Imagine if you and your team could sell professionally, ethically, and without pressuring patients at the same level as ClearChoice, the  No. 1 full-arch implant (aka “All-on-X”) corporate chain in the world. Would you?

Of course you would. But what ClearChoice has and what you most likely do not is called “professional dental sales.”

Professional dental sales is the No. 1 business process missing in 95% of dental implant practices I speak with.

Drawbacks Of Missing Professional Dental Sales

If it’s missing from your practice, you are:

  • Reducing your financial returns on expensive dental implant advertising investment (ROI)
  • Causing more of your patients than necessary to buy at the lowest price only
  • Limiting your success at total arches treated
  • Causing yourself to feel discouraged more often than necessary
  • Reducing your income/hour
  • Lowerings the odds of you ever gaining or sustaining the happiness that a dream implant practice brings

What ClearChoice Brings To the Table

ClearChoice, the biggest corporate chain of dental implant centers in the world, has brought mostly positive change to the implant treatment niche.

They’ve also brought major business process lessons to the independent implant dentists willing to observe and learn, which includes:

  1. Full arch implant cases / All-on-X cases are a 100% advertising-driven procedure. As such ClearChoice has carpet-bombed markets throughout the US with All-on-X ads via TV and in print. The result is that All-on-X patients respond big time.
  2. All-on-X cases do not come from dentist referrals. The only providers who treat All-on-X cases on a monthly or weekly basis, be they oral surgeons, periodontists, prosthodontists, or implantologists, are those who advertise All-on-X caes on a daily and weekly basis.
  3. All-on-X patients are often not members of practices. To reach them requires going to the public with All-on-X advertising.  Furthermore, after you have an All-on-X case flow, if you shut off your All-on-X advertising, you shut off your All-on-X cases,
  4. That a professional dental sales process is paramount to harvest All-on-X cases from the All-on-X advertising that brings complete strangers to call a ClearChoice center or an independent implant practice.
  5. A professional dental sales process means more phone calls from All-on-X advertising turn into All-on-X patient consults.
  6. A professional dental sales process is the only path to having the most patients saying yes to All-on-X treatment and to get checks written for All-on-X treatment plans o a monthly and weekly basis.
  7. A professional dental sales process leverages technology to manage hundreds and thousands of prospects.
  8. Professional dental sales process never be replaced by technology or sales gimmicks as there a very high level of trust needed at the price points for full arch dental implant treatment to proceed.
  9. A professional dental sales process conveys expertise, credibility, and enhances trust.
  10. The only path to a consistent professional dental sales process is that trained staff work from printed physical check-lists to follow defined steps to sell by and these steps are engineered specifically for human psychology as it relates to buying and engineered to the service and price points at which these cases inhabit.
  11. A professional dental sales process is attached to ongoing sales team management. For an independent practice, a weekly sales meeting only requires 15-20 minutes and is an important part of professional selling.
  12. Even in practices where Medicare is being leveraged to partially offset out-of-pockets treatment costs by 25-50%, a professional dental sales process is still required to the their still being significant financial outlays required by every patient.
  13. A professional dental sales process provides structure so that those trained in professional sales now have the tools to be confident and motivated to be partially compensated on a commission-based bonus structure. When the practices makes more, the sales staff make more.
  14. An MBA grad school-level training is what predictably puts a professional dental sales process in each ClearChoice center. It is what guides retraining and hiring. An MBA grad school-level training is what’s missing from 95% of implant practices dreaming of doing more All-on-X cases.
  15. Al-on-X Clinicians, who are usually the biggest impediment to patients saying yes to treatment, can be effectively and completely removed from the professional dental sales process. This may be a necessity due to a stated lack of desire to learn this essential business process and skill, a shown lack of ability, or a lack of time due to the busyness of the practice.
  16. That dental insurance is irrelevant to the All-on-X case in that ClearChoice only accepts cash, credit card, or 3rd party financing.
  17. Promotional gimmicks by manufacturers such as Nobel and BioHorizons are designed to sell high-quality implant systems to dentists. These are little more than Trojan horses to get implant products into practices and in reality do not create significant All-on-X case flow.  Implant products and procedure names do not create All-on-X cases.

I’ve been preaching these concepts year after year before ClearChoice was founded.

professional dental implant sales

ClearChoice and The McAnally Selling System

From day one, with our very first advertising and consulting client, we have been teaching sales training. Our professional dental sales training has continued to evolve and now equals any MBA level course taught anywhere on earth.  It is also the only MBA-level professional dental sales course engineered specifically for practices treating full arch cases (be they restorative only, restorative-ortho, ortho-implant, or implant only). It’s been attended by more than 1,000 clinicians. However, considering that there are roughly 10,000 fully qualified clinicians in North America who could treat All-on-X cases every month, this means 90% of these clinicians are still reducing their All-on-X results due to ignorance on this topic.

None of this is new to me and my team, nor to our longest-term clients who have been with us 15 years and as such have been on the right side of this story for many years.

Fortunately, for observant clinicians in the implant world, ClearChoice’s actions have helped bring some level of importance of these aspects of the full arch All-on-X case into their awareness as business owners.  If anything, most independent implant dentists today at least acknowledge that advertising is what creates All-on-X cases.  Since most of these independents have never embarked on major All-on-X advertising, they are ignorant of the professional dental sales part of the equation as they have yet to see these patients in consults to realize that they are lacking in this aspect of the business.

How To Increase the Number of Your All-on-X Cases

If you are an implant trained clinician and want to do a lot of All-on-X cases, if you want to treat All-on-X arches every month or even on a weekly basis, if you want to use your education and skills to help patients in terminal dentists benefit from All-on-X, then you either live by these realities shown by ClearChoice and move on to adopt OR you must plan to stay frustrated.

Sales professionals working in a multitude of industries with packages of goods and services that range from $10,000 to $10M per transaction attend MBA graduate programs to learn sales process steps that give them control of their sales process versus being totally at the whim of the customers and decisions makers random buying behaviors.

ClearChoice, headed by smart MBAs, removed as much patient random behavior from their sales process by adopting this MBAL level of professional dental selling.  Meanwhile, the average implant dentist is completely lost when it comes to taking this important part of the business of implants seriously.  That same clinician allows random behavior (patient, staff, and provider) to dictate sales which brings lackluster results regardless of the quality of the All-on-X advertising.

professional dental implant sales

Why Professional Dental Sales Isn’t Discussed More

What gives?

Why the disconnect for some of the smartest and clinically adept providers in the profession?

Well, firstly, professional dental sales is never talked about in dental school nor in advanced CE courses for a lot of reasons.

These include:

  • A time factor in which that the ADA’s requirements for what constitutes an accredited dental degree must be dealt with by the school leaves no time for this subject.
  • Licensure doesn’t require this skillset nor is there any sort of “sales test.”
  • Dental school treatment plans are piece-meal and never reach the financial considerations of an All-on-X case.
  • There are no sales faculty at dental schools nor in CE courses.
  • The only full arch cases dental school faculty have treated were typically in their residencies and graduate programs and greatly reduced fees. As such, they have never presented $50,000 cases to anyone.
  • The top-name CE course providers do treat $50,000 cases, but they earn these cases by way of their world-renowned reputations. They are the 1 out of 500,000 dentists on earth that have that level of recognition.
  • The majority of CE course attendees aren’t thinking about their lack of sales ability, they are caught up in the technical mechanics of treatment only. Oftentimes, they have no mental space for anything but the upgraded clinical knowledge.
  • Many CE course attendees are “junkies” of CE and as such CE is a hobby and sales is an irrelevant topic (and can even be offensive to these “purists”).
  • CE courses are not structured to cover this topic in their training regardless of the level of sophistication (The Kois Center is a great example—amazing program but there is little time in the curriculum to cover professional dental sales in-depth to the level required nor is there sufficient staff or trained staff to handle the follow-up for such a training if it existed).

Conclusion

So, knowing the importance of not just effective All-on-X advertising to generate potential All-on-X cases but the mandatory need for professional dental sales to treat All-on-X cases every month or every week in your practice, what are you going to do to rectify this problem if you are like 95% of those clinicians I speak with on a weekly basis?

To have a frank, real discussion about getting you from where you are now and on to treating the cases you want to be treating, go here.