The Prompt-Decision Discount

Most of my orthodontic practice clients offer financial incentives to practice visitors. Perhaps the most common is a family discount for siblings of an initial case; in videotaped consults that I observe, this is almost universal in your profession to the point that the parents expect and often ask for it.

A less common example that I am seeing with increasing frequency is the offer of a financial incentive for making a prompt business decision, as in, “if you start by ________, we will give you a courtesy discount of $____.”

Is you offer, or are considering offering, a discount for prompt decisions to start, there are some fine-tuning points to address here.

First, keep in mind that your practice is giving away part of your fee in exchange for the benefit of a prompt business decision, so it would be worth a moment to define what “prompt” means.

In my observation, it is common for practices to present this incentive as something that the practice will honor for some period of  time at the moment it is presented; i.e. “this offer is good for five business days”. I don’t think that this is a good idea, for two reasons. First, a patient who needs five business days to decide on treatment would make their decision without the incentive to begin with, and more importantly, people who visit your practice will forget most of what took place in your meeting within 48 to 72 hours, including any excitement they had at the time about your prompt-decision discount offer. At the time it was presented, it was a value-added item; five days later, it will likely have become an afterthought.

So if you want to extend the period for which the prompt-decision discount is valid, fine – but wait until the end of the meeting to do so. Your initial offer should be this: “if you make the decision to start today, we offer our patients a courtesy for a prompt decision of $_____”. Let them respond to your offer. It is common here for the single-spouse visitor to stop to make a call to their husband/wife at this point – if your TC will, as shown here, give them that opportunity.

If they don’t take your practice up on the offer at the time it is made,  your TC may conclude the consultation with “we will honor the discount we offered for ____ days from today. (I would recommend 48-72 hours). This gives your practice the opportunity to get what you made the offer for in the first place, which was an immediate start. This offer to extend is one of the last steps of the consultation.

The second issue that you need to consider here is how the patient will view this discount. As some of you who have been through my training program have heard me say, adults are just like kids – they always want to know “why”. Here, if you do not address the “why” aspect of the prompt-decision discount, your offer may be perceived as a gimmick – an offer to lower your fee with no corresponding drop in value.

For this reason, the TC, upon making this offer, should always tell the visitor why the discount is being offered. This explanation would be accurate and appropriate:

“If you give us approval to start (child’s) treatment today, our practice will give you an additional discount of $_____ on your investment. The reason for this is because a decision today on your part saves our staff  time in scheduling and follow-up after today’s consultation.” This justifies the reason for the offer, and gives it needed validity.