When Meeting with Shoppers, the Best Advice is Impartial

Many of you have developed a document touting the strengths of your practice, usually titled “Why Choose ______ Orthodontics?” This is a useful document to you, but not nearly so much to your prospective patient families. That’s because the focus is on what is important to you, not  what is important to the buyer. In other words, “Why Come Here” is, frankly, a printed sales pitch, and as such, has little practical value to your visitors.

If you want your list to be relevant, and useful,  to your shoppers, make the document impartial by taking yourself out of the mix. In other words, change your title from “Why Choose Us” to “Key Items to Consider When Selecting an Orthodontist.” This changes the tone of your information from a self-serving puffery page to an impartial and useful information-gathering tool. Then, as the title suggests, provide the reader with a list of factors that should be given consideration when they are  going through the practice selection process. This approach, for example, would change the statement “we have an experienced staff” to read “make sure that any practice you consider has a team of tenured and experienced professionals.”

The other half of this approach – and this is done for every item on the list – is to explain WHY each item is relevant. So, to the statement “make sure that any practice you consider has a team of tenured and experienced professionals” we  would add “because a practice with low turnover and seasoned employees is a reflection of a well-run business.” Which it is.

Ideally, you would want 6 to 10 of your strengths – things that you either do better than your competition, or they do not offer at all – on two pages, stapled, and given to your shoppers as a value-added tool to help them make a well-informed decision.

I call this document a “Key Items To Consider List” and there is an example of it in my book, Yes to Treatment, which can be ordered by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.