Page 100 - The Dental Entrepreneur

The Dental Entrepreneur
for these opportunities and it requires a pretty organized office to pull it off. By working in one
simple procedure a day, over the course of a year, may add up to tens of thousands of dollars.
To make that kind of additional income by just working a tiny bit harder and a lot smarter is
huge. Please do not overlook working people in on short notice and if you have a lazy staff
person that resists ,help them find a new home.

Telephone Protocol/Scripts

It is impossible to author a section on marketing and not mention telephone protocol and how
poorly most offices handle this. The following statistics are from The Scheduling Institute and
are truly eye opening.
•Only 12% of doctors understand the impact their front desk has on new patient volume and
their income
•The telephone is the only point of entry for 98% of all new patients
•New patients only have a 60% chance of reaching a live staff member during normal business
hours
•86% of new patients will not call back or leave a message when they get a voicemail or
answering machine.
If there is a system in your office that you truly have no excuse for failure it is here. Understand
that you must have a training program for anyone that touches a phone. Scripts are provided
so that consistency and proper questioning is completed on prospective patients. Your phone
must be answered at all times including lunch. It is absolutely unacceptable to use an
answering machine during lunch when that is the time most working people have a moment to
call you.

Practice What You Preach

Here is a super common sense one that is overlooked by many offices. If you are “selling”

appearance and good health, the teeth of you and your staff must be perfect!. It may require
you committing to a fair amount if work on some staff but it is vitally important that the patient
sees exactly what you are preaching about. I was a very early adapter of veneers and I can tell
you that personally having them convinced more patients than I could count. If it was good
enough for “doc” it is good enough for them. Get your teeth fixed!

Christmas in November

It is very important for you to discover and utilize the part of your practice management
software that has to so with diagnosed but unscheduled treatment. November is the perfect
time to make the most of this. Contact patients that have yearly benefits remaining and
unscheduled treatment. It is super easy to connect those dots. For the office that get this,
December is always the busiest and most productive month. A great lead into the Christmas
holiday and end of the year.

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