This week, we continue working towards building more value in the minds of your patients. Now that I’ve armed you with the two most important foundational pillars to a truly patient-centric experience – making it about them and ensuring that you set the tone in every aspect of your communication – you are ready for what comes next.
These two pillars are what will open up your patients to see and think differently about “dentistry” and you as Dentist in general. Often Doctors ask me about how to achieve differentiation. The funniest part about that is – it’s so easy – you automatically have differentiation if you understand that the most unique part about the experience and the interaction with your office is you and your team.
The practices that do the best (achieve the greatest case acceptance for real life-changing dentistry), have success at differentiation because they make it about…
The people; not the product.
Sometimes that is hard to swallow since you’ve dedicated your life to “what you do” instead of “who you are.” All of the education, investment, development and thought has gone into the clinical dentistry instead of the human connection with a patient.
When you get this, you get everything!
So, this week, I’m going to take you further into the minds of your patients and show you how to completely transform their thinking and feeling about “dentistry” into a bigger picture in order to bring them from wherever they are to where you want them to be on values and desires for optimal health.
There are two BIG additional enhancements to what we talked about last week…
#3 – Tell Stories of Success and Benefit
Here’s how you do this right, just like one of my favorite songs in The Greatest Showman, “NEVER ENOUGH” … that’s how you do it right.
You can’t overdo sharing stories of others with your patients because you never know which one they will see themselves in.
Now, here’s where people go wrong… just showing stories about how much everyone loves you (your reviews, your testimonials and your before and afters). Those are all very helpful and you want them – but – it’s not what really drives home the point and it is not what a patient will CONNECT (keyword) with.
Because someone else’s smile is not theirs. Someone else’s comments about how great you are mean nothing to someone who hasn’t yet decided to “do any dentistry.”
Instead, we want stories. We want your patients to talk about what life was like before you, we want to get into what motivated them to make a change and we want to know how they are feeling afterwards.
We want the stories to be about THE PATIENT, not about you. Again, you can have those but don’t stop there. Patients need to see themselves in others and that is what will bridge the gap to build up their trust and open their minds to start thinking bigger.
This should be done, as we discussed last week, IN ALL FORMS and IN ALL STAGES of the experience.
Now, as we move further into your process and interaction with your patients, you then move to the next pillar that helps to create a way for your patients to logically bring themselves to a decision of value which helps to remove and overcome any money objections.
#4 – Show Examples and Comparisons
The point of examples and comparisons are to overcome any disbelief in your patients’ minds and to help them take responsibility over their problems. You can’t leave this up to chance and hope that they get it on their own.
Some examples would be: good tooth – bad tooth; straight teeth – your teeth; smile as it should be – smile as you are; what it used to be like – present reality.
Everything should be made relevant to the patient and now personalized to their situation. This allows them to mentally come to terms with the fact that they are not where they should be and then to emotionally feel that they are worthy of the possibilities that you have shown them.
This appeals to a very basic aspect of human nature. The concept of opposites. If it’s not hot it’s cold, if it’s not right it’s wrong, if it’s not good it’s bad.
You are using their mouths and your abilities to bring to life examples and comparisons to start creating their own stories. You are elevating their level of awareness over their own realities in order to improve their quality of life.
What I have given you here is worth limitless profitable life-changing dentistry in your practice. This is how you finally get to the dentistry you’ve always wanted to do. This is how you attach patients to you for life.
These four pillars, over the past two weeks, are the ultimate difference makers if you not only want to grow your practice but you really are serious about improving patient outcome, retention and overall quality of care.
Why are these so powerful, you ask. Well, I’m sure you can deduce it as I go through this. It’s not rocket science, it is human science – making it about more than teeth but about the patient. You are taking them on a patient-focused journey not just robotically inserting them through a cookie cutter transactional dental process.
It’s about to get even better because now we are ready for your patients to arrive at a crossroads on their path to health. You hold the compass that will help them make the right decision and we’ll address this pivotal junction next week!
Stay tuned…
