When you need to speak from the Heart.

With the pressures on the NHS and many of my Private Clients reporting record numbers of new patients, there has never been a better time to enrol these new patients on a Membership Plan. The next three articles, I will share with you my thoughts and tips on how to enrol these new patients onto your plan and develop lifelong relationships with new patients.

Please share this article with your whole team if you feel it is relevant.

Before I share my strategies, let me share some background, so that you can get some context. I had a client who had just taken my Two-Day Ethical Sales & Communication Course, he had achieved some excellent results and now was transferring his NHS patients to a Membership Plan. However, his biggest barrier to promoting his plan, was that he felt that he would receive negative publicity, especially as his Practice was in a small town and everyone knows everyone. He did not want to come across as the ‘greedy dentist’ especially as he lived in the town, as well as working there. I helped him with his letter, and he was pleased with the final letter going out, but he still had these concerns, by the way, after spending over 38 years coaching dentists and their teams, this is quite normal.

So here was my coaching.

1. Extend his appointment times by 5 minutes and that way you can explain to the patients on a one-to-one basis why you are leaving the NHS.
2. When you speak to the patients, speak from the heart and explain in your own words why you are having to make the change. This is the key, to speak from the heart, be honest and upfront. You need to explain that you are finding it increasingly challenging to provide the dentistry that you want to do under the NHS and hence that is why you are making the change.
3. Explain the added value that you can bring to patients in the future and the benefits of joining the Plan (More about this in my next article)
4. My client had another dentist in the Practice who was still operating in the NHS, so there was an alternative if the patient did not want to go on the plan.
5. Except that some patients might not join the plan and do not take it personally. The likelihood is they are not rejecting you, they are rejecting you new offering, i.e., the membership plan. Again, I will go deeper into this in future articles.

I also stated to him that the people who he thought might not join the Plan, probably would and the ones who he thought would, might not.

Point number 5 is crucial. I have spent close on 34,000 years personally training dentists, and I do know that some dentists take this to heart and can take rejection personally. Please do not. They are not rejecting you; they are rejecting your new offering. If you do take it personally, then it is not fair on the next patient who you communicate with. Patients want to see a confident dentist not one that looks like they have had a day of rejection.

In my next article, I will share some tips on how to present the plan to the patient, that will increase your acceptance rate and your numbers.