You've been in practice 18 years and you're pretty clear that most patients are very impressed with both your dentistry and the TLC factor of your team's patient interaction. You're a solo practitioner so there's no other doctor in the office to undo the great experience you're delivering to your patients. Your staff are simply the finest you've ever worked with. So where are the new patients?
You know that the national average for monthly new patients in the dental office is 22 but that's for the average clinic delivering the average service. You know you're better than that, so why aren't new patients breaking down the door?
That's a great question and one I probably hear about once per week. What is it in this picture that many doctors are missing? We should look a little closer at the monthly referrals before we jump to any conclusions.
How many patient-to-patient referrals should a dentist be getting each month and how many are possible? At this moment Whitehall is coaching doctors who average upwards to 200 referral patients each month. The current all time world referral record is held by a doctor in the Northwestern United States with just over 300 referrals per month.
Granted, these offices have numerous associates so that has to be taken into consideration. Personally I think an office that can generate these amazing monthly referrals numbers is accomplishing the near-impossible. When you have just one owner doctor ready to impress and schmooze it's not so hard to hit these great monthly referral numbers. When you have a chaotic tangle of staff and associates bouncing around a monster office and still achieve referral numbers north of 200 per month, you're in a class by yourself.
So how many referrals should you be averaging? From decades of personal experience coaching I have to say that my number is 40 per month, and that's per practitioner. If you have 3 doctors under the roof, you should be shooting for 120 direct patient-to-patient referrals per month.
So many doctors mistakenly think that a shortage of new patients indicates a marketing deficiency. In other words, too few new patient simply means that not enough money was spent on marketing. To answer this best think in terms of two stages of new patient shortages and responses (like marketing).
First, for the solo practitioner, his or her schedule can and usually should be filled with patients referred by other patients, in other words, marketing is often optional for these doctors. The second stage involves filling an associate doctor. This is where the marketing budget comes into question. When a doctor calls to ask how much he or she should be ready to spend to flood their associate doctor with new patients, they, like me, wince at my answer.
The right number is 7% of your gross monthly revenue to be spent on hard hitting, high impact marketing pieces. At Whitehall we don't have a doctor grossing in the $500,000 per month range who is spending less than that number.
Let's start with the referral side and then discuss paid advertising. First referrals, they come from several sources:
1. Insurance companies send them to you because you've signed up for their plan. The discount they insist on often makes marketing look cheap by comparison.
2. Staff working for incentives, watch for patients with family members or professed friends that aren't a patient of the practice. Once identified, they make a direct request for the patient to send in the friend or relative. Often there's a small incentive tied to this action in an effort to keep the staff person in the hunt.
3. Inspiring patients with full-on knock your socks off approach to wow the patient into telling and selling their friends on you. This one is of course, the most difficult because you have to give the practice a complete overhaul to see that the patient never encounters an unpleasant staff member or is left waiting 30 minutes for the doctor to check them so they can leave.
No doubt, number three is the gold standard, it's the one that tests your control of the practice (staff). This subject was introduced in an earlier blog entitled "The Biggest Problem In Dentistry". If you can only make suggestions to your staff as opposed to giving commands, it's very unlikely they're going to put their full focus on impressing your patients to the point they'd naturally tell everyone they meet about you.
If you are really impressing patients and they're not referring others to your office, you're just kidding yourself, you're NOT impressing them. Oh, maybe in some ways but not in the ways that count. Maybe you do have someone running up to new patients as the enter the practice for the first time, putting a water bottle in their hands and fussing over them in other small personal ways. All's well until they meet the hygienist on commission who hammers them for 4 quads, a sonic spinning toothbrush and a ticket to her own multilevel sales meeting.
Sure, you're doing most things right but unfortunately, it only takes one predictably unpleasant encounter in the office to insure that all your schmoozing and fussing over the patient goes up in smoke. Like I say, inspiring patients to refer indicates highest evolution of customer services. All patient encounters with the office need to be better than expected. By the way, if you do achieve this, you don't even have to ask the patient to refer, they'll do it naturally. If you don't impress or inspire them with your service, there's nothing you can say to make them go tell everyone they know to come to your office.
Before we get too far, what about just having your staff scrutinizing the patient flow for referral opportunities? Sure, that works so long as the patients weren't traumatized by emotionally unstable assistant or left waiting for the doctor for 45 minutes. Usually, the incentive runs around $25 for a referral you can trace directly to the efforts of a single staff person. The scripting and technique for this process is a topic for another blog.
So, what about marketing and the 7% of gross. What do I need to know about marketing other than spending a lot of money on it? I suggest we take up our next blog right here. We'll lay out what works and what doesn't. Who's really ready to market and who needs to fix a few things in the practice first.
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