KickStart Dental Marketing has been named one of the Best Dental Marketing Companies by UpCity. If you would like more information about our services, please call (800) 694-9184.

Hey everyone, I hope you’re well. I just talked to you a couple of days ago, I know, but I wanted to send out another exciting announcement about what we’ve been busy doing to help out clients during this last few weeks of downtime. And I know some of you are opening up or have been opened for a few days now and congratulations, I’m sure that feels great. But, the message before last I had sent out to everybody, I believe it was, it was an exciting announcement about how we’re going to incorporate text messaging onto your website so that potential new patients and existing patients could communicate with you that way, as we are seeing a tendency of people wanting to do live chat/text messaging as a way to communicate.

Well, this next installment is something that I’m even more excited about. This is yet another thing that we’re going to talk about here, that we’re going to add to the account, in fact, we’ve already added it to your campaigns. I’m just showing you this to explain what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what the benefit is to you. So let me just go ahead and get right into it and then Jennifer, our Director of Operations, will be sending this documentation to you as well so you’ll have a copy of this. And of course, if you have any questions about it, reach out to her or myself and we would be more than happy to take you through anything here. But it’s super simple, it’s going to be super impactful for your practice going forward and there’s really no more … it takes a lot of burden off your front desk as well.

So what I want to talk to you about is, do you want to know the number one biggest factor between the most successful dental practices in the country and the ones who are just doing okay? Or even, quite frankly, the ones that aren’t doing well at all? What do you think the one biggest difference is? I’m sure some of you now are thinking about, “Oh, well your service, your pricing, the equipment you have, certainly your staff’s a big deal,” but you’re missing the mark a little bit. The number one reason from a marketing standpoint at least is cold lead handling. What’s a cold lead and what do you mean? Well, a cold lead is anytime a potential new patient has reached out to you, but they likely don’t even know who you are. So it’s not a referral, it’s nothing like that. It’s somebody that found you on Google or somewhere online and they’re just trying to find a dentist, but they don’t really know you from Adam.

So this is a way different type of a lead than per se, a referral where maybe a friend or family member has sent them to you. Because those people are pre-sold, they’re just calling in basically to maybe ask a couple of insurance questions and go ahead and schedule the appointment. And most front desk people are certainly qualified to do that. Cold leads, where they just find you on the internet, that’s a little different story, because these people are not pre-sold. They don’t know you, they don’t even know if they like you and they certainly don’t trust you yet. So those are three big things that you’ve got to achieve on the phone with your front desk staff. And quite frankly, there are a lot of front desk people out there that just are not professionally trained on how to handle these cold leads.

So the number one difference that we see, and it’s not just us, there’s a lot of studies out there that show this, is the difference between the big-time dental practices that do really well with new patients and booking them is cold lead handling. So the problem is that 50 to 60% of inbound cold leads right now did not schedule an appointment. And that’s a nationwide statistic just in dentistry. And 90% of new patient web forums fail to convert, so somebody fills out a form on your website, it gets emailed to you, about 90% of those just don’t work out for whatever reason. And if you start adding these numbers up and you reverse the math here, that’s a lot of missed revenue opportunity, and when you look at this over a year or three years or five years. And we’ve been seeing this with a lot of our current clients right now, and that’s why we’ve decided to attack this problem.

And so what we’re … Just to back up what we’re talking about, some charts here, on the left, what you’re seeing in figure one is the impact of speed to call and what I like to call speed to lead. It’s a big deal. So if you follow up within one minute of somebody submitting a form online or filling out something on your website, whatever it may be, you have a 391% better chance to actually get that person into your office. But if you wait two minutes, three minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, five days, 24 hours, you see that decline in your effectiveness of being able to get that patient in your door.

Now, look, I’ve worked with a lot of you head to head and we’ve tested this sometimes with you guys and sometimes we do get a quick response if we send in an onsite lead. Sometimes we don’t get anything until the next day, and even sometimes we don’t get a response at all. And I get it, you guys are busy, especially now, when you’re getting a lot of your existing patients in and it’s getting booked up and I know a few of you are booked out till August. So it’s very important, speed to lead, as fast as you can get back to those people because some of these people are literally looking at a list. So a lot of you we do SEO work for, and we get you ranked high on Google, and sometimes when we do that, it’s awesome, but they’re going down a list. So once they fill out a form, boom, they might be going to the next person on the list. So we’ve got to respond to those people as soon as possible so we have the best chance possible to get them into your office.

On the right, you see the contact probability arc, and this is what it’s talking about in terms of followup. How many followups do you do to try to reach that person? In dentistry on average, it takes about seven times to follow up with one of these cold leads to actually even get ahold of them. And here’s why, because think about it, number one, going to the dentist isn’t probably their number one place to go for entertainment or enjoyment. So they’re not really motivated to get there anyway unless there’s an emergency. So they fill out the form and they might just get easily distracted and kind of put that off a little bit, even though you call them or email them.

And the big three things in dentistry of why people don’t come to see you is because of time, fear and money. So you’re working against a lot of different combinations and all those things added up together is why it takes a few chances or a few follow-ups to get ahold of these people and actually get them into the practice. So you can see in the graph here, you’ve got about a 48% chance on the first call to get them in. But then after about the third call, and then up to the sixth call, you see your chances of connecting with them and getting them into your practice go up dramatically.

So I’d ask you right now, what is your practice … Do you have a systemized followup system for these cold leads that come in? So somebody fills out a form, you get the email, you do finally checked and get the email. Do you have a followup system other than emailing back, or giving them a call maybe once or twice? Do you follow up for three days in a row and up to seven times by phone, text, email, trying to get them in? I’m going to guess the percentage of you doing that right now is pretty low and I bet the percentage of you that actually have something written down and systemized and a process to do this is pretty low as well. So that’s why we want to attack this.

So we’ve created this solution, we’ve created an automatic response system for all these inbound cold leads. And I’ll get into the details of that in a second, but I want to go over the high level here. So each lead that comes in will be responded to within one minute of submission. Pretty cool, right?

So, you remember those graphs we just looked at? So, that’s what we’re really trying to play to. If during business hours, we actually attempt to connect you to the lead instantly, that’s really cool. And again, I’ll explain this more in a second. And we use text messaging, email and voicemail to follow up with the cold leads. So it’s not just, we’re giving them a call or maybe sending them email, we’re attacking them in different ways. And we’re doing it subtly, don’t think of it that we’re just bombarding these people until they hate us. That’s not the way this is set up, not at all, we do it tactfully. Now our system follows up a total of seven times over three days until we do make contact with that potential new lead. And usually that’s enough to do it and quite frankly, if we don’t reach them in three days after seven attempts, then it’s probably not going to be a great lead anyway.

Now, what’s really cool about this is no front desk assistance is needed for the process other than you to actually schedule the appointment for them. Because we don’t obviously have access to your calendars and we don’t really want to do that at this point. That could be … Just a little hint here, that could be a service offering in the future for us, where we actually can access your calendar and schedule appointments and things like that, but we’re not there yet and I just don’t feel like it’s a good time for that right now. Also, our system will be able to track every lead that comes in through this and find out if they scheduled an appointment or not. And at the end of each month, when you meet with Jen and her teams to go over results and things like that, we’ll actually have a list of names of potential new patients that came in from these campaigns. So it gives you a lot of information. It’s less work for your front desk, you don’t have to worry about a followup system, we’ve built it for you. You put all the work on us.

What’s best of all is it’s 100% HIPAA compliant. And our HIPAA announcement of being 100% compliant with all of our marketing efforts is just about ready to be announced in just a few days, so I’ll give you a little heads up on that. We’ve gone through great lengths, lots of work and training and system upgrades and process procedures to make that happen and quite frankly, a lot of money to make that happen, but it’s just too dangerous not to be HIPAA compliant these days. And if you’re not HIPAA compliant, as a marketing company, you’re putting you guys, our clients at risk for that. So we’ll talk more about that in a few days when the official announcement comes out, but this whole process is 100% HIPAA compliant.

So let’s get into the details of exactly how this works, it’s super simple. This is a four step process. Number one, the action happens. A potential new patient fills out a form, and this could be a Google ad, a Facebook ad, a Yelp ad, whatever we’re running for you guys, or they just do a form on your website, or they do a chat on your website, a text chat. And they indicate, now on that forum, we ask them, are you a new patient or existing patient? Because once they select that, depending on what they select, we route them a different way. So first thing that happens is once they connect that form, and again, you’ll get this documentation and a lot of you already know this process, we just haven’t formally given you the documentation on it and given it to you so everybody can see the same thing.

But the first thing that happens is an auto call comes out. So somebody fills out a form, boom, it hits our system, a robocall is what it’ll sound like. And I know some of you have tested this already and you thought it was a robocall and you just hung up. Well, I’m going to ask for you not to do that anymore and actually listen at least for a few seconds so you know if it’s one of our leads or not, but it will sound a little bit like a robocall. But our system will call your office during business hours only, we don’t do it if you’re not open and it will tell you, “Hey, you have a new lead that just filled out a form. Their name is Chris Pistorius.” So they’ll actually tell you their name too. The system will then say, “To connect with Chris or connect with the lead, press one now, or press two, to not connect or to disconnect.”

And then when your front desk presses one, it’ll actually attempt to connect you to that person’s cell phone because they gave us their cell phone number when they signed up on the form. And then when that person answers, you can say, “Oh, Hey Chris, this is Donna from ABC Dental. I saw you just filled out a form. I wanted to go ahead and connect with you.” Guys, that’s within the first couple of minutes of them filling out that form. I can promise you, nobody else in dentistry is going to be doing this right now. This is going to separate you from your competition big time and you’re going to be able to capture so many more leads just because of how fast you’re responding. And this process that we’ve created is going to enable you to do that. And you don’t have to spend any more money for it, it’s already built out ready to go. Sorry, I get excited.

The next step after we do the auto call, if you’re not able to connect right then and there, let’s say it’s after hours or you miss the auto call or you just got a line of people in front of you and you hit two, because you don’t have time to deal with it right then, we see that. So if you connect with them, this whole process ends because we’ve sent them to you and you’ve had a chance to talk to them. If you don’t connect to them, then it goes to our next step, which is follow up. So we will then … It’ll hit our system, and over the next three days, we’ll send out a series of text messages, emails, even a voicemail drop, basically saying, “Hey, you called in yesterday, we weren’t able to connect, I apologize. Just give us a call here at the front desk and we’ll get you a schedule to get everything squared away.” But those are the types of messages that we send out via text, email, and voicemail.

Now, as soon as they respond to that, our system picks up on that and an email will automatically be sent to your front desk, whatever email you have on file or emails you have on file with us, you’ll be sent a notification from us. It’ll actually come from Jennifer’s email address and we can show you examples of what they look like, but it’s like, “Immediate action needed,” is on the subject line and you’ll see them, they’re pretty obvious. But it’ll show all the contact information of the new lead, if they texted back to us, for instance, during the campaign it’ll show what they set on it. It’s really cool, and it’ll give you all the details you need.

Now, what’s going to be very important is, once we do send that lead to you after they’ve responded to our followup campaign, it’s going to be important that you follow up with that very quickly, because they’re going to be expecting that. So you need somebody really having their email open during the day and seeing emails come in so that when you get these, your front desk can respond to them pretty quickly. And it’s pretty that simple.

Now, the last step is if no response. So if after our three day process, we’ve sent them seven different communications, if we haven’t connected with them and they haven’t responded, we tried, we’ll go ahead and after that process is over, we’ll send you an email saying, “Hey, here’s all the contact information from this lead. We tried to contact them, they didn’t respond. Please go ahead and follow up if you’d like to, but we weren’t able to get a response.” So you still get that lead information, but it’s after we’ve done our followup process. So that way we’re not calling on top of each other and it makes it a little messy if we do that.

Now, one thing to note with this, I mean, it’s super simple. There’s a lot going on there, certainly, but it’s all very simple. All you guys really have to do is answer the phone as you normally do, or respond to emails, which you normally do anyway. So it was really no extra work on your part, and now your front desk doesn’t have to worry about, “Oh, I got to follow up with this guy that called in earlier, or I’ve got to follow up with this guy that sent us an email yesterday.” We got it. We got it handled, we’re on top of it and this is going to increase your new patient conversion percentage.

Now, what I will say about this is that this process will only run for new patient leads because remember, we asked them if they’re a new or an existing patient. If they’re an existing patient, then what we’ll do is we’ll just send the email to you directly. We don’t take them through this process of trying to follow up with them. We’ll just send you an email and say, “Hey, you need to follow up with whatever the name, phone number, email address is. They are an existing patient and they need you to follow up with them.”

So this will be for a new patient leads only and it will only be for the leads that we send you, certainly. But it’s super simple and you’ll have this documentation, and what I’d love for you to do is share this with your office at once. Anybody that’s going to answer the phone or handle new patient leads, please just go through this. It’s very simple, you guys really don’t have to do much, just have them keep their heads up for these emails that come in and talk to them about this auto call system because it sounds like a robocall. I just don’t want them to hang up and not get that potential connection.

And then lastly here, I just want to talk about the result, what’s going to happen because of this. More new patients, bottom line, that’s all we care about is we want to get more quality patients into your practice that obviously increases revenue. This is going to be due to a quicker response, a more robust followup system. You may not even have a followup system right now. So it’s HIPAA compliant, you’re going to have a systemized followup process for new patient leads and it’s going to be less workload on your front desk. You don’t have to do anything to activate this, this is already set up, ready to go. Jen’s working with the final details right now, I’m sure she’s probably reached out to a few of you already. We’re not going to charge you any extra money for it. Quite frankly, though, our new clients that are going to come on after this, we’re definitely charging for this. So, but I want to give it to you guys as a benefit of being a loyal client to us, and we do appreciate that, certainly.

So just share this with your team. Anybody that’s going to answer the call, just do a little five or 10 minute training with them, maybe. If questions come up and you can’t answer them, get ahold of us, we’ll get right back to you, of course. Or we can even be in on the training. We’ll be more than happy to do a conference call or do a Zoom meeting for 15 minutes and just get everybody in a room and just make sure we’re on the same page, we have no problem doing that either.

So that’s it. I think that’s my last slide. Yeah, that’s it. So I hope you’re excited about this. I hope you see the opportunity and how we’re trying to help close the loop on this. We’re really trying to pivot our agency from, yeah, we’re always going to be a marketing company, but we really want to do more and we want to help you not just generate leads, but we want to help you close those leads too. So, look for more stuff like this coming up in the future, so as we try to close the loop on this marketing stuff and do everything we possibly can to help you out. So thanks for your time. Hopefully I’m not over-communicating, I told you in my last video, you couldn’t do that, but sometimes I tend to, so hopefully you like this, you enjoy it. Hit me with questions, hit Jen with questions. We’re here for you and have a great evening. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for watching this segment. Please be sure to check out the next segment on how dental practices can bounce back from the COVID crisis!

KickStart Dental Marketing is a dental marketing company based in Denver, CO. If you would like more information about our services, please call (800) 694-9184.

Chris (00:00):

Hey everybody. It’s Chris Pistorius, the CEO of KickStart Dental Marketing.

Chris (00:04):

Are you ready for the bounce back? Well, let me tell you what I mean by that. So I’ve sent a few videos out over the last few weeks during this COVID-19 crisis, and we’ve talked about transition periods and so I want to share with you a transition period that we’re seeing right now in the dental industry, and that’s the transition of your potential new patients and your existing patients starting to come out of the fear and the uncertainty and the anxiety and more into the pivoting, if you will, to the, “Hey, let’s get out and do stuff.” And some of you are already open and you know what I’m talking about, you’re feeling that. Or some of you right now are busy getting your offices ready to reopen in the next few days. So I want to take just a couple of minutes here and talk about the importance of capitalizing on this transition and how you can really use it to your advantage.

Chris (01:00):

I think that right now, your mind thought needs to be around aggression and being prominent. And what I mean by that is that there’s really two backlogs going on right now. There’s a backlog of pent up demand from your existing patients, these are people that might have had an appointment scheduled weeks ago and they haven’t been able to get in and those have just been piling up, and now they’re chopping at the bed, if you will, to get in. Pun intended. And you’re probably dealing with that right now, if you’re open. But more importantly, I think, is that there’s also a pent up demand of potential new patients. These are folks that might’ve been in the process of finding a new dentist when all of this stuff happened or people along the way that all of a sudden need a dentist and it’s been a priority for them. So I think that pent up demand is a separate thing and something that you really need to be able to capitalize on.

Chris (02:00):

I’ve talked to my current clients, and if you’re not a current client, please take this as a solid piece of advice, I think we need to get more aggressive in the next four to six weeks on being more prominent. And what I mean by that in more specific detail is to existing patients, you need to be sending out a communication to them on a weekly basis.

Chris (02:20):

And that’s not too much right now. You cannot over communicate right now to your current patient base. You need to talk to them about how you’re preparing, you need to talk to them about what you’re doing, you need to talk to them about the process, you need to talk to them about extended hours, perhaps. You need to stay in constant communication. You need to really specifically talk to them about the precautions you’re taking. For instance, some of our clients right now are having people wait in their cars and then they receive a text message when it’s time for their appointment. Others are spreading, if they have a big waiting room, they’re spreading things out there, they’re taking out toys and magazines, things like. But all of this is vital information to your patient base because it’s going to make them feel better and it’s going to make them more comfortable in coming into your office.

Chris (03:07):

And that goes for new patients too. If they see this kind of stuff on your website, for instance, or even a short video of you going over it in your office, right on your homepage, that can really make you stand out from your competition and you more likely to get that new patient in your local market.

Chris (03:25):

So back to the new patient stuff, we just talked about how we can be more prominent to our existing patient base, but what about the new patients? I think for the next four to six weeks are going to be critical to capitalize on this pent up demand of potential new patients. And I think that you need to be more prominent in SEO, which is your Google rankings, you need to get those increased. You need to start doing paid advertising on Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, it depends what market you’re in, it depends on your budget, I get all of that, but we can help you through that. But right now is the time to be the most prominent you may have ever been and that’s going to let you capitalize on this bounce back period.

Chris (04:12):

I just want to make sure we talk about the bounce back and you’re like, “Duh, I’m open, I’m ready to go” but we don’t always think about the details around it. And I just want to make sure that you’re thinking about everything and that you’ve got your mind in the right place, and you’re not just open. We’re going to try to capitalize this and take advantage of this pent up demand because quite frankly, hopefully for this situation, anyway, this is something that doesn’t occur in a very long time, so there is some opportunity here.

Chris (04:41):

So if you’re a current client and we haven’t talked about this yet, please reach out to myself or Jennifer, set up a time and we can go over this and talk specifically about your practice and what I think we should do for the next few weeks. And if you’re not a client, feel free to reach out to me, I’d be more than happy to jump on a call, talk for a few minutes absolutely for free and give you some sound advice, or hopefully some sound advice. But either way, just reach out to me, the phone number’s here on the video or my email address is here as well, and we can get something set up. Thanks again and let me know of any questions.

 Learn how using text & chat capabilities on your dental practice website can make a huge impact on your bottom-line!