[Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to Beyond the Arches i'm Dr daniel Northook with me today we have Nicholas Glick what's going on Dr northick i'm doing well how are you doing well can't complain do you know what we're talking about today we're going to be talking about full arch and the problem of full arch marketing right mhm mhm and so uh first we're going to start today a little bit with did uh did you hear that Best Buy is doing a uh special on a 95 in TV for 750 I think it was delivered to your door no I did not do you believe me honestly it's not a bad deal it's not a bad deal no so the problem with full arch marketing is uh a little bit which is what we're going to talk about today some stuff that you hear can't be believed and other stuff like maybe if I said it was $1,500 it would be more believable and so we're what we're talking about is how do you navigate through that right how do you tell if Dan's full of crap or not right how do you know if I actually have a 95 in TV for 750 bucks yeah the nice part is as a consumer and you know buying TVs you can look at Brandsmart Best Buy other sites and dentistry it's the wild west every website you go to is going to give you a different price point different materials you have no idea what you're even trying to shop for at that point i was just thinking as you said that to stay on the TV thing when you buy a Sony you pretty much know it's a Sony unless you buy it on Black Friday which may be that like special label right have you ever heard that they package it different or they you know they make it a 45 1/2 in TV and so it's a different skew and not not as quality and I was just thinking that how that relates is is that makes me when I hear that I don't buy TVs on Black Friday not cuz they're not good deals cuz I just don't that kind of makes me unett rules and regulations to it you can't just buy a Sony on that day so um that's sort of the difficulty right and for for us as a company it's hard to kind of come from that and say how do you get this message out to people right and and we'll keep it more broad obviously we have our own stories but you know one of the biggest difficulties is and and this is another thing I was thinking about is that it's unfair that a consumer that's never purchased this before has to see and sit and look look through this marketing and has to wade through the information not only do they have to educate themselves fully on what the heck this even is but they also have to go in out into the marketplace and say "Okay who's going to do it now?" Right and there's not a lot of people out there saying "Well we have a 5% failure rate." Right because then anybody that says they have no failures ends up winning and so you end up getting this marketplace that's only all shiny and nice right like another thing I was thinking about earlier today as I was kind of looking to come in here is you know there was actually a Porsche that like pulled out in front of me and I was thinking like if I went to a Porsche dealership and they said there's only a 5% chance that it was going to have a massive problem or like a complication that that would be they couldn't do that they couldn't sell anything absolutely absolutely i'm not buying that car no and you know at least you can do your research on Porsche from the beginning when they you know first started manufacturing to today's 911 models in comparison to you know full arch I don't know what an acrylic is versus a zirconia versus a zirconia with a bar on it there's a full skew of different products out there that really not much of a marketplace unless you're a dentist searching for what I can offer to a patient yeah so so if you think about that what we've just talked about so far in mind how would you just you altruistically done in one not related think about yourself and like how would you go out into the marketplace let's say you needed it and you lived in Indiana we'll go to your home state uh you you're living in Indiana you need this how would you even begin to filter that stuff out not knowing what you know now probably like any consumer your first piece is going to be hopping on Google or Bing or something of that nature doing a goo Google search trying to see what full arch is and understanding what the definition of it really maybe even is however to even get that word of full arch or full teeth replacement you almost have to go to a dentist and kind of be diagnosed and have somebody tell you "Oh geez your teeth are full of decay you really need to get this removed or you're going to be a good candidate for full arch." And that's probably what would send you down that spiral of "Oh gez I need to learn what full arch is." And then from there you're going to get hit with just like if you were buying a TV you're going to type in full arch and you're going to get hit with the sponsored ads of you know Samsung Vizio Sony all these different brands and it could be very misleading on on what you're trying to go about and you know maybe it's like you know going to TV reference again maybe you're buying it for a family room or maybe you're buying it for a you know a second TV for outside or a den and maybe the quality isn't as concerning for you so as a consumer it would be very difficult to kind of differentiate what you're even looking for without even having a baseline understanding of what materials even are so deeper than that where how does Nick decide let's say you find Dr smith and you also go talk to Dr jones like just truly like like heartfelt like what would you decide on how how would you make that choice cuz cuz I asked myself this question earlier as I was kind of thinking about it this morning and I couldn't really come up with an answer like it was it was mostly answers that summated into the place that felt the best that had the good reviews you know like it's a very difficult question to answer absolutely it would probably come down to you know first before I even called some place do they have good Google reviews you know that's kind of a baseline and if you see something that's concerning well maybe I'm not calling them but from there and I said like maybe two three different consultations there's really no way to judge their clinical success or their clinical skills you're really just going to go with the guy that made you or you know the clinician that really made you feel comfortable through the process and that sat with you listened to you that you actually spoke to a doctor through the process instead of just feeling like you're another number that comes through their office and that's actually it's this is actually a really fun podcast to run because it kind of makes us kind of review all of our stuff right because because you kind of start to introspect about okay well we're going to talk about marketing today and we market so um and that's what I that's exactly what I kept coming to today like when I was thinking about like how do you communicate just go with whoever feels good and you know there's more stuff to it than just that but that's like the overriding factor that I kind of came with i was thinking like you know do you pick the one that seems the sexiest no because it just it's probably it might just seem the sexiest do you pick one that takes the longest because the fastest is too too short cuz that doesn't seem realistic so you just take the longest one no and it kind of is all like Goldilocks kind of middle and ultimately I think it kind of just comes down to the like to talk like the kids the vibe right the way that they feel and the way that everything feels around there how the doctor interacts with the staff i mean things to watch out for things to watch uh when you are responding to this marketing is you know did you did you talk to a a person that seemed to know what they were talking about did the person at the specific office how did they uh handle you and treat you but more than that even when let's say you go to a Zoom consult or even go in person um how is that handoff right does it seem cold and like hey we're going to go find the doctor if we can find him right um doctors aren't they're busy but they're not that busy you know uh my staff knows that I'm available pretty much anytime how does that handoff happen does it feel warm does it does it look warm you know does the doctor light up when they're talking about this kind of thing you know very like sort of like not definable things is what I would choose on yeah you're almost making your decision not based on dentistry but based on how you're treated as an overall human yeah so we've kind of diverged into like the selection of it right so so then coming back to the problem with full arch because we haven't really talked too much about that the problem really is that you can hire a really expensive videoing company and you can hire uh a person that comes up with your colors and such and you can come up with whatever you want uh in terms of how fast you get teeth etc uh but you can't fake the personal interaction but the problem with it is that it's an appearance thing it can it can be an appearance thing and and that marketing can get people kind of over their own skis right absolutely and a lot of times it seems like the marketing company is maybe making the decisions on the clinical care that a doctor is going to offer offer cuz they need to as a marketing company you're only paid if you can bring patients in so it's a race to the bottom of you know okay let's lower the price point as low as possible so we can advertise a really cheap price because that's going to get people yeah or let's you know market you know how fast we can do this process because you know maybe we can do it in 24 hours 12 hours something like that because then again you can say fastest in in Palm Beach County to give you teeth so you're really always trying as you know a dentist to probably differentiate yourself in some way and you kind of forget that you're treating a human and you're a human and you need to treat somebody as you would want to be treated i mean it's the classic golden rule yeah and so to bring it to us like what we've tried to do is sort of lay because we would want to we kind of both came to the same conclusion um and didn't talk about this before at all but we that conclusion being that the human interaction and so we try to make it so that when we get patients interest that they have the openness to be able to contact patients via Facebook and such and try to be a little bit more more altruistic and like the other thing that comes with it too is and we're going to talk about this I think like next episode is sort of like experience and and how many arches and things that we've done and what that means for kind of the quality of the results and that's a big part too there's a lot of things that go into it i mean if you do one of these every 3 months like I wouldn't let my own mother go to a place like that could it get done and would it be safe and be okay probably but maybe not and the maybe not is bigger than than where I would want them to go absolutely and you're not and as a patient you really don't have an understanding of how many a doctor is doing of this i mean of course you can ask somebody but if a doctor's about to get your money and they're not going to say "Well shoot you're the first one I've done this year right?" So you really have to you know try to do your research as a patient to figure out what type of clinic am I going to is it a full arch clinic is it a general dentistry clinic that's trying to mask themselves as a full arch clinic so there's so many different variables that as a consumer I could see how you can get lost and throw your hands up and either say "Okay I'm just going to live with my teeth in this current decay fashion or I'm just going to go to the local closest guy cheapest guy fastest guy whatever it is." And then you find yourself you know posting on Facebook saying "Did I make the wrong decision am I stuck in this does the do my teeth look natural to you and that's usually uh you know kind of a catastrophic place to be yeah you just made me think of a story from dental school when we were in dental school we hadn't ever done anything and obviously the patients of the dental school know that we're pretty close to zero and they would they and they do it all the time they would stop us and say "How many of these have you done?" And they used to the the little like locker joke or whatever was you could say a number because zero is still a number and so you you'd say "Oh I've done a number of these." Which was zero um and that's not what you want right or you know there's a need for that that there's obviously somebody's got to start somewhere um but it's hard when you're trying to spend this amount of money you know it's hard to decipher whether or not that person you're going to get extra care maybe because they don't do too many maybe you're not going to cuz they do too many it's a very tough It's almost one of the most difficult things I think is to sort of convey to a patient in a in a not even workforce or a playing field in terms of advertising um cuz it's unfair you know I spend more than most people that do it here in we'll say Bokeh and it's a little unfair that they don't get the chance right and so they don't see as many and it's it all feeds into itself and you know it's difficult uh it's a very difficult the marketing itself is very difficult I will say as a positive what I've sort of observed over time is that the win teeth in a day was the thing that you advertised or teeth immediately or however you want to describe it initially that was the big hook right so people were doing the allon four like we've talked about before where We would take the teeth out put the implants in but we would just leave them in a denture for say three months and when people started gluing these things together they could advertise for we could advertise for teeth in a day mhm and that hit really hard right and what I've seen over time is it's sort of like become the norm it's like uh advertising a car like now with air conditioning well um of course they all come with air conditioning mhm that those kind of like taglines have sort of like faded out now the sexy one that's sort of a little bit on its way out as well is is the digital branding right now all digital and and now immediate finals right that we've been part of that that one we'll talk about really deep cuz that's where my bread and butter of the name in dentistry kind of came from but those things are all like the more people advertise for that stuff they more they kind of get dated and and overused and that's the positive is we're getting to this a little bit maturity level of of digital or full arch marketing I'm sorry where we've kind of run the end of those like buzzwords that just like are a little bit unfair right is for us just to like to tell the listeners we don't do teeth on the same day for two very big reasons one I don't want you in the chair any longer than you need to be i want that to be a very easy minimal surgery day um and I don't want to torture you or or risk not torture you risk not being able to get teeth cuz they broke or something and force that patient to be in the chair for seven eight hours and have it be a really bad experience there are plenty of those there's plenty of ones that go fine but there's also plenty of those that kind of make it so it's just not a great thing that you can sell the second reason is because we don't like the teeth being in the way of the where that um injured sight is going to bleed from that night and we want you to be able to take your time one be minimally uh traumatized from the experience but two be able to manage the bleeding on your own so you don't have to come back in the office for an emergency all that being said the reason that that's not something that that just took me what like three minutes to explain Sure that's not You can't do that on a 30 secondond commercial no and you can't advertise no teeth day one that's not a sexy tagline by any means no with no teeth day one um and so we do it for like a heavy reasoning and there are other people I'm sure that have equal reasoning on the other side for doing teeth in a day but it is nice to finally getting be getting to the sort of like saturation and maturity rate where that's still going to whether you say no teeth on the same day or teeth in a day it's kind of just assumed that you already kind of know what you're doing cuz it's been around a long enough that where maybe you both get the shot and I think that that's where ultimately kind of everything's going to come down to your personal interaction with the staff and such and that's that's that would be my number one if I had a person call from you know Europe and say "Hey we're going to get this done i'm going to go to four places how do I pick?" I would tell them "Pick something that looks like you're in a clean facility that everyone's happy to work there patients are happy etc." And and just kind of go on your gut how do you feel with the doctor does the doctor feel like they're confident and competent right there's two different things um does a person do they feel cocky enough that they're going to get good results but not so cocky that they're like falsely in that in that uh confidence so there's a lot of things to weigh out but I think it really just kind of go with your gut would be my number one advice which really isn't a good rule to follow i mean it's a good rule to follow but it's not it's not like here's your three tips of the things that you should ask sure uh which is a little disappointing um but I think that that would be as I've thought through it coming into this episode like that was what I really wanted to hammer on is that's it sound it seems like a copout answer but and we you came to that same thing like I feel like that's the answer yeah because I mean in the the reality that there are complications or something occurs you want to be with somebody that is kind compassionate and caring through the entire process and is going to treat you as a human and and hear you out and not just brush you off as if you're another number because there is a failure rate to full arch there is a failure rate to implants there's a failure rate to you know higher you know any type of hybrid denture whether that's nanoceramic acrylic zirconia zirconia with a bar all this stuff does have a possibility of breaking so you want to be with someone that is able to be responsive to that but also again compassionate enough to say oh yes miss you do have an issue here let's go ahead and address this together instead of well is a doctor even going to see me today am I just another number or I have to schedule out for two weeks because you guys are so busy Like that's where I feel like patients will really start to feel like this buyer's remorse or this regret kind of sink in of man I I picked the wrong place yeah it's it's really hard to ascertain why people are choosing you or what they choose on and sometimes it can come out you know when we're doing a console it can come out just in the the random stuff like "Hey I went to you cuz you used the color green." and you're like "Okay how many people that like the color red didn't pick us?" Right like some of the weirdest stuff can come out that that you wouldn't ever think of um which I guess is just true against all marketing like some people just don't like the color green or red you know it's just it's tough to be able to kind of pitch yourself and for the professionals out there trying to kind of get into uh full arch I mean my recommendation would be find a a good reputable marketing company that's going to get you enough people to talk to but at the end of the day it's not about the volume of people that you talk to it's how well you connect with those people how well you vi like feel with those people and and and how good and how much they trust like you're going to be there to hold hold their hand through complications when I was in um Jacksonville I I learned a lot of lessons of things that I didn't want for Dunan one and one of those main ones was it was really hard for me to cuz I didn't own the office it was really hard for me and this is also true for the other satellite type offices that I've done kind of one-off stuff work for it was really hard for me to convey the negatives that the possible complications to them even in in person um because the the staff wouldn't want to or the owner didn't want to because we might lose somebody and it's been very freeing to once we get that marketing once we get that patient in to be able to just say "Look here's the open book here's the the 5% chance that you're going to have something break or that you're going to have an implant go bad or not or or whatnot because I have zero stress and I would say my the whole staff has zero stress when it comes to having a complication and to that point you know I've I've heard your consultations where you'll be an open book you'll tell patients that there could be xyz problem or hey your bone density isn't maybe up to to speed where it should be so there's going to be a little bit of risk involved with And that's where I've always heard you say like go also have other consultations feel out what the other clinicians say because if you go to three clinics and the other two clinics say "Oh you're a perfect candidate no risk at all for this." Well that should be red flag central because are they just trying to get you signed up today are they just trying to take your dollars from you because you're a candidate for this or are they really out there with your best interest in mind yeah one more story real quick when when I was in dental school so complications has always been something that I've always really tried to be very transparent about because uh it makes me feel better for treating things in the future if there is an issue right i like to be able to treat things free and clear of any like he didn't tell me that could happen right but I've had that sort of feeling from the very beginning so when we were in residency we had to present cases that we just thought were interesting they were something they could be person had an extra tooth or the implant we thought was going bad but then turns out it wasn't you name it right anything that you thought was interesting and was going to be beneficial to the group and so after sitting through we'll call it hundreds tens and tens of these things once a week I kind of got sick of seeing like here's my ideal space for an implant here's where we put the implant screw this is how it healed perfectly right and so I started to just show all of my we'll call it bad cases right my complications because those are way more interesting you learn a lot more this is during residency and I got to the point maybe I did them I don't know out of five of them maybe I did like three complication lectures we'll say and to me the other thing too is it when you're in a learning environment it stimulates that conversation anyway my residency director pulled me aside after like the third one was like you know you're kind of getting a reputation that you've got complications going on and you know I I hate that for you you know I see where you're kind of going but like you should probably show your good stuff too because you're a good surgeon you do a good work and it kind of hit me like well they can't they just understand that I have really good cases and they're just kind of boring and I don't want to show them cuz they're just kind of boring and so that always kind of stuck with me and that we're in the same kind of situation and I can't we can't go on a 30-cond uh commercial and both be sitting in the live and say "Hey today we want to talk to you about uh come to us because we have fractures on our zirconia everybody has fractures everybody has issues we all live in a human body everybody gets infections um it's the amount that you have you want to be as minimal as possible but you also want to be able to overcome and handle those and as a person trying to select it they want to select the recommendation is select somebody that you know is going to be able to handle it that has handled it before that told you this might happen all those things are going to come into play way more than how many dollars did they charge you how many e you know even if you feel that way with somebody that sat with you 10 minutes and somebody sat you with with you for an hour but didn't tell you about any complications like those are all factors that need to go into this decision right don't make a decision on the color of the marketing make a decision on gut feeling and and other patients and talking to them and how real do those patient interviews seem right one thing that I hope to convey when we're going through these things and and um bringing patients in as guests is how comfortable do they seem with the staff and and with us like that we want to convey that sort of personal relationship and that comfort because you see a lot of these advertisements i saw one today and it was just a video of a almost like a duet with like a Zoom guy and he was like "I wish I made my choice sooner and all of the stuff that you would give him as a as a um script and maybe it works it just it feels so disingenuous to me i I just it feels icky and I don't like it." So for me I'm a little bit encouraged with full arch marketing to see it sort of just be assumed almost like like lawyers right personal injury lawyers maybe there was a point at some point where that was unique like oh I do have I did have spinal fusion in my 80s in the 80s and and I do have that neck pain i didn't know there was a guy for that now we just assume that's there and it's kind of a dime or dozen and it's just a luck of whoever you call so hopefully maybe that kind of is what ends up both for the little guy um and us right like just more exposure in the marketplace and getting people educated to the point where they can make that decision on the gut I think is what really like matters and and is the take-home absolutely you want people to make decisions based on other people and real human interaction so yeah and reviews are the number one thing in the in the game we want to hear that somebody else had you know in the similar kind of situation was able to overcome it and have good results comparatively to well this guy has no reviews whatsoever but well I guess I'm going to be the first one and everybody has to start out there but you made a comment earlier about being fair to other you know dental offices or clinicians but it's kind of like to make a a poor analogy for an NFL team but nobody wants to see the backup quarterback go in the game everybody wants to trust the all-star you know Tua or J Jared Golf nobody wants to see Skyler Thompson in the back field so you know you want to go to the guy that delivers that has success that has had repeated success and can get you there comparatively to taking a leap of faith with somebody and you know maybe it works out maybe it doesn't well that's not something you take you do with your healthcare there's always a Tom Brady sitting on the backup bench that's the unfortunate thing you can never make that total decision but if you have to make the decision you may not have pulled Tom Brady off the off the backup bench there's there's plenty of guys that do not turn into Tom Brady but and that's it's going to be really easy to to kind of knock on people that haven't done a lot there are really skilled surgeons out there they're really good teams they're really good prostadonists really good general dentists and so I think it really just kind of comes down to that like what is the what is the reputation what are the p other patients that have been treated how what was their experience like and um what kind of experience do they have to make that that play in the in the end absolutely so as we wrap up here I'm going to um I'm going to put you on the spot for like two seconds i'm going to You've been here from the beginning so give me in your idea just you may not be able to come up with anything but what is the what do you think what what do you consider as the worst thing in marketing that we've ever done just if you if you have a funny story or something that comes to mind worst thing in marketing what's the worst move or accident or mistake we ever made in marketing probably from the very beginning trying to say we can do teeth in 48 hours or 24 hours or something like that just from the perspective that ones if you don't get it right in 48 hours ones if you don't get it right in 24 hours and now this patient has this false sense of hope that they're going to leave your clinic with the best possible set of teeth and forever you know they'll never have to come back to a clinic again comparatively to where we're at now today where we're trying to sell an experience we're trying to sell you know what this product will be not today not tomorrow or in 48 hours but in a lifetime when in your next 20 years that you'll have a smile that's customized for you so I think we really missed the boat trying to sell a price point and trying to sell the time instead of trying to sell an experience and what you know ultimately those teeth would would result in for a patient yeah the the the time the the hard part about the time was it means different things to different people right you can get a set of teeth in by the end of the day from surgery we could back then and we can today it's all a perception of what is the what is the quality what is the look what is the color what did the patient think what do they want and they're thinking you're going to get it perfect and you got it what you thought was perfect those may not match up mhm mhm i agree well we appreciate everybody listening do you have any final thoughts or anything uh like that no I mean on today's message you know is do your research make sure that you pick a you know a team of clinicians that care about you staff that cares about you but ultimately do what's best for yourself and don't jump to a single piece it's like buying a car you don't want to go buy the first car that you test drive there might be other bells and whistles out there that you didn't even know about so doing your research is is paramount in this in any healthcare uh kind of procedure but especially when you're coming into full arch where it's such a saturated market of full arch marketing that it's really tough to differentiate anything yeah full mouth replacement now with air conditioning yeah backup camera mandatory exactly well we appreciate you listening like subscribe follow submit your questions like we've we've said before um and uh we look forward to uh having another discussion and listening uh in the future thanks for having me Doc thank you [Music]