The Orthodontist Dilemna: Dropping Fees to Improve Conversion Rates

In discussions with orthodontists regarding the case acceptance rate, the subject of reducing fees comes up with increasing regularity. Almost all orthodontists in today’s marketplace deal regularly with competitive pressure. I have seen instances where doctors have made an on-the-spot decision to drop the treatment fee upon request, usually in response to a lower offer from a competitor, in order to avoid a no-start.

It might be tempting to drop your price as a means of improving your start rate, but you will pay for it a thousand times over. In fact, once your market learns that you are willing to lower your fee upon request, two things will transpire almost immediately:

• Visitors will not take your Treatment Coordinator’s initially quoted price seriously because they will know from word-of-mouth that it is a “soft” offer; and
• You will attract a new class of patients to your practice that you will quickly realize you wish you hadn’t. In fact, you are likely to see a decrease in your case acceptance rate, not an increase, as a result of negotiating your price.

The message? Show me an orthodontist that must resort to lowering fees to improve the case acceptance rate, and I will show you one that needs to improve his/her ability to communicate value.

Since most of your visitors can afford the financing of orthodontic treatment, converting visitors to patients is not usually an issue of fees. The real conversion issue – and one that rests squarely with the doctor, not the treatment coordinator – is the issue of educating your visitors on the need for having orthodontic treatment. This is an area in which most doctors need significant improvement. And I’m saying that based on my personal observation of hundreds of new patient consults.

My book, Doctors Orders, covers the steps in detail for doing this, but the bottom line is that if you aren’t putting your best foot forward in the initial consultation, having your Treatment Coordinator drop your price is neither an acceptable substitute nor an effective long-term strategy for saving a case and reducing no-starts.

Another key point to remember about your fees is that most families are much more concerned with the financial pain incurred via your financing arrangements than they are with what your fees are. If you are structuring your payment options properly relative to your market and your competitors, you can have a higher fee and still win a majority of cases. Doing an excellent job of communicating value while offering competitive financing arrangements is the winning combination for maximizing new-patient starts.