By David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com
Every dental lab wants to maximize its sales process. But in reality, that's often easier said than done. By the time your sales department picks up the phone and calls a lead, their decision on whether or not to become a customer has probably already been made..
You can still convince members of your dental audience who are on the fence to go one way or the other, but if you truly want to improve your sales rates, you have to start earlier. From the moment your target audience is first exposed to your brand, they will begin to form an opinion about your brand that ultimately impacts their likelihood of becoming a customer. So if you are looking for effective ways to close more sales, you have to start early: with message consistency.
Messaging and Branding
The ultimate marketing goal of every business should be to create a consistent brand. Global powerhouses like Nike and Apple succeed because everyone knows their brand and has a general ideal of what it stands for. How did they get to that point?
Below is a list of 7 key characteristics that successful dental laboratories share. They include:
- Audience Knowledge
- Uniqueness
- Passion
- Consistency
- Competitiveness
- Exposure
- Leadership.
Achieving any of these characteristics for your brand as a dental lab requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. But for the purposes of this post, we will focus on what we would argue is the single most important aspect of branding: consistency.
Think about it from a Dentist's point of view. If you hear about a dental lab a few times, and the message or visual identity is different every single time, it will be impossible form a coherent image of that brand in your mind. If, however, the same brand establishes a clear visual and textual identity, focusing on the same core benefit again and again, it will be much easier for you to form a reliable opinion about that brand. Consistency, in other words, is absolute key.
The Consequences of Cognitive Dissonance
At this point, you may be wondering how branding and message consistency plays into your ability to close more dentist. To answer that question, we have to explain a key psychological concept that applies to all of us: cognitive dissonance.
In social psychology, dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner motivation to keep our attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge in harmony, and avoid disharmony at all costs. If, however, messages conflict with each other or don't line up in our minds as desired, we tend to discount all variations as untrue to maintain harmony.
If you're not careful, cognitive dissonance can affect your sales efforts in the dental lab, in a very tangible way. If your messaging throughout the marketing campaign, leading up to the final sales call, has not been consistent to create a firm brand image in your leads' mind, they will dismiss your company as not credible and the final sales call will do little to persuade them otherwise. And even if the marketing has been consistent in itself, a sales call that's inconsistent with previous promotional messages can lead potential customers on the fence to say no to your company.
How a CRM Improves Message Consistency
Consistency, in other words, is crucial for your business to close more sales. Fortunately, Customer Relationship Management software can help you increase and maintain that consistency, in two ways:
- Consistent email marketing. If your email marketing relies on sending impromptu messages to potential customers, you run the risk of sending conflicting messages without even noticing it. A single change in phrase can suggest something entirely different to your audience. A CRM allows you to set up and automate your promotional messages, increasing the consistency as a result.
- Consistent Marketing-Sales Hand Off. Especially if your marketing and sales efforts are maintained by different departments, integrating both to maintain message consistency can be difficult. Because CRM software stows all of your contact information, your sales department can make more informed sales calls based on information your marketing department has gathered in previous efforts.
In short, optimizing your sales efforts starts with message consistency. To learn more about how a CRM can help you achieve just that and maximize your ROI, contact us at 888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com
