How can a specialist dentist elevate their referring doctors’ clinical and selling abilities to mutual benefit?
By treating referring doctors as long-term partners and investing in their development rather than just receiving the referrals they happen to send. Most referring general practices have not been through formal ethical-selling training and lose cases between the referral and the eventual specialist appointment because the referring doctor presented the situation poorly to the patient. The specialist can change this. Send referring doctors copies of relevant training materials. Pay the tuition for a formal selling course for the top five or ten referring sources. Offer in-office training sessions that demonstrate how to present complex cases to patients in plain language. As the referring doctors get better at ethical selling, they convert more referrals into actual specialist visits, which produces more patients for the specialist and better outcomes for the patients. The relationship becomes genuinely reciprocal rather than extractive. Top specialists often invest significantly in their referral network, and the network pays back through years of higher-quality, higher-converting referrals.
If the answers you are finding here resonate with you, my team and I work with a small group of clients each year. The next step is a complimentary Discovery Consultation and Practice Review with Dr. McAnally.