Aside from not marketing pet dental health month early enough, the next reason why I see this opportunity ‘fail’, is because no-one has trained the team.
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Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here, and welcome to video two in developing your awesome dental month.
Last week, we talked about all the marketing you can do and should do in order to get your dental month happening better than ever before.
Today, we’re going to talk about the next component, which is training the team and having the team on board.
Before we go anywhere on today’s video, I just need to reiterate something that’s really, really important, and it’s the fact that your client (and you and your team also) needs to hear something between seven and 14 times before they are inclined to take action.
In Australia now, it’s 14.3 times before they believe it, understand it and accept it and that’s for anything new.
So, you need to build ‘repetition’ into your marketing and into your team training a system, a process, a way by which your client hears something again, and again and again so that they come to accept it as ‘the way things are done around here’.
You can’t exactly the same thing every time, you need to ‘belabour’ the point in a nice, kind, gentle and different way until you get that point across.
So, when you’re training the team, your team needs to understand that “Mrs. Smith, you need to have your pet’s teeth cleaned,” Mrs. Smith says “No.” A “No,” is not really a “No,” at all. At this stage, the client’s only heard it once. You’ve got another 13 times that they’ve got to hear it before they are going to come on board.
- 80% of yesses will only occur after the seventh time the client’s heard something.
Why do you think Coke and Pepsi and car sales places and McDonald have all these incessant ads on TV and on Netflix and wherever else you get ads these days, on your phone…
Because they are working on that 14 times repeater. So, you and your team just need to understand that.
The second thing that’s really important about today is if you go to your team and say, “We need to get up pet dental health gross fee income up to 10% of practice production,” or, “We need to get 50 dogs in the door this month,” or whatever it happens to be… – if you focus on the money, or outcomes for you, outcomes for your team, outcomes for your practice, they will not comply.
This has got to be all focused on and about better patient outcomes. This has got to be focused on doing things better for the pet. It can’t have anything to do with outcomes for you, your team, or the practice.
If you focus on that, focus on money, focus all those sorts of things, KPIs, etc., then this isn’t going to work for you.
Just focus on patient outcomes, and then you can most certainly say “Let’s set a target. We want to help a hundred patients this month have better teeth.” You can phrase it that sort of way, but it’s got to be all about improved patient outcomes, that’s really important.
You need to train the team in why dentistry is important, and as I say that, you may be looking at me say “Hang on a minute, everyone understands pet dental health disease is really important and that it causes a decrease in pet life expectancy and all those sorts of things.”
My question to you is, with the same sort of look on my face as you just gave me is, “Really? Are you sure they all understand that? Or, are you just hallucinating that? Yes, you were told at university, and you know it, and you hear about it when you read journals and go to conferences and whatnot, but do all your team members have the same understanding of pet dental health disease as you do? Because, what I see as I’m traveling around practice all over the world, that is not the case.”
The next thing is to ensure that your whole team are grading teeth the same way. What is it a grade: 1, 2, 3, 4?
I’ll bet you that your team is not consistent in their grading. I’d be very surprised if they are. There’s not many practices that can say that they are. If you are one that’s got consistent grading, congratulation, fantastic, I admire and applaud you.
But, again, there’s few and far between practices that I see that get the grading the same.
I’m going to suggest also that your team start to use the same consistency of phrase.
Everyone is going to say the same thing, but they’re going to say it in a slightly different way, but I’m going to suggest that you talk about what they say, how they say it to engage the client.
Just saying that “That’s puss,” doesn’t work! So what, it’s a fact, that’s puss, big deal.
The client doesn’t understand that puss means pain.
Going back about what we talked about last week; don’t work with logic, work with emotion.
- Puss means pain,
- Red gums means they are sore,
- Bad breath means rotten mouth…
… and it’s up to you whether that last phrase is something that’s acceptable to you or not.
Everyone has different turns of phrase and different ways of saying thing. So, something that I may say may sound hoaky to you and you’d never use it, and vice versa.
Have a staff meeting in which you discuss the phrases and terms and whatnot that you can use and choose to use and are going to use consistently.
Another couple of phrases that I hear that work really well are;
- Would you allow your pet to sleep on your pillow?
- Would you allow your pet to kiss you?
They phrases that aren’t comfortable for me, but there’s people I know who use those phrases consistently and are very, very happy using them and say that these phrases give them really good outcomes.
The other thing in training the team is to tie dental disease into patient longevity, good health, renal disease, pulmonary disease, etc.
On that, as a matter of fact, and I’m asking you, not talking to your client, I’m talking to you—did you know that the latest research in people shows that aneurysms, as in people are getting more aneurysms all the time – the research is finding that most of the bugs in an aneurysm are from dental origin, and one of the most recent thoughts about why people are getting more aneurysms is it’s related to bad teeth, or dental disease or periodontal disease? Did you know that? My dentist hammered me about it not too long ago.
That’s the sort of thing that’s really interesting to your clients, that’s the sort of thing that you should share with your team.
The other thing is, in human medicine, if you’re going to a plastic surgeon to have a bum cheek implant, or a calf implant, or whatever it is that you want, any form of cosmetics surgery, or any form of knee replacement or ankle replacement or anything else like that, most surgeons will demand that you have your teeth “fixed” beforehand.
I’ve recently had two knee replacements (May last year), and my surgeon absolutely hammered me about getting my teeth in order first. And I’ve got reasonably good teeth anyway, and since then, my dentist has since then made sure that I’d come in more often than normal to ensure that I don’t have any periodontal disease because they’re both worried about implants being seeded by bacteria and stuff like that.
When your team understands that sort of stuff, and when your clients understand that sort of stuff, it really adds emotive weight to the conversation about dental disease.
Next, it comes to “What’s in it for me?”
We’ve all got this radio station playing in our head, and it’s an FM band radio station, and it’s called WII-FM. That radio station is “What’s in It for Me”—WIIFM, what’s in it for me.
Whenever you’re talking to your client about anything at all, nutrition for your pet, dental disease for your pet, senior blood screens, vaccinations, desexing, pet insurance, whatever it happens to be, that radio station is playing in their head and they ask themselves, “What’s in this for me?”
- That’s something VITAL to talk about with your team, what are you going to tell your client is in it for them?
One of the biggest s in my opinion that’s in it for the client, is that happier pet that fits in with their family, that lives with their family healthily, happily and longer.
Most pets these days are part of the family, they’re part of the extended family. That’s why people have pets, and so if we can help extend that longevity and make it a happier, longer, more pain-free life, that’s a really good radio station to play in that client’s head as you’re discussing that disease process.
Remember, we have this thing called ‘features, benefits, feelings’.
90% of our decision making is based on the feelings we get from doing something.
We buy the red car, and we might say we buy a red car because it looks prettier, because it goes faster, but, we buy the red car because of how good we feel when we’re standing at the traffic lights and people are looking at us and admiring the car and admiring us.
That applies to pets as well.
There are logical reasons as to why the pet should have the teeth cleaned, and they are the features. There’s logical reasons why the pet need should go on TD, or you should brush its teeth or whatever it happens to be.
Then we have the benefits that arise from that, but ultimately, what their decision is based on are the feelings that ensue when you’ve got a pet with a great healthy mouth that can sleep on your pillow, that you can kiss, that lives a long and happy life as a companion to your children .
Think of that radio station, and also think of the features, the benefits and the feelings, and start having those conversations with your client around that, and this is a part of the team training.
As I said, clients don’t care about bad teeth or such, they care about how teeth and bad teeth affects their relationship with their pet. They think of smelly breath, longevity, family pet, which is actually a family member now doing family things comfortably for as long as possible.
A couple more things, and then we’re done for today.
Have a talk to your team and develop phrases and tasks for the conversation that happen with the clients, and also really carefully look at the handover procedures.
Look at what happens when the receptionist ‘hands the client over’ to the vet, when the vet ‘hands the client back to the receptionist’, when the pet is admitted—so whether that’s from the vet handing the client over to a nurse to be admitted, or whether the client comes in, sees the receptionist who hands the client over to the nurse who then just does the admit, and the discharge and everything else.
What is everyone going to say around those handover times? They’re the critical times when the ball can be dropped.
If you want to use a football example—whatever form of football, or whatever form of hockey or whatever it is that you follow….
- if the client is the ball, or if the client is the puck, when the ball or when that puck is passed from one player to another, that’s when it’s most likely to be dropped, missed, lost, etc. Do you want to be the player that’s dropping the ball at that stage? This is why and where the handover procedure needs to be developed and done really with elegance.
A few more things that should happen as well;
- the vet should be examining the teeth at every exam,
- the vet should be making notes on the record about the teeth at every exam
If the vets are too busy, then have a dental Queen or a dental nurse, and then the vet can say, “Great, we’ve talked about the cat bite abscess, we’ve talked about the sore toe, or whatever it is. I’ve noticed that Fluffy’s also got dental disease. I’m going to hand you over to Julie, she’s our dental Queen. She’s an expert in all of this, and she’s going to talk you through that process.”
That’s a good way to do a hand over to a nurse if that vet’s too busy to have that dental conversation, but, every pet needs to have the lip flipped, every pet needs to be examined and recorded, dental disease recorded by the veterinarian, or passed over to someone else to do that.
- The last thing that I want to mention is plaque discloser or a UV light, like a Hill’s lamp.
These need to be used at every single examination, because 60% of our clients prefer to code and store information visually.
So, you can tell, tell, tell, tell all you like, but there’s an old phrase, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and when a client sees that stuff fluoresce or sees the plaque discloser stain the teeth, that’s when it really gets ingrained into their neurology and they’re going to make the right decision to have that pet’s teeth treated by you.
I see so many practices that have the plaque discloser, have the woods lamp, have the fluorescent light, they’ve got whatever it is that’s needed, and it is not used, and if it’s not used, it’s not going to impact the client.
That’s it for today’s video. I hope you got lots of ideas about how to train your team. Now, you just need to do it – train your team.
Once again, document what you’re doing and how you’re doing it so that next year, you can roll this out again exactly the same way and you don’t have to recreate the wheel.
I look forward to catching up in video three next week in which we’ll talk about building the value of this whole process for your client.
See you then.
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here, and welcome to video two in developing your awesome dental month.
Last week, we talked about all the marketing you can do and should do in order to get your dental month happening better than ever before.
Today, we’re going to talk about the next component, which is training the team and having the team on board.
Before we go anywhere on today’s video, I just need to reiterate something that’s really, really important, and it’s the fact that your client (and you and your team also) needs to hear something between seven and 14 times before they are inclined to take action.
In Australia now, it’s 14.3 times before they believe it, understand it and accept it and that’s for anything new.
So, you need to build ‘repetition’ into your marketing and into your team training a system, a process, a way by which your client hears something again, and again and again so that they come to accept it as ‘the way things are done around here’.
You can’t exactly the same thing every time, you need to ‘belabour’ the point in a nice, kind, gentle and different way until you get that point across.
So, when you’re training the team, your team needs to understand that “Mrs. Smith, you need to have your pet’s teeth cleaned,” Mrs. Smith says “No.” A “No,” is not really a “No,” at all. At this stage, the client’s only heard it once. You’ve got another 13 times that they’ve got to hear it before they are going to come on board.
- 80% of yesses will only occur after the seventh time the client’s heard something.
Why do you think Coke and Pepsi and car sales places and McDonald have all these incessant ads on TV and on Netflix and wherever else you get ads these days, on your phone…
Because they are working on that 14 times repeater. So, you and your team just need to understand that.
The second thing that’s really important about today is if you go to your team and say, “We need to get up pet dental health gross fee income up to 10% of practice production,” or, “We need to get 50 dogs in the door this month,” or whatever it happens to be… – if you focus on the money, or outcomes for you, outcomes for your team, outcomes for your practice, they will not comply.
This has got to be all focused on and about better patient outcomes. This has got to be focused on doing things better for the pet. It can’t have anything to do with outcomes for you, your team, or the practice.
If you focus on that, focus on money, focus all those sorts of things, KPIs, etc., then this isn’t going to work for you.
Just focus on patient outcomes, and then you can most certainly say “Let’s set a target. We want to help a hundred patients this month have better teeth.” You can phrase it that sort of way, but it’s got to be all about improved patient outcomes, that’s really important.
You need to train the team in why dentistry is important, and as I say that, you may be looking at me say “Hang on a minute, everyone understands pet dental health disease is really important and that it causes a decrease in pet life expectancy and all those sorts of things.”
My question to you is, with the same sort of look on my face as you just gave me is, “Really? Are you sure they all understand that? Or, are you just hallucinating that? Yes, you were told at university, and you know it, and you hear about it when you read journals and go to conferences and whatnot, but do all your team members have the same understanding of pet dental health disease as you do? Because, what I see as I’m traveling around practice all over the world, that is not the case.”
The next thing is to ensure that your whole team are grading teeth the same way. What is it a grade: 1, 2, 3, 4?
I’ll bet you that your team is not consistent in their grading. I’d be very surprised if they are. There’s not many practices that can say that they are. If you are one that’s got consistent grading, congratulation, fantastic, I admire and applaud you.
But, again, there’s few and far between practices that I see that get the grading the same.
I’m going to suggest also that your team start to use the same consistency of phrase.
Everyone is going to say the same thing, but they’re going to say it in a slightly different way, but I’m going to suggest that you talk about what they say, how they say it to engage the client.
Just saying that “That’s puss,” doesn’t work! So what, it’s a fact, that’s puss, big deal.
The client doesn’t understand that puss means pain.
Going back about what we talked about last week; don’t work with logic, work with emotion.
- Puss means pain,
- Red gums means they are sore,
- Bad breath means rotten mouth…
… and it’s up to you whether that last phrase is something that’s acceptable to you or not.
Everyone has different turns of phrase and different ways of saying thing. So, something that I may say may sound hoaky to you and you’d never use it, and vice versa.
Have a staff meeting in which you discuss the phrases and terms and whatnot that you can use and choose to use and are going to use consistently.
Another couple of phrases that I hear that work really well are;
- Would you allow your pet to sleep on your pillow?
- Would you allow your pet to kiss you?
They phrases that aren’t comfortable for me, but there’s people I know who use those phrases consistently and are very, very happy using them and say that these phrases give them really good outcomes.
The other thing in training the team is to tie dental disease into patient longevity, good health, renal disease, pulmonary disease, etc.
On that, as a matter of fact, and I’m asking you, not talking to your client, I’m talking to you—did you know that the latest research in people shows that aneurysms, as in people are getting more aneurysms all the time – the research is finding that most of the bugs in an aneurysm are from dental origin, and one of the most recent thoughts about why people are getting more aneurysms is it’s related to bad teeth, or dental disease or periodontal disease? Did you know that? My dentist hammered me about it not too long ago.
That’s the sort of thing that’s really interesting to your clients, that’s the sort of thing that you should share with your team.
The other thing is, in human medicine, if you’re going to a plastic surgeon to have a bum cheek implant, or a calf implant, or whatever it is that you want, any form of cosmetics surgery, or any form of knee replacement or ankle replacement or anything else like that, most surgeons will demand that you have your teeth “fixed” beforehand.
I’ve recently had two knee replacements (May last year), and my surgeon absolutely hammered me about getting my teeth in order first. And I’ve got reasonably good teeth anyway, and since then, my dentist has since then made sure that I’d come in more often than normal to ensure that I don’t have any periodontal disease because they’re both worried about implants being seeded by bacteria and stuff like that.
When your team understands that sort of stuff, and when your clients understand that sort of stuff, it really adds emotive weight to the conversation about dental disease.
Next, it comes to “What’s in it for me?”
We’ve all got this radio station playing in our head, and it’s an FM band radio station, and it’s called WII-FM. That radio station is “What’s in It for Me”—WIIFM, what’s in it for me.
Whenever you’re talking to your client about anything at all, nutrition for your pet, dental disease for your pet, senior blood screens, vaccinations, desexing, pet insurance, whatever it happens to be, that radio station is playing in their head and they ask themselves, “What’s in this for me?”
- That’s something VITAL to talk about with your team, what are you going to tell your client is in it for them?
One of the biggest s in my opinion that’s in it for the client, is that happier pet that fits in with their family, that lives with their family healthily, happily and longer.
Most pets these days are part of the family, they’re part of the extended family. That’s why people have pets, and so if we can help extend that longevity and make it a happier, longer, more pain-free life, that’s a really good radio station to play in that client’s head as you’re discussing that disease process.
Remember, we have this thing called ‘features, benefits, feelings’.
90% of our decision making is based on the feelings we get from doing something.
We buy the red car, and we might say we buy a red car because it looks prettier, because it goes faster, but, we buy the red car because of how good we feel when we’re standing at the traffic lights and people are looking at us and admiring the car and admiring us.
That applies to pets as well.
There are logical reasons as to why the pet should have the teeth cleaned, and they are the features. There’s logical reasons why the pet need should go on TD, or you should brush its teeth or whatever it happens to be.
Then we have the benefits that arise from that, but ultimately, what their decision is based on are the feelings that ensue when you’ve got a pet with a great healthy mouth that can sleep on your pillow, that you can kiss, that lives a long and happy life as a companion to your children .
Think of that radio station, and also think of the features, the benefits and the feelings, and start having those conversations with your client around that, and this is a part of the team training.
As I said, clients don’t care about bad teeth or such, they care about how teeth and bad teeth affects their relationship with their pet. They think of smelly breath, longevity, family pet, which is actually a family member now doing family things comfortably for as long as possible.
A couple more things, and then we’re done for today.
Have a talk to your team and develop phrases and tasks for the conversation that happen with the clients, and also really carefully look at the handover procedures.
Look at what happens when the receptionist ‘hands the client over’ to the vet, when the vet ‘hands the client back to the receptionist’, when the pet is admitted—so whether that’s from the vet handing the client over to a nurse to be admitted, or whether the client comes in, sees the receptionist who hands the client over to the nurse who then just does the admit, and the discharge and everything else.
What is everyone going to say around those handover times? They’re the critical times when the ball can be dropped.
If you want to use a football example—whatever form of football, or whatever form of hockey or whatever it is that you follow….
- if the client is the ball, or if the client is the puck, when the ball or when that puck is passed from one player to another, that’s when it’s most likely to be dropped, missed, lost, etc. Do you want to be the player that’s dropping the ball at that stage? This is why and where the handover procedure needs to be developed and done really with elegance.
A few more things that should happen as well;
- the vet should be examining the teeth at every exam,
- the vet should be making notes on the record about the teeth at every exam
If the vets are too busy, then have a dental Queen or a dental nurse, and then the vet can say, “Great, we’ve talked about the cat bite abscess, we’ve talked about the sore toe, or whatever it is. I’ve noticed that Fluffy’s also got dental disease. I’m going to hand you over to Julie, she’s our dental Queen. She’s an expert in all of this, and she’s going to talk you through that process.”
That’s a good way to do a hand over to a nurse if that vet’s too busy to have that dental conversation, but, every pet needs to have the lip flipped, every pet needs to be examined and recorded, dental disease recorded by the veterinarian, or passed over to someone else to do that.
- The last thing that I want to mention is plaque discloser or a UV light, like a Hill’s lamp.
These need to be used at every single examination, because 60% of our clients prefer to code and store information visually.
So, you can tell, tell, tell, tell all you like, but there’s an old phrase, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and when a client sees that stuff fluoresce or sees the plaque discloser stain the teeth, that’s when it really gets ingrained into their neurology and they’re going to make the right decision to have that pet’s teeth treated by you.
I see so many practices that have the plaque discloser, have the woods lamp, have the fluorescent light, they’ve got whatever it is that’s needed, and it is not used, and if it’s not used, it’s not going to impact the client.
That’s it for today’s video. I hope you got lots of ideas about how to train your team. Now, you just need to do it – train your team.
Once again, document what you’re doing and how you’re doing it so that next year, you can roll this out again exactly the same way and you don’t have to recreate the wheel.
I look forward to catching up in video three next week in which we’ll talk about building the value of this whole process for your client.
See you then.