have a great referral practice and your patients love you – you have to be on defense online because that is where people go first.
(You probably know my friends and the experts over at My Dental Agency…who do the best job of this in the industry… protecting what you have built, brand, reputation, relationship. They have a great book that you can study up on this type of marketing among many other things – you can get a copy here… )
You also have to be on defense against competitors or patients who try to commoditize you and make you seem like just another dentist.
I don’t believe in competition when it comes to getting enough patients – there are plenty of patients for everyone to achieve their goals. The problem is when other people are trying to change the way the patients think about dentistry.
This is why the best defense is about proactive education and controlling the new patients’ mindsets and expectations.
Before we move into the other types of defense, I would ask you to take a hard look at all the ways you are losing patients or letting patients control your process.
Next, if you don’t give them a chance to love you – meaning get them in the door – then you aren’t giving yourself a chance.
Playing defense to protect every patient phone call, every online inquiry, every referral by setting up your systems and checking it twice, like Santa Claus, to make sure the right people are getting in and the wrong people are staying out.
You want to wow your new patients before they get in the door because most never make it in. So if you do all the great things after you meet the patient then you are missing out on the hard-to-get ones and those, by the way, are often the biggest and best cases.
Think about everything leading up to the front door of your practice… what’s missing, what could be better, is what we do great being done consistently – how can we make sure?
One more football analogy: you can’t leave a single gap in the defense, otherwise the running back will break free for a big gain. This means that every aspect must be fine tuned.
We’ll dive into the exciting parts of defense where you are certain to have incredible breakthroughs in the coming weeks.
Get ready for the new year and hey, enjoy your family for the Holidays. Love and happiness is what it’s all about.
I’ll be back with a special Christmas Message bringing good news and gifts of all kinds for everyone… then on into the New Year we go.
