Who Is Your Dental Competition Part 1

You have two forms of dental competition. The one that is routinely thought of is competition with other dentists. If you are serious about performance, you’ll identify the highest performing practices in your market and list them out. More on why that’s important in Part 2 of this series.

The second type of dental competition in every practice performing elective services, where treatment plans total more than $2,000, is competition against other goods and services requiring similar time investments and similar or even much greater monetary investments.

Many of the tenets discussed in Volume 2 of The Dentist’s Unfair Advantage – The 39 Key Tenets to Practice Success are about how to deal with BOTH forms of dental competition—other dentists and other goods and services. The higher the treatment plan or treatment plan price point and the more dentists directly competing with you at higher price point services, the more of the 39 tenets are a must for being successful. Volume 3 in The Dentist’s Unfair Advantage series is also now available and it completely unravels the reality of niche marketing in the information age.

OK. Let’s talk about other goods and services.

Realize that most patients on a weekly and monthly basis are thinking about purchases that are just as costly as any treatment you can possible do for them as a dentist if not more costly.

Vacations, Scooters, Bicycles, Cars, Jet-Skis, Fishing Boats, Wine Cellars, College Tuition, Motorcycles, High-Class prostitutes, Jewelry,…insert  $5,000+ object here.   If they aren’t thinking about it for themselves, then they are likely thinking about it for their husband, wife, GF, BF, mistress, children, or grandchildren.

In this category of dental competition, there’s no sense in trying to come up with a comprehensive list—just realize it is still dental competition and if you don’t have strategies built into your selling process to deal with it and to position your service’s value, you will do a lot less dentistry.

When I read practice reviews one of the first things that typically jumps out at me in “bad” reviews is just how poor of a job practices do with positioning fees and what things cost as part of their sales process and new patient intake systems. The result is a patient writing a bad review related to something fee related.

If you have patients complaining about fees, the most comprehensive way to deal with that issue is here.

By the way, the program trial now includes our exclusive software app Text2Review  that streamlines getting reviews for your practice. Reviews affect both marketing and sales and are a part of dealing with dental competition which is why we’ve made this tool part of our programs.