DO YOU KNOW THE COST OF BRINGING IN A NEW PATIENT TO YOUR DOOR?

Do you know your numbers? Not knowing them leaves us in the dark – not a great place to be in business. Knowing them gives you an immediate advantage; it enables us to invest money in the right areas and often significantly increase what we can spend in bringing in new clients

Business, as you and I know is about three key areas:

1. Delivering the service
2. Marketing the product (and selling)
3. Measuring – everything!

It’s simple. It’s not so easy, but it’s straightforward.

You the dentist are good at delivering the service. You solve your patient’s problems and give them incredible smiles that can bring about massive benefits to their lives.

The second area, marketing and selling. Most dentists are quite good at telling people what they have to offer, it would be fair to say it could be done better.

However, the other area I think dentists could do better is to know your numbers. Lots of people, I hesitate to say ‘most people’ are not so good at the measurement, the numbers, the keeping-score.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure!
So the question is, do you know the cost of bringing in a new patient to your door?

Let me give you an example of a conversation I had recently with a dentist who is the owner of his practice. I have personally trained his whole team over the last 12 months, thankfully they have achieved incredible results, far better than even I expected.
They ran an Open Day/ Evening recently where 19 people turned up for an Implant Consultation, 13 decided to go ahead with the treatment, which has resulted in treatment plans totalling £70,000 plus. The Practice did some intensive advertising and marketing to get the clients through the door, the cost of which was around £850. This is a tremendous return on their investment, I would love those figures in my own business. As yet, this does not include any referrals from the delighted patients, nor does it take into consideration that they may stay as long term clients to the Practice.

In addition to that, some of the patients who did not buy the treatment now, may come back at a later date and take up treatment. It is vitally important that the Practice keep in touch with these potential clients ( that is an article on its own for another day.)There could be another £30-£40,000 yet to come.
Yes, you need to factor in other costs, such as your time spent on this and my training fees etc, but I am sure you will agree this is an incredible ROI.

Knowing this number and the potential, tells us how much we can spend on marketing. My client is getting an incredible return back on the investment he has made, the next step now, is to run with the campaign again, but next time, I would increase the spend. The last marketing campaign only cost £65 to bring in a new client, each of these new clients is spending on average £5000. Just think what might be possible if he increases this spend.

One question that we always ask new clients is how did you hear about us? What caused you to take our programmes now? This is very important information, because we can find out what works, what activities we are undertaking are paying off, when we do find this out, then we take massive action in increasing our effort in this particular area. I take the same attitude with education. I invest heavily every year on my own education. I go on courses, read books, watch DVDs and I always listen to CDs in my car. If I walk the dog, I listen to a business podcast. I have discovered that the more I learn, the more I earn.

Going back to my dentist client, now although my client is now really busy, in fact his words not mine, ‘I am bombed out,’ in my opinion, he needs to make the investment straight away and get more campaigns off the ground.

Three main reasons,

The message to the market place builds momentum, it will build the brand of the practice
If he doesn’t someone else might and then profit from all the good work that my client has done.
Apart from my training (LOL) he cannot invest his money better.

What we now need to do is work on his Time Management and Delegation Skills, so that he can concentrate on what he is good at.