We need to talk about how dental practices manage their enquiries. Unfortunately all too often they are not treated with the attention and nurturing they deserve.
Let me explain what I mean by that in 4 simple steps…
By Steven Mills
Be honest with how you’re currently managing your enquiries
Firstly, it’s a matter of how you manage new enquiries that are coming into your practice. When a new enquiry arrives, ask yourself honestly, what is your practice’s mindset? Are you excited about being able to deliver new revenue and welcome a potential new prospect? Or do you worry from the outset that it’ll be a dead-end lead, a time-waster or that you won’t even be able to get hold of the patient?
Stop ghosting your patients - they’re interested in your practice!
Every time your phone rings or a new patient email arrives, you need to think of each new enquiry as a possible pot of gold for the practice. Patients haven’t come to your website by accident - they have found you and searched out your practice for a reason. So if they’re contacting you, it’s because they are interested in your services. And we all know how valuable new private patients can be. So a shift of perspective is what’s required, to view each new lead not as a bothersome chore to follow up, but as highly valuable income for the practice.
So when new leads come in, how do you manage them? It’s surprising how many seemingly highly-functioning practices are still managing their leads with spreadsheets or sticky notes. This is a sure-fire way to lose track of who needs to be contacted, by whom, and when. You need a system to protect, nurture and keep track of the leads you receive. Not only for follow up purposes but to help the rest of your team to understand the needs, history and potential treatments you need to buy.
Don’t waste time doing menial tasks - automate where possible
There’s another problem common in many practices. Too much time is wasted by valuable staff performing menial tasks. Your biggest expense as a practice owner is most likely your payroll. It’s obviously important to have valuable members of staff who you can rely on to perform for your business. But if they are spending their time doing jobs that can easily be automated, you’re throwing money down the drain. Many practices simply aren’t aware of the importance of a process-driven practice with a centralised system, but managing new patient enquiries in a procedural way allows key team members to spend their time more profitably - doing the work they’re best at.
With an enquiry or patient management system, you’ll take control of your leads, prioritising those that are most valuable, and automating tasks to ensure your staff don’t waste any of their valuable time.
Supercharge and centralise your patient management system
EnquiryBot Dental not only converts more of your website visitors into enquiries, it comes complete with a simple, yet fully-featured back-end Enquiry Management System, designed specifically for dental practices. Unlike overly complicated CRM packages, your staff won’t need any in-depth training to get up to speed. You’ll be able to create different treatment pipelines for the different services you offer. You’ll be able to funnel certain types of enquiries to specific members of staff. And you’ll also be able to automate tasks, so you can set up different auto-responder email replies for different types of enquiries, or assign a task internally to a particular member of the team.
And all this information is displayed in an intuitive, user-friendly, drag-and-drop ‘kanban’ pipeline - a visual format which effortlessly shows you exactly where each lead is in your sales process. It’s the modern way to deal with new patient enquiries. It’s time to ditch the spreadsheet.
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Find out more about how EnquiryBot’s end-to-end, fully automated lead management system can vastly improve your sales process. See EnquiryBot in action yourself and book a book a Zoom demo meeting at this link, or contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Steven has delivered new patient leads worth over £10m for hundreds of dental practices in the UK & USA for over 15 years.
He has worked at leading international ad agencies and smaller start-ups. He now runs PPC Republic - an agency specialising in Google, Facebook & LinkedIn Ads for dentists. EnquiryBot Dental is a fully automated concierge service that converts more of your website visitors into patients, and is guaranteed to double your new patient enquiries.