How Much Do You Really Know About Your Next Patient?

Know your audience. That is a cardinal rule, whether you are writing, or giving a presentation, or whether you are a dentist having a one-on-one treatment presentation with a patient. After all, how can you hope to really reach an audience if you don't have a good sense of their motivations and desires? How can you connect with them in any meaningful way if you don't understand what they want or what is holding them back?

Back when I was delivering several workshops a year around the country, I would always spend time with my team before the event going through the profiles and completed questionnaires of each and every attendee. Often, we were talking about more than a hundred practices, and it would take many hours to go through them all.

A lot of people thought this was crazy, but I insisted. I wanted to get to know as much about each person in attendance as possible—their background, the kind of practice they had, the issues that were most important to them. It gave me a real sense of connection when I looked out over the audience and could not only put a face to a name, but I could direct specific parts of my presentation to specific people whom I knew it was most relevant to.

I can't tell you how many times participants were blown away when I spoke to them privately and was able to mention things off the cuff—things such as their hygiene production numbers—that demonstrated I really knew their business and their concerns.

In dentistry, you have the advantage of always dealing with an audience of one – and it is vitally important that you go in knowing everything you can possibly know about your audience.

As I have pointed out many times, including in this e-book, there are specific levels of engagement that dental patients occupy. Your role, of course, is not to accommodate whatever level they are at, but rather to bring them up to the highest possible level where they get the best possible care. But to do that, you do have to meet them at the level they are at today. That is their reality. And that is your starting point.


If you want to learn more about patient value, check out Imtiaz's practice management courses available through the Course Library. Not yet a Digital Suite member? Click here to learn more.