Seal The Deal by Colin Receveur

No matter how good your practice marketing might be, your investment is completely wasted if “the deal” isn’t closed.

That’s the stage in your customer funnel where the prospect calls your office. Not to take anything away from any dentists’ front office staff—they’re great people doing the very best they can—but few of them are formally trained in phone skills.

Even if someone has some natural phone skills, it’s not the same as taking control of a call and steadily moving the caller to becoming an appointed patient. Every new patient caller who isn’t appointed is a waste of the money you spent to attract him or her. In my experience, there are very few dental practices that can afford to waste money.

That first point of contact is too often the final point of contact. There are several reasons why even competent phone answerers may not be closing the deal.

The curse of multitasking
Not all practices have dedicated phone answerers. Many practices have front offices with a few people who constantly juggle multiple responsibilities: checking patients in and out, trying to answer insurance questions, dealing with semi-crisis or crisis situations (screaming children, or someone with dental anxiety who becomes faint), and maybe answering the phone and trying to move a prospect to become an appointed patient.

That’s a lot of distraction, and sometimes it’s a wonder that anybody gets appointed.

SmartBox records and analyzes every call to all our doctors’ practices. Our data indicates that in Q4 2017, an average of 94 percent of our dentists’ incoming calls were answered, which is extremely high. We’ve seen practices with 14–17 percent no-answer rates.

As well as those doctors’ staffs performed in Q4, 6 percent of incoming calls were never answered: No staff member or answering service ever talked to the caller, or the call never went to voicemail.

Think about the number of calls your office fields in three months. If just 1?percent of all callers are prospects, how many new patients are you not getting?

This is an area where practice owners can take action. Adding even one front office person to help answer calls can make an enormous difference in the number of appointed patients. That’s not always feasible because of space limitations, but wherever possible you should try to help your front office focus on the task in front of them.

If needed, you can also help your staff establish a protocol for handing off conflicting tasks, so your phone answerers can focus on getting more new patients through the door. That has to be a high priority.

The average value of a new patient to a dental practice is $1,500. SmartBox’s data indicates that average hold time for callers is 1½ to 2 minutes, based on all of our clients. If your callers are on hold for 3 to 5 minutes—or longer—they’re likely lost to you. And so is that revenue.

Not finding the objection behind the objection
People who call your practice aren’t always upfront about their fears and concerns. Hesitation to commit to an appointment may be disguised as needing to talk to a spouse, financial concerns, or a belief that the procedure won’t be worth the time and expense.

It takes real skill, a healthy dose of intuition, and excellent training to consistently detect when some underlying concern isn’t being voiced. It takes even more skill to gently elicit that concern so that it can be successfully addressed (See example at left).

There are very few people who are naturals at this process, and my hat’s off to them. That’s an invaluable skill, and I hope that you have one or more of these godsends. If not, you’ll need to obtain some high-quality phone training for your staff to have any hope of getting maximum return on your marketing investment.

Choose the right phone training program
Dealing with the unique wants, needs and fears of dental patients demands a more evolved approach than the typical customer service training program provides. Your best option is to find a program that was developed specifically for dental practices by people who understand dentistry and dental patients.

Ideally, the program you choose will include a way to judge its effectiveness and to identify any weaknesses in your front office’s phone technique. Call monitoring is the best way to accomplish those objectives.

With the right training program and call monitoring, you can fix the hole in your dental marketing that’s costing you new patients.

Discover how to attract more patients
In a recent installment of his daily podcast, SmartBox CEO Colin Receveur explained why many dentists are putting out newsletters that practically define “bad marketing.” To discover the solution, and to learn some of Receveur’s other successful marketing strategies, check out his blog by clicking here.