Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery: Learn to handle patient objections in dentistry: listen, categorize, and engage effectively.
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About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hello friends, welcome to your weekly Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. This week, I wanna talk to you about objections, how to handle them, and really at first, how to listen for them. I think oftentimes we think we’re hearing them or think we’re paying attention or we miss them. We don’t really even acknowledge that they’re there. We’re skipping over them.
00:32
And so I want to do two things on this meeting really quickly. And then this week you guys can talk about these things. One is identifying the category and two, figuring out what stance you take. So let’s start with that. Most oftentimes people, when they hear an objection, take one of two stances, fight or flight. They’re either in a fight mode, which we call argument, or they’re in flight mode, which is agreement. How that sounds is.
01:01
when someone objects to something and let’s just use money and they say, I can’t afford that. Well, if they’re in agreement mode, they say, I totally understand. We’ll keep your treatment plan here for you when you’re ready, let us know. Well, when someone is in argument phase and they say, I can’t afford that. Argument says, well, we have some amazing payment plans. What if we could spread this out over 12 months? No interest, which is.
01:27
Kind of good verbiage, but it just skips over the important parts that we’re going to work on in part two of this series. So I need you to first understand that you don’t want to be in agreement or argument. Next week we’re going to put this into play where we say things like, all right, we’re going to now deal with this in an acknowledgement and engagement fashion. We’ll teach that next week.
01:53
Part two of this is understand the categories. You guys can have some fun with this. All right, so everybody, and you can pause this as you go if you like, but let’s do a survey says, what do you believe is the most common, number one objection we hear in the dental office? You could push pause. Okay, most of you probably said money. Survey says money is number one objection. Category two, what do you think the second most common objection is? Okay.
02:23
Probably got a mixture of time and fear, two and three. Time and fear, two and three. So it was money, time, fear. Now, categories four and five. These are a little harder to come up with. So what do you think category number four is for objections?
02:40
Okay, little harder. Maybe someone said something that sounded like money or time or fear, a different version of that, but probably you’re hearing things like urgency, lack of urgency or value. It’s not bothering me, I think I’m gonna wait. And category five, the last one, anybody have an idea what that one is? There’ll be a lot of points for that one if you can figure out category five. Lack of trust. People don’t typically say, oh, I don’t trust you, I’m gonna leave. They’ll say things like, I’m gonna go get a second opinion.
03:10
So remember, as you hear, I want you listening for these objections. People will say things like, I can’t afford it, I’m nervous, I don’t have time, I’m really busy, it’s not bothering me right now, I think I’m gonna wait, or I’m gonna go home and think about it, or I want a second opinion. Now, my firm belief is that that order is not correct.
03:37
Even though we all say money is number one, money is not number one, money I believe to be a smoke screen because we’ve all had patients say to us, I can’t afford it, and then watch them go out and get their brand new Cadillac on their way on vacation to Hawaii. So they have the money, they just don’t see the value in it. So for me, lack of urgency, category four, right, in the survey, lack of urgency is number one. It’s the umbrella over all of these.
04:02
And if they don’t have lack of urgency, they’re gonna say they don’t have the money. They’re gonna say they don’t have the time. They’re gonna say they’re too nervous, okay? So that’s why preventing lack of urgency objection using the 95-5 rule is so important. So keep that in mind. As you move forward this week, I want you listening for objections that you’re hearing. Is this person objecting because they really don’t have the money or is it because they don’t have buy-in and value to this? And then next week, we’re gonna go through the formula on how to handle these objections moving forward. All right, guys.
04:32
Make it a great week. Have a blast with this. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
