Avoid the Finger-Pointing Trap
You can tell a lot about a practice by how the people in it take responsibility for patients who say no.
I have no doubt that people in dental practices work hard and truly want the best for their patients. But it’s human nature to rationalize when things don’t go right and our best efforts come up short. It becomes easy then to blame the patient: “He just can’t afford it” or “She has a low dental I.Q.”
But I’ll bet you can point to several patients in your practice who are in a similar economic situation as the patient who “just can’t afford it” and yet they found a way to proceed. And what about the patient with the “low dental I.Q?” Who else but you is qualified to educate them on dental matters? The patient may be particularly challenging to reach but in the end he or she is still your challenge.
I’ve often said you have to learn to love the “no.” That’s where the opportunity for growth is. You have to recognize that every patient has the capacity to be a success story. And the responsibility for success, not the blame for failure, has to start with you.
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It is a challenge and a great responsibility to educate our patients and get them to the “yes”. I have found in my own practice that these “hard to reach” patients often get less of my attention from a patient education standpoint once we have moved them through the initial appointment and the first couple of hygiene visits. I think we sometimes give up on these patients too early and don’t realize that the process of moving them to “yes” is a process. And as you mentioned, that process can take years. The results of becoming lazy with these patients or not engaging them each time they come through our door, are seen in our daily schedules.
The truly exceptional practices don’t typically have on/off days and it’s because they have mastered the process of educating their patients and creating value for their dentistry. They move more no’s to yes and that in turn brings new patients through the doors that are ready for great dentistry.
The practices that don’t engage the “no” patients usually see holes in their schedule more often. They may be super busy for 3 weeks and then have a week that its very unproductive. And as we get busier, the less we see the need to focus on the “no” patients because we are busy. Eventually, however, this will always catch up with your practice and ultimately cause you to lose weeks of production over the course of a year.
I’ve seen the direct results of this on my practice in the past. And on those “slow” weeks or months, I would always begin to ask what’s wrong. Are we not seeing enough new patients? What time of year is it? Should we advertise more? Do we need to bring a consultant in? what’s going on? We would start looking to fix issues that were not the true cause of our problem. The true cause of the problem was that we did not consistently engage each patient at every visit. We didn’t use our time as an opportunity to help them see what great dentistry could do for them.
What I have learned is that most offices already have all the patients they need to fill their schedule and become great. They just need to move more of their “no” patients to “yes” by spending more time educating them and creating value for great dentistry. Imtiaz, you have mentioned this on several occasions and at one our Spear seminars, you said, “each one of you go back to your practice and pick one to two patients each day out of the hygiene schedule and spend an extra 5-10 minutes with them talking about their needs”. You went on to say that this extra focus could have great impacts on your practice. I have found this to be very true.
I think that if we learn to treat each new patient exam as an opportunity to teach our patients and engage them in dialogue about our findings, we will see our practices flourish. And, when we can learn to get excited about a “hygiene check” in the same regard, we will really excel.