Jeff Palmer, founder of the Case Acceptance Academy.
What I want to cover with you today is the number one mistake that every dentist makes when they’re doing an exam.
Now I’m not a dentist and I’m not talking about how you diagnose during an exam, I’m talking about what every dentist does during an exam that kills their case acceptance.
When you’re doing an exam it’s for diagnosis purposes. However, the number one thing that every dentist does during the exam is they begin to talk to the patient about what it is they see and what’s going on with them.
Now, of course, the patient needs to know what’s going on, but during the exam it’s actually a fact finding, information gathering visit, to see exactly what the patient is aware of and what the patient is not aware of in regards to their dental health. Because when you go into an exam, what you should do is you should look at the X-Rays before walking in to see the patient and look at what do they have going on, what’s their chief complaint, and what do you see on X-Ray?
If there’s a big difference between that the patient’s aware of from their chief complaint and what they have going on in their X-Ray, your exam needs to be done totally differently from a sales perspective from a case acceptance perspective then if the patient is aware of exactly what’s going on and it’s showing up on X-Ray.
So this is just one example of why when you’re doing an exam, you shouldn’t be talking and going over what you see, you should be asking questions, and uncovering the need and the problems that the patient has. Because if you’re talking too much during the exam and you’re trying to present your case during the exam, when you present the fee it’s going to be very difficult to get them to own that problem that you’ve diagnosed and it plummets your case acceptance.
So the number one mistake that dentists make in the exam is they talk too much.
What I would recommend that you do in the exam is you ask questions and listen.
Then use that information during your case presentation, which I’ll cover with you in another video is how to do your case presentation to get the patient to own the diagnosis.