So this week, I've been mostly thinking about sales again for one reason or another at the Campbell Clinic, the group here—including the academy and the clinic work—we're working on a sales handbook for our team, as with all of these things, this will effectively convert into a course, as we find out everything we can about what we need to know, and then transfer it to our team and then hopefully to other teams if people are interested, and so it means thinking about sales at a really high level, because if we're not selling and selling all the time now then we are dying.
Currently in the United Kingdom, we're in the midst of an economic shock, what they call a cost-of-living crisis, which to me seems the same as austerity or all the other names it's had since 2008. It was worsened enormously after the COVID pandemic, and so many people sat at home doing very little, and the government paid for it, and now we have to pay it back. For us as a business, that's hit us pretty hard: 6% on corporation tax, 2% on National Insurance contributions, all the rest of the stuff related to this. Trying to keep our team's wages on the up, while the government freezes
the tax boundaries, then the cost and inflation rate increase, and how that affects us.
We're an extraordinarily well-managed business financially (and that's never because of me; it's because of other brilliant people), but the fundamental basis here is that we need to sell stuff, or else we will die.
People will begin to notice they sell less, then panic, and it's harder to sell when you're panicking. Sales, at its very least, is an emotional connection and interaction with a person who has a problem and is seeking someone to sort that problem, maybe your car has broken down, or your boiler has burst, maybe you've decided you want your house to be bigger, or you'd like to go on holiday, maybe you're picking a university for your child; maybe you're trying to convince your wife you're a good person.
It's all sales.
Understanding how that works in healthcare for people who want to provide ethical, integrity-driven healthcare is complicated, which is why people struggle to teach it, vocalise it, or write about it.
At the very heart of it in healthcare, you never ever want to treat a patient who doesn't need the treatment. You never want to apply a solution to a patient who didn't have the problem in the first place (think turkey teeth or composite bonding). So, what you need to do is attract a larger number of patients, some of whom you're not going to treat, because you're going to tell them they don't need the treatment they're seeking.
For other people, they have problems they didn't realise, so part of the sales is providing a full and comprehensive assessment of someone and then discussing how you might be able to help them with other problems you've identified that they didn't know they had.
An example of that recently would be a patient called H., whom I saw in the clinic probably a year ago. She's in her early 30s, with two children, fit and healthy, and in a good place in life. She has a missing upper front tooth, which has been replaced by a denture for many years, and she is hugely embarrassed by this H. wanted to be rid of the denture with a fixed restoration and was considering the possibility of an implant or a fixed bridge.
When I saw H in the practice, it was first necessary to understand where she was and who she was. She's massively affected by the confidence impact of losing an upper central incisor, and her teeth are now a focal point of confidence and emotion, so we were able to photograph things, do a full examination, and talk to her. But she also has a space on the top left, and some interproximal spacing, and so I was able to chat to her (after we'd built trust together, sharing personal information), and ask her how she felt about the spaces—both the upper left and the space at the front.
She basically decided that if she had a magic wand (one of my favourite phrases) she would straighten, fill the gaps with fixed teeth, and go into a maintenance plan to keep things great for the rest of our life, if possible. She was surprised that we would be able to do that for a price she could afford and was prepared to pay, but if the sales process is done kindly and properly and the connection is met, people often feel that they're getting greater value than the cost of the treatment itself, and are prepared to pay at a higher level for something that they wouldn't have paid for when they entered into the conversation in the first place.
After we'd presented this in a beautiful way and sent the patient away to consider things, our treatment coordination team had touched base once or twice on the telephone (at an interval the patient felt was totally acceptable). She returned to see her clinical nurse specialist to have her diagnostics carried out, a clinical nurse specialist has all the time in the world to talk through the plan, discuss with the patient, build the trust and empathy in the clinic, and explain the process. This is how sales and healthcare should work, we think. I wonder if that's how it works where you are.
In the background to this, you're counting everything to see how you're doing—conversion rates, wait times, costs of treatment, etc. But that sits behind the patient in a place that they don't need to see.
It's a complicated thing, sales. We're nearly finished with the handbook, and then the handbook will be included in all the courses that we provide. If you're interested in knowing more about it or understanding sales, we're just about to hit the sales module of a digital dental entrepreneurial programme in conjunction with the ITI.
You can't get on this one, but you could get on the next one.
Click here to get back to us if you're interested.
See you soon.
Leave a comment