Brett Walisever: Yeah. Leader. Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I tried to do something really different. I see so many of these big groups, the classes—“Hey, I’m gonna sign you up and teach you how to do full arch treatment planning”—and I’m in a room of 20. It’s good, but again, I wanted to do something different.
I sit with the office for one hour, and we talk about, “Hey, tell me where you’re at in life.” It’s really the same thing as us talking to a patient. What are your pain points? Tell me where you want to be. Do you have an exit plan? Are you just working? Just tell me what your goal is.
“Well, I want to get into implant dentistry.”
Okay. Where are you at right now?
“I’ve taken all the CE, I’m only doing two arches a month, I want to get to five to seven arches a month.”
Okay, great—now we have a goal. Tell me how you’re going to do that.
“I’m not sure.”
So that’s where I help devise a plan. Now, who is going to sell these cases? Doctor, are you going to sell them?
“No, I don’t want to be the seller in the practice. I don’t want to talk about money, and I don’t want to be the one following up all the time.”
Totally fair, right?
So who in the practice is going to take over that role? And what skill set do they have right now? What do we see in them that tells us they want to—or can—take this role over?
Then we identify that one to two folks. I do personal one-on-one training—two hours a week. One hour on technical sales training, including scripting, SOPs, role play. And I would say this for people who are like, “Hmm, role play, I don’t want to do it”—the only way to get good is through practice and repetition. There is no other way. There are no shortcuts.
If you’re talking to a patient for the first time and those words are coming out of your mouth, it’s going to be a disaster—just like someone’s first sales call of their career. You feel like you’re the seller who puts their foot in the door—“Oh, by the way, this… by the way, that…” and you realize, “Holy cow, I was terrible.”
You just don’t know what you don’t know. You need all the experiences. You need all the training you can get. And again, that’s where folks lack. I hear it all the time: “This person has the gift of gab.” Eric’s got the gift of gab, he’d be a great seller. The gift of gab is not selling. The gift of gab is—I can strike up a conversation with anybody. Great. But again, that’s not selling.
So invest in that person. If that person’s not there, then we go find them—hire them, incentivize them, and put together a structure. I ask so many doctors, “Did you put together a comp plan for this? Did you put together a job description? Did you put together expectations?”
How many folks hire without that stuff? When you have clear, concise goals and structure, the employee knows exactly what needs to be done. There’s no room for interpretation whatsoever. It’s clear, it’s concise. And the reality is—it might sound a little harsh—but people understand.
Then you’re able to have those conversations afterward. So I do one hour of technical sales training, and then I do one hour of case review. Bring a case—let’s see where it stalled out. Let’s see what questions were being asked. Can we recover something like this? Or do we put it in the pipeline to keep revisiting?
And last week with one of the clients, we found one. They didn’t want to sell the highest-priced thing—it was a full-arch zirconia. They went with the middle-grade material, which was $15,000 instead of $22,000. It’s like, “You know what? This patient could have easily spent the $22,000, and they may have appreciated the upgrade.”
So let’s go back. Let’s just ask them a couple questions and see if they do want to move forward. And from there, you’ve generated $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 for the practice—in a matter of one hour. Just one hour. Because you asked the right questions.
And if it wasn’t going that way, it’s okay—you still have them. But understanding where to push, where not to push, the certain personas—and really, again, asking the questions.
I tell everyone too, if you’re having trouble getting the words out of your mouth—write it on a piece of paper, walk in, and just read the words off the paper. I’m telling you, you have to do that. If you don’t, you’ll never, ever be comfortable. You’re going to say the wrong thing.
And really, at the end of the day, I tell people all the time: if everything goes awry, just go back to one basic question. Say, “Eric, tell me—what’s the most important thing to you right now?” And that will steer you back to the right conversation.
Dr. Eric Block: That’s great, man. I love it. Now let’s wrap up with two final questions. One is: how do we find out more about what you’re up to? You can leave an email, phone number, website—whatever you want to leave.