Productive Dentist Academy with Chris Moriarty

Transcript of Chris Moriarty on The Dental Marketing Guy Show

Justin: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Show. I’m Justin, the dental marketing guy and today we’ve got a really, really great guest. I’m excited to introduce this guy because, let me tell you, I told him about almost nobody in dentistry is as entertaining and lively and as enthusiastic about growing your practice. This is a really big deal guys, we’re going to talk about behavioral economics, which you know, if you’re a dentist, you know, you’re already really smart when it comes to a lot of things. I hope we can educate you on behavioral economics throughout this series and what that means for your practice. A lot of times you’ve got everything down, you’ve got the Krebs Cycle, you’ve got the chemistry, you’ve got all this different stuff down, but when it comes to psychology of your patients, we want to make sure you’re empowered to do all the right things in your marketing so Chris Moriarty.

Christ: No problem, it’s Moriarty, yep.

Justin: Alright, excellent. Chris Moriarty and, man it is such an honor to introduce you to the viewers. Would you tell us a little bit of your history? How you got into Productive Dentist Academy and all that jazz.

Chris: Absolutely, and again thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to see a townie and again my hats off to Howard and the whole gang for giving me the invite to speak at all. My history is a little bit abnormal for the dental profession. Actually I started working with attorneys and then after working with attorneys I started working with MD’s and surgeons on everything from the adoptions of technologies, preservation of relationship. But most importantly, what I found myself, being more and more surround by, was just folks who want to help people change and so in the successes that I had, I got a call from pharmaceutical in Oregon who was trying to help dentists change and help them bring technologies into their practices, help them communicate to patients, why they needed to change and before then I hadn’t really thought that much about it and that was eight years ago and I just fell in love with the industry. So in helping these practices grow I started to, the company itself started sponsoring PDA events and so all of the sudden love for science and business and economics kind of all came together. So I ended up joining them about 5 years ago and have been growing practices ever since.

Justin: And you know Productive Business Academy, you know, quite the reputation in the dental community. Could you tell us a little bit of history for those with the viewers who haven’t really heard of it though?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely, so the PDA was originally started by Dr. Bruce Baird about 12 years ago, now. He kind of hit the scene because he was producing an incredible amount of dentistry, almost in spite of where he was. He practices in a small town in Texas called Grand berry. Literally 4,000 people in the whole town but for the last 15 years he’s been working 2 days a week producing between 2 and $3,000 an hour in dentistry doing primarily bread and butter dentistry. Now to make that even more interesting the county has 45,000 people in it and his average new patient drives between 75 and a hundred miles to come and see him. So folks started, what they wanted to know was how do you do that. And so Bruce kind of took a page out of a John Kois’ playbook and if you follow John Kois clinically, his approach to treatment planning was so wonderful because he put everything on the backbone of these risk factors. Just follow the risk factors and the clinical outcome will be better for it. So Bruce did the same thing effectively with communication because every single dentists I’ve ever worked with is incredibly intelligent but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re very eloquent. They didn’t want to be sales, we didn’t want them to be salesy, we only will order them to be who they were but they didn’t know how to effectively communicate with that patient. So putting everything on the back of these risk factors made communication seamless cause we always tell folks, you know, do the patients need to work or not? Would they be in a better position, having a healthier mouth? The answer’s always yes. So how do we bring them down that road for a more comprehensive treatment? And that’s what he started teaching. Now to make a long story longer, we started with dentists because we believe that most of the change in the office was going to be driven by the leader, by the owner and that was true but who are all those people around them making that possible? It’s the team. So a couple years into it ,he wound up partnering with Vicki McManus, who now owns 6 dental practices of her own and that’s where the team put component came into play. Teaching them how to do a proper delegation training handoffs, all that kind of thing because in the PDA way, day in and day out, basically I need the doctor doing 2 things, one spending as much time as they need developing relationships with their patients and number 2, doing A+ clinical dentistry, end of list. That’s the only thing they have the mental space for everything else to be properly delegated. So between Vicki and Patty, our director of coaching, that’s what we do day in and day out. Its just help these offices run seamless because one of the things that you said earlier, very few of these offices have capacity for lack of components. They  have great teams, they have the clinical skill, they have all the parts, it’s just how do you make some subtle changes to make things more effective and that’s what behavioral economics does and that’s my passion, it’s how can we make small twist and small tweaks to make sure that when patients are deciding “Do I go to this office or your office?”, “Am I willing to drive 50miles, I never thought I’d ever drive 100miles to see a dentist.” And now they will. How do you influence that behavior to make sure patients are getting the level of care that they deserve?

Justin: You know, actually it’s funny, on Dental Town, just the other day there was a thread and a dentist was, I don’t know if he was lamenting or just remarking on it but he said that there was a tattoo artist in his, It’s funny I  didn’t think most dentists get tattoos, but he was saying there’s a tattoo artist and he was on some TV series and he’s got a line around the block for 4 months but then 100miles away there’s a tattoo artist and that’s the one that he goes to. I don’t know most dentists get tattoos so I don’t know how relatable that is.

Chris: More than we probably think.

Justin: You just can’t see them, right. They’re not on the neck.

Chris: Yes, yet.

Justin: How about the full, that. But, yeah, it’s very interesting because, you know, we’re talking about behavioral economics and maybe you could kind of talk about like what the definition of that is.

Chris: Yeah.

Justin: Talk about the psychology of consumer behavior and how that affects our viewers.

Chris: Yeah, sure, and I always tell the same story, you know, kind of what, how I found my way into behavioral economics. So it all started when I was in grad school and I was in a bar like many, many students tend to be and this gentleman started chatting, just chatting at a young lady, and just trying to have a conversation. And I’ll never forget it because he says to her like a lot of people did, he goes “don’t I know you from somewhere?” and without missing a beat, she doesn’t even look up, she goes “Yeah, and that’s why I don’t go there anymore” and it was, the whole place, just the air got sucked out of it, dropped like 10 degrees. It was icy cold, but, you know, those things happen but about 5, 10 minutes later a gentleman of almost identical description comes up, he starts up a conversation and all was well. So what was the difference? Why the second guy not the first guy? And of course the moral of the story is I became very interested in this because I was that first guy. So I wanted to know what that second guy did differently than I did to get that outcome, right.

Justin: Right.

Chris: So, that opened the door, but then all of the sudden you started seeing it just in almost every conversation you had your entire life. People have these and these impulses, they have these opinions, they have these thoughts and they don’t necessarily know where they came from. Like why will somebody pay 20% more for Nike shoes and they wouldn’t even consider Adidas, you know. Why do they love BMW but not Mercedes, you know, how do we start to factor some of these different things in. You know one component that really kind of links back to dentistry is there is a facet of behavioral economics called cultivation theory and again that’s just the study of where these thoughts, feeling, and pinions come from. And what we find is primarily a lot of the opinion that we have, the core, the root of them is actually based on fiction. A primary example that always talk about is I was a child of the 80’s. So in every movie I ever saw the bad guys were always the Russians, the Soviets. We were always against the communists and if you say the word Russia to me at any point in time, when I picture it, it’s always winter, always. Like I never picture there being summer there and that’s just where I’ve been conditioned over time- that’s Russia to me in my mind. And so when it comes to dentistry and especially even though there have been so many advances we’re still up against a lifetime of this cultivation effect. People thinking that a dental experience is going to be X especially when it comes to things like endo or some serious restorative work. They have absolutely no idea what can happen anymore. They think they know a person that something bad has happened to. We’ve all heard the story of the doctor putting his knee into a patient’s chest to do the extraction. I would love Snopes or somebody to run that story down because I can almost guarantee it never happened or happened in the 1800. But everyone seems to know someone who that happened to.

Justin: It wasn’t a dentist, it was a barber.

Chris: Oh, well, there you go. So this is all of those things where we want to start running that back down. So when imp talking to an office about marketing usually what they’re trying to do or I should say a bad habit is they instantly start to try to replicate something that they’ve seen someone else do. They look for who’s successful in dentistry, what does their marketing look like, well then I should do that. So they try to be, it becomes the sort of regurgitated copy of a copy of a copy that ultimately becomes anonymous and so in some of the things that I’ve learned, we run doctors through a variety of different exercises to kind of pull back those peel, the layers of the onion if you will, and figure out- number one, what are they really trying to do? Who do they really communicate well with? Because every dentist I ever spoke to will tell you, they’ve sat across from patients and it just clicked. They hit that rhythm, they’re laughing at the same jokes, the patient understands what their needs are and they’re able to say yes to the treatment and they’ve also had the opposite. Where that person sits down there and it is rough, it’s difficult for them to come to conclusion no matter how many times they explain it. So then what do they do? They start to backpedal now, pulling out the articular, you know, they’re pulling all these models, they’re going back to the camera and they just can’t seem to get on the same page. So some of the things we do is try to figure out what type of messaging can you put out to where we have a better shot at attracting the people who communicate like you do, who value the same things that you do and it’s pretty subtle, it’s incredibly effective when it’s done well.

Justin: That’s really interesting. And so, you know, always when you’re dealing with psychology you’re talking about something that can’t necessarily be explained in 2 seconds. So were gonna talk in bird’s eye view here but maybe there’s, could you provide like 2 or 3 quick tips, as far as like for, I’m a dentist and I’m watching the Dental Marketing Guy Show. I’m hearing what you’re saying Chris, sounds great, maybe I contact PDA in the  future but right now what I’m wondering is what can I do this week or this month or today to really, kind of jump start this product, this thought process and kind of get me started on that road of, you know. Why do people choose BMW but not Mercedes, and things like that?

Chris: Yeah, so there’s a couple of different kind of ad hoc assessments that people can do anytime. One, is have them write down, literally, so anybody listening to this you can do this right now. I want you to write down the animals’ cow, tiger, sheep, horse, and pig. You can write them down in any order that you want but when you do, after you have that list I want you to rank them from one to five, one being the animal that just jumped out most whether it be your favorite, whichever one you most drawn to. And this is an assessment that I’ve been doing for a long time to kind of figure out what’s really one of those subconscious emotional drivers of this doctor and what you’ll find on this list, and again you’re playing along at home. I’ll try to go through some of these, you can kind of see how this works, you can do it with your team, you can do it with all kinds of stuff but most of the time in dentistry tiger is number 1. And of course in grad school and all the literature we put all those electrodes on people’s brains. You say certain words, it lights up different areas. That’s how we make these connections, but the folks who pick tiger are most, they know the part of their psyche that’s most prevalent for them is this element of pride. Now pride seemingly is a good thing to have, it’s what makes sure that they’re doing top quality work, they agonize over those details and when it goes well they feel incredibly rewarded. Now what winds up happening though is in dentistry is what we call the assumption of aptitude, meaning that patients haven’t even, in no way, the ability to truly appreciate any level of clinical artistry. The only thing that can really appreciate is that they’re in pain, out of pain or if it’s just an obvious aesthetic fix or something like that. So with these doctors who spent their entire life figuring out how to do these thing and do this things well. Tobia, the dentist, and dentist these guys are amazing. When a patient says no to their treatment plan or asks the wrong question to a treatment plan. It dings him hard ad that pride, now that’s something that is fairly, of the course that’s going to happen and of course it is. I’m not seeing the reactions bad where this becomes problematic is when they go into the next operatory, they tend to carry that with them to the rest of the day and ask your team if you or somebody who was, who is a tiger,  they’ll reinforce the same thing and what we can’t do is have that happen. You got to shut that door in the DA, we call it a one-act play. Meaning as you go to that next operatory it’s a reset, cause that patient deserves you but100% you gotta remind yourself this is your tiger coming through. Now I’ll jump to the to one more. I always ask how many folks put down pig, and pig of course is the one that’s most closely associated with money and its always the smallest percentage of the room which is fascinating because what’s the name of our company? The Productive Dentists Academy, right. Production, money, increasing money and all those things, and what people find out at the end of the day that it’s actually one of the things that’s the least important to them. They want to be successful, l but feeling successful and feeling wealthier, completely two different things, in fact they’re hardly related at all. Like they want to feel appreciated, they want their patients to understand what it went through to do this work and take care of them at such a high level. The money is us a byproduct of that. One of things that Bruce will always say is that if you take amazing care of people the money will take care of yourself and for the most part that exactly what we find. So as this relates to marketing, what do we see? We see a lot of guys who are so proud of their accomplishments that when I go to their websites, what do I see? I see that long, just the acronyms, I see the whole, big alphabet behind their names because they’re so proud. I tell you to go out ask 100 patients what any of those mean.

Justin: They don’t have a clue. I mean that can be really confusing.

Chris: Yeah, I mean they don’t have, they’ve never been put in a position to be able to appreciate what that means. So then they go one step further, they put all their associations up there and whether it be the ACD or the HDD, and there’s, it just goes on and on. So here’s what we tell people to do if you are a tiger and you have those accomplishments, we absolutely want you to be proud but how do you turn that into a consumer experience that they can participate in because you can’t raise the flag and run around town saying that you’re the best. You can’t say, can you? But what we can do is teach the patients the question to ask. So I’m envisioning a blog post now or pay-per-click addresses considering implants, the questions I would ask before I did so and these questions of course are designed with intention to say I would make sure I would want the person placing the implants to have attended these courses to have done these things and all that stuff and what were dong is of course leading them down the road to where the answer is that the providing doctor or the one who’s most apt. so but it’s difficult for them to come to those conclusions but you see it being done all over the place and that’s where I really push on dentistry will be hard. You got to get out of your profession, your dentistry is about this big and we haven’t been marketing for that long. She gotta look at the guys who have been doing this forever, in fact, one good example of thing you don’t necessarily know what’s happening is we want intelligence, we want predictability. You’ve all seen like the Geico commercial or whatnot where they’ll run a quote for you and say “Hey, sometimes were the best deal in town and sometimes were not.” but what they’re really doing is checking to see who you are as a driver because the insurance company makes more money when they’re not paying claims. So when they run a driver’s profile and their higher risk, they’re going to show you a cheaper option that’s not them. They’re pushing bad clients away, you don’t think so here, to the world what their message? Oh my gosh, were benevolent, we care so much about your bottom line, but hey, we might not be the best option and that is not what’s happening to everybody. That masterful marketing because even if you’re turned away, you’re like “Hey, you know what. I went to Geico, they actually found that it was cheaper for me to go with progressive. They’re amazing.” No, they’re not, they’re not amazing one bit. They figured out that you don’t get to play on their team because you’re a bad drive so they jacked their prices up to push you out of preserve the profit margin. This is all the kind of stuff that’s happening, it’s super clever, but the average Joe on the street would never know. So those are the some of the types of thing that we’re trying to begin. We’re not trying to be subversive, you know, more than likely, but we’re just trying to do is lend to that predictability, that makes sense.

Justin: Yeah, totally, you know, that’s really incredible. I thought in a sense, I thought progressive or Geico or whoever it is that’s doing that. I thought they were just saying “Look we are benevolent and we’re so honest.” Therefore the consumer says “Oh m well they must pay claims more easily because they’re so honest on the sales process, when you become a customer it’s got to be that much better.”

Chris: Exactly, how wonderful are they and that’s great because it’s interesting when you find other people that do what I do. It all comes down to numbers and how do you tell a different story with those numbers. Another great example is if you go to your local supermarket and yours, they give you a little discount card and you swipe it every time and you get, its rather than swiping coupons, you just kind of get them and everyone loves it but what’s really happening there is they’re gathering consumer data. Then there’s guys like me who are so good at what they do that just with basic demographic information they can predict within 90% accuracy every single thing within your refrigerator, they’re that good. But with dentistry we rarely see an office that takes those steps that looks at their patient pool and number one they don’t have the time to do this 90% of the time, they’re not bad business owners that just never really thought and ask these questions. So if you’re using a, whether it’s Solution Reach or Smile Reindeer or a company like that. A lot of them have these mapping functions where they can show you exactly where every single one of your patients’ lives. They put the little pin on the map, it’s great. So they need to look at they, they need to figure out why nothing is by chance. What are you doing to attract people from that area now the knee-jerk reaction that most people do and this is wrong, well let’s just say your town is in quadrants into the Northwest, you just own it? 90% of your patients are coming from the Northwest so what they try to do is go everywhere they’re not, thinking they’re going to increase their market share. And that’s not what you do, you create a singularity. You pour where you are most successful and you dominate that thing, it’ll spill over to the other regions but you gotta know who those people are, what they’re doing, why they’re coming to you, what services they’re offering and what’s the lifestyle value with the patient. So numbers, numbers are crazy thing. You know, I love, again, looking at other industries and how we come to certain conclusions and folks listening, we’re old enough to remember when Ralph Nader wrote his book back in the 60’s about consumer protection, it’s what led to seat belts being mandated in every car. Seemed like a good idea, right. Cars are dangerous, seat belts save lives, people should have to have seat belts. That was the common reaction that your common economist, right. Now a behavioral economist got a hold of this information and he said “I predict that, yes, there will be fewer driver fatalities but there will be more accidents and there’ll be more pedestrian fatalities.” This is what he predicted and as you can imagine they tracked all this data and he was absolutely right because what did that seatbelt do, it gave them a false sense of security and made them think “I am safer now so I can take more risks.” Right, so the driver was safer but they hit more people, there were more crashes. Now what made this really interesting and I loved it is this guy’s presenting his findings and he said “I can bring automotive fatalities, accidents, and pedestrian accidents down to almost zero within one month if congress would let me.” And all of a sudden we’re like “This sounds fantastic.” And do you remember what recommendation was?

Justin:  I think it was some sort of spear pointing out of.

Chris: Exactly, it was a metal spike that came out from the steering wheel and ended about 2 inches from the driver’s throat. Likes to where all of a sudden you can inherently increase the risk and make people safer and it’s just that’s one of the ways that we try to break people out of the commonality of their thinking, you know. If I’ve got this everything’s going to be okay, well maybe not what. What do the numbers say? Now we gotta run back the numbers, every time.

Justin: That’s really incredible because I’m always preaching this. I do SEO for dentists and I’m always preaching this that SEO is not the Hail Mary you think it is. But maybe it is for some practices, you’re going to get 150 new patients per month and they’re all doing all on point, you know. For other practices you’re not getting 1 patient per year and there’s a lot of variables there so, yeah, that’s really incredible, you know is that analogy I would’ve never thought that would relate to dental but that’s an incredible analogy and it all has to do with , you know, the amount of responsibility one person takes. So the dentist takes responsibility for following up on those calls the SEO brought them. Yeah, he’s going to get more patients, but if he doesn’t do that, if it’s kind of like the seat belt in a way, well I’m doing SEO so.

Chris:  ..So I guess it’s ok, and yes, that’s exactly what we find is this lack of culpability in this lack of pass through when it comes to the tracking. And I made this mistake myself, this actually was maybe 2 years ago, we had a client call up and just going to walk into some numbers, what’re they doing that we don’t know about, that kind of thing. And they were spending, I want to say it was somewhere around $1200 a month on Yellow Pages, okay. Yellow Pages has done some great things for people but I’m looking at it and I’m like “According to my numbers here you’ve got 10 patents from this all year.” and I reacted, I said “Dump it, get it out of there, should’ve caught this earlier.” I even apologized to them while were going to figure out what other avenue they should go on and then actually one of the co-worker said “Woah, whoa, whoa. Who were those 10 patients?” and lesson learned, we checked it out about held of them were folks who did some considerable amount of chemistry and that’s the whole thing where were so emotionally driven and that’s what a big part, of course, behavioral economics is we got to get ourselves out of this behavior patterns of reacting to those different things. Accept and develop proper plans that get us out of our own way and get more predictability. One example that I talked about in my lectures, somebody who knows their industry inside and out, believe it or not is the airlines. You know, we talked about the author talks about the failures, everyone talks about the failures and  of course pull that back from the clinical sense and I want to know when we get at bats in case presentations where we are falling short in every which way. And so one of the things we talked about earlier was this delegation. You know, the team, well I don’t care if its international communication, external communication, internal marketing or external marketing, you gotta have something backing that up. If you look at the airlines again, if they even had a 1% failure rate it would mean 1, excuse me, it would mean 2 crashes at every major airport every single day at 1%. How do they prevent that? Redundancy, they got back ups on backups on backups and that’s been one of the biggest problems with marketing, whether it be SEO or web or direct mail or whatever. Everyone just kind of goes, they throw that dart against the wall, they put their seat belt on and say “I’m doing marketing” and then they take off. There’s nothing backing that up, there’s nothing leading the how and why. Where are the layers, where is that redundancy because if you have one marketing initiative, you’re going to be 100% successful or 100% that it’s gonna fail. So I mean it’s one of those deals where you got to look at it and kind of get these influences from mother avenues, from mother industries.

Justin: Yeah, and that’s incredible you now. We had Dr. Christopher Phelps on the show, he talked about diversification. We were talking about tracking and diversifying and how, you know, really when you leave no stone unturned. You’re going to find the opportunity, but if you do leave one stone unturned that could be the one thing and I talk to dentists about this. Yeah, I mean, I talk to dentists about this, about SEO, they’re like “Well, what does it take, what’s it gonna take, how long is it gonna take.” Well, it could be the very first thing we do, we can edit that title tag and in 3 seconds you’re ranked number 1 and you’re getting your patients or we might have to go down the list 300  different things. It just depends, you know, so, but for those dentists who are like, you know, “Hey you know how long is this going to take?” You know, we’re 2 months in and we projected 9 months and they’re like “You know we’re not going to see, like well we’ve still got 7 months worth of things to try.” and then the next month, boom, ranked up high. You know, because it was just, it happened to be one thing, who knows what that one thing.

Chris: Well and keep in mind this is something that I always remind them is there, usually in any town at the dental office or a dentist themselves or one of the more successful people around. So you kind of get some clout, you get a little bit of extra leverage in certain arenas. What I have to remind them all the time, love or hate Google, you can’t buy your way to the top, at least not effectively. What I gotta remind them all the time is that it’s in their best interest. We have an office up in Alaska who they were paying $14,000 a month to some company to get the number one on Google, okay and as you can tell since I’m telling the story they weren’t there so they called us and they said “Hey, what’s the deal? We’re paying all this money and we’re not number 1.” I mean like yourself if there was a magic bullet for that there was a solution, believe me we all have it. So we looked at it though and what we found was sometimes it just comes down to hustle. They were getting out reviewed about 19 to 1, they had very little social media presence, things were just linked, they weren’t active. They weren’t putting up original content, all those things that Google tells us that they want. So we said, we told them as a matter of fact, like, I can appreciate the tactics that they’re trying but believe it or not it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing that you can’t buy your way to the top otherwise the larger entities and I don’t think they’re good or bad or otherwise. There just a different style but the heartland of the world of Pacific’s, the Midwest, you know, all those guys would simply just buy out the top slots and Google has luckily  came to the conclusion that that’s not in the world’s best interest, you know. Originality should rise to the top, authenticity should rise to the top, and hopefully they never change that.

Justin: Yeah and that’s what they need to do in order to make Google successful is providing the best search results as possible. I always ask dentists, I say “Well, why do you deserve to be on the top of Google?” Like well.

Chris: I like that.

Justin: There like “Well, cause we’re paying, Justin, that’s why.”

Chris: And its true, and all these things help, you know, and it’s one of those, we also get gentleman who might be a little bit later in their career where marketing really wasn’t part of the game and they’re very, very frustrated about full parking lots in their town and because we’ve gotten this misconception that the marketing chief instincts and I always tell people poor marketing or poor advertising, cheapest things. What they’re fearful of is participating in this race to the bottom, everything is going to be cheaper, faster. Who can just give away whitening fast enough or whatever and I go and I’m, generally like us we tell people that often what marketing is doing is just letting people know about the level of quality and level of service that you provide to your community. We had a gentleman down in a smaller town in Missouri who did not want to market, not want a website, did not want anything, is going to grow his practice kind of within his philosophies we’ll say. Well, he has a very, very high tech office and of course he found out actually through church that a member of his congregation had driven almost 100 miles to have a procedure done that they could have done, probably had a better quality in their town and he was telling the story was very frustrated on behalf of the patient they had to do that. He felt bad that they had to do that and I said “Well, doctor how could they possibly have known, you know that’s what marketing is. I go otherwise you’re leaving it 100% to chance that this person just happened to have been talking about their dental health to somebody who happened to be one of your patients, who even happened to know what that machine was. That’s too much chance right there, I mean, that’s part of what this is. This is a service to your community, gotta let people know what they’re doing so part of what I do, I fly down to Cerritos, California, part of the LANAP trainings from time to time with the millennium, it’s the same thing. If you’ve seen somebody have conventional gum surgery, it’s a tough surgery and it’s a tough recovery. LANAP is exponentially easier on the patient, the results are undoubtedly better, but I always ask these guys, you know, what’s your plan to you know, market yourself so that can spread the word (inaudible 31:54) and $10,000 laser. I’ve come up with a better plan and of course that’s where guys like you and me can come in and help but it’s not just about body count.

Justin: Oh yeah, yeah. And you know I always tell dentists, I say “Look being good at dentistry is doing the same make rounds, it’s getting the CEREC, its learning those skills but good marketing is actually a really revolutionary concept. It’s telling people that you do it.

Chris: Well, yeah, I mean to say the least it’s interesting. Another example that people can run at home is sometimes we’ll say if your practice was a car, what type of care would it be. And of course they knew a lot for a little bit and some people are, their faster, there speedy, their Porsches. Other people will see “No we’re more outdoorsy, we’re like a jeep with the roof off and we have fun” and what we’re really looking for in these questions if of course tonality. You know people who always want big, like SUVs and carriers, those are people who tend to really enjoy the community aspect so their story, their narrative might really be that generation of patients, that type of story. But every now and again more than you would probably guess, somebody says our practice would be a Rolls Royce and they’re dead serious and I appreciate what you’re trying to say, what they’re trying to say is nobody takes care of patients on the level that we do but what I really stressed them is number one, that’s not authentic because if I come to your office I better be greeted by a guy in white gloves and you better have solid gold toilets or you are not a Rolls Royce but the reality is you don’t have to be Rolls Royce. We run a lot of these exercises and I use the example of a BMW and Kia and Walmart, Nordstrom’s and I always end things with “I don’t care if your Nordstrom, I don’t care if you’re Walmart because both of those companies make billions with a beep. What matters is that you’re you and only you and only trying to be you and trying to attract people that you get along with and just people who want to meet you and want that type of care. You know its again, I get people, I push people to get outside their industry and one of the things I’ll do in the seminars is I’ll wave my magic wand and I’ll say “Okay for the next 10 minutes nobody here is involved in dentistry anymore and in fact you are all on car dealerships, nice ones. BMW car dealerships.” I tell them and everybody nods “Yeah, I like that, I like that.” I said “business is good to boot, you’re doing great. Now one day you wake up and across the street they’re building a Kia dealership. How do you feel about that?” Now most people get where I’m going so they’ll say “I’m not really worried about it.” And I said “Well why are you not worried about the Kia dealership?” and the answer is pretty obvious because most people on their way to buy a BMW or more than likely not going to take a hard right onto the Kia lot and steal that business but maybe, just maybe some other way to get a Kia might do a little window shopping or BMW might pick up some business but they’re not really worried. So then I have them raise their hands and I say “Now how many people in this room, I’m curious, have owned both a BMW and a KIA? Preferably at the same time.” and of course the answers are almost nobody, in fact I can’t think of anybody who has so I said “Well explain this to me then. How is it that I could give anybody in this room a piece of paper and you can easily write down 10 differences between BMW and Kia? However, nobody here has ever owned both? How is that possible?” and that answer of course is marketing. The answer of course is that both of those companies have spent millions upon millions of dollars to make sure that everyone knows the difference. But again the moral of the story is I don’t care if your BMW, I don’t care if you’re Kia because they both make billions. Now the idea is to figure out who you are, what’s the community that you serve and just serve the hell out to be the best at that, you know, and that’s the real trick. So, I mean, you can tell that Kia is trying to have some nicer automobiles, but they’re not trying to be BMW, they’re really not and I go “that’s why they’re playing in their successes that’s why they’re  still one of the fastest growing car companies in the country.” So that’s some of the modeling that I do, get out forget its dentistry because every time a new office pops up in somebody’s community, there’s this reaction, there’s this visceral, emotional reaction. “Oh there’s always competition, like oh, corporate dentistry is driving us out.” and its all the sky is falling sort of attitude. Now reminder, well, are you the BMW dealership or the Kia dealership? And I don’t care but who are they in this scenario, walk through that, just come up with a plan to make sure people know the difference.

Justin: Absolutely, absolutely and you know some of the most bait, and this is really, really good stuff. This is why I wanted to have you on the show. Your delving deep into the psychology and I know this is just the surface level but your delving deep into the psychology of, you know, just what people think and the why marketing actually affects people’s perceptions of things and you know a lot of times I speak with dentists and it’s not even that deep of level. It’s, they have a CEREC and none of their patients know it. So they go down, they go to doctor down the street and he advertises same day crowns. So here we are, you know.

Chris: I love it and this, the CEREC’s a super fun tool, you know, it’s one of the things that depending on where people are, it’s interesting who they’re actually competing with. Soon, I’ll say offices and maybe more affluent areas, they’re competing with plastic surgery, all the discretionary spending on aesthetics is going to go into some of the other avenues that might be competing against a facelift or liposuction or whatever this may be. So we actually ran a campaign for a gentleman in Aspen. We had a CEREC, it’s a cool piece of technology and it was a billboard and the billboard said doctor so and so come in and ask me about my time machine, nothing will make you look 20 years younger, faster. Now that’s an interesting use of technology because nobody knows what the CEREC machine looks like by and large all they know, and you’ve seen this as you’ve seen people doing, you know, I don’t care if its, you know, 5 units, 6 units, 8 units, whatever it is but there waling out of that the same day smile situation and they easily look 20 years younger. So that was an innovative us of technology, that spoke more toward what people in that area were looking to spend those discretionary dollars on so it’s interesting to think about some of those things is just a different way and who’s really your competition. Not other dentists necessarily.

Justin: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s great because, you know, if someone, dentistry is depending on who you are. It has a different level of value, you know. A Hollywood actress is going to have a different level of aesthetics that she wants versus someone who’s working a blue collar job a then not just in demographics but the psychographics of the person, you know. You talk about the psychology, 1 person might have a career reason for wanting a nice smile but then another person might have a career reason but the still not care.

Chris: Let me tell you, and it’s interesting, you know, we’re all victims of doing this and one way or another in our lives is kinda of doing that wallet biopsy assuming what that value is for the patients. When it comes to the marketing you’re using the right, if you’re using the right bait to attract the right fish, all those fish might look very different and I can tell you from experience with Dr. Baird’s office. We’ve been staffed by more people driving a crystal blue Mercedes than we have the folks working in the pecan orchards. It’s like you would just never, you never know but we know the message we’re putting out and the message we’re putting out is that it’s a plus clinical dentistry. Of course in your area that you can afford, whatever it may be, you know, but it’s one of those things like they came to us because we put this message out. Once we come in through that door we can only assume that they’re there because they fit a profile that we design so it’s one of those things we’re all guilty of. Its, we’re all guilty of those reactions and that’s what behavioral economics is all about, you know. How do you get off that, fall back to the numbers and trust the plan.

Justin: Excellent, well this is great stuff, you know, great introduction to PDA, Productive Dentist Academy. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here. Man, is there like a first step? I’m a dentist watching this show. Is there like a low commitment way, like some sort of like self-assessment on the website?

Chris: Yeah, we try to go a little bit further meaning that without looking under the hood, it’s hard for us to give just real guidance. More than anything we want to be a trusted advisor. So what folks will do, and in fact how I spend most of my day is just doing what are called assessments. Where somebody will call us to set up a time, usually takes between 20, maybe 30 minutes and I can build you a big beautiful financial dashboard. Pull that information out seamlessly from your server if you want us to. But more importantly, I really want to get down to what you’re trying to do. What’re you trying to build, what have you tried and what are some strategies with or without us that you could put in place today to kind of help them move that dial and take better care of the people in your community. That’s what I always recommend and of course as a thank you to the folks who are listening and if you ever want to come to our productivity workshop which is our flagship workshop, the next ones in September, give us a call. We’re going to do a 30% discount for anybody who listened to us, we’d love to have you.

Justin: Excellent, thank you, Chris. That’s great and man I’m definitely going to have some of my clients check this out. I think this is an incredible resource, you know, and you’ve got Dr. Bruce Baird who has a proven model. I know you’re on the lecture circuit, where can everyone find your, let’s just get the website.

Chris: Yeah, of course. It’s just going to be productivedentistacademy.com. Of course it’s got all of our events, it’s got some different resources and most importantly it’s the fastest way to get a hold of me but whether you’re a scratch start, mid-career looking to just do things differently, ramp up to sell, whatever it is. Typically my first goal is to show people how we can slow the offices down while increasing production, that’s one of the things that breaks my heart about dentistry is they believe that the answer is always more, more, more, More hours, more patients, more technology, more over and it’s just not true but what we really want to design a practice that they can live in and grow until the day they turn the keys over so give me a call, I’d love to show you guys how we might do it.

Justin: Excellent. Man, I think this goes rally well with what I’m always trying to do and the purpose of this show is to help dentists and I just tell dentists “Look I’m not everything to every dentist, you know, I’m feeling search engine optimization where we’ll build on those websites, we’re shooting these videos, doing the photography but that is only one piece of the puzzle. What you guys are doing is huge, this is really huge so thank you so much for appearing on the show.

Chris: Absolutely, thank you for having me and again we really appreciate it and we look forward to hopefully doing it again sometime.

Justin: Excellent, excellent. And tell Bruce, tell Dr. Baird, he’s allowed on the show.

Chris: Oh, he’d love it, he’d love it. Between him and Vicki like we’ll be here every week if you want.

Justin: We’ll give it some time. Let’s see how many people get to sign up to the seminar, maybe you’ll be incentivized but yeah, guys if you have any questions you know where to reach Chris. You know where to reach me, if you see this on Dental Town, Dental Marketing Guy blog, wherever you see this on social media check this out on YouTube. This is really good information and, you know, if you know someone who might be interested in learning a little bit of these tips, these ideas, these concepts, really good narratives here.  Really like it Chris so feel free to reach out and ask any questions you have. Thanks for watching the Dental Marketing Guy Show.’

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About the Author - Justin Morgan

Justin Morgan is the CEO and founder of what most of us affectionately refer to as the “DMG.” From all circles within the dental industry who address dental marketing as a topic, Justin Morgan is the dental marketing guy that everyone keeps talking about.

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