I have come a long way in my understanding of sales in healthcare since Chris Barrow shouted at me over a nice Jamie's Italian lunch, "You think sales is an STD!".
Chris was right; I basically did at that stage.
My answer to sales at that point was to talk to a patient in a 30-minute consultation and tell them what I thought they should have; I would then tell them that I would send them a letter, and if they asked me for an indication of the cost, I would say, "No, I don't want to estimate it here verbally because I might get it wrong, and you might be disappointed" (I was terrified to talk about the cost to patients).
I would send patients a letter with the cost included, ask them to contact me if they wanted an appointment, and never speak to them again.
I've got no idea what my conversion of patients was, but it was pretty low because patients were too busy, they needed support, they needed help in deciding what they might want to do, they needed to modify their plan based on their lifestyle or their income or what was possible - I never gave them that I never helped them through the process.
For a long time now, I've been investigating how to talk about sales, what I think of sales, and how I want sales to be done at The Campbell Clinic and Campbell Academy.
It's impossible to avoid sales if you work in a business but as Dan Pink so brilliantly told us in 'To Sell is Human' it's actually impossible to avoid sales if you're alive.
We're all selling all the time in lots of different ways; it's just that sales itself was made to feel like a dirty word because double-glazing salesmen would barge themselves into people's houses who were elderly and then not leave until someone had 'signed on the dotted line'. It doesn't have to be that way.
There was a fad during the Noughties and the twenty-tens in which dentists were encouraged to suggest to people that they release the equity in their houses to pay for their dental treatment.
"F*ck off".
That's entirely a patient's choice, not in any way a dentist's or a clinician's suggestion.
If you decide to cash in your monopoly hotels to pay for healthcare, that's entirely up to you, but it is not up to me to suggest or tell you that. That's where sales started to go wrong in dentistry.
And so, what do I think sales is?
I honestly feel that it is our professional ability to guide people through a very difficult decision-making process with many options that make it possible.
I believe sales is inextricably linked to Montgomery consent.
I believe it's essential for us to get inside the patient's head as best we can and see the world through their eyes.
I think in the olden days, that was called empathy.
In any event, now that I have a little bit of clear water and space and some more amazing manpower and intellect in the clinic (one of my great friends, Stuart Reekie, has joined us as a business development and IT director), we will be working on the sales strategy and the whole sales project for The Campbell Clinic Group, including the Academy.
In essence, that means we will define what sales means to us before deciding what exactly the process looks like and how we never, ever let a patient down for service, but we never, ever badger a patient to have something that they don't want or need.
We'll then decide what tools we'll use, all the technology that we can use to help show people what's possible for them as they seek solutions to their problems.
Finally, we'll measure it so that we can see where we are failing, where we are not meeting the patient's needs, and how we can improve.
We will turn this into a handbook for sales at The Campbell Clinic Group, much like the extraordinary HR handbook that Hayley Brown developed (If you'd like a copy of that hit, reply to this email or download it here).
Once we've developed this into our own handbook and used it, it will become a course like the Consultation Masterclass or the Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program or the management training scheme that we've now launched for our own management group here at the practice, which will also become a course moving forward.
In the next five years, we will offer extensive courses on vision, values, and mission setting, financial management and dental practice, marketing and advanced marketing for dental practices, HR and leadership, sales, and strategy and strategic planning.
We'll be setting these up as a range of courses that you can drop in and drop out of. You can pick in as you want, but it starts with us designing, developing, prototyping, and then moving along.
See you there.
Blog Post Number - 3957