Dentistry Uncensored Highlights: Fair Warning

You might say that Colin Receveur's destiny in health care marketing was steeled in the crucible of childhood: He's the son of a dentist and a top sales executive for a Fortune 100 health care organization. Today, as CEO of SmartBox, the country's fastest-growing patient attraction firm, Receveur is parlaying the hands-on experience he gleaned from helping his father's practice thrive into a hands-on approach that helps dentists navigate an environment threatened by such challenges as corporate dentistry and economic uncertainty.

In a recent Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran podcast, Receveur expounded on his firm's unique strategies, emphasizing that SmartBox is more than simply a marketing firm—it's a patient attraction firm, and to attract new patients, "you have to take it all the way to butts in the chair."

Dr. Howard Farran: It's a huge honor for me to bring you back as a guest on the show. I loved your previous podcast ["Patient Attraction Podcast"]—and I want anybody listening to this one to go back and listen to that—but that was two years ago at Townie Meeting. So what's changed in the past two years since that podcast?

Colin Receveur: If you follow best practices today and you followed best practices two years ago, your marketing's still going to be successful. Now, there are new shiny objects out there. There are new tactics and strategies, but the best practices haven't changed. Does that make sense?

HF: Yeah. I mean there's so much. I see millennials, they're all going to build their practice on Facebook; the old guys, it's all going to be direct mail. Who's smarter? The old guys like me, doing direct mail? Or these young kids doing it all on the internet, Facebook and social media?

CR: You can kill it either way, and I think the most sensible guys are doing both. I think it's shortsighted to limit yourself to just one. Do both and dominate your market.

One thing to remember: People today are referencing 10, 11 and 12 information sources before making a buying decision, and that's what's fundamentally changed. Twenty years ago, people referenced two sources of information. They had, one, a friend who liked Dr. Farran and, two, the Yellow Pages with Dr. Farran's ad. That was it. Today, there are online reviews, videos, websites and all this stuff. You have to think of it as more of a path than an event. It's a process.

HF: I've been reading a lot about one of your websites,

practiceundersiege.com [which promotes Receveur's new book, The Four Horsemen of Dentistry: Survival Strategies for the Private Dental Practice Under Siege]. When did this come along?

CR: I think there are four big threats facing dentistry today. Of course, there's corporate dentistry. In many markets, you've got your Aspens and ClearChoices coming in, and they're the big gorillas in the room. They're driving up marketing expenses and they've got economies of scale. They get everything cheaper and they have more marketing dollars.

You've got more dental grads than ever, you've got dental schools opening up everywhere and you've got older doctors extending retirement because of the Great Recession. Hence, you've got more competition.

Insurance sure isn't something to write home about these days. I read an interesting article recently where four doctors in Massachusetts filed a class action lawsuit against Delta for what it has done there, cutting off top tier. There's a lot of pushback on that from a lot of dentists. It's their livelihood.

And then there's economic uncertainty. We've been in the largest, longest bull market since World War II. To not consider a plan if there's a small setback in the economy, I think, is shortsighted. I'm a big planner, and how you're going to prepare for these situations is what I push our doctors to do.

HF: When dentists call you up and say, "Dude, I want more new patients," what do you say?

CR: First, you've got to do the diagnostics. You've got to meet with them and see what they want. Every practice is different. Every market is different. We figure out what is needed, then put together a blueprint of where these wants and needs align. Also, how does this plan look? And what results do we see as being realistic to achieve?

HF: I also think the procedures a dentist wants to do would matter. Like Invisalign would be a totally different patient than one needing an implant. Would you agree that the majority of implant patients are elderly?

CR: Oh, they're all the boomers. That's where the money is. That's your largest edentulous population.

HF: So you're saying the implant market is boomers and the Invisalign market is millennials? Is it a completely different campaign and target market?

CR: The target market's different, but the mechanism, the strategy to get people to buy a $5,000 Invisalign case or a $25,000 implant case, is still the same. As transaction costs increase, so does required trust. And building that trust, whether you're building it with a millennial or with a boomer, it's all the same. People do business with the dentist they know and like.

HF: Tell my homies more about the website. You've got a new book out?

CR: I do, and I'm not even selling it; I'm basically giving it away [for $2]. It goes back to the four forces that I talked about—corporate, competition, insurance reimbursements and economic uncertainty—and how to overcome each of them to have a thriving practice.

HF: Speaking of websites, what percentage of them do you consider to be lame, and what is the conversion rate of the lame websites versus the hottest websites you can build?

CR: I'd say 90 percent of the sites I look at are awful. What we do with dentists is help them look at the marketing, the advertising, the website, the follow-up, the phone tracking—it's a system. And it's moving patients through this system and holding the staff accountable at the other end of the system. We're the only patient attraction firm in the country that handles everything from advertising and marketing to actually scheduling butts in the chairs and ensuring the front desk is held accountable to actually scheduling a reasonable percentage of the calls we generate for the practice.

HF: And that's why I will never go into dental advertising—because you can do the best dental advertising in the world for a client, yet their website is a dog. And then when potential patients call, half the calls go to voicemail. And if a human does answer the phone, he or she says, "Can you please hold?" And then they blame it on you.

CR: That's why we don't talk about hits and clicks in conversion rates. At SmartBox, we've got a team of people that listens to all phone calls that come into the practice and monitors them in near real time. So our reporting at month's end is this: You spent this much on this marketing campaign; you got this many phone calls; and you didn't answer this many phone calls. And from that, you scheduled or didn't schedule this many new patients.

We have a guarantee, and our guarantee is voided if the doctor doesn't answer 90 percent of his phone calls. And that's how we help hold him accountable. We approach it differently than a lot of marketing agencies because we're not a marketing agency. We're a patient attraction firm, and to attract new patients, you have to take it all the way to butts in the chair.

HF: OK. What else do my homies need to know?

CR: Well, we're a fully HIPAA-compliant company; we've been through the same HIPAA training that any dental practice goes through, probably more because we've had to certify all 80 people in our company.

HF: And finally, what's next for you?

CR: We want to help 10,000 dentists by 2020, and to get there we're soon launching new online products that are going to help us spread our wings and help dentists thrive and attract more and better patients, which is our motto.

Hear the entire podcast online!
This article includes just some of the highlights of Colin Receveur's conversation with Dr. Howard Farran. To download the podcast, watch the video or read a full transcript, go to dentaltown.com/receveur-on-trust.