Should a dentist push back hard when a patient says they need to talk to their spouse first?
No. The ‘man up, you’re an adult, can’t you decide on your own?’ approach is selling-floor confrontation that may work for gym memberships and burns trust in professional services. Sheena Iyengar’s research on automatic decision-making shows that unexpected confrontational requests trigger gut-instinct refusal across decision categories. The patient’s instinct will be to walk away, not to comply. The professional response is upstream: identify the decider on the first phone call, schedule everyone together, and never let the situation develop where you are alone with the patient at the moment of decision. If you find yourself confronting a patient at the close, the failure happened weeks earlier in the qualifying process. Fix the qualifying. Stop trying to fix the close.
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.