Dental Patient Financing – The Truth about 3rd Party Financing

dental patient financing

If you drink the kool-aid put forth by 3rd party finance companies, they will convince you that you “need” to put every patient on an account and do all of your billing through it when dental patient financing.

WHY? Well, because they get an amazing fee out of the deal—duh.

There is also a back-end where these companies continue to sell to the consumer so in effect YOU pay them to create a new customer for them for many years ahead. That’s something no dental journal is going to broadcast. Whoopsie.

Over time they have had more and more dentists drink up and the result has not been pretty. Less than 2 years ago, CareCredit was hit with a major fine from the federal consumer protection agency for deceptive practices and was ordered to repay $34M in money back to customers.

Needless to say this kind of news does nothing for building patient trust but alas that is another topic I’ll save for another time.

Now….when handled inside an ethical sales process third party financing does play a major role in any practice presenting niche cases outside of the insurance system.

Here are a few examples of patient financing on offer :Henry Schein Patient Financing, Wells Fargo Health Advantage Dental Patient Financing, icarefinancialcorp.com, Dental Loans.

The reality is interest free financing IS appetizing for many consumers. Recently, I needed a new souped up Mac Pro computer (64 GB ram, 8 cores) for my recording studio and I was more than happy to utilize an 18 month interest free option. I’ve utilized the tool as well on other major purchases knowing full well that I’d kill off the debt before the promotional period expired and I’d take the tax write-off for the entire purchase in that year. Bam!

So it’s good to use and offer under the right circumstances, but when, and how? How do you talk about it? Who does the talking? How does it fit into a comprehensive financial presentation? How does it fit into what I call “smart discounting” to leverage human behavior related to deals/discounts? Where does it rank/order in financial options you need to present with major cases?

Well all of these questions matter a lot and the catch is none of these companies is going to tell you any of the answers. They also are not going to teach you how to best utilize their product in ways that make sense and in ways that don’t actually damage your case acceptance success and patient trust in you.

The reality is they don’t even know the answers themselves as their primary goal is to initiate as many accounts as possible.

We have the only case acceptance training (AKA professional sales training in real business world speak) program in dentistry that shows you EXACTLY how to use these 3rd party tools along with reasonable in-office financing options to do more good and to do more dentistry.

We even provide you with a financial presentation template that fits them into your financial coordinator’s presentation for consistency. Those templates have helped sell more dentistry than any other consulting financial template. I personally developed and used them first hand and now they are in use in thousands of practices doing a lot of good things for patients and dentists.

So…just how much money are you leaving on the table because you don’t handle the 3rd party options correctly?

Well, if you are signed up for a 3rd party payment option and present more than two $5,000 cases each month and you haven’t been trained in The McAnally System and don’t have the financial template, you leave at LEAST $2500 per month on the table right now every month. Without the other tools provided in this same training, the odds are that mount is closer to $5000 EVERY MONTH. Even at $2500/month that more than covers the highest tuition I charge that includes private consulting every month. In essence, improving your financial coordinator’s ability, makes anything I do for you FREE.

Now….if you present even bigger cases, the number is even higher. If you present two $25,000 cases each month, your “money on the table” is at least $12,500 every month and without the rest of the training that amount can go to even $25,000 EVERY MONTH.

For many niche practices, many multiples of their advertising budget is buried in case presentation and financial presentations. So…do you think it would be worth fixing your 3rd party financing issue as part of comprehensive and professional sales training for your financial coordinator?

If so, you can access the basic program trial here for only $1.00.