Want to grow your dental practice? It’s not just about excellent dentistry and expanding the scope of procedures to include services like whitening, veneers and implants. It also includes marketing those offerings. Here are five steps you can take to market and sell those services:
1. Educate Your Patients. While you have a captive audience in the dentist’s chair, take the opportunity to let patients know what your elective services are. As you explain, keep in mind your patient is not an expert and will not be familiar with clinical terminology. Keep your explanation focused on why the procedure will benefit them.
As an office, develop scripts hygienists and front-desk staff can use to make sure patients get a concise description highlighting the benefits to them, what it will involve and why. (For instance, if an elective procedure will involve multiple visits, explain this is to ensure it is done well and the final result is one they will be happy with long-term.)
2. Be Prepared. Help get your staff comfortable with explanatory scripts by practicing. In a staff meeting, have them role-play, using the scripts and anticipating different patient responses. This is a good exercise for placing yourself in the patients’ position. Brainstorm a list of patient questions as a group and work through how to answer them.
3. Offer Flexible Payment Plans. If patients are sold on the benefits of an elective procedure, they will probably be willing to find a way to pay – especially with plans breaking it down into manageable amounts.
4. Maintain Trust. Patients will return to and recommend dental practices and services when they feel they can trust their hygienist and dentist. Keep elective service offers centered on how they benefit the patient. If you jump straight into the script, patients will recognize it as a sales pitch and likely be turned off. If, after you have presented the information later in the appointment, a patient makes clear she is not interested, respect that. Speaking from experience, at my visit to a dentist, both the dentist and an assistant gave me their spiel about implants after I insisted I was not interested. I have never returned to that office. In fact, I’ve told my friends to stay away because I found their pushy sales approach off-putting. While they had good equipment, they did not take no for an answer and forgot about me in the dentist’s chair for over 20 minutes. The message I received was they were viewing me as a money-making opportunity, not a patient whose oral health they were caring for. Remember while you make the elective services clear, don’t violate your patients’ trust or neglect their care by being too pushy.
5. Reinforce the Information. Use brochures as a supplemental avenue for presenting the information. Practice Builders offers writing and design services for both print and digital brochures to help your patients understand your elective dental procedures. Click here for more information!