You can easily improve your communication skills to increase your treatment sales, your income and your enjoyment of dentistry, so what’s stopping you, Barry Oulton asks.
Over 65% of dentists have struggled to communicate with their patients, and more than 60% sometimes found that patients hadn’t understood what they were being told, according a recent study conducted by The Confident Dentist Academy.
What’s more, almost two-thirds felt that they could make more money if they just improved their communication.
Despite this, half of the dental professionals surveyed had never invested in communication training despite wanting to, and almost all of those who had training in the past believed that they needed more.
A simple solution
Do you think learning these skills might be difficult or onerous? If so, you’re not alone. But actually, it’s easy to achieve and it can be a lot of fun!
With the negatives out of the way, consider instead that having these abilities in your back pocket will increase your confidence, language skills, influence and rapport.
Investing in this kind of education will improve your ability to communicate and will be time very well spent – offering value that far surpasses any initial outlay.
Dr Rajen Nagar a dentist at Kiss Dental, having attended The Confident Dentist Academy’s ‘Influencing Smiles’ communication course, followed up to say: ‘I had 10 new patient consults this week for a variety of cosmetic treatments and every one of them signed up on the day! It’s amazing what impact taking just a few tips from the course has had on my everyday communication and rapport with my patients.’
The key is rapport
As dentists, our job is to serve our patients to the best of our ability. If our patients like and trust us, then we are serving them well, which ultimately means we are serving ourselves and the business better.
This can be achieved through rapport; someone who likes you will be more likely to follow your advice and recommendations, refer a friend or talk positively about you.
Rapport occurs when you match someone else’s behaviour, physiology, words, thought processes, or even their values or beliefs. In some way, you enter into their ‘model of the world’ and get a sense of forming a ‘bond’ with the other person.
We all do this subconsciously to some degree, but there will be times when a person who is important to your success is not on your ‘wavelength’, and you will need to work at building the relationship with them.
Since rapport is the forerunner to effective communication, learning how to build and maintain rapport is a highly valuable skill. Ultimately, your success (or failure) depends upon your ability to guide patients effectively as to what is best for them and this requires the ability to build rapport rapidly.
To learn how to do this and so much more to best effect, on 20 and 21 September 2019, The Confident Dentist Academy will be in Birmingham with its two-day communication training course. And, for one time only, every paying dentist is invited to bring along an assistant or practice manager free of charge, to support whole-practice training.
Priced at just £989 per dentist, including dinner and accommodation for Friday night, plus your assistant or practice manager attending the course free of charge, can you afford not to invest in communication training with The Confident Dentist Academy?
For further information, please visit www.theconfidentdentist.com, call 0333 220 2447 or email [email protected].
