How believable are you to prospective patients?

How hard have you worked to engineer believability when it comes to advanced procedures such as full arch implants / All-on-4 / All-on-X implants?

Did you know believability will either help or hinder your advertising results?

Here’s a story about believability in the marketplace.

About Believability

Six years ago, I had a conference call with two docs in an area of South Florida with a lot of retirees.  One of them (a GP) was gung-ho on restoring a lot of All-on-4 cases.  The other (a periodontist) was simply on the call to kvetch about why things are different where they are and why any particular plan of action was bound to fail…blah blah blah…..a repeated story .  They loved feeding off the kvetch together.

One thing that jumped out at me when I reviewed both these guys’ websites on the call was that neither was very believable based on how they presented themselves to the public.  If I was a patient looking them over from my home by computer after seeing an advertisement for their services, I’d keep looking for someone that had more believability.

Eventually they pointed their kvetch toward me and I gradually pulled myself out of the discussion and ended the call.  These are not the types of docs I want to spend my limited time on earth working with or for–life’s too short!  The odds are a non-kvetching doc will appear in short order and I’m happy to wait on that day.

Lessons Learned

Fast forward to 2020, and these same docs were still doing the same thing they were when spoke in 2014 as they had never taken a decision much less worked on being any more believable!  One asked to speak to me this year, and my response was, we’ll happily do custom market research in your area FOR A FEE and of course there was no next step as he simply is not serious about any action whatsoever.

After years of observing and listening to practice owners throughout the world, I can tell you there aren’t many new surprises.  Being nearly two decades into what I call my third career (advertising agency owner), I can confirm that these stories are repeated over and over and the kvetching personality is common.

The complaining was clouding over their willingness to look at themselves or their own deficiencies which was glaring; “well, I’m just not that believable so I better address that as part of my effort to find more patients especially if I’m advertising to strangers.”  This need for creating believability goes UP as the price of the procedure goes up. 

Step into any market and you’ll find duplicates of these two actors on the dental stage AND you’ll also find someone (or a few) who decided to skip the complaining, make some decisions, and who now do a lot of implant cases.

Again, you are trying to convince a dis-trusting stranger who has probably had a bad dental experience somewhere in their history to trust you to make a purchase that costs as much as a nice Toyota or an entry level BMW!  It’s a big deal.

If you now advertise your services, the odds are you aren’t as believable (or credible) as you could be or believe you are.

Why not fix that issue and as a result help more patients and get more from your advertising or finally not be afraid to advertise and get the cases you really want?

Our advertising clients not only get access to our agency services placing ads that deliver full arch implant cases but they and their treatment coordinators/presenters must go through our mandatory MBA level sales training teaching a REAL SALES process.  This training also shows you exactly what is required to create more believe-ability than others around you.  T

The Kvetchers Component

Now….I want to finish up the lessons you can learn from kvetchers.

These two guys live in what I like to call “complainer’s ville.”

Firstly, if you want to remain successful, don’t hang around this type of person professionally.  They bring nothing to the table with the negative energy of what they focus on.  They are like a black hole out of which no good energy escapes.

Practices led by doctors who aren’t complainers, whiners, or kvetchers provides the opposite tale. When those in the opposite camp identify something they either don’t want more of (e.g. a specific problem in their practice) or something they want more of (free time, 4, 6, 10+ All-on-X cases per month, income, etc.), instead of kvetching, they either make a request or they take action.  That’s it.  Request or Action.  There’s nothing else.

A complaint is uttered and it wastes everyone’s time.

A request or action replacing a useless complaint leads to a solution.

If you complain a lot, how about taking action instead?  Maybe you’ll surprise yourself with the outcome.

To have a one-on-one discussion about all of this with Dr. McAnally, click here to schedule a meeting.