Winning Growth Strategies - 7 Ideas for Scaling Your Dental Lab

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

As your dental lab begins to experience growth pains, the necessity of addressing the issue of how to handle growth appropriately becomes apparent. How to address scaling issues, however, is somewhat less apparent. Here are 7 top tips and best practices for scaling your small business:

1) Position your brand in the marketplace.

Creating a brand identity is an essential first step to dominating your market space in the dental lab industry. While volumes have been written about creating a brand identity, for the purposes of this post, a few simple rules apply:

• Define your core value as a dental lab.
• Choose a distinctive logo, catchphrase, and brand voice to communicate with your customer base.
• Use consistency across all marketing channels and initiatives, so that customers experience a moment of recognition each time they interact with your company in any way.

2) Tailor product offerings to customer desires.

Put real effort into learning about your target audience. A CRM system will enable this process by capturing important customer metrics for you. Study customer behaviors, and let the results you gather inform product design and development. Taking this essential step will help establish your dominance in the marketplace.

3) Market your product with a targeted, focused approach.

Though broad and general marketing techniques have their place in an overall marketing strategy, they do not generally provide the most bang for your advertising buck. Use your CRM system to segment your customer base into different groups. Tailor marketing campaigns to specific sub-groups within your overall customer base. Make each customer touch point a unique and personalized experience. This drives customer satisfaction, and generates more qualified leads.

4) Sell, sell, and sell.

Manage your sales pipeline correctly by utilizing your CRM to its full potential. Keep an eye on where each lead falls within the sales funnel, and move each one along without losing qualified leads along the way. Automate portions of this nurturing process through your CRM. Design drip campaigns and monitor results. Create a standard workflow arrangement to manage your sales pipeline to prevent loss of sales due to sloppy organization. Engage in regular and frequent interaction with your customers via multiple social media channels.

5) Integrate your business processes.

When a small business experiences a growth spurt, it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to accommodate new growth by hiring additional staff or purchasing new software to meet the growing needs of your company. Before making such an investment, take some time to examine your overall business strategy. Where are you headed? Rather than adding staff or software in a piecemeal fashion, choose options which will enhance your entire business workflow.

For example, can you integrate your accounting software with your CRM software? Can you facilitate a better workflow between your departments by making transparency a priority? Can a cloud solution work well for your business? Choosing wisely at a growth pain point will help you streamline processes, reduce overhead, and stabilize your growth for sustainability.

6) Measure results continuously.

Scaling your business is not a once-and-done process. Measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns with your CRM software. Make adjustments as needed. The goal of measurement should always be to arrive at actionable insights. While it is good to look at where you have been, it is more profitable to project where you will go. Constant review of your business processes will enable a more agile environment, better suited for sustainable growth.

7) Do not skimp on customer support.

Proper use of your CRM will help your sales department and your customer service department to more capably manage customer satisfaction. Ensure that your customer support staff is adequate both in terms of the number of employees involved and the training provided to them. Emphasis should be placed on projecting your company brand identity consistently both in sales and support.

Building a Model for Sustainable Growth

For your business to grow and prosper, it is necessary to have a careful strategy for continued growth. This strategy includes keeping your company brand identity clearly in the forefront of the minds of your customers; marketing in a targeted, customer-centric way; managing your sales pipeline effectively; making constant adjustments to capitalize on the insight gleaned from robust customer analytics; and creating an environment that fosters customer satisfaction as a main business priority.

For more information please contact DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com.