Last week I let you in on the bad news… that your patients are your fault. Like them or not (and I’m sure you have some great ones and some that maybe you’d prefer to plant elsewhere), they are a result of what you have attracted, nurtured, created, and lived with all these years.
That’s okay. I’m not asking you to get rid of anyone, in fact, quite the opposite. I’m asking you to take each one far more seriously and give them all a chance to step up and become an A-Patient for you.
Our philosophy is simple, treat all patients like A-Patients until they prove otherwise and they down grade themselves.
It’s not the patient’s job to walk in ready for dentistry and already being an A-Patient. It is your responsibility to create an amazing experience that cultivates your patients to become conditioned and well-trained as A-Patients.
The first step to this is…
Emotional Connection and Differentiation
I like these two concepts together because of three reasons:
1st – This is what must happen right away, as soon as possible, upon first point of contact
2nd – Emotional connection is a form of differentiation in and of itself because so few practices (let alone any business) take the time to really connect with their people
3rd – The most important part of developing A-Patients is to get to know them and establish your interest in them so they will begin the trust building process
We’ll take them one at a time.
Emotional Connection is the actual occurrence of letting the patients feel your sincerity and interest in their well-being, in getting to know and understand them.
This can be conveyed on a website based on the writing and content. It is of course most often initiated on the telephone when the patient first calls.
The secret to a successful phone call is to bond with the patient, to connect with them and to understand their personal motivation for wanting to come and visit the dentist.
You are going to find out all of the normal things – but in many cases these details we try to get over the phone get in the way of actually forming a relationship with the caller.
By showing you care and putting genuine importance around their time, the fact that they called, and most importantly that making an appointment to visit a doctor for the very first time is a big deal … and in fact, going to the dentist is a big, important and meaningful thing and it should be treated as such.
This is where 99.9% of all practices mess up on creating A-Patients…right here in step #1 because the patients are not made to feel they are important and equally as bad, they are not made to feel the appointment is important.
If you fix this and practice to really master an emotionally connecting phone call with every patient (especially new patients), you will be blown away by the results of your show up rate, the vested interest the patients have, their homework and study prior to coming in, and above all else the acceptance on the back end of the visit.
They say you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. You think about that when you are using your ineffective phone scripts that sound like some stuffy medical office that doesn’t know what they are doing, rushes callers off of the phone, hurries them up as if they are an inconvenience and tries to trick them out of answers to legitimate questions.
Change this and change the feel, flow and outcome of everything.
As for differentiation, you can already tell that the process and philosophy we are using here makes you different from everyone else. They will not call another office like yours and that is what we want.
Obvious differentiation.
You can test yourself on this if you want, by calling around to 10-15 other dental offices in the area, down the street, the neighboring state, I don’t care where. And listen and experience the way they answer the phone and the conversation that happens next. Then of course do it to yourself and well, you get to be the judge.
You want to stand out in a way that is spectacular, personal and feel-good-happy that makes people enthused to come in and find out just who these wonderful people are and even, if possible, excited about going to the dentist.
We’ll get into more ways to differentiation in the coming weeks. Remember, every interaction matters. It can begin on the website or the phone call… but shoving people off of the phone to go chase down your paperwork that you want them to fill out, as an example, is not differentiation nor is it the way to create A-Patients.
A-Patients want to be cared for, they want to feel cared about, they want to be valued and even a little pampering wouldn’t hurt.
Think about it – what would you want your dental experience to be like?
Think about it – if you knew this person was going to end up writing a check for you to do what only you can do to help give him/her the mouth and smile he/she deserves, how would you treat that person after the check was written? Well, the point is: do it now, do it early, do it often, do it before you expect anything in return.
That’s what winners do, that’s what practices that deserve the investment of their patients do, that’s what you’d want and that’s how you make an emotional connection and differentiate yourself from all others which is the first step to developing A-Patients. You have to start caring about them before they will care about you or themselves.
There is one way to make sure you always put your best foot forward, it’s called lead by example. Behave the way you want your patients to behave and you will be surprised at how many of them fall in line and become amazing patients for you who pay, stay, and refer, as we all like to say.
Step 2, next week…
