KickStart Dental Marketing is a dental marketing company based in Denver, CO. For more information on our services please call (800) 694-9184.

Chris Pistorius:  Hi everybody. This is Chris Pistorius again with Kickstart Dental Marketing. Today, I’ve got an awesome guest that I know a lot of you are going to be interested in. This is Billy Parra, he is the Director of Sales for Elite Payment Group. He’s located in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll let him speak here in a second, I promise. But, I get asked a ton from dental practices and I’ve never had a really good answer about [00:00:30] credit card processing. There’s some of you that do over a million dollars a year easily in credit card processing and you spend a lot of money in the transaction fees. Well, I had a dental consultant friend of mine, Brenda, talk to me about Billy and his company, Elite Payment Group, and I looked into it and I’ve actually switched over myself. His rates are unbelievable and he focuses on the dental industry. So, without further ado, Billy, thanks [00:01:00] so much for being a part of the show today.

Billy Parra:                    Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it Chris.

Chris Pistorius:              Yeah. So, you said you’re in San Antonio, right?

Billy Parra:                    Yes. It’s beautiful, great weather. San Antonio, Texas.

Chris Pistorius:              Yeah. Today, we were talking before we start hit the record button, that we got our first snow here in Denver and San Antonio is starting to sound pretty good right now, so.

Billy Parra:                    It’s always golf weather.

Chris Pistorius:              Right, right. Well, hey, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your company, Elite Payment [00:01:30] Group.

Billy Parra:                    We started this company in 2010 because I used to own restaurants and in restaurants I was always… my rates would always keep climbing, my all in rate. My fees kept going, going up. So, we decided to start a company doing processing the right way. In other words, a lot of people… a lot of processing companies are huge conglomerates or units that are small amount of BOPs. What they’ll do is they’ll get you, tie you into a contract, say this is a rate they’re going to give you and then over time, the rate keeps going [00:02:00] up and up and up. Also, rent equipment to you, release equipment to you, which is not what we do.

We kind of flipped the script where, in a nutshell, the way payment processing works is there’s three people that get paid. The bank that issues a credit card, Visa and MasterCard and Amex for every transaction and the processor. The processor that actually takes your payments and puts it in your bank, that’s the only negotiable piece. The other piece is, imagine Walt Disney World and Joe’s little hotdog [00:02:30] stand, they pay exactly the same for the cost of the different types of cards. Your rewards cards, Capital One, business cards, debit. Take debit if you can, that’s the best rate for you.

So, what they’ll do is they’ll say, we’ll put you on a kind of tier pricing and some cards will be at 1.50 and others will be at 2.0. What they’ll do is they’ll just put cards that are 1.15 and put them at the 2.5 rate. And over time, they’ll just keep raising those rates and [inaudible 00:02:57] fees. What we do and I’ll tell you, just [00:03:00] Google interchange pass through pricing. And from there, you can Google that interchange pass through pricing, that way you can learn about pure pricing versus interchange.

We do interchange. Interchange is the actual cost of the different cards. There’s over 600 different rates for credit cards. If you key a card in versus if you swipe it, it’s going to cost you more. What we do, we add only 0.08%. 0.08. So, that’s 0.0008 and 8 [00:03:30] cents a transaction above that. And we have fees that average out to $35 a month, those fees never go up. What we do is, we make very, very little off each customer, but you’ll see on our statements of when you see it, we make very little, but we have thousands and thousands of clients.

We owned about 10% of the self storage market for a long time, we sold that. And we only basically focus on dental, veterinarian, optometry. I handle the dental side. We never raise those rates, we never play games. We don’t put you into a contract that ties you in, you can [00:04:00] quit whenever you want. And we get free equipment, we don’t lease equipment and it’s good quality equipment. You can have a mobile vial that works off your wifi.

And the main thing is that people, we like to say, people come for the price and stay for the service. We answer the phone 24 7. Most companies will just send you to the main processor behind that 800 number and you’ll never get an answer. 24 7, we answer the phone. So, basically the thing about it, you come to us, you will save thousands per year [00:04:30] and it won’t cost you a penny to do it.

Chris Pistorius:              Yeah. And I’m attested, I mean you did a rate comparison for my company and it’s going to save me a considerable amount of money. And quite frankly, I get nothing for doing this. This is legit advice to all my clients. The process was very simple, I signed a couple documents, emailed them back over to you guys and everything’s right on track.

So, [00:05:00] this is the real deal and it’s one of those things that… Sometimes my clients will say, well, I can save a couple hundred dollars a month to switch credit card processing companies. And I’m almost like, it’s not worth it because you got to go through and change processes and it’s just not worth it. But I’m seeing your company literally save dental practices, thousands of dollars a month in credit card processing fees. And that’s just, [00:05:30] that’s amazing. So, is there anything that you can tell the audience? Because my clients do get a lot of calls about credit card processing and it’s taking up some of their front desk time. Do you have any tips or advice on how to really stop those calls other than saying, “Hey, stop calling us.”?

Billy Parra:                    The best tip is, when I had my restaurants I would get calls all the time, I got to say your money or the boss, the boss says like, we need, you need to say [inaudible 00:05:56] I am the boss, I never spoke to you. So, tell them when they call, tell your [00:06:00] front desk or whomever, just say, “I have my own ISO.” Now the ISO allows you… You can do your own processing and you’re not going to rip yourself off. Anybody can become an ISO like we are, and that way you can tell… At least that person will not call you again, you know?

Chris Pistorius:              Gotcha.

Billy Parra:                    They’re not going to call you because they know, Hey, I’m not going to rip myself off. [inaudible 00:06:21] We do so much volume that our buy rate, our cost rate is extremely low. That allows us to do that 0.08 and 8 cents of transaction. [00:06:30] I have to say, I have my own [inaudible 00:06:32].

Chris Pistorius:              Yeah. Okay. And I’ve always wondered, this is kind of my own personal curiosity, but why is it that Amex rates seem to be higher than Visa and MasterCard? Is that just a negotiated rate or?

Billy Parra:                    Well, Amex has the prestige about it, shall we say. Usually when you had Amex, you’d have to pay it off every month, that’s why they charge that 2.89. We have, we were the first in the country to have a program a few years old, that [00:07:00] our Amex is lower than the average. The average is 2.89%. If it’s under $300 a transaction, it’s 2.14. If it’s between 300 and a thousand, it’s 2.4. And then if it’s over a thousand, it’s 2.89%. The thing is that those rates cannot, they won’t go up. And the best thing is the rates on top of that, that we put on, it’s not going to go up.

Chris Pistorius:              I see. Okay. Great info. I know [00:07:30] Billy you’ve offered to my clients and my audience to do a free, absolutely free kind of rate comparison of… I think you take a statement that they currently have, you analyze it and then compare it to what it would be with you. Did you talk about the details with that and how that would work?

Billy Parra:                    It’s real simple. Just get your last current statement and I’ll tell you a little trick to do for yourself. Take the fees that they charged you for that month, divide it by how much credit card volume you did, [00:08:00] and you’re probably going to be in the 2.65 range, which is high. Our average all in, with Amex and everything, is 1.8%. All depends, if you’re in the very affluent area of town, people are going to use more Amex, more rewards cards so you may be in the 2.1, 2.2% range. You send us that statement, within 24 hours we send you back an analysis detailing exactly the savings and how, side to side.

If you’re doing well, I’ll tell you, you’re doing well. [00:08:30] I’ll say, “You know what? You’re doing well enough, just ask them to get rid of this fee.” It’s not about trying to get as many clients as I can, but trying to make as many clients of a lot of my CPAs and marketing companies happy. I would love to do that, just please send me a recent statement, I’ll email it back to you. My email is billy@elitepaymentgroup.com. You can also text the word “Dental” [00:09:00] to (321) 244-3031 and you’ll get my brochure that basically states what we do.

Chris Pistorius:              Awesome. That’s great. Billy, I really appreciate you coming on. This is truly, you know, I don’t really bring a lot of vendors on this show and try to kind of represent what they do just because… Especially credit card processors, because it’s such a flooded market and it’s hard to find people to trust. But I know that you’re doing great work with [00:09:30] dental practices, and like I said, my company’s switched and I know a lot of dental practices already have. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this information, and I’m sure that a lot of people in our audience today is going to reach out to you. So, thanks so much for being on.

Billy Parra:                    Thank you very, very much.

Be sure to check out our CEO, Chris Pistorius talk about creating a winning dental marketing strategy!

It’s Chris Pistorius with Kickstart Dental Marketing. I wanted to take just a couple of minutes and talk about how we come up with our strategy for our clients and what makes it so successful. First of all, we don’t see a dentist as being just a dentist, or an orthodontist is just an orthodontist or an endodontist as just an endodontist. We feel as though each dentist has something unique about them that really makes them pop out from the rest of their competition. So we really want to make sure that our clients have a really solid USP or unique selling proposition. And that’s really something that we’ve got to have in place before we start marketing your business. You should ask yourself the question, why should somebody choose you over the competition in your area? And it can’t just be something simple like, Oh, we have the best service in town, and it’s got to really be something compelling.

But once you really have that in place, it makes marketing your practice that much easier. The best way to bring in new patients is to attract them at all four phases of the new patient journey, which is what you see here. And I’ve got it broken down into the research phase, the get to know phase, the decision phase, and the advocate phase. This is all the way from when they’re first trying to decide who they should call to be a dentist, all the way to the point where they’re a patient. Now, most marketing companies are going to focus on number one. I’m looking for a new dentist, and they’re going to try to talk about the new patient acquisition, SEO, paid ads, all this stuff. And there is no question, that’s absolutely very important, but where our strategy is different is that we don’t just help with that.

Yes, we’re very good at bringing in new patient leads, but we also help in the second phase where after they call you and they’re kind of trying to get to know you to try to figure out if they want to do business with you or not. And then we also help when they’re actually ready to make that appointment and schedule the appointment. We can help a lot with that. And then it just doesn’t end after we bring them to you. We’re going to help you get them back in, and help them refer you out, and just kind of turn them into little mini salespeople for you to bring in referrals. So just really quickly, I want to go over all four phases and how we do help.

Now that first phase is critical. We’ve got to get your website right. It’s got to be the best in class. It’s got to be stunning, but at the same time, it’s got to have some marketing science behind it to make people want to take that next step. It also has to be very fast. People really underestimate that. It has to load fast. Google likes it to be fast. It’ll help your SEO rankings. There’s a lot of different things into the website versus just how it looks. Well, we definitely have to increase visibility on Google, and not just Google, really Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, all these different search engines, and online places people go to find their next dentist. And even if you think that your rankings are good already, I can promise you after you do a consultation with me, I’ll show you some places where it can get even better. I believe that it’s very important to invest in paid advertising opportunities, especially on Google and Facebook. Almost all of our clients are making very good money and return on investment by using these platforms.

And it’s not just a matter of, yeah, maybe I’ve tried it before, and it didn’t work. It’s have you tried it and had some people behind it that really know what they’re doing, and they know the science of this? It’s also quick. SEO will take a few months to really get you where you want to be. But with paid advertising, it can be up and running and new patients coming in within a matter of a couple of weeks. We also want to look at your online reviews and make sure that you’ve got a very good repeatable system that’s mostly automated, honestly, to keep patients bringing you in and great reviews on places like Google, and Yelp, and Healthgrades, and places like that. So phase one is all about attraction.

Phase two is where we really start to make ourselves a little bit different. So we’ve generated the lead, but we’re actually going to help you close that lead. We’re going to build an automated follow-up system for you that allows you to follow up with somebody that fills out a form or responds to an ad online. We can respond to them within one minute and put you in touch with your front desk and that potential new patient within seconds. It’s absolutely stunning technology, and it works beautifully.

We also want to make sure that we’re creating as many ways as possible for potential new patients to be able to communicate with you. So we’re going to add forms, and tracking phone numbers, and even text and chat options on your website. And don’t worry. All of these features that I’m talking about today don’t put any more workload on your front desk. In fact, it lessens some of their workloads. Phase two, all about building up a system to be able to respond quickly to leads, and making sure that they are connecting with your front desk, and give them more ways to communicate with you.

In phase three, this is when the patient’s actually going to schedule the appointment. So we want to track and listen to every phone call that comes in from our campaign. Now, don’t worry, we are 100% HIPAA compliant, so everything that we do in all of our systems is HIPAA compliant, so there are no worries there. But I do have a team that does nothing but listen to these phone calls, and they will actually provide feedback to you on ways that your front desk could potentially answer cold leads a little bit better. And what we do is we actually will take your front desk through an online training course where they will go through modules, and at the end of the modules, they will take a test if they have to pass. And then once they do pass, they’re sent a little certificate in the mail saying that they have passed. And then every quarter we would like them to go in and take refresher training to make sure that they’re up on the latest training.

Now, this training’s all-around how to better close new patient calls, and not referrals because those are kind of already sold for you. But these are people that find you online, and they don’t really know who you are, and they’re looking for reasons to do business with you. We’re just going to train your front desk on how to give them those reasons.

And then finally, in the ongoing patient treatment section, you’ve already got them as a patient. We’ve generated the lead. We’ve helped you follow-up with the lead. We’ve helped train your front desk on how to close that lead. Now they’re actually a patient. They’ve been in to see you. Job’s done, right? Wrong. We’re actually going to turn these existing patients into advocates of your practice. Look, these are people that already know you, like you, and trust you. They should be the easiest ones to get back into your office and to generate more revenue for you.

Most dentists, unfortunately, will not communicate great with patients that have already been in. And if they do, it’s kind of ad hoc or like, Oh, they haven’t been in nine or 10 months, we should send them an email, or they may send them some automated email through Dentrix or something like that. But what we found is that, yeah, you do need to follow up with them, but you need to put this on autopilot. This needs to be scalable, and you’ve got to know what to say. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do reactivation campaigns. We’re going to use text messaging, email, even voicemail drops we can use, along with programs that we put together to entice people to come back into the practice.

Now, we also use these sources to help get people to leave you reviews online, as we talked about a little bit earlier. Not only do we get them to leave you reviews online, after they leave that review, we get them to take that review that they left and put it onto their social media pages to share with all of their family and friends. This turns them into new patient advocates for you and will grow your referral base by leaps and bounds. Again, this is a very high level. And if you want to discuss this in detail about your practice, just schedule a free consultation with me, but I hope you can see where we’re different. We not only help you generate the leads, but we help you train, we help you follow up, we help you close. And then we help bring back in the patients that maybe haven’t been in, in a while. So I hope this helps a lot, and I look forward to speaking with you in a free consultation very soon.

Be sure to also check out Chris’ interview with Stephen Trutter on how to start a new dental practice!

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!