Clear Idea #4

www.acasociety.com | info@acasociety.com 35 What about new patients? When you have lots of regular patients coming, the new patients come too. That’s how it used to be, before 1985, when advertising was virtually non-existent. Personal recommendations are free and give you excellent patients. Also, there’s a lot of work to do in your current client base. A note about dental communications techniques It’s natural to assume that communications is a euphemism for sales. Traditional sales techniques, which essentially are attempts to talk a patient into accepting the dentist’s treatment plan are often counterproductive. Putting aside all moral considerations, patients are quite sensitive to having their health-care professional try and sell them treatment that the patient might believe is expensive and unnecessary. Even the process of trying to educate the patient into understanding the benefits of your treatment plan can be misinterpreted as part of a sales agenda. I’m currently creating an online training program that gives dentists and team the ability to master these skills in an anti-sales way. I’ve only scratched the surface in this article. My course goes into full details. Like the re-appointment strategy in this article, it’s counter-intuitive and highly effective. Go to www.sernikspeak. com and register your interest and we’ll let you know details. I also recommend you consult Sue Rusalen. Sue has 30 years of experience as a dental hygienist and practice manager. Sue helps dentists and their teams fully utilize their hygiene departments and by analyzing their item-code metrics, she highlights gaps in claimable items. Her analysis also reveals a range of performance gaps. I’ve seen her efforts result in hundreds of thousands of increases in profits. Sue offers two online and in-person courses: The Dental HyGenius ™ as well as The Oral Wellness Mastery program in conjunction with Professor Tom Larkin, from Kentucky, USA. This gets patients to be seriously motivated to keep returning for hygiene and as I have said, this will drive your re-appointment rate through the roof. You won’t need to pay for new patients anymore. Dr Michael Sernik is the CEO of Channel D: Custom dental videos for the treatment room and the waiting room. www.channeld.com www.sernikspeak.com michael@channeld.com