Days Are Gone When Dental Patients Just Lined Up At Your Door

The definition of external marketing is anything that lets a prospective new patient know who you are, and where you are.  Dentists in busier market areas pine for the days when all they had to do was unlock their door and patients were waiting.  Most had great dental insurance plans, and the biggest decision a practice had to make was when they were taking their vacations that year.

Now – new practices are open in every strip mall, usually with corresponding neon signs and large painted windows.  Opening hours from 7:00 AM to sometimes 9:00 PM are not unusual, and Saturdays and Sundays openings are much more common.  If you are on the 3^rd floor of an obscure office building – how is any prospective patient to even have a clue you exist?

Any public persona in terms of signage,…

Every Word Spoken In Your Practice Is Internal Marketing

Absolutely every bit of patient communication is internal marketing.  It is not restricted to the little signs everywhere that say ‘New Patients Welcome’ or ‘Your Referral is Appreciated’.

Marketing starts on the telephone.

Guess what?  Voice mail is a killer – regardless of how it is rationalized.  Nothing makes less sense in a progressive practice than to simply allow the phone to go to the ‘machine’.  Most people won’t leave a message – and most of the messages sound like an invitation to a migraine festival.  They frequently threaten to charge you for cancelled appointments if you do not speak to a receptionist ‘in person’ during business hours.  Think about the logic here.  Most of your good loyal patients do not miss or cancel their appointments, yet the message that 100% of your patient…

Team Attitude to the Economy

Is the recession over? Can anyone turn on the evening news without some pundit or another going on about who said we were ‘out of the woods’ – or did the market make another ‘correction’?  Why is a ‘correction’ usually somehow negative?

Your team members are wage earners, tax payers, and ‘just plain folk’. They are equally as susceptible to the media and all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy. Perhaps they have a spouse either laid off or fearful for their job. If part of their job description is treatment case presentation – and a patient says that a $6,000 treatment plan is expensive and they have to ‘think about it’ – do you find your team member silently agreeing with them?

We worked with a very high end practice, and did job shadowing with the relatively new treatment case…

If They Don’t Accept Treatment – Who Do We Blame?

I dropped in to a colleague’s office recently because the doctor had requested some assistance on a challenging case.  His reception area had 2 people waiting, and the receptionist was intent on her screen with pursed lips and a scowl on her face.  She didn’t so much as glance up at me, and continued to ignore me for an additional 30 seconds.  Had I been there to theoretically spend money she alone would have changed my mind and I would have voted with my feet!  This is the same gal my colleague counts on to ‘close’ his cases once they leave his chair. He says his numbers are way off, and simply blames the economy.  Her poor attitude was contagious – so do you think her behaviour may have a part in all this? How can we control our teams’…