Avoid the COVID Mindset Gap

Episode #295 with Dr. Christopher Phelps

You may be tired of hearing about the pandemic, but this topic is worth listening to! Today, Kirk Behrendt brings in Dr. Christopher Phelps to explain the two mindsets that the pandemic created: risk-tolerant and risk-adverse. By understanding these ways of thinking, you can build strategies to change your patients’ and teams’ behaviors to grow your practice — especially during this time of uncertainty. To learn the best ways to market effectively to both mindsets, listen to Episode 295 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

COVID-19 created two main types of mindsets: risk-tolerant and risk-averse.

Analyze who’s coming in and why so you can improve your marketing.  

Create the conditions to drive patients to you and stay long-term.

Use the social proof and authority principles to market to both mindsets.

Market more to your risk-tolerant patients — they're still looking to get in somewhere.

Listen to your patients’ insights to come up with solutions.

Remind patients of all the safety precautions you're taking.

Positive Google reviews can attract more risk-tolerant patients.

Now is the best time to offer membership plans for patients.

Be adaptable to get ahead.

Quotes:

“Whether you realize it or not, when your patient walks through the door of your practice, they're coming in with a mindset already established. And most of the time, unfortunately, the mindset they're coming in with is competing with what we want to talk about. So, potentially, if their mindset competes, the door to “yes” is already shut in our face.” (09:26—09:43)

“Before COVID-19, 80% of our patients were more proactive, especially when given choice in the matter. And the minority were the reactive mindset ones, the ones that would just put it off until it’s too late. Now, COVID-19 has flipped the paradigm because this new mindset that pairs well with this proactive and reactive is, are they risk-tolerant or are they risk-averse. And what we’re finding is the risk-tolerant mindset tends to go along with the reactive mindset people, the ones that are taking the calculated risk by letting things get worse.” (12:01—12:31)

“All of those reactive mindset people, those risk-tolerant people, had always felt like they could get into a dentist anywhere at any time when their issue became apparent. That was what their calculated risk was, ‘Yeah, it doesn't bother me today. But when it does tomorrow, I'll find a dentist somewhere.’ But what did the shutdown show them? When their problem did manifest, could they find us? Could they get in somewhere? And the answer was, they could not. So, what it did was it created this powerful scarcity effect.” (12:52—13:20)

“While we had the risk-tolerant folks filling our chairs — that's great — guess who’s not coming in right now, and still really isn't coming in unless they have a big dental issue? That risk-adverse crowd, the majority of our patients.” (15:16—15:28)

“When I talk to a lot of the dentists that follow my advice on this, it’s been off the charts. In fact, many of our practices like mine, we actually produced so much towards the end of the year that we made up for the two-month gap. It was like we never even shut down . . . because we were tapping into that risk-tolerant mindset, getting as much done as possible. And they were more than happy to say yes because they didn't want to be stuck in that same situation again.” (17:13—17:38)

“I've almost been in practice for 20 years. I'm still going through the risk-tolerant folks, because we had a ton of them to get through. You built your practice on them; you just hadn’t realized they only come in on occasion.” (17:45—17:55)

“My main advice is . . . and I still feel like you need to be