Business
The big five
Ashley Latter looks at the five biggest communication mistakes dentists make, and asks: Which one are you making? Because it could be costing you a small fortune...
O
ver the last 20 years, I have personally trained over 6,000 dentists and their team members on
my ‘Two Day Ethical Sales & Communication Programme’ world-wide. During this time I have probably presented to ı0 times this number all over the world at various conferences and I socialise more with dentists than I do my own family, so I feel I know a fair bit about how dentists communicate with their patients. I have discovered some common
mistakes that dentists make in their communication and in this article I have listed the top five. At the same time, I have also written about what you can do instead, so that you can build stronger relationships with your patients and have more of your treatment plans accepted.
Mistake number one People always buy people first, before they buy any of your services. One of the areas I find dentists don’t invest enough time is building relationships with their patients. I once heard a dentist on one
of my courses tell me that we put the patient on the chair and
we sometimes forget they have a heartbeat, and that we are more interested in looking at the clock on the wall to ensure that we are not running late. A few weeks after every
programme, I follow up with every dentist and I often hear the dentist
telling me that by spending time building rapport, getting to know the patient and becoming genu- inely interested in some of their patient’s personal details, they have learnt more about the patients in one consultation than they have in the previous 20 years. If you want patients to become genuinely interested in you and what you offer, you first have to be genuinely interested in them.
Mistake number two One of the biggest mistakes dentists and orthodontists make is that they tend to talk too techni- cally when presenting solutions to their patients. Every day you are immersed in dentistry and the vast majority of the courses you go on are technical, particularly if you are a specialist. If you tell a patient that an
implant is a ‘titanium screw that gets surgically screwed into your jaw bone under anaesthetic’, then don’t be too surprised if your patient loses interest. If you are an orthodontist and you tell your patient that you have a bracket that is ‘self ligating, with low frictional forces and uses heat activated niti wires containing 6 per cent copper’, then don’t be surprised if they look confused.
Ireland’s Dental magazine 37 Continued »
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