How to compete against the Practice down the road when your prices are higher

This is a very common question! The first thing to recognise is that buying decisions are rarely made on price alone. This article discusses why you should not drop your prices and the steps you can take to stand out from the crowd

One of the most common questions dentists ask me is “What should I do when the practice down the road has lower fees than ours? How do we compete?”

I could really go to town on this subject but here is a shortened version…

The first thing you don’t want to do is drop your prices, which is what I hear a lot of practices are doing. Why should you not do this?

1. No one wins when you play the race to the bottom, if you reduce your prices, then the other practice does the same, how far are you going to go?

2. Every 10% reduction in your price, can mean a 25% or more reduction in your nett profit. Remember the saying – turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

3. When you deliver your dentistry for fees that you have reduced, you will never feel comfortable delivering that treatment. You will feel devalued, your self-worth will be low and emotionally you will not be happy.

The first thing you need to recognise is that patients very rarely buy on price. If you have read my book ‘You Are Worth It’- How to communicate effectively and create the perfect patient journey in your dental practice, I go into this concept in more detail. Patients may tell you they do buy on price but they very rarely do. Very few purchases are made on price alone. Think about your own purchases that you made recently, was price the issue, or an issue? Very few purchases are solely price driven. Your patient does not mind paying a higher price, all they want to know is why, what’s in it for me?

So what strategies can you adopt, so that you achieve a higher price for your treatments than the practice down the road?

Firstly, work on your positioning. What this means is that you want your potential client to look at your website and see that you are the experts in your town/area in your field. You want them to look at your website and be in no doubt whatsoever that they want you to treat them well and that they will not mind paying your prices. By working on your positioning, you will eliminate all the doubt from your patients before they walk through the door, hence you should receive few objections.

Here are two things that you can do.

1. You want outstanding testimonials, ideally video. In future articles I will write about this subject in more detail. However, for the purpose of this one, if I visited three sites and yours was the only website that had say five or six video testimonials from delighted patients, I know which I would favour. These testimonials should explain the major benefits they have received by having your treatment, the difference it is has made to their lives and also comments at the end which say things like,

“I wish I done it years ago”
‘It was the best investment I have ever made in both time and money”
“The service and care here is incredible”

If the other website don’t have these video testimonials, then you are already stand out.

2. Have a questions and answers section on your site, but instead of having written text, you answer the questions yourself on video. I can already hear the moans and groans in your voices and all the reasons why you should not be doing this. It is uncomfortable yes, however, look at the flip side. You become the expert in your town. Potential patients can build rapport with you, they can see who will be treating them and as a result it will make them feel more confident. Each video need only be 60-90 seconds in length, can be done by a professional company, but each one answers your potential clients concerns.

I strongly recommend that you adopt these two strategies. By instantly applying them, you will position yourself as the expert in your town and patients can easily see why they are paying more for your services. In any field of life, experts always get paid the most.

To read more about why patients don’t always buy on price, how patients make buying decisions and how to create value when explaining your fees please get a copy of my book “You are Worth it” for only £9.95