Every practice owner has heard the same advice, usually from someone who sells consulting: never put a number in front of a patient before they are in the chair. Anchor them to value first, the thinking goes, and reveal the figure once you have built rapport and laid out the clinical case. Quote a price cold and you scare off the very people who would have said yes after a proper conversation. We believed that too, for a while. Then we did the opposite, and the results were not what the playbook promised.
We publish everything. Composite bonding at £199 a tooth, veneers at £695, clear aligners from £999, IV sedation from £249 an hour, and implants at £1,999 all sit there on the website, in plain figures, before a single soul picks up the phone. The £20 emergency assessment with X-rays included is right there at the top. No "prices from," no "subject to consultation" weasel-wording, no quote-on-request gate. And the thing we were most afraid of, that the headline implant number would frighten people away from the big cases, simply did not happen.
The No-Show Rate Was the First Thing to Move
Here is the part that genuinely surprised us. The no-show rate fell. Not the conversion rate, not the average case value, the no-show rate. You see, the patient who books knowing the implant is £1,999 and the sedation is £249 an hour has already done the wincing at home, on the sofa, with their partner. They have had the conversation about whether the money is there. They turn up having decided. The patient who books against a fog of "we'll discuss costs at your visit" turns up half-expecting an ambush, and a meaningful slice of them quietly does not turn up at all. Curious, isn't it? The number we were told would deter people turned out to be the thing that committed them.
Think about what an empty chair actually costs you. It is not just the lost fee. It is the nurse stood ready, the surgery prepped, the slot that a paying patient three days deep in pain could have had. When you run a 24/7 emergency model across multiple sites, every no-show is a small fire. Transparency put a fair number of those fires out before they started, and we did not pay a marketing pound for the privilege.
Pre-Qualified Patients Change What Happens in the Room
Now, the downstream effect on the consult room is the bit a fellow owner will really feel. The awkward reversal, where you have built the whole treatment plan, the patient is nodding along, and then the figure lands and the air goes out of the room, that conversation became rare. Our team stopped spending the front half of every consultation managing sticker shock and started spending it on clinical decisions. Bonding or veneers. One implant or an All-on-4 down the line. The patient already knows the rough shape of the bill, so the talk is about teeth, not about whether they can afford to keep listening.
That does something lovely to the team's morale, by the way. Nobody enjoys being the person who drops the price. Take it off their plate and they go back to being clinicians and carers rather than reluctant salespeople. Our ethos has always been no judgement, sedation for the anxious, finance for those who need to spread it, and honest figures sit comfortably inside all of that. Funny how the "soft" stuff and the hard commercial result point the same way.
Yes, It Cost Us Some Cases. We Kept Doing It Anyway
We will be straight with you, because a peer deserves straight talk. Transparency did cost us cases. There is a patient who, faced with £1,999 in black and white, decides they will chance the clinic abroad or sit on the problem another year. We never got to make our case to them, because the number sent them away before the conversation. That is real, and it stings when you can see the clinical need.
But, well, here is why we never reversed the policy. The patients we lose to a published price are, overwhelmingly, the ones we would have lost in the chair too, only later, after we had spent an hour of clinical time and a slot we could not refill. Losing them at the website saves everyone the theatre. And the patients we keep arrive warmer, more decided, and far more likely to say yes to the comprehensive plan, because they already trust us. Trust is the whole game in emergency dentistry. Someone in pain at 2am is handing you a lot of faith, and a practice that hides its prices has, quietly, told them not to. We would rather not start the relationship with a small lie of omission.
What This Means If You Are Thinking About Trying It
If you are tempted, a few honest pointers from having lived it. Your prices have to actually be defensible, because the moment they are public, every competitor and every patient can see them, so the discipline of pricing well comes free with the transparency. Publish a real number, not a range so wide it is meaningless, since a vague figure does none of the pre-qualifying work and just looks evasive. And brace your front desk for a different kind of call, the one where the patient already knows the price and is ready to book, which is a much nicer call to take. We rolled the same published-price approach straight into our newest clinic, the emergency dental practice serving Bradford and Bingley opening this summer, precisely because it travels so well between sites; the pricing page does a chunk of the qualifying before a patient ever speaks to a human.
So, the conventional wisdom about anchoring patients to a number? We found the truth ran the other way. Honest prices did not cost us the big cases. They handed us patients who had already said yes to themselves before they walked through the door, a no-show rate that came down on its own, and a consult room where the conversation is finally about the dentistry. Does that sound like a trade worth making? For us, every month, it has been.