Indoctrinating patients to your dental practice will turn a patient who visits for a one-time hygiene appointment into a lifelong evangelist. This has nothing to do religion (aside from language); rather, this involves winning others over with extreme enthusiasm.
What are examples of businesses that have done a great job indoctrinating their audience? Tesla is a perfect example. People talk about how great their cars are without ever having driven one, let alone owned one. Apple computers have wait lines and underground markets for their new releases. These companies have a powerful pull that attracts an audience like honey to bees.
How can you capitalize on this type of powerful tool that uses human emotion to cause people to talk about your dental practice at every opportunity as if you have a super power? Your biggest window to capture this lies in between the time a prospect first hears about your dental practice and their first visit. The key is to absolutely blow your new patient’s expectations away on that initial visit (and it might help if you do it every visit after that).
Lucky for you, this isn’t too difficult to do. I have a two-step plan that my clients use and it works like gangbusters.
Step 1: Have a giant whiteboard or a chalkboard right behind your front desk and write the first time patient’s first name on it with color and decoration. Ideally, you’d have one patient’s name at a time, but if you’re expecting a lot of new patients coming in one day, multiple names at a time is fine as long as there’s enough room.
Step 2: Have your practice manager come out and introduce themselves, give the new patient a quick tour, and learn about each other as you give them the iPad to fill out their information. During this time, your practice manager should have a conversation to get to know your new patient, keep tabs on what makes them unique and educate them on what makes your dental practice unique.
Put yourself in your patients’ shoes… when is the last time someone made you feel THIS special? If it’s like most people, probably never. Executing this every day will turn you into THE dentist to go to and will create Evangelists out of otherwise ordinary patients.
Authored by Vlad Kostovski
For more help on driving calls to your practice, converting calls into new patients, and increasing treatment plan acceptance rate, check out my blog at http://www.vladkostdentalmarketing.com/blog/.
