Why You Need To Exit the Implant Case Sales Game – Part 3

Even if you are an elite clinician, your personal odds of having significant success at treating a lot of cases is terrible, so what’s the solution?

Here are the facts about sales as it relates to the profession and implant dentists:

  1. Implant dentists and the profession as a whole we are ‘hacks’ at selling our best services; especially with cases that cost as much as automobiles.
  2. Only 15% every get proficient at this important part of the business of implants and that is with years of work.
  3. Your (and my) weaknesses are for all intents and purposes unchangeable and will never turn into our strengths.
  4. 85% of those contemplating or buying major implant advertising or even just reading this seriously have no chance at being component in selling their full arch implant services consistently.
  5. A lot of doctors follow a ‘siren’s call’ and invest significantly in implant advertising while agencies and marketing companies are “not truly forthcoming” (AKA they lie) about the odds of success these businesses face.
  6. At least one good outcome of this is clinicians often just get better and better and better at their implant skills which is the big picture great for patients who do enter treatment.
  7. While special titles and academic designations do benefit patients, none of those things unto themselves make a difference to most patients.

Many readers may feel a bit depressed over these facts but I’m here to tell you that it’s actually a very positive thing to understand the situation objectively because that means workable answers can be found that solve this issue for your practice, your business, and to reduce risk to making the leap into major advertising so that you can move on to helping far more patients with implants than you do at this moment.

Today, let’s talk about what has sort of worked to correct these ‘forever’ problems in implant advertising that related to sales failures by the doctors and teams.

What Worked In the Past…

What was the pre-pandemic solution to sales issues (well unless you were one of the national implant centers)?

In a nutshell, historically the very best agencies trained and/or provided some advice in sales and sales management because of how important sales outcomes are for advertising returns. As a stark example, one practice getting the same type of leads from the same ad budget would close $500K in a month and another would say “no patient will buy.” The only difference between the two were the sales capabilities. As such, it was clear some level of sales training had to be provided just for us to sleep well at night.

Early on when I started the company, we literally were the only agency providing any sales advice and any sales management. It was so far ‘out there,’ we were considered crazy to focus on this as an advertising agency. We used to give nine-month long sales training courses since I falsely believed that everyone we interacted with could elevate themselves (and wanted to elevated), their teams, themselves, and their processes to a high level of sales performance. This optimism turns out to be completely out of touch with the DNA of most clinician’s as we have already discussed.

…Won’t Work In the Future

Over the years, we scaled back to where sales training became a two-day intensive course and we just accepted that some doctors would indeed have it in their DNA to take what they were handed and run and others would run off a cliff as that’s just how the business worked. Besides we were still providing something that no one else in the industry was even close to being capable of regardless of their puffery on the subject. All of these efforts for us came directly out of my experience selling cases year after year personally.

[A bit of foreshadowing – today we know that what the dentist and TPC really needs to know and do for sales when a remote sales team supports them can be handled in a few hours of online preparation and in a half day live intensive training. Most of the set-up for successful selling can be shifted off-site and in some cases due to in-house staffing issues a remote TPC (what is really a sales closer) can zoom in to close the case with the doctor in the consult room which means 98% of sales has been “remoted” away from the clinical team.]

The majority of agencies, marketing companies, and marketing ‘gurus’ have followed a different tact (and they still do) in dealing with this sales elephant squashing cases. Their approach is to simply ignore the issue. “If we don’t talk about it, then it doesn’t exist.” A few, not only ignore this but they focus on heavily discount fee advertising with gimmicky countdown clocks on low priced offers in an hope that some patients will buy without any sales process or skills in the business! In other words, since we won’t even talk about what sales is doing, we’ll simply slash prices and let the doctor figure out if the overhead is supported.

A New Approach

Out of hundreds of clients all getting the same prospects and sales trainings, 15% of doctors and teams are found to be hard-wired to be great at sales and with training, intense desire, dedication, and coaching, can and do develop good sales behaviors and build reasonably good sales team in-house but these doctors and owners have always been the outliers.

Complicating this, even for the outliers, is the fact that MVP staff who occasionally excel at sales do leave practices which essentially resets the business back to zero in sales acumen. The pandemic made this last scenario more common. The pandemic and post pandemic labor market has also made it nearly impossible to find and hire team members with sales backgrounds regardless of the salary being offered.

As an example, we have one advertising member client practice in a Top 10 metro market offering $125K for a full-time salesperson and they can’t get applicants qualified for the job! Those who do a trial the work bomb out because they’ve over-inflated their capabilities!

Sadly, up until quite recently, no advertising agency or marketing company out there had any solution to this except for either A) constantly asking that the practice go through sales trainings and reinforcements (guilty as charged!), B) washing their hands from sales and telling the practice to simply do fee discounting since ‘some people will aways buy at a lower price’ ($13,9997 full arch care anyone?!?), or C) ignoring/not discussing this problem knowing that it will take out most of their clients after a period of months of their on-boarding with their agencies (95% of all agencies/marketers).

That last item is the normal – MOST advertising companies don’t want you to understand any of this as they don’t have solutions for you! It is the dirty secret never discussed.

Next time, we’ll go on to how thanks to the pandemic, most of the heavy lifting with sales can be moved off-sit to professionally trained salespeople to support your practice.

How We Can Help

If you feel like you have lived what has been discussed and found yourself in the 85% group, the good news is you can be in the group with 95% success in selling because of the support we’ll provide as part of our advertising and sales support service. If you are having an a-ha moment, I’d love to speak to you 1:1.

The first call to discuss your goals in full arch implant cases and how the remote sales team is part of how to get you on to that goal is FREE. To schedule, go to www.meetme.so/jamesmcanally