Sharyn Weiss

Think like an advertiser. Incorporating these three common advertising themes into your treatment presentations can help get your patients to ‘yes.’

Every team member has a role to play in making sure hygiene patients feel comfortable and well taken care of. Because the hygiene visit is the appointment patients are most likely to cancel, your words and tone must be consistently professional and compassionate.

Emotional intelligence is sometimes referred to EQ, as opposed to IQ which stands for intelligence quotient or intellectual intelligence. In a contest between people with book smarts versus people with street smarts, people with high street smarts or EQ are more likely to be successful, more productive, more profitable, less likely to be fired, are better at selling and make better leaders.

Meetings are microcosms of an office’s culture. They reveal the practice’s true values. Consider a dental practice where meetings are infrequent, poorly run and allow team members to be late, bored or passive. One could conclude that this behavior extends to all areas of the practice, including the treatment of patients. It would suggest that team members’ ideas and opinions are not highly valued and the processes of decision-making and problem-solving are not priorities. In contrast, an office that holds frequent, well run meetings where team members are expected to contribute likely has a culture where collaboration, team work and communication are highly prized. Which practice do you have? Which practice do you want to work in?

Every dental practice engages in some degree of customer service in order to stay in business. However, in some offices the focus on customer service takes a back seat to the focus on clinical skill. The thinking might go something like this: “Patients come here to get dental work, not to talk about how their weekend went.”