I wrote an article at the start of the year about the Five Essential Numbers I’d be tracking and measuring in my dental practice as we start into the new year of 2021.
The fourth number of the five that I’d be tracking is this one:
The exact referral source of every one of your new patients.
Each and every one of your new patients has found out about your dental practice by either your external marketing, or by referral from one of your patients or your friends.
You need to know each and every source.
For a number of reasons:
- Patients referred to your dental practice by either an existing patient, or a friend, or by someone with whom you have a business arrangement with, has come as a PERSONAL RECOMMENDATION and needs to be cared for in a specific manner.
This is because of the fact that not only do we have to “win over” the new patient, but we know that whatever impression we give to that new patient will be reported back to the original referrer.
And if our dental practice does not meet and exceed the expectations of the new patient, then there is a good chance that the new patient will express their disappointment when they report back to the referrer.
Which may result in the referrer ceasing to recommend our dental practice ever again.
If the new patient’s expectations are exceeded, then there is also a very good chance that they will report back favourably to the referrer with thanks and gratitude, which then will fuel more referrals.
If we fail to find out this important information from our new patients we are carelessly damaging our business by failing to collect all this necessary relevant data.
A good patient that refers may even leave the practice because of something bad that was done or said to the person whom they referred.
- Patients who refer their friends to our dental practice need to be rewarded and thanked for their recommendation.
“What gets rewarded gets repeated.”
It’s not that we are “buying” referrals from our patients and friends, but simply, if we FAIL TO reward and thank them for their kind recommendations, we may be thought of as “taking those referring patients for granted”.
- We need to accurately know why EXACTLY all new patients who come to our practice without a personal recommendation have chosen us to be their dentist.
They may have discovered and chosen us because of one particular piece of marketing we have used.
As a business we need to know which forms of our marketing are working.
We need to know how many enquiries are coming from each marketing effort, as well as how many appointments are being scheduled from each of those, and what sort of revenue and treatment is being scheduled and completed.
Hunches are not good business practice.
Having a hunch about these numbers here today is not good business form.
If you do not know these numbers and ROIs accurately, then you are literally at your marketing and hoping for “some kind of” result.
You need to know accurately the ROI on every dollar spent on your marketing. You need to have an expectation that if you spend $1000.00 on one form of marketing that it will give you an accurate [and positive] return on your investment.
And you need to know accurately that if you spend $1000.00 on another form of marketing that you will have an accurate [and positive] expected return on that investment. In terms of number of patients booking, and the type of dentistry that they are needing, as well as the cost price of that dentistry.
Having only “feelings” and not having accurate data about the ROI on your marketing is sheer madness.
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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Email me at david@theupe.com
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