Never Answer "How Much Is an Implant?" With a Number

Someone rings your practice and asks what an implant costs. Your receptionist, trying to be helpful, says three and a half thousand pounds. The caller says thank you and hangs up.

You will never know what you lost, because the call never became an enquiry. Dr Barry Oulton's position is simple.

Number one is we don't really give them a number.

The car question

Barry tests this on everyone, including me.

If you phoned me up and said, Barry, how much is a car? What would you say to me?

The answer is obvious the moment it is a car and not a tooth. Which car? New or used? Two seats or five? Do you have a dog, so you need a boot?

I mean, we need to do some fact finding.

Nobody would price a car down the phone to a stranger who has not said what they need. Dentistry does it constantly.

Patient phones up, how much is an implant? It's three and a half thousand pounds. That has no value, that's a price. Does that include bone? Does that include the crown? What does that include? What doesn't it include?

What to say instead

Barry does not dodge the question, which matters. Dodging reads as evasive and loses the caller just as fast. He reframes it, then gives a floor.

How much is an implant in your practice? Do you know that's a great question. And let me ask you, what sort of implant are you looking for?

So I'm not sure if you're aware, but it is a bit like cars. There's lots of choices, lots of options now. And actually it's also down to you and your biology as to whether some people need to have some bone reconstruction, some don't.

What I can tell you is that an implant starts from around about one thousand two hundred pounds.

Then the invitation, with the pressure removed.

What I would love you to do is to come into the practice, no obligation, just come and meet us, have a little chat and we can see what might be the right fit and then I can give you an idea.

Note the structure. Acknowledge the question. Explain honestly why one number cannot answer it. Give a from price so nobody feels stonewalled. Invite them in.

If they must have a price, I like a from.

This is a training problem, not a staff problem

Barry is careful not to blame the person holding the phone.

The receptionist is giving that because they have not been trained, they've not been nurtured, and they've not been looked after. They're doing their absolute best.

So the first thing is train them in whatever way you would like that patient to be handled.

Most practices write a script for clinical consent and nothing at all for the first thirty seconds of contact, which is the only part of the journey every single enquiry passes through.

Why the door matters more than the price

The reason Barry wants people through the door is not that he will out-argue them on cost. It is that the experience does work the price list cannot.

For us, when we get people through the door, when it was through my practice, they were blown away by how they were looked after. It was the experience. They would rather pay more and come to me for the experience than they would to save money and go somewhere else where they were just treated as a number.

A price quoted down the phone is the one piece of information that lets a stranger compare you to every other practice on a single axis, the only axis where you are interchangeable.

Price is not value

The same principle runs through how Barry talks about treatment in the chair. Early in the relationship he asks what he calls the twenty year question: what matters to you further down the line?

If a patient says they want to still have their own teeth at fifty, then a year later when they fracture a lower left six, the conversation writes itself.

The best option is that we crown it. And what that's going to do is massively increase the likelihood that at the age of 50 you haven't lost any teeth.

The price is the same, but the value is what you look at. And I have to get you to look at the value, not the price.

The £800 did not move. What the £800 is attached to did.

Watch the full conversation on the episode page.