How to Present Extended Terms to Patients
As I cover in detail in my book No to Lost Cases, your profession is facing pressure on financing arrangements from two fronts: technology that is reducing the treatment time for patients, and competitors who are offering financing options that are more budget-friendly than yours are.
For both of these reasons, one of your three financing offers, along with payment-in-full and a high-down-payment/short financing term option, should be to offer extended terms – I recommend six months past treatment – to give you a competitive opportunity to win cases with price-sensitive shoppers.
In a perfect world, you would have completing payment for treatment coincide with debanding. Unfortunately, you don’t live in one, and because of competition, you cannot dictate to the market under what terms the market will pay you. The outcome of attempting to do so is to push good cases to your competition, simply because the financial pain will be less severe elsewhere.
One problem with the way in which most of you currently present your terms is to ignore the fact that treatment time does not end with de-banding; there is also post-treatment retention to ensure that the finished result is permanent. Most of you present this as a twelve-month, post-treatment period, but you do not present it as a part of the overall paid-for treatment plan. My opinion is that you should.
Adding a year of post-debanding retention to an eighteen-month appliance period gives you a 30 month window within which to present your financing arrangements. I therefore suggest that you present the treatment period in this way and make “Option C” a modest down payment with 30 months to pay. This should, in most cases, protect your flank against those ankle-biters out there who attempt to undercut your fees.
I would also suggest that a patient who cannot pay for your services within those terms is likely someone who cannot afford treatment to begin with, so you can part company at that point knowing that you probably made the right call for both you and that treatment candidate’s financial situation.
