Feeling nervous or unsure with patients is not a permanent problem. Jeff outlines how drilling and practice can turn discomfort into confidence and bring stronger case acceptance to any dental office.
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Questions From This Episode
What does Jeff mean by "drilling," and why does he say it's underused?
Drilling is practicing a skill again and again in a controlled situation, with a colleague, an assistant, or a friend, until you have the confidence to try it in the real world. Jeff says it's underused in dentistry and many other industries, and that there's a fallacy in thinking something only needs to be drilled once. He points out that dentists practiced procedures before ever working on a live patient, and sales and communication skills deserve the same treatment.
What does Jeff recommend for someone who feels uncomfortable meeting or talking to new patients?
He identifies it as a communications issue, with a full solution in a four-day Communications Course, but recommends role-playing a first meeting with a new patient in the meantime, using an assistant, office manager, or friend, and starting with easy scenarios. He shares a story of an owner who played the patient for a full hour so his associate could practice until the situation no longer felt uncomfortable.
How does Jeff suggest practicing explaining treatment in a way patients actually understand?
Practice with someone who knows nothing about dentistry and ask them to stop you whenever you get into the weeds. Jeff's example is replacing a technical phrase about a necrotic pulp with "the nerve inside your tooth is dead and infected, cleaning it out stops the pain, and we'll save the tooth." He adds that this same plain language is what you want for social media videos and website copy, since your public isn't other dental professionals.
Why does Jeff say the doctor should explain the fee, and how should someone practice it?
He says the doctor's word carries the most command value with a patient, so hearing the fee from the doctor means far more than hearing it from a treatment coordinator after the doctor leaves the room. To get comfortable, practice in the mirror and then with an office manager or treatment coordinator who can raise the realistic, resolvable objections patients actually give, not the ones from a couple of nasty patients.
How does Jeff handle objections like "I need to talk to my spouse" or "I need to think about it"?
He treats both as possible sales resistance, so he asks questions like whether the patient would do it if it were up to them, what would happen if they went ahead, and what they expect their spouse to say. For "I need to think about it," he acknowledges the objection and either returns to the treatment explanation or asks what's really on the patient's mind. For the spouse objection, he offers to re-explain the plan to the spouse in person or over Zoom.
Episode Transcript
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Do you want to improve your treatment presentation skillset, and potentially your treatment acceptance? I know that's one of those dumb questions, sort of like asking if you'd like to have more money. In any event, I assume you answered yes. I'd answer yes too, but I ask because a funny thing happens when you're training a group of people at the same time. It's something I've observed over the years. I've been one of the primary speakers at the MGE Communication and Sales Seminars, and we've lectured to over a hundred thousand dentists and their teams. The peculiarity has to do with the fact that no two people are the same.
We're all different to some degree. You could even sort people by background and education, I could be lecturing to a room of licensed dentists who all have a degree. But when you take something like sales training, or any interpersonal training, which is very implementation heavy, not everybody is at the same point or stage with relation to implementation. So you'll see a disparity in application. Many do really well, some do pretty well, others not so well, and a small few need additional help to get over the proverbial hump. I think a lot of teaching, especially when it's done in a group, runs into that.
So for this week's episode, I wanted to dig into this application issue, especially on the subject of sales, meaning treatment presentation and acceptance. I plan to provide a number of tools and ideas you can use to bust through any barriers you might have when it comes to application in this area. Regardless of what stage you're at with selling, you, your office manager, and your treatment coordinator can use these exercises to improve performance and potentially see an increase in treatment acceptance, which is awesome, because that so often translates into healthier patients. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
We've all seen this to some degree. Say you have five staff members you're trying to train on how to handle a new patient call. A few of them are dead on, they do exactly what you teach them. One doesn't quite get it. Another answers the phone with "doctor's office," and needs a lot more work. But the point is, all of those people are trainable. One just requires more work than the other. And I think we all have areas like this, there are areas where I'm quicker on the uptake than others.
Here's how I see it play out. I could get in front of a room and say that the doctor should establish rapport with a new patient. Say you're doing a new patient treatment presentation. You establish rapport, explain the findings in a relatable way, show them what's wrong, explain what you want to do to fix it, walk through the whole treatment plan and what's involved, again in a relatable way, answer any questions or handle any concerns, and explain what happens if you don't treat it, why you don't want to wait, and why you don't want to just do what insurance covers this year. Make sure the patient actually wants it, and tell the patient the fee. Of course, your treatment coordinator is there for the whole presentation, so they can pick up on anything, and you can pass the patient over to them. Then you handle any objections, you get the patient on board, and they go off with the treatment coordinator to finalize financial arrangements. You might even plant a little seed about when you want to see them: "I only do these procedures in the morning, so when's my next morning appointment available? Day after tomorrow at nine, can you be here? Great, I'll let you go off with Sally and you two will work out the finances. Any more questions? Okay, great."
I could say this to a room of 50 doctors. I could also explain more complex sales or communication techniques, how to handle certain objections, how to structure the presentation, I've even done some of this on the podcast. Quite a few would just go home and do it. We start our seminars off with wins from the last seminar, and they'd raise their hand and share one: "I closed this case, I had a patient who didn't do the treatment plan the last three times I explained it, and now they did it." That's maybe 20 or 30 percent of the group.
Then I'd see a bit of a mix in the response from the rest. Some would do parts of it and see some results. They'd explain the whole treatment plan, but not want to discuss fees. They didn't feel comfortable, or they didn't feel comfortable handling a particular objection. A couple might not make themselves very relatable. A patient asks why they can't just do a filling instead of a crown, and they answer, "due to undermined cusps, a direct restoration won't provide adequate structural integrity," instead of saying, "a filling patches a spot, a crown protects the whole tooth, and without it the tooth can split and that'll cost more to fix." And then a few others, I might find out later, are completely uncomfortable even meeting a new patient. They get anxious, upset, nervous, they don't look at the patient when they talk to them.
So you can see that the quality of how this basic advice is applied, or more complex information for that matter, has a lot to do with the person applying it. If someone has difficulty meeting a new patient, if they feel like a fish out of water, how are they going to handle objections or discuss fees? We're not even there yet. How is somebody who's deathly afraid of discussing money going to tell a patient how much something costs?
Now, assuming the person truly understands what's being taught, which is a whole other issue, and I went into that in detail in episode 172, a little while back, an episode called The Barriers to Study, these issues are easily resolved. That said, someone not finding immediate success might immediately zero in on "there's just something deficient in me. I'm not cut out for presenting treatment, I'm never going to be good at sales, I hate it." That's incorrect. If you can be taught, you can learn to do anything, and the proof that you can be taught is right there when I'm lecturing to a licensed doctor, they obviously sat for four years and learned to be a dentist. So you can be taught, if you have a good amount of determination. Some people just need a little more work than others, and again, we all have things like that. There are things I've mastered that you'd think I never would have, it just took a lot more work for me than something that came more naturally.
So with that in mind, I wanted to look at this from the sales implementation perspective. This is a bit of an interesting episode in the sense that you may or may not fit one of these categories, but let's look at the common problems I see when doing sales training. I've broken them down into four major scenarios, and I'm going to cover each one and how I'd resolve it.
Scenario one: the person just doesn't feel comfortable meeting or talking to people. Maybe they get nervous, they don't like it, it's not something they want to do. They just want to do dentistry. They don't want to meet new patients, they feel uncomfortable, even just approaching and speaking to people. Ultimately, that's a communications issue, and I'll tell you straight up, the solution is a Communications Course. That's the first shameless plug of the episode. We deliver a Communications Course that's four days, with a little bit of theory and then all practical learning, and the end result is that a person feels comfortable communicating and can control communication. I think everybody should do it. If you're interested, I'll put a link for a consultation on the episode webpage, since you should talk to someone first to see if you'd be a good candidate.
But what do you do in the meantime? You're listening to this and thinking, "this is me, I don't feel good meeting or talking to people." I'd suggest you drill it, and you're going to hear that word quite often in this episode, because I think it's completely underdone. What do I mean by drilling? It's also been called role playing, or practical exercise, call it whatever you want. Basically, you take a skill you want to perfect, and you work on it again and again in a controlled practice situation until you have the confidence to try it in the real world. When I say confidence, you may go out and try it for the first time completely nervous, but at least you have an idea of what you're going to do, and you're not caught flat-footed.
Drilling is completely underused in many industries, especially in dentistry, though it's not limited to dentistry. Here's an example. If I had somebody answering my phones, I'd first give them a pattern to follow. I'd have them drill that pattern by themselves, over and over, until they had it. Then I'd have them drill it with one of the staff, maybe the office manager, in different scenarios, and I'd make the scenarios very easy to begin with, then more and more complex, until the person felt confident before I put them on the phone. That way they aren't caught flat-footed. Are they going to screw up when I put them on the phone? Probably, but a heck of a lot less than if I'd just put them on the phone cold, and at least they'll have the confidence of knowing what they're supposed to be doing.
There's also a bit of a fallacy that if you drilled something once, you never have to drill it again. That's absolutely not true, there's nothing wrong with repeated drilling to keep perfecting someone's skillset. Think about your professional training as a dentist. You didn't learn to prepare a composite and then go work on a live patient first. You practiced before you did that. That's the whole point, you don't start a person off with the real thing, you bring them up to the point where they can do it.
So how would I get somebody over "I don't like meeting new people"? Practice meeting a new person. You might do it with your dental assistant, your office manager, or a friend. You're meeting a new patient for the first time, and you come up with a comfortable way, in your own words, that you can do over and over again. I've told this story before, but I had a client whose associate felt exactly like this. The owner doctor practiced it with him for an hour, with the owner playing the patient and the associate being himself, over and over and over until the associate felt comfortable, and then it was no longer a situation.
You could even extend this. When you go to an event, make it a point to go meet people and introduce yourself. You eventually get used to it. Here's a funny story. Early in my career I was doing some marketing training, and part of it was that you had to go out and do actual surveys, since surveys are a great way to make sure your marketing is on target, rather than just sending things out blindly, which a lot of people do. We were supposed to go out on the street and survey random people, and the reaction you get from a class is crazily variant. Some people are fine with it, "sure, I'll go outside and talk to people." Others are deathly afraid, it's the last thing they want to do, they feel sick. But what's funny is that the people who were petrified, who do they survey first? The most non-threatening person they can possibly find, a nice, sweet-looking old lady who's not going to yell at them. After a while, they get so used to it that they're going up to the guy sitting on a Harley, covered in tattoos, who looks like he could mess somebody up pretty badly, and surveying him without a second thought.
I think we tend to build up in our minds that people are a lot worse than they actually are. A lot of people are just cool and nice. Sure, there are some bad eggs, but most people are fairly decent, just like you are. So you practice it, and practice it, and practice it. If you're an owner doctor, you're having to do this anyway, but the more you practice, the more confident you become. You try it, you start to see some success, maybe you go back and work on a few things, and eventually it gets easier. Like I said, the full solution is the Communications Course, and I have that link up, but that's how I'd handle it in the meantime.
So what's the second scenario? Say I have somebody who can interface with people, but they're not good at explaining things in a way the patient can actually receive. They can't really estimate what the patient knows, so they're talking to the patient as if the patient were another medical professional. Here's what I'd do for this one. You want a non-dentist, and ideally somebody who knows nothing about dentistry. Your spouse might be a good stand-in, though a spouse might have a degree of familiarity, unless they don't. All they know is that you're a dentist and they're your friend, and you ask if they can help you with this. You just want to get better at explaining dentistry to non-dentists.
Then you start explaining the procedures you do, especially the ones you'd like to do more of, maybe more restorative, prosthetics, or implants. Explain what the procedure is and why they need it, and tell the person, "if I go over anything you don't understand, or I start getting into the weeds, stop me and tell me." What does that sound like? You start getting into "the pulp is necrotic with a periapical radiolucency" while explaining endo, and they go, "wait, what are you talking about?" You need somebody who's going to be honest with you about whether you're explaining things well. Then you figure out a way to explain it that's accessible: "the nerve inside your tooth is dead and infected, cleaning it out stops the pain, and we'll save the tooth."
This tends to be an issue because people get very heavy with technical terms, since that's how they're used to thinking and talking, especially with staff. So practice explaining things until you could explain them to anybody, especially somebody with zero dental background. Focus on the procedures you have the most difficulty explaining to patients, or the ones you'd like to do more of. This also helps if you end up doing social media videos, or you want copy for your website. This is the language you want to speak in, the language everybody can understand, because that's who your public is. Your public is not other dentists or dental team members.
That's stage two. Stage three: we have a person who can interface with people pleasantly enough, they can explain procedures, but they get uncomfortable asking people to do certain things, like "you have to come in at this time," or "here's how much this is going to cost," especially the financials. If you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you know we're big proponents of the doctor explaining the fee to the patient. You might wonder why the doctor should have to do that, since their relationship with the patient should just be as a doctor, and they have staff who handle that. That's the way it's always been. But the reason this works better is that the person a patient is most likely to listen to in a dental practice is the doctor. If you don't believe me, ask your staff. Your word has the most command value. So when you go over the fee, it means a lot more to the patient than when you go over the treatment and then send them off to your treatment coordinator to tell them it's going to be $15,000, and they blow up in the consult room when you're not there.
If you have trouble discussing financials, there are a number of things you can do. It's part of the sales hat, which is one of your hats, so you have to wear it. And this applies if you have an office manager or treatment coordinator who has this problem too, say they give the fee and seem embarrassed. I'd have them practice it. You can start off easy, in the mirror: "this treatment plan is going to cost $14,000." Then practice it with your office manager, your assistant, or your treatment coordinator. And if you're the owner doctor and this is something you haven't been good at, but you have an office manager or treatment coordinator who is good at it, that's even better, because they can sit across from you and play the patient. Say you're just practicing the financial part: "Do you want to do this treatment plan?" "Yes." "Good. The treatment plan is going to cost $14,000." And they can give you realistic objections patients have given them before.
The only caveat I'll add is that they can't just bring up the objections from a couple of horrible patients who were nasty to them, because that's not the norm. We want to go over the normal objections: "Wow, I don't know how I'd pay for that." "I didn't think it was going to be so much money." "Why is it so expensive?" These are the objections you want to hear, the ones they've actually been able to resolve, not the irresolvable ones. This is another peculiarity I've seen when I have people do exercises in a group setting. One person is supposed to be the patient, and they play the patient they could never close, the one who gave them a hard time. Those patients are a small minority, not the majority of your patient base. A good chunk of your patient base is going to give you some pushback when you explain what something is and how much it costs, they'll ask questions, "why is this so expensive, I don't know how I'd pay for something like this." Those are the objections you want to have command over, because they're the normal ones you hear quite often.
What we're trying to resolve in this step is getting you comfortable explaining the fee without that nervousness in your stomach, or that worry, "oh my gosh, what is this patient going to think of me?" The only way to get past that is to drill it, and then eventually do it, for long enough that you're not even going to think about it. It becomes second nature, and it will increase your treatment acceptance. I'm telling you, I've seen this over and over again. You can make up all kinds of reasons why you can't do it, I could make them up with you, but there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to do this. If you can't do it, or you don't, drill it until you can. It will make a huge difference in your office.
Which brings us to stage four. We have somebody who can do all of these things. They can mention the fee, give explanations the patient can follow, they're comfortable relating to a patient, but they have trouble handling a specific objection. It's like your kryptonite objection, one you just don't know what to do with, like "I want to speak to my spouse," or "I need to think about it." Then I'd practice how to resolve that. I had a whole episode on handling specific objections, episode 82, so I'm not going to rehash it, and I forget the name of the episode, but if you want to check it out, that's the number. But I'll give you a few examples.
Say a patient tells you, "This is great, but I'm going to have to talk to my spouse." What do you do? It depends. Someone telling me they need to speak with their spouse could mean one of two things. It could be a real, legitimate reason they can't do it right now, or it could be basic sales resistance, which we all have, and they're trying to blow me off. So how do I find out? The first thing I'd check is, "If it were up to you, would you want to do this?" "Yeah, absolutely, I'd do it in a heartbeat." "Okay, so what would happen if you went ahead and just did it?" This is where I get my valuable information. "Look, I'd love to just do this, but my wife and I have an agreement that we don't spend over a thousand dollars without talking to each other first, and this is $4,000 or $5,000, so I have to talk to her first, or I'm going to be sleeping outside." You go, "okay, good." Then you have a couple of options. You could ask, "What do you think she's going to say?" "Oh, she'll probably just tell me to do it, but I have to give her the courtesy of telling her."
At that point, some people might ask, "Do you want to call her real quick?" Some people don't want to do that. I don't really have an opinion either way, to me it's situational. The patient might offer to call the spouse. If somebody told me to call my wife, maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't, I might say, "you know what, I'll just talk to her tonight when I get home." It really depends on the situation. Or you ask, "What do you think your wife is going to say?" and they say, "She's going to look at the dollar figure, because that's the one thing she'll understand. She hasn't sat with me for the last 20 or 30 minutes while you explained this. She's going to freak out about the amount of money." Then you might say, "Let's do this instead. We just spent 20 or 30 minutes together explaining this. The most important thing to me is that you get the treatment, because you need it. You want to do this, right?" "Yes." "Okay, good. Here's what I'd be willing to do. I'm more than happy to re-explain this to your spouse. I can do it over Zoom, or you could bring her in if you'd like, and I'll re-explain it. You tell me what works on the schedule."
To a patient, that actually means a lot, that the doctor is willing to open up their schedule to sit down for free and talk to them again. And the great thing is, if the spouse isn't a patient, you might get a new patient out of it, whether you're doing it over Zoom, which I don't know is HIPAA compliant or not, a big disclaimer here, I don't know, so I leave that to your responsibility, or in person. The point is you're taking responsibility for the patient. Are you going to have some who don't make it? Absolutely. Some people are just not going to buy. It happens, you're not going to close everybody. But if you can keep your closing percentage high enough, 70 or 80 percent, you're in pretty good shape.
Now, say I'm asking those questions, "if it were up to you, do you really want to do this?" and they say, "well, I don't know." Then the wife objection really isn't the issue. The issue is the person isn't closed. Or if I say, "I'm willing to talk to your wife," and they say, "no, no, no, no," they're just shutting down. There's another objection there, and this isn't the real reason, it's just a way for them to get you to back off.
It's very similar to when somebody says they want to think about it. I've just explained what they need, and they say, "let me think about this." What are they actually saying? They're saying no, it's just a nice way of saying no. Not very often do you explain something to somebody and they just say "no," nobody does that. They'll say, "I want to think about it," or "this just isn't a good time right now," or "I'm very busy," or "I don't know if I can afford this." These are the things you're going to hear. If someone says they want to think about it, I could go one of two ways. One, I could decide I'm just meeting sales resistance and they're not closed yet, and go back into explaining the treatment plan. In that case I'd acknowledge their objection, which is very important: "I understand this is a big decision. Can I show you one other thing? I want to show you what's going on with this tooth here." You go right back into it.
Or here's what I've done. If somebody says, "let me think about it," I'll say, "Look, my job as your doctor is to get you healthy. I would love to do it. If there's a reason we have to wait, we can take a look at that, but the most important thing for me is that I get you healthy. What I've found is that when people tell me they want to think about it, there's something else on their mind, and they feel like they shouldn't say it, or they don't feel comfortable saying it, or they think I'm going to react badly, but I'm not. I'm here to help you. So what is it you're concerned about? Just tell me, it's fine, and we'll see if it's something we can address." They may say, "Look, I hate getting shots. I hate needles. I hate the sound of the drill." Now you have an actual objection you can deal with, instead of this big, nebulous "I want to think about it." Or they say, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea it was going to be this expensive." Okay, let's take a look at that again.
The point I'm making is, take the objection you're having trouble with, and ask your dental assistant or office manager to sit down with you and practice handling it until you're comfortable. Then the next time you get it, you use what you practiced. It may fall on its face, but at least you didn't feel flustered or confused, and you can say, "okay, I've got to work on this one a little more until I get better at it." Obviously, the ultimate solution for all of this is formal training, things like that Communications Course I talked about, or the Communication and Sales Seminars, and I have those links on the episode webpage, another quick shameless plug. That's where you actually make these skills your own and become effective with them. But in the meantime, take things like this, drill them, practice them.
And here's an overall viewpoint: you can do this with any part of your skillset. Be willing to look at where you need work. The toughest part for anybody is looking at what they're not doing well. It's easy to look at what we're doing right, but when we're doing something wrong, or we're not effective, we tend to just beat ourselves up. I want you to put yourself in an interesting position for a second. If you had a friend who came to you and said, "I have trouble handling money," would you tell them they're a piece of garbage, they're not very good, and they're just dumb? No. But that's what people do to themselves, "I'm just dumb." Why would you treat your friend better than you treat yourself? Shouldn't you be your own friend, to a degree, and have at least some equality there? Treat yourself well. If you're not good at something, don't immediately go, "wow, I'm just a piece of garbage." Ask, "how could I get better at this?"
It's the one thing that's kind of saved me over the years. When I started lecturing in 1998, and this is a funny story, my wife and I were partners in a company way back when, and she told one of the other partners, "Oh, Jeff's a great seminar speaker." I had done only limited study club meetings. I was not a great seminar speaker. She told me this, and I said, "thanks a lot, hon," and she said, "okay, good, we're going to work on this." So I practiced lecturing in my living room for probably 30 hours until I could go on stage and be okay. And she was a brutal coach. "You're doing this, you're doing that. Quit doing that with your hand. Why are you putting your hand in your pocket?" She was all over me until I got to the point where I could actually present.
Then, over the years as I started speaking more, we do evaluations at the end of the seminar, and I look at those evaluations to see if there's anything I can improve. Sometimes you get things you can improve on, and some is very subjective. But if someone writes, "when Jeff did the drill, the room wasn't controlled very well," I think, "that's a good point, I should control the room a little better." I worked on those things until I got better and better and they became second nature. I've now done this for 10,000 or 15,000 hours, and I'm better at it. That's my flex moment of the podcast, but the reason I'm saying it isn't to flex, it's to say, listen, you can take anything you want to get better at, if it's important enough to you, and practice it the right way, and you can get better at it.
There's nobody who's not able to sell. I could teach anybody to sell, if they have the determination to learn how. And this has application outside of sales. You can do this with your team when you're teaching them to handle the phones, interface with a patient, collect money, or assist with certain procedures. You practice it, and practice it, and practice it, you put them out in the real world, they mess it up, and you practice it some more, until their performance levels up to the point where even they're amazed at how well they're doing.
This is something you can do in this new year, 2026. You do it, you get better at it, and you'll see more and more success. I do hope this helps, and let's have a great 2026. If you want to know more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Don't forget, I have those links on the episode webpage. Folks, have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.