CASE PRESENTATION: The Fulcrum of Your Practice By John H. Jameson, DDS & Cathy Jameson Ph.D.
The case presentation is the fulcrum of your practice. It really doesn’t matter how well you perform the dentistry itself, make a financial arrangement, schedule an appointment or anything else, if a person doesn’t first decide that they want the dentistry. People buy what they want long before they buy what they need. So, there’s your ultimate challenge: helping people want what you believe they need. How you present your recommendations makes all the difference.
PLAN
The doctors and/or teams who carefully organize and plan their cases do a better job of presenting, take less time doing so and achieve much better results. Data shows some interesting statistics related to people who are involved in sales. The people who are most successful in sales spend about 40% of their time presenting and demonstrating, about 10% of their time doing administrative functions and about 50% of their time qualifying and planning. In comparison, other people in various sales positions who are much less successful spend about 80-90% of their time presenting and demonstrating. The point here is that if you spend quality time planning the case and preparing for the presentation, you will spend less time in the presentation itself and have more people agreeing with your recommendations.
PREPARE
Once you have gathered and studied a patient’s appropriate clinical and personal data, it is time to prepare for your presentation. Carefully plan the case: what you want to do to accomplish optimum health or appearance, where you want to start, how you will proceed on sequential appointments, how many teeth you will work on per appointment, how much time you will need for each appointment and how much time you will need between appointments (if this is appropriate). JUST DO IT! Your team cannot make excellent financial arrangements or schedule effectively without this critical information.
PRESENT
The attention span of an adult in a presentation situation is about 17 minutes. You don’t have much time to get the person’s attention, make your presentation, identify and overcome objections and close. If you lose someone during a presentation, it is quite difficult to recapture that person’s attention.
The goal of your case presentation is to have a person say “yes” to your recommendations.
Here are four critical factors to incorporate into your presentation:
1. You stay in control of a situation by asking questions and listening. By asking questions, you identify motivators and objections. Vary your questions. Ask questions that keep the person involved and keep them thinking about how your recommendations will meet their needs or benefit them.
2. You identify objections by asking questions. Don’t be afraid of objections. They are the steps necessary to the close. If you never know what may be getting in the way of having a person proceed, you will never have a chance to handle the objection. The first step to problem solving is to identify the problem (or the objection). Once the problem has been identified, you can begin to work on possible solutions. If a person presents an objection, know that they are interested in your proposal - they just have some things to work out. On the other hand, if they never present an objection, they may not be interested at all. So, an objection is - in reality - a gift. Don’t be afraid of objections.
There are just so many objections that a person will have to proceeding with treatment. Identify the objections that you hear quite often and determine effective ways to respond constructively to those objections. Do not become defensive if someone presents an objection to you. Rather, remember that an objection is a gift because it not only indicates that the person is interested in your proposal but they are also telling you what is getting in the way so that you can work toward a win/win solution.
3. Be careful with your words and with your presentation style. You must say words that do not turn a person off. You must carefully choose your words. Let me encourage you to pass several word options by a person who is non-dental. Let them tell you if the word turned them off, if they understood the word, and if the word interested them. Be creative. Use word pictures to support your presentation.
In addition, be ever aware of your body language. Approximately 60% of the perception of a message - whether you are sending or receiving it - is body language. Be well-dressed, well-groomed. Be alert. Lean slightly toward the person to whom you are presenting. When you want them to look at your visual aid (such as the computer monitor where visual images may be appearing), you look that way. When you want to make a point, stop and look at the patient. Their eyes and their attention will follow your direction.
About 30% of the perception of a message is the tone of voice. So, practice this. Are you monotone or is your voice interesting, dynamic, convincing? If you come across as bored and uninterested, your patients will follow suit. If you don’t make this treatment seem interesting and relevant, your patients won’t think so either.
4. Involve as many of the senses as possible. However, there is no more intensely important sense to stimulate than the sense of sight.
How To Effectively Use Visual Aids:
Since you are in a teaching/learning situation during your case presentation, you must use the very best teaching methodologies. Consider the use of visual aids. Why? Experts in the field of education have determined that approximately 83% of learning takes place visually. Therefore, if you are to use the very best teaching methodologies, you will need to consider visual aid.
Visual aids will help you get and maintain attention, move quickly through the presentation, and stay in control of your demonstration. Gather visual aids that support the kind of dentistry you are providing: books, brochures, before and after photography, patient education systems, digital photography. During the appointment where you are gathering information about your patient, take intra-oral or digital photographs. Store these so that you can retrieve them during your presentation.
There is no visual aid that will be more powerful than a person seeing his/her own mouth. And, if you are storing all of your images, you can show a person some before and after photography of similar situations so that they can truly understand what you are talking about, they can see the benefits and the end results of the treatment you are recommending, and you can provide proof that you can create the results you are describing: features, benefits and proof.
Features: Visual aids show people examples of your dentistry. Remember, most people know nothing about dentistry. For instance, when you say “crown” you must not assume that the other person knows what you are talking about. Use visual aids to help them see what you are talking about. If all you do is talk, only 11% of learning is accessed.
Start now (if you haven’t already done so) to take before and after photographs or images of all your cases. Begin to create a portfolio of these photographs or images so that you can refer to them. As you are preparing for your case presentation, think about a case that is as close to the new case as possible. You will want the patient to relate to the similar situation so that they can begin to understand what you will be doing for them.
Benefits: A person must grasp the benefits or end results of treatment you are recommending. All behavior and all decisions are based on “what’s in this for me.”
When you are preparing for your presentation and you have selected a similar situation to show the patient, be thinking of how to relate this similar situation to the patient’s condition. For example, “Mrs. Jones, this person had a situation similar to yours, she had a tooth that was fractured much like yours. Can you see the similarity? Once we restored her tooth to health again with a porcelain crown, she looked like this. What do you think?”
It is critical that you have examples of all the kinds of dentistry you are providing. Don’t ask someone to relate to something that is totally different or unrelated to his or her situation. You will confuse them - and a confused person cannot make a decision. Or, if you use an example that is unrelated to them, you will be sending them a message that they are not important enough for you to individualize your presentation specifically for them.
Proof: People often base their decisions about future activity based on the past. In dentistry, people will have a limited amount of information and/or experience on which to base their decision. So give them some information. Show them before and after photography of similar situations so that they can see what you have done in the past. This will give them more confidence in their decision about their dental future. Plus it will give them confidence in your ability to create the results you are describing.
You can certainly use professionally produced photo albums. These are better than no visual aid at all. However, there is nothing that will be more effective than showing your own dentistry - giving proof that you can produce excellent results. Implement digital case presentation so your branding and real patient before and after photography may be showcased and set to music.
The fulcrum of your practice is your case presentation. Everything in your practice springboards from this critical system. Focus on your case presentation skills and make a commitment to continually improve those skills. Learn to ask questions and listen. Learn how to use visual aids in your presentations. Learn how to identify objections and then be prepared to handle those objections.
There is more dentistry sitting in your charts waiting to be done than you could probably ever do in the rest of your career. Get the dentistry out of the charts and into the mouths of your patients by making your case presentation the main focus of your practice.
