Alex Nottingham JD MBA discusses Marketing Mistake #4: Selling yourself – instead attract and retain patients through education.
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About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
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. Hi everyone, I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy, and welcome to the six marketing mistakes.
00:16
podcast series, and we covered three already. And today is our fourth, which is don’t sell yourself. That’s a mistake selling yourself. So let’s do a quick review of what we were covering before. And the first marketing mistake is doing what everyone else is doing. And if you do what everybody else is doing, you’re going to get what everyone else is getting. And that’s poor results. So we don’t want to be putting out fires, not marketing or not marketing well.
00:45
Not tracking, we gotta be tracking our marketing. We wanna avoid just knowing it all. Start with the beginner’s mind. And very, very important, we provide great customer service and great phone skills. And then the second marketing mistake is trying to market to everyone. If you market to everyone, you get no one. And the premise here is to think like a fish, not a fisherman. Think like your patients, not a dentist. Where are your patients?
01:13
What type of ads do they respond to? How do they think? How do they feel? And how do we adapt to them? And I’ll put a link in the show notes to all the prior episodes so you can access them and listen to them or watch them, depending on whether you’re watching us on YouTube, our website, or listening to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any of the sources out there. The third marketing mistake is discounting. And here we have to know the difference between goods and services.
01:42
that you’re providing a service, you’re not a good, you’re not a product that can be basically commoditized. You don’t wanna be commoditized. And be careful because if you discount too much, whether it’s discounting or insurance write-offs, you have to do a lot more work to get to where you need to be and sometimes you are actually losing money on a client. So be mindful of that, be mindful of your ads and who you are attracting to your practice.
02:10
So now we’re on, we covered those three, the fourth marketing mistake, which is selling yourself. And the problem with this is that most customers are not buying now. So selling yourself is saying, hey, here’s our product, buy it. But according to much of the sales and service research that we see, and I have to attribute this to one of my mentors, Chet Holmes, when I worked with Tony Robbins, and he has this pyramid, right? And in the pyramid,
02:39
The very top of the pyramid, 3% are buying now. 3% of your clients are buying now. They need dentistry. They want you. Whatever you say, they’re going to get it. 3% are buying now. But there’s a lot more that we have to market to. Under that in the pyramid, you have 7% are open to what you have to offer, dentistry or case presentation. Then you have another 30% that they’re not really thinking about dentistry or your services.
03:09
another 30% under there don’t think they’re interested. I don’t think I need dentistry or I need you. And 30% know they’re not interested, they’re happy with their dentist or they’re not going to any dentist. So obviously, we want to focus on the the 70% that are really applicable, the 30% the bottom that are just a waste, don’t worry about that. So how do we target that 30%? How do we drive them up the pyramid from
03:38
I don’t think I’m interested to I’m open to it, to I’m buying now. We have to consider a couple things. One is our marketing sources. Now, it’s important that you provide or cast a wide net. In dentistry, website is critical, optimizing your site is critical, that’s SEO, search engine optimization. You also have pay-per-click or paid ads, local search, email marketing, YouTube and other social media outlets.
04:06
There’s many options out there. Talk to your marketing company about that and test and see which works, which doesn’t. But we have to cast a wide net. And as I mentioned earlier, we don’t want to do what everybody else is doing. We want to do it differently. We want to do it better. So it’s got to stand out with respect to that. Now, when you are marketing, it’s not just a marketing source. It’s what do we say? And this is a concept that Chet Holmes talks about, which is the stadium pitch. And let’s just imagine.
04:35
You’re in Miami Stadium, that’s by me with the Dolphins play. And you say, or I say to you, you have to come this evening, but you don’t have to stay. If our speaker fails to keep your interest, you can simply get up and leave. Please welcome Dr. Nottingham. And so basically here, you have to say something or convey something that’s gonna get interest. So your patients are gonna be attracted to that. So what would you say? What would be your message?
05:05
buy me $50 off exam and x-rays or free consultation, what’s gonna get somebody to come in? And often what we advocate, and we do this a lot at All-Star Dental Academy, is free information, whether it’s a free guide or free download or free resource, or something you can teach or educate your patients to help them pay attention.
05:31
So your market or your conversation in your blogs or in your ebooks or whatever are going to be something to the patient. Like the five things you need to watch out for to enhance your oral health. Something like that that would get them to stay and listen to your message. And just look at all the ebooks we provide on case acceptance, on phone skills, on scheduling, on reducing your dependence on insurance. All those are positioning ourselves.
05:59
as an expert, that’s what you should do. If you position yourself as the expert, you become the logical choice. You never have to sell again, and patients are gonna wanna work with you. So the message of this is don’t sell yourself, educate your patients. And I wanna turn your attention to the webinar, alls backslash webinar, and in there you’re gonna see education-based marketing. You’re gonna see how this works, where…
06:26
Basically, we educate you on the best of customer service, phone skills, scheduling, reducing turnover. And you’ll learn a lot, but you also can see what I’m doing. I’m educating, I’m helping, I’m providing something free that then if it resonates with the dentist, they work with us because they go, now I got to know this person, they weren’t just pitching me, they weren’t selling me. I chose to involve myself. So utilize what we are doing here at All-Star to attract.
06:55
great dentist to work with us or to be aligned with our cause and use that with your patients. So make sure you subscribe, like, follow, put all the good comments, share with your friends. And until next time, go out there and be an All Star.
07:13
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
