Chris (00:20.558)
Today I wanna challenge something that most every dentist I talk to believes deep down. And that belief is this, if I could just get more new patients, everything would be fine. It sounds reasonable, right? It feels logical. And honestly, it’s what most marketing agencies want you to believe because it keeps you buying ads and buying services. But here’s the truth, for most practices, more leads are not the answer.
I know that sounds crazy. And if you pour more money into marketing before fixing what’s actually broken, you’re not going to grow. You’re just going to continue to lose money, but maybe at a little bit of faster pace. So let’s get into it. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the No BS Dental Growth podcast. I’m your host, Chris Pistorius, founder and CEO of Kickstart Dental Marketing. Now, for over 17 years, we have worked exclusively with dental and orthodontic practices.
No chiropractors, no med spas, no random local businesses, just dentists and orthodontists who are serious about growing the right way, for the long term. This show is about real stuff, real strategies, real numbers, and real talk. There’s no fluff, there’s no theory, no hype, hence the no BS. It’s just what actually works and what doesn’t. And if you haven’t already, please make sure you’ve hit subscribe.
wherever you’re listening right now, whether it’s Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever that is for you. New episodes drop every week and I don’t want you to miss one. Now today we’re gonna go after one of the most popular beliefs in dental marketing, at least from a dental standpoint, that the answer to a slow practice is almost always more leads. I’m gonna show you why that’s actually wrong. What’s actually happening in most practices
and how to diagnose the real problem before you spend another dollar on marketing. And remember, I’m kind of the dental marketing guy. So it’s going to contradict what you might believe about me and what you might believe about your own marketing agency. So let’s dive in. We’re gonna talk first about the kind of the dangerous diagnosis, if you will. So here’s the most dangerous thing I hear on a sales call when I’m talking to a potential new client.
Chris (02:38.635)
A dentist gets on the phone with me and within the first two minutes, sometimes sooner, says, we just need more leads. We just need more patients. We need more traffic. And I get it. When the schedule looks a little thin and production is down, the instinct is to get more people in the door. That feels like action. That feels like solving a problem. But here’s what I’ve learned after the 17 years of doing this. We need more leads is almost never, almost, the real diagnosis.
It’s the symptom that people point to because it’s the most visible. But the actual problem is usually invisible or at least inconvenient to look at. So think about it this way. If you had a bucket with holes in the bottom and you wanted more water in it, would you pour it faster or would you plug the holes first? Most practices are pouring faster and faster and faster and wondering why the bucket always stays empty or it keeps going down at least, right?
Let me show you what I mean with some real numbers, because this is where it gets a little bit uncomfortable, especially if I’m talking to a brand new practice. So say you’re getting 40 leads a month from your marketing, calls, form fills, whatever, and you’re converting 25 % of those into scheduled patients. That’s 10 new basic patients a month, right? Easy math. Now, most dentists in that situation say, I need more leads.
So they doubled down on their ad spend or their marketing spend, and now they’re getting 80 leads, if it were that simple. Same thing though, 25 % conversion, that’s 20 patients a month, right? But here’s the other path. What if instead of doubling your ad spend, you fixed your conversion rate? What if you went from 25 % to 50 %? Same 40 leads, same marketing budget, but now you’re getting 20 patients a month out of it. Same result.
the cost. Seems more efficient, right? And here’s the part that really stings. That 25 % conversion rate in most practices, it’s actually lower than that of all leads, not just qualified. We do call, we do call audits all the time for practices. And I can tell you a 40 to 50 % conversion rate from lead to scheduled patient is absolutely achievable. But the average practice we look at is converting somewhere between 20 and 30%, sometimes even lower.
Chris (05:07.936)
The gap is not always a marketing problem. That’s an operational problem and no amount of ad spend fixes it. In fact, it can just make the problem feel worse. So let’s talk about where the money is actually going because in most practices there are five leaks that are quietly draining revenue every single month. And I bet at least two or three of these are happening in your practice right now. Keep me honest though.
The first one is brutal. We’ve tracked call data across dozens of practices. See my dog back there? She’s helping me out today. And the average dental practice misses somewhere between 20 and 35 % of their inbound calls. Think about that. You’re paying for marketing to drive the phone to ring, and then a third of those calls just go unanswered, or they go to a dark voicemail or whatever. And here’s the kicker. Most of those calls don’t call back. They just call your competitor.
That’s not a lead problem. That’s a hemorrhage. So the second thing I really want to talk to you about is let’s say a call comes in, it gets answered, and then it doesn’t convert. It happens, right? No matter what training you do, you’re always going to have that. The patient asks about price and the front desk fumbles it a little bit, or they quote a number with no context. And the patient says, well, let me think about it. Or they…
It might even be they put the patient on hold for three minutes and by the time they come back, the energy is dead if they haven’t already hung up altogether. So this happens every day in practices spending thousands of dollars on Google ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, whatever it might be. You’re paying to get the phone to ring and then the conversion falls apart on a $15 an hour phone call. If your front desk isn’t trained, then it’s please listen to this. If they’re not trained on how to handle objections, how to build value,
and how to schedule on the first call, you have a conversion problem, not a marketing or a lead problem. Let’s talk about leak number three. Someone fills out a form on your website at 9 p.m. When does your team follow up? The next morning? The next afternoon? Tuesday? Speed to lead is everything. Studies show that if you don’t respond to a web lead within five minutes, five minutes, your chances of converting that person drop dramatically.
Chris (07:35.231)
By the time your team gets to them the next morning, they’ve already scheduled somewhere else. This is fixable, especially in today’s world of AI. You know my opinion though, AI don’t go too far with it right now. There’s automated follow-up ways, there’s sequences, there’s after hours voice bots. This problem doesn’t have to exist anymore, but most practices still have zero systems in place to tackle it. Leak number four.
I did a growth hack episode on this recently. Pull your unscheduled treatment report right now. Go into Dentrix, Eagle Soft, Open Dental, whatever you’re on, and look at the total dollar value of treatment that’s been diagnosed but never scheduled. In most practices, that number is between 200 and $400,000. It depends on what size practice you are. Some are over a million that we’ve seen. That’s real dentistry that your patients actually need sitting in your software
collecting digital dust. That money does not require a single new patient. It requires a system, a follow-up campaign, a phone call, a reactivation sequence, not just one out of the box, but one that actually works. But most practices don’t have one. So they go out and buy more ads instead. So leak number five, how many patients in your database haven’t been in for 12 months or more? Two years, three years.
These people already know you, they like you, and they trust you. They already have all of those checkboxes marked. They’re not cold leads. They’re warm relationships that just went quiet. A proper reactivation campaign will always outperform a cold Google Ads campaign in cost per patient every time, but most practices do nothing. They let those patients silently drift to whoever sends them a postcard.
or they just use the out of the box solution from Dentrix or whatever you’re using essentially. You need to customize these campaigns, not just send what a thousand other dentists are sending as well, right out of their systems. Okay, so here’s what I’ve come to believe after doing this for 17 years. Most practices are not ready for more leads. I know that’s not what marketing agencies are supposed to say, I get that, but it is the truth.
Chris (09:59.985)
If your phones aren’t being answered consistently, if your front desk isn’t converting at a high rate, if you have no follow-up system or ad hoc system in place, if your unscheduled treatment report looks like a disaster, more leads just means more waste. It’s just gonna enhance the problem. You’re not gonna advertise your way out of an operational problem, I guess is what I’m trying to say here. It doesn’t work that way. And the practices that tried…
end up frustrated, burned out, and convinced that marketing doesn’t work. I hear that all the time. Marketing hasn’t worked for them. Marketing works fine. The system behind the marketing is what could be broken. And here’s what I tell every practice owner I talk to. Before we even think about scaling traffic or scaling leads or scaling the practice, we need to answer three fundamental questions. Number one, what happens when a lead comes in right now? Walk me through every step. How does it work? A lot of them don’t know.
And I get that, I totally understand it. Number two, what percentage of your inbound calls are actually converting to scheduled appointments? Usually that’s deer on the headlights as well, because that’s pretty hard to track. Number three, what does your follow-up process look like for people who didn’t schedule on that first call? Most people say there is not one or nothing formal. If you can’t answer those three questions with real numbers, not guesses, real data, you’re not ready to scale ads.
you’re ready to fix the foundation first. So how do you figure all this stuff out? How do you kind of audit your own practice to understand it? I want to hit that. I kind of want to do this with you this week before you spend another dollar on marketing. I want you to run kind of this quick internal audit that I think is really going to help you identify what’s going on. Number one, pull your inbound call data for the last 30 days. How many calls came in? How many were answered?
how many resulted in a scheduled appointment. If you don’t have call tracking in place, that’s the first thing to fix. But most of you, think, will have something in place. You cannot manage what you can’t measure. You know from listening to me, I’m a big believer in what gets measured gets done. So a lot of this is around that. Step two, listen to 10 % of your recent inbound calls. Just randomly selected, not the good ones, totally random. I promise you will hear things that will surprise, if not shock you.
Chris (12:26.16)
Objections handled poorly, patients put on hold, pricing quoted with zero value built in. Most doctors have never actually listened to how their front desk handles a new patient call. So do it. Step three, pull your unscheduled treatment report, get the total number, segment it into the last 90 days. 90 days to a year and over a year. That’s your low hanging fruit list. That’s money already in your system.
Step four, look at your inactive patient list. Anyone who hasn’t been in for 18 months or more, that’s your reactivation opportunity. A simple multi-touch campaign to that list could fill your schedule for the next 60 days without a single new patient acquisition. Do those four things and I guarantee you’re gonna find at least one area where fixing the leak is worth more, sometimes way more, than buying more traffic, buying more marketing.
So look, I’m not saying marketing doesn’t matter. Clearly it does. I’ve built a 17 year business around it. But the best marketing in the world cannot overcome a broken system. That’s what I’m trying to get through. And the practices that grow the fastest aren’t the ones spending the most on ads. They’re the ones who fixed first, fixed their foundation first and then scaled with confidence because they knew their system could actually handle the volume.
So stop pouring water into a leaky bucket, plug the holes, then pour. If you want help figuring out exactly where your practice is leaking and what to fix first, head over to my website, kickstartdental.com. We’ll do a completely free analysis of your practice. We’re look at your numbers, your financials, and give you a real roadmap, not just a bunch of marketing. No pitch, no BS, just absolute clarity.
So that’s it for today’s episode of the No BS Dental Growth podcast. If this one hit home a little bit and I hope it did, do me a favor, share it with another practice owner, forward it to your office manager, post it in a dental Facebook group, because I guarantee there’s someone in your circle right now spending money on leads when what they really need is to fix their follow-up, fix their operations, fix their process, create processes.
Chris (14:52.805)
And if you’re getting value from this show, please subscribe wherever you listen. Like I said, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever that is for you. And if you’ve got a minute, leave a quick review. It generally helps more dentists find the podcast. And that’s the whole point of doing this. So I’m Chris Pistorius. Until next time, go find your leaks, fix them, and then grow. I’ll see you next week.
