Dental Case Acceptance-The Good News about Hard Selling
McAnally Selling Rule #16 in dental case acceptance- Hard selling focuses on OUR reasons why a patient would pick a certain treatment versus their reasons.
This one fact alone suggests that hard selling is a bad idea. To be blunter, hard selling isn’t just a bad idea it’s something that isn’t necessary for case acceptance and doesn’t belong in our administrative systems as highly trained ethical clinicians. More on hard selling in a moment.
Most dentist knee-jerk reaction to the word “selling” is because they equate all selling to hard selling which is simply not the case.
As defined before: Ethical selling is getting patients emotionally engaged in a treatment result that is GOOD FOR THEM and getting them emotionally and intellectually committed to treatment and accepting their case treatment.
While hard selling focuses on OUR reasons why a patient would pick a certain treatment versus their reasons, ethical selling helps the patient move from reasons to commitment and case acceptance. The other thing that repulses us as dentists is the fact that hard selling adherents typically use some very deceptive influence tricks that have a high risk of creating buyer’s remorse and regret following treatment. While it might sort of work in the short term, it ultimately comes back to bite the user since an ever larger stock-pile of buyer’s remorse and regret leads to very serious and negative long term consequences for a service business.
If you’re selling widgets you can eat 15% of the product from returns where customers hate you/your product and still be okay financially but that is not our reality. Imagine if 15% of your patients hated your guts. Not fun! Hard selling in action is a high speed train to that very end result and ultimately reduces case acceptance.
Fortunately, ethical methods of influencing and selling are readily available along with plenty of books discussing applications of the appropriate science. One such book is our most recent one on Amazon One simply has to choose to access and apply it.
One very big reason to systematize your selling process via a check-list is to allow the dialogue between doctor, team, and patient to help the patient discover why they want treatment–again the opposite of hard. Using our case acceptance strategies you can help the patient realize why the want and need treatment.
Here’s another way to think through this concept of the patient arriving at the right reason for them to choose treatment and accept that they need our help.
Think about all the things you are TOLD personally to do. How many of them do you really want to do?
I tell you and many others 2X a week why it’s a good idea to step up to the selling system I developed. Much of what’s in these blogs is meant to generate your own personal thoughts on why you would pursue this–your reasons not mine. It may mean being more fulfilled, helping more patients, having more money, more vacations, more time off, paying for who knows what, more credentials, who knows…..
Once you discover a reason why there’s something in particular you want to do or buy, watch out, nothing will stop you.The same goes for your patients and by approaching this from a case acceptance systems viewpoint you are more likely to allow them to tell you their reason. That reason is then easily tied back into treatment presentations and the power of ethical selling.
