Why You Need To Exit the Implant Case Sales Game – Part 2
It’s more than okay that most implant clinicians truly suck at sales and have almost no chance of that fact changing.
All of the facts we’ve reviewed in Part 1 about sales capabilities and the odds working against great clinicians from ever being proficient at sales (85% chance against) are more than okay because the everyday reality for patients is that clinical outcomes need to be at high levels!
If most dentists planned and treated their implant cases at the same level of proficiency as their practice capabilities in sales (doctor and team), 95% of their cases would be failures and patients would be running far far away from implant treatment.
Turn Weaknesses into Strengths
I will bet you $5,000 that your core strengths and your staff’s core strengths are heavily weighted toward the delivery of predictable clinical services and reasonably good patient experiences. I would bet that you are far more prone to be interested in some change in a treatment protocol, restoration design, or restorative material that improves long-term clinical outcomes, right? I would also bet that same $5000 that the conversations and management of processes for selling $50,000 things are in your weakness column and in fact this is an area and subject that simply doesn’t excite you.
Your weaknesses are essentially impossible to change into strengths. The research has already proven this.
While we are talking about weaknesses, in case you missed the memo, it’s an utter and abject waste of time to focus on “improving weaknesses.” This has been borne out in numerous management studies from reputable business schools like Wharton, Kellogg, and Harvard. It’s easier and more predictable to simply build up your best strengths and make them even stronger and let someone else handle those things you are weak at or are in fact incompetent at.
Think about your personal history in your life endeavors in this weakness versus strengths exercise. In your education, were there some subjects that were far easier to improve than others? Did you ever take a subject that was weak and flip that weakness into that subject being something you were truly a master at and could have gone on to be world class in or did you just manage to get by and check it off the list? What about in hobbies or sports. Can you point to similar experiences? As someone with a personal background in participating in a lot of different sports from football, baseball, basketball, tennis, triathlon, and competitive rowing, I know from experience there were certain things I naturally was better at and enjoyed more and the same pattern played out in my education and in my adult life in every respect. It is how we function.
Those who spend hours working on their weaknesses just wind up with a bunch of slightly improved weaknesses. Focus on your strengths since they are far easier to build up to higher levels and for most readers that means your implant clinical strengths.
Now here is the catch with all of this. If you are in the business of implants (or want to seriously be in that treatment niche), sales is one of the most important key factors that will make or break your success with advertising and the cases you treat.
The Catch-22 of Sales Realities
Both for the clinician and for having patients in treatment.
Most implant cases are found by way of advertising that requires major investments of practice capital, thus, it’s impossible to gloss over how important sales is to keep from throwing money away regardless of how fantastic of a clinician you are – (ABOI doctors I’m looking at you).
Yes, the returns are greater for full arch implant cases (like All-on-4 / All-on-X) than any other procedure both professionally financially) but without having an ‘A game’ in professional sales, your returns will be lackluster, dismal, or even upside down (negative returns!).
For more than 17 years, I’ve watched this play-out firsthand with hundreds of skilled clinicians and what has remained clear is that the single biggest failure factor is lack of sales capabilities at the practice level and the lack of the business being run as a sales organization versus blaming advertising and blaming the patients calling!
So, the secret that has been withheld from you by every advertising agency pitching you on buying implant advertising is that you cannot ‘pass go’ without sales and that the overwhelming majority of you will fail because you simply aren’t built for professional sales at the level needed to sell $50,000 cases and you never will be.
Next time, we’ll go more into the how the solution to this problem evolved for us as an advertising agency as we have literally engineered away sales issues for the doctors we work with.
How We Can Help
If you are ready to up your implant case flow and have found out either through the school of hard lessons that sales has greatly limited your success or you are simply having an ‘a-ha’ moment going through these discussions together, let’s talk 1:1.
The first call to discuss today’s advertising realities for full arch cases and how the remote sales team eliminates the sales issues blocking most implant clinicians is FREE. To schedule, go to www.meetme.so/jamesmcanally
