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What is the average two-year dollar value of a new patient in your Dental Practice?

As I travel the length and breadth of Australia, in fact, even as I travel around the broad landscape of mainland USA, this question, surprisingly, is the most difficult question to get a straight answer for.

Yet the answer, which should be an exact number, should be an amount that every dentist can spit out automatically, at any time.

Wake them up from a deep sleep?

And they should be able to tell you this Dollar value.

Throw them into a cold swimming pool?

The first thing they should be able to tell you, when they come up for air, should be this dollar value.

Yet most dentists cannot.

They do not know this amount.

And they will openly admit to not knowing.

Or worse still, they will guess an amount.

And when they guess it, they usually talk in multiples of $1000.00, which means they do not know.

So why do they need to know this amount?

The #1 reason we need to know this exact amount, this exact dollar average amount, is so that every time we see a patient’s name in the New Patient Slot in our Appointment Schedule, then we can say, with confidence, that that New patient will be worth $2430.00 to our Dental Practice in the next twenty four months.

On average.

[$2430.00 was what a New Patient in 2012 was worth to my Dental Office, on average.]

Some will be worth more.

Some will be worth not so much.

Some will only have one single tooth treated.

Others will accept a comprehensive treatment plan.

That’s why we take an average.

With an average, then we know, that on average, each New Patient will spend, on average $2430.00 on their Dentistry over the next twenty-four months.

So every time the phone rings, your Front Office Employees need to look at that ringing phone in a completely different way.

They need to say to themselves:

“That’s a New Patient ringing, with $2430.00 in their hand, and it’s my responsibility to schedule them an appointment in our Dental Office, and not let them go anywhere else.”

Now, we already know, when the phone rings, that “they’re not ringing for a pizza”, as my wife would say.

They are a person with a Dental need that we have not yet persuaded or convinced that our Dental Office is the best place for them to have that Dentistry done.

And that’s it.

They are not a shopper.

They are a person with a Dental need that we have not yet persuaded or convinced that our Dental Office is the best place for them to have that Dentistry done.

And when we place that average dollar value on every New Patient enquiry, we soon come to realise that for each new patient that we fail to schedule, we have allowed $2430.00 of Dentistry to slip out of our schedule, and into the Office of some other Dentist down the road.

So when we track our New Patient phone enquiry numbers, and then we track our New Patient phone enquiry Conversion numbers, and work out our “Failure Rate”, and multiply that number by $2430.00, we can arrive at a large number that is really quite sickening.

We soon come to realise that if we are only converting twenty percent of our enquiry calls to appointments, and if we are actually scheduling thirty six new patients per month, then on average each month, we are letting nearly $350,000.00 of Dentistry over the next two years slip out of our appointment book, in just one MONTH!!

[At 20%, 36 NP appointments made means 144 appointments not made. 144 x $2430.00 = $349,920.00]

Even if we could improve our New Patient enquiry call conversions from one out of five to two out of five, only, each and every month, that would mean an extra thirty six new patients per month, spending on average $2430.00 on their teeth, over the next twenty four months.

That means that each month, you would add an EXTRA 36 x $2430.00 to your practice, or an extra $87,480.00 of future dentistry, over the next two years, each and every month.

As I said, every month, the dollar amount of future dentistry not secured by NOT scheduling them an appointment can be quite upsetting.

BUT MOST DENTISTS DO NOT KNOW THIS NUMBER!

And most dentists do not know their New Patient Enquiry Conversion rates.

And the silly thing is, that all this money, all these numbers, have already been paid for by marketing.

So it’s FREE MONEY, going down the drain, if it’s never captured.

And that’s just stupid!

So how do we calculate the two-year average dollar spend?
It may be just as simple as making up a list of all the patients who came in in 2012, and pulling up each ledger, and writing down exactly what each of them spent on their Dentistry in the two year window from the date that they first came in.

Once you have this amount for each and every New Patient for 2012, then we add those amounts up, come to a big dollar amount, and divide that big number by the total number of New Patients on the list.

And there’s our average.

In my case, the 242 New Patients in 2012 spent a total of  $588,096.30 in the following twenty-four months. Dividing the big number by the small number we arrive at $2430.15

Obviously we have to wait two years to know what the current Average New Patient Two Year Dollar amount is.

But it’s a heck of a lot better than not knowing at all.

Knowing that number gives you a handle on so many other important numbers in your practice.

And as I’ve shown, the larger multiples of this number can be sickening, when we look at lost opportunity.

I know, that after reading this article, you will never look at a ringing phone in the same way again.

You’ll never tolerate the use of the word “SHOPPER” in your Dental Office.

You will understand that that ringing phone, is a genuine person, with a genuine Dental need, who has already chosen us to be the Dental Office to help them.

That’s why they’ve called.

Not for a pizza.

We now need to realise the GOLD in that ringing phone.

We now need to know what we need to do, what skills we need to master, to maximize that return, on that ringing phone.

And that’s all we need to do…

******

My One-Day Workshops in May cover in greater depth how to address simple changes that create BIG RESULTS.
For more details about my Australian workshops in Perth and Sydney in May, CLICK HERE.

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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