Why I became a student of sales process and why ClearChoice and every implant practice owner serious about treating multiple full arch cases weekly or daily is also a student of the same.

Well, tough personal real-world experience where my advertising dollars were on the line forced me to leave my comfort zone as a typical implant practitioner to find answers otherwise I had no business advertising for these patients.  On my personal journey to treating 50 full arch implant cases annually in my clinical practice in the 00’s, I made two big sales discoveries. 

Sales Discovery #1

Even with great advertising messages that cause an abundance of patients to call who need and are interested in dental implants, if you don’t acknowledge the level of seriousness and importance of the inbound phone call from your ads you are sunk.  This was well before we even had caller ID much less the technology advancement of real-time call logging systems of today where we can see calls happening in real time and listen to each call between an advertising practice and the patient. 

These calls are literally the start of the patient relationship and sales process.  You can have abysmal sales results and wrongly believe your ads are the problem when it reality it is the first step of your sales process. to manage what ideally needs to be said to close consults from ads! 

The reality for me and for hundreds of doctors our ad agency has serviced over the years is that at the heart of the front-line sales issue is mostly a lack of training. My team had back then and most teams new to working with us start with a nearly empty toolbox for the critical skill of closing the most in-bound phone calls to consults from advertising.  

Implant dentists have no clue what their staff say on the phone, nor do they have written objectives for call outcomes (i.e. % of calls that go to consults). 

I had back then what I now call the ‘McDonald’s dental disconnect’ where the employees at the nearest McDonald’s selling $5 Big Mac’s were given more intensive training in sales process than what I had given my staff and what most implant dentists give their sales staff right now. 

What did I do?  I sought expertise in training to close those calls to consults ASAP and to put into place a front-line sales process for this critical first step. I apologized to my team and gave them a better toolbox! 

Interestingly, 17 years later, we still have the same guru teaching how to close the most phone calls to consults with us.  While Chris has worked for others over the years, she is currently ONLY working with our advertising members because she believes in Big Case Marketing more than anyone else out there. She has literally seen it all and based on years of experience knows we are the most ethical operators in this specialty niche of bringing a vulnerable patient to a dental implant provider.  

Sales Discovery #2

In implant sales, sweat the small stuff!  The small details of sales process with $50,000 cases matter a lot!  The series of very small steps taken during consults, diagnosis, and presentations, the simple questions asked, statements made, and verification that information is understood by the patient is what unlocks acceptance rates of 65-100%.   

For full arch cases, the face-to-face sales process is even more complex as the clinical treatment.  Everything in sales for these cases must be designed to minimize patient confusion and maximize trust and believability both to the patient and to a second party who is almost always involved in the buying decision.  

Once we had our phone sales issues worked out and patients coming to consults, finding that only 20% of our patients were saying yes to treatment was the next big eye-opener.  This hard lesson meant finding out that in person sales issues were just as frustrating and as important to cases and advertising success as simply closing the consults from the phone calls. 

Face to face sales process would also be the #1 business system Big Case Marketing would go on to fix in more than 1,000 advanced clinical practices in the years when counted those attending our sales training courses. 

The advertising moves for generating phone calls were a far easier proposition to arrive at for achieving predictable results with perhaps only 5 years of testing required before we could happily go into almost any market as a specialty ad agency and turn on ads to deliver a desired # of cases each month. 

We invested 10 years from 2005 to 2015 researching persuasion and compliance science from sources such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, and the Kellogg School of Business as well as studying and applying sales concepts from industries with similar price points specifically to our special needs as highly trained implant clinicians.   

As an agency, we made management discoveries along the way that are useable by our advertising clients but we’ll save those for other discussions. 

These two key sales discoveries live on in the value added education we bring to our advertising agency work which keeps us in a ‘category of one’ that remains unmatched in the specialty niche of full arch implant advertising.  Yeah, there are other advertisers with less stellar track records and fewer years of operation but none have made this level of investment in sales trainings for their agency clients.   

To have a discussion about full arch case advertising to meet your case goals which also includes both of our sales process trainings (front line phone sales for consult closing and face to face sales), go here.