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A short series on the Business of Dentistry: Part 4 - Marketing and Sales

In this fourth part of my short series on the business of dentistry over Christmas this year, I want to cover a little insight into marketing and sales in the same piece of writing.

That is almost impossible because these are two enormous areas of your business and areas that I could write about all day. Still, the thing I think is most important to understand about marketing and sales is they are, in effect, the same thing.

This will surprise some people, but not those heavily involved in either aspect because one cannot work without the other.

Marketing and sales exist on a continuum, with pure marketing on the far left-hand side and pure sales on the right-hand side, but a grey, amorphous area in the middle where both meet and they cannot be separated.

It's why if you have someone providing a sales service within your practice (and we are all providing sales all the time), they must be completely in tune with anyone who might be providing the marketing.

Even in the smallest of businesses, this is essential (and often easier because it's often the same person doing both jobs).

When your practice gets a little bigger, and you have someone designated to marketing and someone else in sales (for dentistry, that would be a marketing assistant and the treatment coordinator), they need to be tuned to what is happening so they can get the maximum impact out of the investment that's being made.

Marketing is an enormous scientific subject now, so you can never stop learning aspects of marketing into new ways to work and leverage the brand of your business and the story you have to tell.

But it's all useless if you create enormous amounts of leads and then no one takes up treatment.

So the process that guides people from first being interested in what you might provide to actually becoming a patient who trusts you and having work done is one that you can design yourself over a longer period and then make sure everyone in your business is trained in a way that allows them to represent you to the best possible level.

From my perspective, I have always hated the concept of sales in healthcare.

It was Chris Barrow who taught me this; it was Chris Barrow who showed me my feelings in sales and finance (I talked about my financial feelings in the previous business blog).

But for sales, it took me the book by Dan Pink, 'To Sell the Human', which really showed me that sales were not some filthy under-the-table thing that I should not talk about; it's something that we're engaged in all aspects of our life, even if we work as a volunteer or for charity, or for any other reason.

Understanding this and the fact that what sales does takes the marketing message and brings it to life for people is perhaps one of the most insightful things we can learn about marketing and sales, not being separate entities but being one reflection of the same thing, just in slightly different directions.