At the very heart of it all, particularly in private dentistry, but actually in every aspect of dentistry, Dan Pink was right: 'We are all selling all the time'.
Some people don't get that; they don't understand it; they think because they're an NHS consultant in the hospital or a senior house officer doing what they're told, they believe they are not selling all the time. They make the mistake of thinking that everything they do isn't a job interview, a chance to showcase themselves, or a chance to project 'their brand' in the world.
The essence of sales is connection, and in actual fact, it's connection with the right people.
Can you find someone who has a problem that you have the ability to solve, allow them to trust you, and then solve their problem (delight them) so they will tell other people that you can solve their problem? Can you make them feel as though what they have just received is of greater value than that which they have paid?
The essence of sales is emotional; everyone needs to feel they're getting a deal, higher quality for the money they've paid, a lower price for what they've got, treated by 'the man/woman' treated at 'the place'.
When you begin to understand that all sales are emotional, and what people are actually looking for on the deepest level is a connection and validation, and to be part of a group that's like them, it becomes easier to start to give people what they want.
Of course, this gets complicated because you can 'game the system', and that's where the ethics of sales comes in: only selling what you can actually sell, only trying to attract the people who you really should attract and then realising that there is not an infinite marketplace, and that really you will reach a ceiling, and in order to go past that ceiling, you will have to improve your offering, improve your quality, increase the number of products that you sell, or find some other way of making it more valuable to the people who come to see.
We have to be thinking about this all the time, or at least most of the time - never selling to people something that they shouldn't buy, but also never letting people down on service so that they have the opportunity to experience a service from you that will make their life better.
It takes a lot of thinking about this, especially as you start to build your business.
For all of us, when times get tough, the urge is to sell anything to anyone, but that is to destroy what you started and what you built.
It takes a long time to build something like this, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Are you ready?
Let's get started.