Episode: The 6 Treatment Coordinator Mindset Shifts That Take Close Rates to 75%
Show: GrowOrtho
Host: Luke Infinger, Founder and CEO, HIP Creative
Guests: None (solo episode)
Published: [07-13-2026]
Last updated: [07-13-2026]
Summary: Luke Infinger argues that treatment coordinator performance is a mindset problem before it is a training problem, and he lays out six shifts that change it. Only 20 to 30% of dental and orthodontic offices staff a dedicated treatment coordinator, which means most practices are asking an admin or the doctor to sell, and conversion suffers. The core reframe is that the patient who booked, showed up, and sat down is already pre-sold, so the consult exists to remove fear and friction rather than to convince. Practices that install these shifts can move from the roughly 52% average close rate to 75% or higher, add up to $1,000 in production per new patient start, and double daily consult capacity by cutting the new patient consult from 60 minutes to 30. Luke also covers pay structure, recommending low hourly with heavy commission upside rather than the high-hourly, low-commission model most practices default to.
Topics covered: treatment coordinator role, case acceptance, close rate, consult length and scheduling capacity, sales mindset, patient objections and no-shows, softening language and tone, film review for sales teams, TC compensation and commission structure.
Entities named: HIP Creative, GrowOrtho, Luke Infinger, George Bernard Shaw, Brian Tracy, Buckle, Amazon, Invisalign, HIPAA.
49:17;3175-3191">AUTHOR BLOCK
52:97;3193-3310">By Luke Infinger CEO & Co-Founder, HIP Creative | Author |
54:678;3312-3989">Luke Infinger has spent more than 12 years helping dental and orthodontic practices grow through marketing, software, and education. He is the founder of HIP Creative, which works with more than 500 dental and specialty practices across the country, and the creator of Practice Beacon, a lead-tracking CRM built specifically for dental and orthodontic teams. His work has included taking practices from regional obscurity to nationally recognized growth benchmarks, among them helping an orthodontist become the fastest-growing in the country by 2018. He is also the author of multiple books on practice growth and a sought-after speaker for dental continuing education events.
56:45;3991-4035">LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-infinger-b36a001b/
Most practices try to fix case acceptance with a new script. The treatment coordinator mindset is what actually moves the number, and it moves before anyone opens their mouth in the consult room. What your treatment coordinator believes about the patient walking through the door determines how they open, how hard they push, and whether they ask for the start at all.
Luke Infinger opens this episode with a line from George Bernard Shaw: those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. It sounds like a poster on a wall until you watch two coordinators with identical training produce a 45% close rate and a 78% close rate. The scripts were the same. The belief about the patient was not.
Six shifts follow. They cover who should hold the role, what to assume about the person in the chair, how to hold your own certainty when leads go quiet, how to lower a guarded patient’s defenses, how to build consult capacity out of thin air, and how to pay a top performer so they never take a call from a competitor.
Key takeaways
- Only 20 to 30% of dental and orthodontic offices staff a dedicated treatment coordinator (TC), and it is rarer on the dental side than in orthodontics.
- Putting a generalist in a sales role produces poor conversion. Luke’s view is that a salesperson can survive at the front desk, but an admin moved into treatment presentation usually cannot survive as a closer.
- The average practice close rate sits around 52%. Practices that treat every patient as pre-sold can reach 75% or higher.
- A one-hour new patient consult can be cut to 30 minutes with a defined format, which takes a practice from roughly three consults per day to six without adding chairs or hours.
- Over-explaining kills starts. Luke’s rule is that details are the enemy of execution, and he points to Brian Tracy’s “-er factor”: faster, better, easier, cheaper.
- Most practices pay treatment coordinators too much hourly and too little commission. Luke recommends flipping it toward minimum wage or near it, with significant upside tied to starts and revenue added.
- Installing these shifts can add up to $1,000 in production per new patient start.
Why should an orthodontic practice hire a dedicated treatment coordinator?
A treatment coordinator (TC) is a specialized sales role, and only 20 to 30% of dental and orthodontic offices actually staff one. In orthodontics it is more common. In general dentistry, Luke says a dedicated TC is genuinely rare.
The cost of not having one shows up as broken flow state. When the doctor has to sell, the doctor stops doing the only thing the doctor can do, which is diagnose, treat, and move to the next chair. Pull that same doctor into payroll, time-off approvals, and team conflict, and you get a stressed owner with operational chaos underneath them.
The same principle applies to the coordinator. A strong TC who is skilled at sales, extroverted, and genuinely empathetic should be presenting treatment, closing treatment, and moving to the next patient. Break that rhythm by handing them administrative work and their numbers drop, partly because they are not happy doing it.
Luke’s argument on direction of movement is worth sitting with. Take a salesperson and put them at the front desk or in an admin seat and they will probably be fine. Take an admin and put them in a sales seat and conversion tends to fall apart. The skills do not travel both ways.
For a small or startup practice, Luke still treats the TC as a key hire. His build order is one administrative assistant, one clinical assistant, and one treatment coordinator. As the practice grows, that administrative assistant becomes the office manager.
What does “the patient is pre-sold” actually mean?
It means the patient already decided something before they arrived, and the consult is not where the decision gets made.
Luke sees practices operating from the opposite belief. They act like the patient is on the fence, like there is a long warming-up process, like the start is genuinely in doubt until the last minute. Then he asks the obvious question: who takes two hours off work, gets the kids ready, and drives to an orthodontic office for the fun of it?
Most patients who need treatment are insecure about their smile. That insecurity is what motivates them to move fast. They want confidence. They picked your practice out of the options available to them, booked the appointment, and showed up. Very few of them want to repeat that process at two more offices next month.
Luke pulls the analogy from his own retail days at Buckle in the mall. Plenty of people walked past. But the ones who came in were touching product, picking up jeans, holding shirts against themselves. He closed at a high rate because he believed those signals meant intent. If he had assumed those people did not want to buy, he would have performed like someone who assumed that.
When a treatment coordinator treats every patient as ready to move forward, the close rate can move from the roughly 52% average to 75% and above. The belief changes the ask, and the ask changes the number.
How do you build certainty before a consult when leads go quiet?
Luke’s third shift is a three-question check a treatment coordinator (TC) runs on themselves whenever their confidence slips. He calls it truth, fact, and reality.
The truth. What does this person actually want? Straight teeth. Teeth that let them eat normally. Confidence. To stop hiding their smile in photographs. That desire existed before your practice showed up in their feed.
The fact. They clicked on something. They called your practice. They booked an appointment. Nobody forced them to do any of it. That fact does not evaporate because they went quiet afterward.
The reality. Everyone is guarded, and people are busy. A no-show does not mean a bad patient, and it does not automatically warrant a fee or a booking block. In a dental practice, the patient may be carrying real fear about pain. In an orthodontic practice, they may be scared of what it costs. They may have simply forgotten.
The practical payoff is in follow-up. A practice that varies its outreach across call, voicemail, text, and email eventually reconnects the dots for the patient. They recognize the name, remember the person who was kind on the phone, and remember that they do want braces or Invisalign after all. Luke’s point is that the no-show can become your best patient once the guard comes down.
Any time a coordinator catches themselves believing a lead is dead, running truth, fact, and reality restores the accurate picture.
How do you lower a guarded patient’s defenses?
Luke frames the treatment coordinator (TC) as a disarmament agent. The job in the first minutes of contact is to lower the guard, and guard comes down through words, tone, and body language.
Start with the words. Here is a transactional version of a same-day start offer:
“We offer same day starts, so we can start today if you’re interested.”
Here is the softened version Luke prefers:
“We offer same day starts, so you could begin today without another visit, if that might possibly work for you and your schedule.”
The content is identical. The second one gives the patient room to breathe. Softening words and connecting phrases lower guard where a direct push raises it.
Delivery carries more weight than word choice. Luke cites the widely repeated Mehrabian research, which found that in situations of ambiguous emotional messaging, the literal words accounted for around 7% of what got communicated, with tone and body language carrying the rest. The specific percentages get overapplied, but the practical lesson holds. How the coordinator says it is doing most of the work.
Which leads to Luke’s most concrete recommendation in this section: record your treatment coordinators and watch film with them. Every competitive team, collegiate or professional, reviews tape. Salespeople almost never do. If a coordinator pushes back hard on being recorded, you probably have a real problem, because a good salesperson wants refinement.
There is a HIPAA-compliant way to do this in a healthcare setting. Talk to your attorney about the specifics before you start. Once you have the mechanism, sit the front desk and the treatment coordinators down together, listen to phone calls, and watch consults. Listen for tone. Watch for body language.
How can an orthodontic practice double consult capacity without adding hours?
By cutting the new patient consult from 60 minutes to 30.
The one-hour new patient consultation is standard in orthodontics. HIP Creative runs a 30-minute consult process instead, tested with a stopwatch alongside practice teams. The math is simple. A practice doing three new patient consults a day can do six.
Two things make the hour work against you. First, patients do not want to be in your office longer than necessary. Second, an hour-long block gives the team permission to slow down and expand into areas where extra time adds nothing. The most common expansion is the doctor over-explaining.
Luke’s rule: details are the enemy of execution. When a patient receives a large volume of information, they typically do not move forward. This is not an argument for withholding or for failing to educate. It is an argument for understanding what information does to a nervous person.
He tells it through his own bilateral hernia procedure. He chose an expert in Ohio with thousands of cases behind him, the kind of surgeon patients fly in from other countries to see. Every communication from that surgeon was designed to put Luke at ease. Your case is easy. It will go quickly. I could do this with my eyes closed. The surgeon never went into detail, because he knows that detail frightens people about a procedure that frightens people.
Easier, faster, better. Brian Tracy calls it the “-er factor.” Amazon is the clearest example. Faster shipping with Prime, equal or better quality, reviews front and center. Luke buys the 4.9-star product over the 4.5-star product for exactly that reason. In a practice, the equivalents are better outcomes, faster appointments, easier processes, and lower down payments.
How should an orthodontic practice pay a treatment coordinator?
Low hourly, high commission. Luke’s position is that most practices have it backward.
Across the hundreds of doctors he speaks with each year, the pattern is consistent: a high hourly rate paired with a small commission. He points to a director of sales at an eight-figure practice who confirmed their treatment coordinators (TCs) are commission-based, and that is not a coincidence.
The structure Luke recommends is an hourly rate at or near minimum wage, with substantial upside tied to goals, new patient starts, and revenue added to the practice. A treatment coordinator who is genuinely good at closing will earn more under that structure than under the safe salary, and a coordinator who is not good at closing will self-select out.
The retention logic sits underneath the compensation logic. If you install these six shifts and build a top closer, the last thing you want is for that person to leave. Upside that grows as the practice grows gives them a real financial reason to stay.
HIP Creative has a full incentive framework covering the entire team, not only the TC role.
What changes when the treatment coordinator mindset changes?
The numbers Luke attaches to these six shifts:
- Close rate at 75% or higher, against a roughly 52% average
- Up to $1,000 in additional production per new patient start
- Double the consult capacity, moving from three new patient consults a day to six
Those three compound. Twice the consults at a substantially higher close rate, each start worth more, is not an incremental improvement to a practice. It is a different practice.
Change your thoughts, change your practice.
FAQ
What is a treatment coordinator in an orthodontic practice?
A treatment coordinator (TC) is the person who presents and closes treatment with the patient after the clinical exam. Luke Infinger treats it as a specialized sales role rather than an administrative one, which is why he argues against filling it with a generalist or a front desk team member.
What percentage of practices have a dedicated treatment coordinator?
Only 20 to 30% of dental and orthodontic offices have one. It is more commonplace in orthodontics and quite rare in general dentistry, based on what HIP Creative sees across the practices it works with.
What is a good case acceptance rate for an orthodontic practice?
The average sits around 52%. Luke’s position is that practices operating on the assumption that every patient is pre-sold can reach 75% or higher.
Should a treatment coordinator be paid hourly or on commission?
Commission-weighted. Luke recommends an hourly rate at or near minimum wage with significant commission upside tied to new patient starts and revenue added, which is the inverse of what most practices do.
Should you charge a fee for a no-show consult?
Luke says a no-show does not necessarily warrant a fee or a booking restriction. People are busy, they forget, and some get scared. A varied follow-up sequence across call, voicemail, text, and email brings a meaningful share of them back, and some become your best patients.
How long should a new patient consultation take?
Thirty minutes, with a defined format. The hour-long consult is standard but allows the team to slow down and the doctor to over-explain, both of which reduce same-day starts.
Glossary
Treatment coordinator (TC): The team member responsible for presenting treatment options, handling financial conversations, and closing the case with the patient.
Case acceptance rate (close rate): The percentage of new patient consults that result in a treatment start.
Same-day start: Beginning treatment during the initial consultation visit rather than scheduling a separate appointment.
Flow state: Working in a focused, uninterrupted rhythm on a single type of task. Luke uses it to describe why doctors and treatment coordinators should not be pulled into administrative work.
Disarmament: Lowering a patient’s natural defensiveness through softening language, tone, and body language before asking for a commitment.
Full episode transcript
[00:00] Opening: mindset as the limiting factor
Luke Infinger: Today we’re going to talk about mindset. How do you foster the right mindset in your team to get the best performance possible? Specifically with your TC, your treatment coordinator. There are six specific steps I’m going to share with you, and when installed in the practice and in the mindset of your treatment coordinator, you will have the ability to be in the top 1% of practices in the country. So let’s jump into it.
I love this quote by George Bernard Shaw. It says, those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. What we see in psychology with people is that the one thing you have control over is your mind. Most people have a poor mindset, and that is their limiting factor.
When you think you can and you believe in the possibility, you have a much greater chance of actually accomplishing your goal, mission, vision, whatever it is. I was just listening to Brian Tracy today, and he was talking to a group of people, and none of them were where they wanted to be with their income goals. He told a story about people coming to our country and within five or ten years they could be millionaires, or in some cases documented billionaires. How is it that immigrants can come in and do that, but your average American citizen typically doesn’t? It all goes back to mindset. I get that some of that self-help stuff can be cheesy, but I do think there is truth to belief, to having a resilient mindset, to being optimistic versus negative, poor, or doubtful.
[02:00] Shift one: the TC is a specialized role
So here are the shifts. Number one, the TC is a specialized role. In many practices we see a generalist in the sales role, and specifically with sales, putting a generalist in the role is the worst possible thing you could do. I would argue you could take a salesperson and put them at the front desk, maybe put them in an admin role, and they could do okay. But when you take an admin role and put them in a sales role, it is typically very poor performance, specifically with conversion rate.
[02:50] Shift two: the patient is pre-sold
Number two, the patient is pre-sold. It’s strange. I go into a lot of practices every single year, and they don’t really have the mindset and the belief that the patients coming in just want to start. There’s this whole process to getting them warmed up to the idea, and they’re on pins and needles, and are they going to start or not start? I don’t think many people go to a dental practice or orthodontic practice just for the hell of it. Maybe I’ll take time off work and get the kids ready and take an hour or two out of our day without thinking or wanting treatment to happen, right?
So when people come in, let’s just say in an orthodontic practice, believe that they’re already there to get started. That’s the assumption. If they’re coming into a dental practice, they want to have treatment, whether they need hygiene or something else. I went to the dentist recently and had some cosmetic things done.
People are there, especially with a brick and mortar business. When people are coming in, they want to buy stuff. I used to work at Buckle in the mall. Yeah, there are people who just walk through, but by and large people are looking and touching product, touching the jeans, touching a shirt, wanting to try something on. If I believed that they didn’t really want to buy whatever they were trying on, I probably wouldn’t have been a top closer at Buckle. But I was, because I was very optimistic and believed, hey, they’re coming in, they’re touching product, they’re looking at things. If I ask them or introduce certain things, they want to try it on. If I go get something like the product they liked, they’ll try that on. And I just keep stacking my potential of closing more business.
[04:55] Shifts three through six, introduced
Number three, certainty from truth, fact, and reality. I’ll explain that later. Number four, you are a guard disarmament agent. People are guarded. If you had someone opt in from the website or a Facebook ad and you call them and they pick up, what do they sound like? They probably don’t know who you are. They don’t have your number saved in their phone. Guarded. How do you lower that guard?
Number five, build capacity for more consultations. I hear this all the time. We’re having to book out two weeks, four weeks. How do you actually create more capacity in your schedule? It can be very easy.
And finally, number six, how do you reward the right behavior? The last thing you want is to install these things, have a top closer, a top treatment coordinator, and then have them leave. So how do you keep them? How do you give them upside as they grow? As you grow, they have a large benefit to staying with you in the practice.
[05:51] Specialized role, in detail
Getting into the specifics. A specialized role. Only 20 to 30% of offices have a dedicated treatment coordinator. This is across dental and orthodontic practices. Certainly in orthodontics it’s more commonplace. In a dental practice it’s actually very rare, from what we see, to have a treatment coordinator.
The issue with having an admin or a front desk person or a doctor selling treatment is that you start taking people out of flow state. With the doctor, you want them focused on treatment, on the patient, then getting them out of that room and into the next bay, next chair, to keep doing what only they can do. When they have to sell, it takes them out of flow state. Now they’re having to do multiple things, and then there’s operational chaos if they’re doing more than that. Maybe they’re running payroll, approving time off, dealing with team issues. That’s when a doctor typically is very unhappy, very stressed out.
The same applies to your TC. You want them just closing, presenting treatment, closing treatment, and then moving to the next patient. There’s an optimized way to do this. When that is done, and when that treatment coordinator, who’s very skilled at sales, an extrovert, has empathy, is good with people, is just focused on presenting treatment and closing treatment, that’s when they’re going to be most valuable for the practice.
Now, you break that flow state and make them go do an administrative task, and their results can go down drastically, because ultimately they’re not happy doing those other things.
You may not be able to do this if you’re a small practice or starting out. But I would also argue that in a small practice, a TC is a key hire. You could have an administrative assistant, a clinical assistant, and then a TC. That is kind of the priority. Then maybe as you grow, that administrative assistant becomes office manager.
[08:22] The patient is pre-sold, in detail
Number two, the patient is pre-sold. Most people who need treatment are insecure about their smile. They’re motivated to act fast because of that insecurity. They want confidence. And they chose your practice to come into. Do most people want to get a second or third opinion? Do most people want to take more time off? Probably not. So if you have the right offer and they feel comfortable and they feel like you get them and you make the process easy, they’re going to move forward that day.
When you treat every patient as if they are ready to move forward, your conversion rate can go from the average 52% to 75% or even higher.
[09:34] Truth, fact, and reality
Number three, build certainty from three questions. The truth. What is the truth? This person wants straight teeth. Or this person wants teeth so they can eat food. Or this person wants confidence. This person wants to stop hiding their smile in photos. That’s the truth.
The fact is they clicked on something, they called your practice, they booked an appointment. It doesn’t matter whether you can get a hold of them, whether they no-showed. That is the fact. They did that. No one forced them to do that.
And the reality is everyone’s guarded. So when you call, you text, and you don’t get a hold of them, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad lead. When they no-show, it doesn’t mean you should charge them necessarily, or that you should block them from booking another consult. The reality is people are busy. They may have forgotten, or they may have gotten scared. There’s fear. If you’re a dental practice, there can be a lot of pain associated with going to the dentist. If you’re an orthodontic practice, maybe they’re concerned about their finances. That is the reality. We’re all guarded.
So how do you have empathy for that person? Put yourself in their shoes and understand there’s just a process to lowering the guard. Once you do, maybe that no-show comes in and becomes your best patient. Maybe that person who wasn’t responding to your phone calls, when you have a process to try different messaging and methods, meaning call, voicemail, send a text, send an email, and you connect communication, they go, oh yeah, that is that person. They sounded really nice on the phone. I really do want to get braces or Invisalign. Maybe I should call them back.
So anytime you catch yourself having the wrong mindset around getting people into the practice or converting cases, go through the truth, fact, and reality with yourself.
[11:07] Shift four: you are the disarmament agent
Mindset shift number four. You are the disarmament agent. So how do you disarm? You can disarm with words. You can disarm with body language. There’s this whole thing to communication.
So this is pretty pushy: we offer same day starts, so we can start today if you’re interested. Some people may not respond to that well. So how do you soften it? Something like this: we offer same day starts, so you could begin today without another visit, if that might possibly work for you in your schedule. It’s a little softer, a little less transactional. So softening words and connecting phrases can help lower guard.
Now, it’s all about how you deliver it. Tone is a huge thing. I think it’s estimated that only 8% of communication is verbal. So tone and body language are the things that really put your words to work.
I like to record treatment coordinators and have them watch film, just like an NFL team or basketball team. Really, any team that competes competitively, whether collegiate or pro, is going to watch film. Oftentimes salespeople don’t. And if there’s strong pushback from salespeople about watching film, you most likely have a big problem, because any good salesperson is going to want refinement.
There is a HIPAA-compliant way to do this. You have to do it right. If you’re doing it in a healthcare practice, you can look into that, you can talk to your attorney. But I would strongly suggest doing this, so you can have the sales team, front desk, and treatment coordinators watch film together, listen to phone calls together, and listen for tone and watch for body language. It will be huge with your team in the practice.
[13:42] Shift five: creating capacity
All right, mindset shift number five. How do you create more capacity? We find, and I’ll use an orthodontic practice here, it’s very commonplace for a new patient consultation to last about an hour. We have a 30-minute consult process. If you click below this video and drop us a line, we will send it to you. But there is a specific format to follow, and we have even worked with practices who get a stopwatch out and test this with our team to optimize the schedule.
The reality is people don’t want to spend more time in your practice than they have to. Also, when you have an hour-long consult, it allows the team to move a little slower and to spend more time in areas where it’s actually unnecessary, meaning we find the doctor gives way too much explanation. Details are the enemy of execution. So when you give a lot of information to a patient, they typically don’t move forward.
I’m not saying to omit things or not educate the patient. It’s interesting. I had a bilateral hernia procedure last July and I chose an expert. He’s done thousands and thousands of cases. Older guy. People fly from other countries to this guy. He’s up in Ohio. All of the communication with him was him just putting me at ease. Your case is going to be so easy. It’s going to go by quickly. I could do this with my eyes closed. He never really got into the details, because I think he knows when he does that with patients, they get scared. This can be kind of a terrifying procedure. So everything was easier, faster, better. That’s it.
Actually, Brian Tracy calls that the “-er” factor. Kind of like Amazon. What do they do? Faster with Amazon Prime. Better or equal quality. You can see that with them highlighting reviews. That’s how I buy things. If I’m looking at the same product, this one has 4.9 stars, the other one has 4.5. Better, faster, easier, cheaper, lower down payments. That’s just an add-on and something tangential here to mindset shift number five.
[16:19] Shift six: rewarding top performers
And lastly, mindset shift six. How do you reward top people in the practice? How do you reward top team members in the practice? This is a direct quote from an eight-figure practice. This was a director of sales, and she was saying that their TCs are commission based.
When I talk to practices, and I talk to hundreds of doctors every year, a lot of times they’re paying far too high hourly and low commission. It should be switched. It should be kind of minimum wage or close to it, but with tremendous upside on your goals, on new patient starts, on revenue added to the practice. We have a process for this. You can drop us a line and we’ll send you all kinds of ways and ideas and concepts on how to incentivize your entire team, not just the TC role. Very, very important with salespeople.
[17:31] The numbers
So here are the numbers. What changes when the mindset changes? Your close rates could be 75% or higher. You can add at least up to $1,000 in production for every new patient start. And you can double your capacity. This is huge. You could go from three new patient consults a day to six.
So change your thoughts, change your practice. The takeaway is when you change your thoughts, you can change your practice. Thanks so much for watching.
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