In this little business blog for a Sunday evening, I wanted to start to touch on the principle of sales and sales in healthcare and what was once known as 'ethical sales'.
Ethical sales seem to have received a really bad reputation as a title for selling, but it's really difficult to square this circle, isn't it? Because for those of us who work in any part of private or independent healthcare, selling is fundamentally essential.
Selling in healthcare became difficult in the United Kingdom, probably due to the development of the NHS. Practitioners didn't need to talk about money anymore and still don't need to in the NHS very much in dentistry, not at all in hospital-based medicine. So, skills did not develop, and an embarrassment was created about the possibility of selling things to patients.
Collecting money for the work that you did became something dirty, something which seemed to be immoral or difficult, and it was certainly an attitude I had when I exited my hospital-based jobs and entered into practice, having to ask people for money for private healthcare.
This is something that many (most?) dentists find difficult, and so they reach out to consultants to teach them how to approach 'ethical sales'.
We have wrestled with this over the last 15 years at the Clinic to try to get the best setup, the best description, and the best philosophical understanding of what we do when we enter into a social contract with patients where money needs to be exchanged for goods and services.
This year at the Clinic, we are developing a sales handbook; it will take that long to develop it, but it's in keeping with The Campbell Clinic handbook, the HR handbook, which has gained so much attention over the past two years and was constructed mostly by our genius MD Hayley Brown. If you want a copy of the HR handbook, you can download it here.
In terms of the sales hand below, this is a large project, but mostly based around the principle that 'we are all selling to everyone all the time'.
If you have never read To Sell is Human by Dan Pink, there is a link to it here. Get it as an audiobook and listen to it starting tomorrow in your car or walking your dog. It's a fundamental, game-changing book that helps you understand why it's important for you to have a handle on what your sales are and what your sales-selling and non-sale-selling differences are.
One of the things we did with sales in the Clinic was to develop a principle, a format for consultations, and then this was distilled down into the Consultation Masterclass, which happens on the 7th of March this year.
If you're interested in this, you'll be able to get it online or face-to-face. Click here, get in touch and let us know.
The Consultation Masterclass is a route through a one-hour consultation (adjust the timings for your own Clinic) to take you through a process of building a bridge to trust and understanding with the person you're sitting in front of before technically examining them and then before discussing and exploring possible options to help them and to provide them with products which removes their problem and gives them a better quality of life.
The final stage is how we follow up and use technology to make sure that we don't miss anything or let our service drop.
Fundamental, though, to the Consultation Masterclass is the personalities that we identify in patients and how best to talk to them and approach them in relation to different scenarios.
While it would take too long in this blog to explore all different personalities, let me choose two for you to show you the different understanding of how you might approach a patient who you've spoken to for 10 to 15 minutes and realise that they have specific needs and requirements.
1) Is the CEO personality (this person does not need to be a CEO).
For that person to come in and be identified by you means to understand that they trust or do not trust in a very short period of time.
They're generally in a hurry, and they generally do not have too much difficulty with financial elements related to your treatment. If they trust you, they want you to move on; no flimflam, no wasting your time, just get on with the treatment you recommend and make me better to get back to my work as quickly as possible.
Contrast this, though, against number 2.
2) The accountancy personality.
If you gloss over the financial elements of the treatment, the details of the appointments, or the explanations related to that with an accountant's personality, they will go elsewhere for their treatment.
Accountant personalities are detailed individuals (they don't necessarily need to work as an accountant); they want everything to add up correctly, and they're almost spectrum thinking.
In a consultation, if you identify both of those types of people, you'll be able to tailor your consultation (your sales interaction, actually) to the personal requirements of those individuals.
The funny thing about this, though, if you work in the United Kingdom, is that this ties in beautifully with all the regulations and laws around Montgomery consent.
First, we must understand in order to be understood.
It's so important to start to access these types of knowledge streams as dentistry moves away from state and government-funded dentistry and into the world of private dentistry, where we are all selling all the time, and if we're unable to sell ethically, we will die.
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