Dental Practice Management|Building a dental team Archives - The McAnally Selling System

Weekly Sales Meeting Agenda for Dental Practices

james2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

What should a weekly sales meeting in a dental practice actually cover? Keep it tight and keep it numbers-first. Every week you review the pulse of the practice with the same fixed agenda so nobody walks in guessing. How many new calls came in. How many are still sitting on the books. How many diagnostic visits did we do, because that is where the case gets diagnosed. How many case presentations followed, and what was the outcome of each. That is it. Fifteen minutes is enough if the numbers are pulled together before you sit down. If you hate the word [...]

Weekly Sales Meeting Agenda for Dental Practicesjames2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

Why Every Dental Practice Needs an Admin Manual

james2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

Why should I write an admin manual for my dental practice? Because details you keep only in your head get forgotten, and forgotten details cost you cases. An admin manual is where you write down every process and step so the flow of service stays consistent no matter who is working or what changed last week. Staff turn over. People who have been with you a decade leave. Without the manual, all that hard won knowledge walks out the door with them. When you move into big implant cases, brand new details appear that a regular practice never had to think [...]

Why Every Dental Practice Needs an Admin Manualjames2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

The Unlearning Curve: Why Staff Skills Slide Back

james2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

Why do my treatment coordinators get good and then slide back to average? Because skill is not a thing you earn once and keep forever. A Swedish psychologist named Anders Ericsson mapped this out. You climb a curve as experience and practice build your skills, you hit a plateau, and then without deliberate practice and feedback you start to forget and slide back down. I call it the unlearning curve. Plenty of practices send their team to a course, get a bump, and a year or two later they are right back where they started. They drifted because nobody kept the [...]

The Unlearning Curve: Why Staff Skills Slide Backjames2026-06-18T00:00:00-04:00

Why a Checklist Process Changes How Your Practice Runs

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Why do I need a checklist to change how my dental practice operates? Because a checklist is the only thing that makes a behavior change stick. You can fire up your team with mindset talks all day, and by Thursday everyone drifts back to how they always did it. Modifying how a practice actually operates is brutally hard, and willpower is not the tool for it. A written, step-by-step checklist is. It turns a good intention into a repeatable action that anyone can follow, including the associate you hire next year and the new front desk hire who has never seen [...]

Why a Checklist Process Changes How Your Practice Runsjames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Consistent Treatment Plans: Build A Predictable System

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

How do I keep my treatment plans consistent across every patient? Use a template and a fixed production system, so the report comes out predictable every time no matter who is busy that day. Most of a strong case report is the same from patient to patient. The promise, the responsibilities, the deadlines, the takeaway language. Those get copied over with only minor tweaks for this person's specific clinical surprises. That is a feature, not laziness. Predictability is what guarantees nothing important gets left out. Decide on your version of the layout, train the team members who touch the report, and [...]

Consistent Treatment Plans: Build A Predictable Systemjames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Why a Staff Led Visit Beats Doctor Time on Big Cases

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Who should run the follow-up visit after a big case presentation, the dentist or staff? Staff. Not you. This visit is almost entirely about financials, so it belongs to your treatment coordinator, financial coordinator, or office manager, whoever owns the money conversation in your practice. You being in the room changes the dynamic and chews up chair time you don't have. Now, schedule it for a window when you happen to be in the building. That way if some clinical question pops up, the coordinator can grab you for two minutes and you answer it. But you are the backup, not [...]

Why a Staff Led Visit Beats Doctor Time on Big Casesjames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Checklists for Dentistry Are Not Just for Selling

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Are checklists only useful for selling dental cases? No, and treating them that way is a mistake. The step-by-step method matters for everything you do, not just presenting a case. Emergency services, office tours, clinical procedures, administrative tasks, anything new you bring into the practice should run on its own checklist. Go to the best clinical courses on the planet, Kois or Spear among them, and you will notice the material is laid out so cleanly you could format a checklist around every procedure. That is not an accident. We use them because they reduce errors and frustrations in our critical [...]

Checklists for Dentistry Are Not Just for Sellingjames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Office Noise and Stress in a Dental Practice

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

How does noise in the office affect happiness and performance? Uncontrolled noise quietly works against you. The happiness research flags it as a clear negative effector, and the key word is uncontrolled. When you have no control over the noise around you, it raises your cortisol and wears on your systems over time. That is real physiological cost, not just annoyance. I call these things no-brainers. If a condition is dragging on your wellbeing and you can easily fix it, then fix it, because you know you will get more happiness out of it. Look hard at your operatories and your [...]

Office Noise and Stress in a Dental Practicejames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Build a Repeatable Selling System for Your Practice

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

How do I make my dental selling system repeatable when I add associates or new staff? Write it down so it survives you. A selling approach that lives only in your head is worthless the day an associate joins or a new front-desk person starts. The whole value of a system is that it is teachable and repeatable, something you can hand to a new team member and trust to run the same way it runs today. So document the steps between every visit. Who sends the note, who orders the smile preview, who assembles the presentation, who books the appointment [...]

Build a Repeatable Selling System for Your Practicejames2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Who Should Be Standardizing Clinical Images?

james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

Who should standardize and edit clinical images for the presentation? Not you. Get the doctor out of image manipulation entirely and hand it to a capable team member. Your job is the diagnosis and the illustrations that come from it. Standardizing the photos, transferring your hand-drawn markups into digital form, getting everything into a clean, consistent format for the presentation, that is staff work. Most practices today have plenty of digitally competent people, so let them own it. I will not pretend to dictate the software, because there are a hundred ways to skin this cat and the tool you already [...]

Who Should Be Standardizing Clinical Images?james2026-06-16T00:00:00-04:00