Prav Solanki
Welcome to the Dental Leaders podcast. Today’s episode, it’s just me, Prav, and I’m just going to cover a few topics that are current amongst my clients, questions that have come up, especially with navigating the current climate that we’re in at the moment. So the topics I’m gonna cover, I’m gonna talk about the new patient consultation.

Prav Solanki
my thoughts around it, how it should be structured, whether it should be dentist or TCO, is there a right or wrong way of doing it? A lot of people have very strong views on, you know, whether dentists should give free consultations or it should be all TCO driven, don’t waste clinical time, blah, blah. My answer to that question, and pretty much every question anyone asks me, is it depends.

Prav Solanki
Every practice is different. Every clinic is different. You know, some have got TCOs, some have not. Some have got dentists sat there twiddling their thumbs. Would they rather be spending that time maybe exploring a sales opportunity with a patient or would they like to carry on twiddling their thumbs? Does that dentist have the ability to convert and strike rapport with the patient? What’s the difference between a free consultation and a free assessment?

Prav Solanki
And a lot of practitioners don’t know the difference between that. So some dentists really struggle with offering a patient a free consultation, which in my mind, sit down, have a chit chat. You’re not really going to do an oral examination. You may take some photographs, blow them up on the screen, take the patient through a, almost like a, what do they call it, co-diagnosis discovery where they essentially write their own treatment plan on the screen.

Prav Solanki
and talk to them about costs, rough indications, are you the right person for them? Do they feel close enough? Are they connected? Have you built enough rapport for this patient to trust you so that you can make a recommendation, sell them a treatment and book them in for the assessment? And then the old topic of leads, generating leads and lead generation, you might be running open days, Facebook campaigns, Google campaigns, and when you try and contact these patients, can you get through to them?

Prav Solanki
often and the narrative I’m hearing at the moment is you just can’t bloody get hold of patients and you know you follow them up you chase them you chase them you chase them you ring them you email them and you can’t get through to them. So these are the general topics I’m going to navigate my way around today in no particular order but these are the topics that are that are coming up at the moment with

Prav Solanki
conversations that I’m having with clients, or just potential clients or new customers who are looking to sort of either switch agencies or looking for a bit of coaching and consultancy advice. So I thought I’d just dish out this advice on the podcast so that you can all benefit from it. So let’s talk about consultations, okay? To free or not to free is the question. And…

Prav Solanki
If you ask me, should you do a free consultation? And, you know, often the rebuttal to that is, well, you know, does the dentist want to waste their clinical time? They could be drilling in that time. They could be doing something else. The TCO can deal with the tire kickers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? What’s really important is that how that free consultation has landed in that dentist’s lap.

Prav Solanki
So before I answer that question, free consultations come in different flavors. So you could have an offer, an advert that says free consultation with a dentist, usually 75 pounds or something like that, right? And anyone who’s willing to put down, let’s say a 30 pound fully refundable deposit, you will happily give them a free consultation.

Prav Solanki
And that’s where the trouble starts. Because unless you’ve got a series of filters that means that patient has to earn that free consultation, you are going to get the equivalent of what a lot of people refer to as tire kickers. But for me, it’s just a mismatch, right? I think it’s, I’ve probably used the term myself, right? But I think it’s derogatory in the sense that, do you know what? These are just human beings who’ve got a problem.

Prav Solanki
a dental problem that needs fixing. And there’s a mismatch between what they believe, the price and the service, the cost is, and what it actually is. And so if you allow those patients to walk into your practice without knowing enough about the practice, without having a very clear indication of pricing, and you sit them in front of the dentist, you’re going to have a poor experience. Out of 20 consultations, you might have 15 patients.

Prav Solanki
who are either not clinically suitable or simply just miles off on the price point, right? And you’re not doing any favors to anyone. So what’s really important is what happens prior to booking that free consultation. So let’s say it is with the dentist and even if it’s with a TCO, I think this discovery process should be going on. And find out what the patient knows. What do they know about the treatment?

Prav Solanki
What do they know about Invisalign? Have they had any previous consultations? What was the outcome of those consultations? Why didn’t they go ahead with those consultations? What was it? Was it an information? Was it confusion? Was it price? If it was price, did they perceive it to be too expensive? If they thought it was too expensive, what does too expensive mean? And how does that lie in terms of your price point? Because if they thought two and a half grand was too expensive for Invisalign, for example,

Prav Solanki
then what is the point of that patient walking through your door? Okay, let’s be upfront about prices. Perhaps they’ve been given a treatment plan. Always say that when a patient comes into my practice for a free consultation, I want to be armed with as much information as I can. And more importantly, I want to understand what those patients’ expectations are. And I want to know, I want that patient to know exactly.

Prav Solanki
what they’re going to get in their consultation, whether it’s a free consultation or a paid assessment. So what we always say is before a patient books a free consultation, I want to find out what they know about the treatment. I want to find out what they know about the costs and the range of costs. And I want to inform them of the costs, the range of costs.

Prav Solanki
and payment options. I definitely want to find out what that patient’s funding sources are. So we will ask the patient, so have you thought about how you’re going to fund the treatment? Is this something that you’re just gonna pay for upfront? Have you got the funds to pay for this? Or would you need to apply for one of our affordable finance options or pay as you go choices? So you get an idea of, you know.

Prav Solanki
what it is that this patient is going to pay with, right? How they’re gonna fund this. And you have an open conversation with them about it. The patient will appreciate that, right? Because often, especially in today’s age, right? Interest rates have gone up, people’s mortgages have gone up by a phenomenal amount, cost of living’s going up, prices at the forefront. So we should be very upfront about this.

Prav Solanki
So I want to know what does the patient know about it? Have they had any previous consultations? What were they like? Why didn’t they go ahead? What do they understand about the possible costs and what are their funding sources? And then the final thing I want this patient to have a very clear understanding of is what is it that is different about us, right? What is it that’s our USP? Whether it’s the clinician’s experience, whether it’s about the patient journey, whether it’s about your all-inclusive.

Prav Solanki
whether it’s about remote check-ins and all the rest of it, right? Whether it’s about the volume of cases that you’ve done, the variety of cases you’ve done, or your communication journey or what’s included in the package, right? Make sure that patient understands what your, we call it, unique selling proposition or unique selling points are. And your team should be very, very clear in being able to articulate that.

Prav Solanki
I think you also need to bear in mind that you shouldn’t be disillusioned that this patient is not only gonna call your practice, they’re gonna call half a dozen. And when they do, you better make sure that the phone calls at your practice are memorable. Let me say to my team, whether the patient books or not, I want you to leave them with a lasting impression and I want you to make sure that the phone call is incredibly

Prav Solanki
memorable. So when they ring the four or five practices, they realize, ah, I’m going to book in with Kerry. She was excellent. She mentioned X, Y, and Z and so on and so forth. Right. So it’s really important is we talk about free consultations and not what’s the quality of that free consultation. How much filtering have you done before they have earned the right to book a free consultation in your practice. Right. And not only that,

Prav Solanki
All that information that you’ve taken from the patient about the funding sources and what their expectations are, whether they’ve had a consultation elsewhere, whether they can send you a treatment plan that had been sent by another clinic, that information should all make it through to the TCO or the dentist before their consultation. And they should take five, 10 minutes out before that consultation to consider that.

Prav Solanki
If you’re running consultations back to back to back to back, you’re not going to have that time to just take that data in that’s really, really important and then plan and prepare for that consultation, which is essentially that sales appointment. So now when you ask me the question, should dentists offer free consultations, the answer it depends, really depends on what’s happening upstream.

Prav Solanki
Are we taking a refundable deposit, even though it’s a free consultation? Are we putting these filters in place? And is that patient attending well-informed and well-educated about what our process is? In our practice, when a patient rings up and they want a free consultation, we actually offer two appointments. We say you can come in and have a free consultation. And during that appointment, you get 20, 25 minutes with the dentist.

Prav Solanki
You’ll have the opportunity to get all your questions answered. We’ll show you examples of cases that are similar to yours and we’ll give you approximate indication of costs. The alternative is you’re booking for a comprehensive assessment because even if you have the free consultation, you will need a comprehensive assessment and the cost of that assessment is £95. Now what some patients do,

Prav Solanki
is they decide to skip the queue and upgrade straight for the comprehensive assessment because they are more serious about getting treatment done. Which one would you like to do?

Prav Solanki
And what we invariably find is that approximately 40% of our patients who inquire about a free consultation actually say, well, what’s the point of the free consultation? I’ll just book in for the comprehensive assessment. I wanna get started sooner rather than later. And so, it depends on whether a dentist should offer a free consultation or not.

Prav Solanki
How good are they? What are their sales skills like? What are their report building skills like? What are their communication skills like? Can they convert at an exceptional rate? Do they have the time in their diary to be able to be offering these free consultations? Or are they so clinically busy that they can’t? I’ll go back to the case study of my brother, Kalish. He’s been in the business of dentistry.

Prav Solanki
for what he opened his practice back in 2005. He’s gone through that point where he’s grown it multiple practices and sold it for an unbelievable sum to a corporate. And still to present day, he offers free consultations. And I’ve yet to meet practitioners who can convert like him. And if I was to bottle up what…

Prav Solanki
Kailish does in his consultations and the secret source is just his people skills, his rapport building skills, his chameleon type communication skills and his level of emotional intelligence. And that is all something that you can train, right? That is all something you can get better at. But that’s the difference. Now, Kailish can consistently…

Prav Solanki
And I’m not putting these numbers out here to brag or anything, right? But just to sort of say, even as a dentist who picks up the drill and works, but also spends a significant amount of his time talking and selling and does all his own talking and selling, can comfortably in a decent month, gross in excess of £300,000.

Prav Solanki
And I’m well aware of a lot of other dentists and clients who operate at a similar level. They sell all their own work, but they’re exceptional sales individuals. They follow a specific formula, structure and strategy, and it works incredibly well. There are some dentists, they can go on every sales training course on the planet. They can practice, practice and practice, and they will never be that good. And in that particular case, perhaps.

Prav Solanki
a TCO may be the right person for them to be that filter.

Prav Solanki
The other question, I’m gonna come back to consultation structure in a minute, and I think this conversation is gonna just wax and wane as my thoughts just do that, because it’s the way my brain works. But let’s think about what the role of a TCO is. Because what I described earlier, the data collection, the finding out what the patient’s funding sources are, what they know about it.

Prav Solanki
And obviously on the call, you’re going to try and connect emotionally with the patient, understand their why, understand the why now, understand what their pain points are and what their smile is holding them back from doing and all that, razzmatazz, right? All of that is a TCO’s role, right? Or you could call it a TCO’s role or you could call it an emotionally intelligent receptionist. And I find today

Prav Solanki
that the role of TCO or the title of TCO gets bandied about a lot and it means different things and different practices. Later on this year, I think around September time, I am running a sales mastery course for TCOs. And one of the issues that I really want to address is what is a TCO in your practice? What is their role?

Prav Solanki
and how that role can be completely different in every practice, yet be completely correct for that practice. And I guess I’m fed up of hearing that a TCO should take photographs, a TCO should scan, a TCO should do this, a TCO should follow the treatment plan. You create your own patient journey. You map out what your patient journey needs to look like, the whole communication journey, and you decide where the TCO slots in.

Prav Solanki
to deliver that perfect journey. So in some of my practices, our TCOs are actually dental nurses, but they’re dental nurses with TCO superpowers, that’s all. We don’t call them TCOs. And the way the consultation works is the patient comes in for a free consultation. The nurse is sat in on that free consultation. The nurse contributes to that conversation with the dentist.

Prav Solanki
The nurse then takes that patient out of the dental room into a separate room, sits down in that room, and asks the patient the following question. So do you know all that stuff that dentist went over with you just now? Any of it you didn’t understand? Any of it didn’t make sense? You got any questions for me? And sometimes the patients really open up. And why is that? It’s because there’s a natural power dynamic between

Prav Solanki
the dentist and the patient and the power dynamic is completely reduced between the nurse and the patient. And so some patients may feel more comfortable speaking to the nurse, opening up about pricing and asking more probing questions. Following that, the nurse stroke super TCO will go through pricing. They’ll show them examples of testimonials, play some videos.

Prav Solanki
make them read some Google reviews, and just add a little bit of color to that consultation, and eventually close the deal. So that’s what our TCOs do. They’re essentially dental nurses. Some TCOs are just on the front line. They’re super receptionists. They take all the details I’ve described above. They make sure that it’s all passed to the dentist. Then the dentist takes over. They hand the baton over to the dentist.

Prav Solanki
And then once the consultation’s done, that TCO may take over the communication journey and take the patient all the way through to completion of treatment. Some TCOs start from the phone call, frontline, get the patient in, meet with the patient, either in person or over Zoom. In person, they may scan the patient, they may take some photographs, they may give some indication of costs before they sell them a comprehensive assessment.

Prav Solanki
What’s right, what’s wrong? What’s the perfect way to do it and what’s the right way to do it? There is no right or wrong way to do it. From working with lots of practices over the last 15 years, many of them super successful. I can tell you one thing, they’ve all got a completely different approach, but it is the right approach for them. So going back to the consultation, right? So we’ve spoken about…

Prav Solanki
TCOs and their role and their role can be wide and varied. What’s really important, you know, if you want to ask me, you know, what are the key qualities of a TCO? I will tell you, probably the most important quality for me is a high level of emotional intelligence or what we may refer to as people skills or being able to connect with different people from.

Prav Solanki
different demographics at their level and find common ground really, really quickly. Obviously listening skills, well presented, great telephone manner, be able to use technology such as CRM systems to manage the flow of patients, be able to operate and manage things like Zoom and video platforms and all that sort of stuff.

Prav Solanki
And so I’d say that’s really, really important in terms of skill sets for TCOs. But let’s move on to the consultation process, right? And what that is, what it could be, but not necessarily what it should be. Because having sat in on over, I would say over a hundred dentist patient consultations as the observer.

Prav Solanki
I’ve seen lots of different styles, I’ve seen lots of different approaches, and I’ve seen different styles and approaches be equally successful. But there’s definitely some commonalities in the ones that have really, really high treatment uptake.

Prav Solanki
So let’s think about the consultation, okay? So you’re armed with all the information, right? So that’s really important. As the dentist, do you go out to reception or your waiting area and collect the patient? Or do you allow the patient to be escorted by your nurse or walk into door number two? Let me tell you, if you’ve got a nervous patient,

Prav Solanki
Even if you’ve not got a nervous patient, right? There’s a level of hierarchy that sits between you and the patient. Okay. Referred to as the power dynamic. Now there are ways in which you can make that patient feel more comfortable and that’s by reducing the power dynamic, right? So you could go and collect the patient. You could use your first name rather than Dr. Salanke when introducing yourself to the patient. Hi.

Prav Solanki
Dr. Prav Selanki here, lovely to meet you. Follow me into surgery one. Or it could be, hey, it’s Prav, lovely to meet you. Been looking forward to meeting you. I know you’re really nervous, but I promise you got nothing to worry about. Come with me and step into my room and we’ll have a little chat. So you get into the room, where’s your eye level? Is your eye level above the patient? Is it below the patient? Are you knee to knee, eye to eye? Or are you…

Prav Solanki
sitting further up and is the patient lying down? Have you swung around to the side and tried to talk to the patient from the side or even worse, behind them? Or are you looking the patient straight in the eye with a friendly smile? All of these things impact the power dynamic between you and the patient. What’s the interaction like between you and your nurse? Is it friendly? Is it informal?

Prav Solanki
Is the nurse contributing in that conversation? Or is it quite formal and rigid? You’ll know that, but the less formal it is, the more inviting that relationship between you is the more comfortable that patient will be, and the lower the power dynamic will be, okay? But the first part of your consultation, the first part of that process, is really about trying to…

Prav Solanki
Connect, trying to connect with that patient on a completely non-dental level, on a human level, right? So, you know, every sales training course will tell you this. What you want to do is you want to try and find some common ground. You want to ask the patient, how did you get here? Did you get here all right? Did you drive? Did you walk? Where did you come from? Are you off work today? Are you working at the moment? You got any kids?

Prav Solanki
going on holiday, whatever it is, just try and find something in common with the patient so that you can share similar experiences. Maybe talk about their job, tell them how interesting it is, perhaps your son, daughter, friend, family member’s got a similar job, they find it challenging. But try and strike some rapport where that patient essentially connects with you and people buy from people like them.

Prav Solanki
people buy from people that they like. So you’ve got to try and make those two things happen before you go in with your sales pitch. Once you’ve nailed that, that’s the point to try and figure out what that patient’s problem is, right? Whether you ask them a bunch of questions that revolve around you finding out the why now. Yeah, what is it that happened? People don’t wake up in the morning and think, holy crap, I’ve got crooked teeth today. Where did they come from?

Prav Solanki
There’s usually a moment, an event or a time or a point where that particular patient woke up and thought I’m gonna do something about it today. What’s triggered that? Find out. What does that patient struggle with? What is it that their smile holds them back from? Maybe try and paint some scenarios for that patient, such as if I was to get a camera out, Prav, and you were at a party, what would you do?

Prav Solanki
Some patients would run to the back. Some patients would smile with closed lips. Some patients would just do a run a full stop and make up an excuse, go to the toilet. Let those patients open up about those situations. Maybe it’s a functional issue and because of failing teeth and gum disease, they can’t eat the foods they want to eat. So give them some scenarios, ask them to talk to you and share with you what sort of foods they’d love to eat if things were better, yeah.

Prav Solanki
just understand the what’s and the why’s. But then when it comes to, and look, I’m not gonna go through the entire consultation masterclass process here, but just really see this as a bit of a discussion and just some thoughts that have been flying around in my head recently. And so if we get to the point where, okay, patients shared information with you, they’ve opened up with you, you understand the what’s, the why’s, the where’s, and you’ve built some rapport.

Prav Solanki
there will come a point in the consultation where you need to present options to the patient. And I think this is on observing more than 100 consultations, right? On observing those, what I will tell you is this is where a lot of dentists will mess it up. They’ll present too many options. They’ll say, well, this crown, you can have it in this material, that material, and that material, and this, and this, it costs this, but if you didn’t go for a crown and you went for a bridge, or if you did this, you went for a partial denture, and so on and so forth.

Prav Solanki
And this is this option, this is that option. You get to the end of it. I understand dentistry. I understand the type of dental work that gets done. I’m not a dentist, but let me tell you, if I’m getting bamboozled, your patient’s getting bamboozled. There’s absolutely no two ways about it. When I sit there and break it down, the one thing that’s really important when you’re presenting options and a plan is the art of concise communication.

Prav Solanki
You need to be really clear about the options. And I advise never present more than three. Even if your treatment plans offers more than three, tell them, look, these are my top three recommendations for you and option one is this, and this is the investment. Option two is this, and this is the investment. And option three is this, and this is the investment. How does that sound to you?

Prav Solanki
Okay, try and get some feedback on the options and the costs and what their preferences are. You know, you may have to give a load of other options, but incorporate them in your treatment plan. You don’t have to talk about them all.

Prav Solanki
You know, there was a famous experiment, it was called the famous jam experiment by I think it was Lenger and Leper. I’ve written about this on my personal blog. So if you go to prav.com and look at the personal blog and it’s about analysis paralysis, and it’s how too much choice can really discourage us from making a buying decision.

Prav Solanki
I think that’s the easiest way to describe that analysis paralysis situation. And it’s a phenomenon called choice overload. If you present your patients with too many options, research is pretty clear. It’ll put them off buying. And so if I go back to the JAM experiment, what these researchers did is in a particular shopping mall center, you name whatever, day one.

Prav Solanki
They put out a whole display of jams, 24 different flavors and varieties. And the following day, they only put out six different flavors and varieties. What was really interesting is loads and loads and loads of choice attracted more people. Oh, look at all them different jam flavors. So more shoppers actually went to sample and taste the jam.

Prav Solanki
but only 3% of people who tasted bought. Compare that to when we had six choices, 30% of shoppers bought. So when the choice is reduced, certainly in that particular experiment, they had a 10 times increase in sales. Moral of the story, try and reduce your choices. If it’s just one or two choices, present one or two choices.

Prav Solanki
Don’t sit there and rattle through all of them because you will get paralysis. Another thing that I’ve seen in a lot of consultations that I think is incredibly valuable is when you take just three smile photographs of the patient, get them to give you your biggest cheesy smile, take a shot from the front, a shot from the left and a shot from the right.

Prav Solanki
use some kind of wireless tech to beam it up via Apple TV to a massive screen in front of them and let them look at that screen. When they see their teeth on a huge screen, they’ll tell you what they need to do, right? And I’ve seen it done really, really slickly where a dentist has taken a picture and literally within seconds, it’s on the screen, right? Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, don’t put whatever, right? And…

Prav Solanki
You know, all you’ve got to say to the patient is this, looking at that picture of your teeth there, how does that make you feel? And what would you like to change? And that is your invitation to just zip it and listen to the patient and hear what they’ve got to say. Tooth by tooth, they’ll write their own treatment plan for you and it works really well. Going back to price and I know this conversation is waxing and waning between different elements of the consultation, but let’s go to money.

Prav Solanki
A lot of practitioners, I have seen this, when they think about quoting a price, they apply some taxes to the price somewhere in their head. We call this concept fiscal drag, right? So in their head, they’re gonna charge a thousand pound for that crown, but they apply a 300 pound tax before it works its way from the brain right through to their mouth.

Prav Solanki
and they say that crown’s gonna be 700 pound. And it’s this concept of, the main issue there really is lack of confidence and lack of self-worth and valuing your own work, right? It is a confidence issue, but there’s certain things you can do. You can have a price list there and it’s as bold as day there. This is what it is, right? So you’re confident talking about the prices. So that’s one element, fiscal drag, just don’t do it.

Prav Solanki
The next thing is, if you do offer finance, if you do offer flexible payment plans, every time you mention price, do bring that up. Make sure you have a little cheat sheet in front of you that says, okay, this is going to cost 4,000 pounds and on our flexible monthly payment plan, that’s going to cost you, I don’t know, 44 pounds a month for X number of months. And you know that off the top of your head. You’re not having to get a calculator out or work it out on a screen. You just know it.

Prav Solanki
becomes the habit that you consistently drill for these consultations. So, you know, that would be what I would consider to be my general advice when it comes to the core elements of what makes a really good consultation versus one that’s just average.

Prav Solanki
There’s one other thing I think that’s really important during a consultation, and that is evidence. Patients make decisions and make buying choices based on evidence, right? And so I think what’s really important is that you show patients evidence of what you can deliver. This may be in the form of

Prav Solanki
before and after images. But if you’re gonna show a patient a before and after image, do pull a little bit more effort in and show them a case that’s very, very similar to their central diastema. Here’s four central diastema cases. You know, sticking out whatever tooth, show them a sticking out whatever tooth case, yeah.

Prav Solanki
loose denture, whatever it is, you know, show them something similar to what you’ve done. So you can say to them, I have done this before and I’ve done this before plenty of times. All these before and afters you take and put them into some kind of a PowerPoint or keynote presentation and be able to beam that from an iPad straight to your screen and take them through cases. If you’ve got video testimonials, don’t let them rot on your website. Bring them into your surgery.

Prav Solanki
and let the patient watch a video testimonial of a patient who’s been in the same position as they are right now, had the same objections and dealt with those objections. We find that that’s an amazing conversion tool. And one last thing that we use in consultations is reviews. So Google reviews, Facebook reviews, we screenshot them.

Prav Solanki
put them into a presentation and we say, oh, by the way, Linda here was in the same position as you, absolutely terrified of the dentist and look at what she had to say about us. You know, it was amazing. And so those are what I’d consider to be sort of the key elements of a consultation. But there’s one thing I’ll tell you now that a lot of…

Prav Solanki
Practitioners won’t do the keep going through the motions. They do consultation after consultation after consultation. They don’t get any better. But you’ll get better if you stop to think about it. And one piece of advice I can give any clinician really is after you have, after you’ve delivered that consultation and the patient’s walked out of the room, sit and reflect. Think about what’s

Prav Solanki
could have gone better. What you could have said, what tools you could have used that you didn’t use, or forgot to get those type of dots out of the cupboard to show them the difference between a fixed ceramic brace and Invisalign or something like that, right? And just jot down in a pad, piece of paper, whatever it is, three things that could have gone better. If you get into that habit of doing that, you will naturally get better.

Prav Solanki
You’ll keep drilling that process. You’ll find you keep writing the same thing down That leads me back to the beginning of the story which is

Prav Solanki
lead generation and converting patients and getting hold of patients. Now, what I’m hearing a lot, we’re generating loads of inquiries, but we just can’t get hold of the patients. We call them, we text them, we ring them, we call them, we text them and ring them. We can’t get hold of them, we email them. How many times do you try? Twice, three times. What times a day do you try? Or always in the morning? And

Prav Solanki
What I have seen in the landscape is the landscape has changed. Before a patient would just pick up the phone or you’d pick up the phone and speak to them. You’d sell, you’d essentially sell them a consultation over the phone, whether it was a free one or a paid one, and they either book in or they don’t. What we’re hearing and seeing a lot of now is patients are now attending multiple consultations before deciding where to go.

Prav Solanki
Some of them are looking for the cheapest deal. Some of them are looking for the best deal, which may not necessarily be the cheapest deal, right? But it’s the right deal for them. And patients are generally a lot harder to get hold of. Let’s layer this on a background of higher cost of living, mortgages going up 500 to a thousand pound a month, heating bills going up, okay.

Prav Solanki
There’s not as much money sloshing around as there was when we were all paid to sit at home and do nothing and get money every month and then not have anywhere to go to spend it and then when they let us out on the streets

Prav Solanki
decided to treat ourselves and spend it on dentistry. And we had the post-COVID dental explosion, where we could drop our marketing budgets and patients were falling over after themselves to try and get into a practice and get the work done. Landscape is completely different from that now. So yeah, patients inquire. They don’t pick up the phone. They don’t respond. And then we have the conversation

Prav Solanki
Well, these inquiries are a waste of time. What you’ve really got to do is you’ve got to try and put yourself in that patient’s shoes and think, why on earth would a patient hand over their name, their phone number, their email address, and tell you their story if they weren’t even remotely interested in attending a consultation, having a conversation or exploring dental treatment?

Prav Solanki
Why on earth would they do it? I mean, is it some kind of a crazy fad or something, or are they actually interested? What we found when looking at the data within our Lead Flow CRM system is this. The time between those patients sending the inquiry and getting communication from you, the smaller that time, the more likely you are to succeed.

Prav Solanki
So are those patients interested in talking with us? I believe so. And do you know when they’re more likely to speak to us than any other time? The exact moment they send that inquiry. So if we’ve got our team literally sat there, get an alert, ping, inquiry’s gone through, and they pick up the phone there and then, their hit rate on getting through to that patient goes through the roof.

Prav Solanki
Leave it till the following morning and the following afternoon you’re playing cat and mouse, you’re playing chase. You’re trying to get hold of that patient and maybe you try and ring that patient from a landline they don’t recognise on their mobile so they think, well I’m picking that up. Maybe you try and ring them from a practice mobile and don’t recognise that and they say, I ain’t picking that up.

Prav Solanki
Maybe you try and pick them when they’re on the, call them when they’re on the school run. They’re busy, missed call, another call comes through. Ain’t answering that. So what we need to do is we need to try and increase the probability of getting hold of these patients. And the number one way in which you can do that is strike while the iron’s hot. As soon as that inquiry lands, you’re on the phone, you get through to the patient, you book them in. Failing that, your attempts should be as follows. Try them in the morning.

Prav Solanki
Try them at lunchtime. Try them after work and try them on a Saturday morning. Certainly in my clinic, we book 50% of our patients in on a Saturday morning. Not into the diary on a Saturday morning, but that’s when we have the conversations with them on a Saturday morning or after work. If your team, your infrastructure doesn’t allow you to call patients during these times, you’re missing a huge trick.

Prav Solanki
So, you know, and have some kind of robust system to automatically follow up with patients, to send them the odd text message here and there, after they’ve inquired, if they’ve not sort of proceeded to a consultation, send some automated emails to these patients, sharing things like case studies, video testimonials, screenshots of your Google reviews, for example, those sort of things. So,

Prav Solanki
Yes, is the market a tougher place today? 100%. We have just come out of what was the COVID explosion. Are patients finding it more and more difficult to get accepted for finance? 100%. We’re seeing a lot more declines at the moment. So then we’ve got to adapt, right? And I think the practices that are gonna survive are those who are capable of adapting.

Prav Solanki
to the environment, right? So what have we done to adapt? We have done for a while, but offering our own in-house finance for longer treatment plans. Thinking about the fact that even for bigger treatment plans, why don’t we just take a bit of a risk and offer our own finance plans and take a bigger deposit? Because if the naught percent subsidy is 10%, then if one in 10 patients default, I mean completely default and don’t pay anything.

Prav Solanki
you’re still in the same position. But if you’re taking a deposit, you’re way ahead of that. And you’ll find that your default rate is much, much lower than that. And by the time they finish treatment, maybe they’ve done four or five appointments plus the big deposit and there’s not a lot left. You’d have lost more with a finance company. So just some food for thought there really in sort of navigating what is the current situation that I see a lot at the moment, which is first of all, quality of inquiries.

Prav Solanki
People call them tire kickers or whatever and we’ve got to find a way to filter them and we’ve spoke about that. And I think that’s all I’ve got to rant on about today. There’s probably a lot more I could talk about, but I think I’ve said enough. That leads me to introduce the next series of episodes of Dental Leaders. So a few months ago, Payman Langroody and Rona Eskandar

Prav Solanki
connected on a new series of podcast episodes, which are called, which is called Mind Movers. And they’ve got some amazing guests that they’ve interviewed who have been recorded all in and around mental health and optimization of that. And there’s some really, really exciting interviews coming up. These are gonna be launched every Friday.

Prav Solanki
So it won’t be midweek like the usual dental leaders episode, you’ll still be getting that. But every Friday for a few weeks the Mind Movers episode is going to be live and you’ll get to hear from guests who are essentially outside the dentistry and how they overcame their…

Prav Solanki
mental health challenges or what advice they’ve got for optimizing them. So, so just a slight twist to the Dental Leaders program. But I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.