How a Focus on Relevance Can Help You Close More Dentist

The more relevant your dental labs sales message, the more likely a prospective customer is to buy in. It may sound simple, but remains true nonetheless. Of course, coming up with a sales message that is actually relevant to each individual prospect is more difficult in practice than it sounds in theory.

Difficult is not the same as impossible. Still, if you want to close more sales, consider a shift in technique toward relevance.

Approaching a Sales Pitch From the Prospect's Perspective

Most sales agents, regardless of how well they're trained, tend to revolve to a simple and easy to understand mistake: the make the sales call about the company. Rather than focusing on potential customers, they praise the product or service, highlighting its various features and uses.

The problem, of course, is not necessarily the message itself, but the timing of it. By the time your prospects are ready for the sales call, they probably already know about the product's features; otherwise, they would not have become a lead. Now, they're more interested in how the product can benefit them, and why they should sign up now.

In addition, and perhaps most crucially, an inward-focused message fails to account for the individual prospect's perspective. While you can easily group potential customers according to common demographics and sources, each will come into the sale with a unique situation that should be addressed. Here, sales professionals can learn from account-based marketing, a preferred method especially by advanced B2B marketers in which each account gets its own marketing (and sales) strategy.

The Difficulties of Achieving Relevance in Practice

In theory, focusing your sales pitch on relevance sounds great. Simply use the information you have about each prospect for a more relevant and effective sales call. Reality, of course, is not nearly that simple.

Most importantly, both collecting and storing the type of information that would make for a relevance-focused sales pitch is difficult. If you don't have the right software, you may have to refer to multiple platforms in order to gather all the information you need.

As a result, rather than using relevance to close more sales, you spend much more time preparing for each individual sales pitch and convert less prospects to customers. A focus on relevance, in other words, is only possible if you know how to quickly and efficiently both gather and collect all the information you need to account for each of your prospects. That's where customer relationship management software enters the equation.

Using Your CRM to Increase Relevance and Drive More Sales

Imagine a software that helps you constantly collect information about your potential customers as they move through the sales funnel. From the pages they visit to the forms they fill out, you can easily track their interests and analyze that information to draw conclusions about their pain points and need for your product.

Then, imagine that this type of software is accessible for both your marketing and sales team. Each prospect profile can include references to marketing initiatives, which members of your sales team can pick up to improve their sales calls. Suddenly, achieving relevance for each individual customer is not nearly as daunting or difficult.

CRM software can be that catalyst for you. As its name suggest, a CRM platform is specifically designed to help you improve your customer relationships, which - as you might imagine - is only possible if you can provide relevant messaging that acknowledges and seeks to solve each prospect's needs.

For more information, please visit us at DentalLabSupport.com or by calling 1.888.715-9099

How Dental Labs & Dentists Can Make Patients Happy

Dental laboratories and dentists have a symbiotic relationship. Without each other, neither would be able to reach their common goal of meeting dental patients’ needs. If you’re a dental lab owner who wants to keep dentists satisfied, keep reading. 

Relationships Between Dental Labs and Dentists

The relationship between dentists and labs is a notoriously delicate one. Whether you are a dentist or a dental lab owner, you surely realize that this relationship is extremely important. Without a solid dentist/lab relationship, running an efficient practice becomes difficult and is not nearly as enjoyable. A good working relationship makes the process smoother and more profitable for everyone.

Tough Times Create Tougher Competition 

In the hyper-competitive market that emerged with The Great Recession, there is increased pressure on both the dental practice and the dental lab to operate as efficiently as possible while still providing great service and a quality product. 

While an increase in dental labs and dental practices may signify an increasing need in the market for dental services, now more than ever it is difficult for both dental labs and dentists to differentiate and position themselves. This is yet another reason why dental labs and dentists need to take advantage of their symbiotic relationship and work together to provide dental patients with the dental services they so heavily rely on.

How Dental Labs & Dentists Can Keep Dental Patients Happy

In order for dental labs and dentists to keep patients satisfied, they need to keep dental patients’ needs at the forefront of everything they do. So how can dental labs work with dentists to keep dental patients happy? Make communication easy, honest and enjoyable.

Easy communication means not only making it easy for your dentists to contact your dental lab, but by taking the lead to ask important questions and actively listen to what your dentists say. Be upfront about which dental services your dental laboratory can and cannot provide, and within what time frame, otherwise your risk ruining your dentist’s relationship with their patient. Finally, keep communication enjoyable by checking in with your dentist about the quality of service received. Bonus: opening your dental laboratory to honest feedback will enable you to improve and continue satisfying your clients.

Frustrating and Avoidable Causes of Lost Sales Opportunities

Nothing is worse than forecasting your dental lab's sales for the month and then losing the sale you were most sure of closing. According to research from IDC, 85% of sales representatives struggle to meet their quotas. In this article let’s take a look at a few possible causes of lost sales and how getting past the first meeting is a big step.

Keeping the Meeting
Getting your qualified prospects to set up an appointment is one thing; actually having the meeting is a different story. Lets face it, dentist are busy! The appointments you set with your prospects could be getting canceled for several reasons. Let’s start with the basics.

The first aspect of canceled appointments I’d like to address is who. Job titles today can be misleading and provide the idea of more authority than the person holds. For example, secretaries are now Administrative Assistants, and many other non-managerial titles include “director.” These individuals are often just gatekeepers. Be certain that you’re talking with someone who truly has decision-making power to avoid lost sales.
Inviting too many people from your company is another deterrent and a possible reason for abandoned sales meetings. You risk scaring off your prospect by introducing them to too much too soon. If they have specific questions for IT, then invite IT to join in on a follow-up call in the future.

In the Dental Lab Industry, timing is another important factor that comes into play. Everyone is busy these days, and a thirty-minute meeting with a dentist is rare. When sending a calendar invite try to keep it under 20 minutes and show that you value their time by being prepared. How far out you schedule an appointment can also affect the likelihood of it being canceled. By allowing the prospect to pick a date more than two weeks in advance, you are setting them up to cancel on you. A lot can come up over two weeks, and a sales meeting will be near the top of the chopping block if they need to trim their schedule.

One way to avoid cancellations by a dentist is by clarifying what will be discussed in advance. Set expectations for the conversation so that when your prospect sees your appointment on their calendar, they think about securing a solution to problem ‘x’ and not just another sales call. You can do this by including a brief outline of your meeting in the calendar invite or simply mentioning it when asking for the meeting.

Qualifying Your Leads
According to Forrester, by the time a lead contacts someone at your brand they’re already more than 60% of the way into the sales process. This means they’ve already done most of their research and have been comparing your brand with competitors. Colleen Francis from Engage Selling says four stages make up most pipelines: prospecting, qualification, presentation, and closing. She points out that 75 percent of the time in the buyer’s journey is spent in the qualification stage. It’s also important to note that “90 percent of all sales start to fail in that qualification phase.” The probability of a sale increases as the seller invests more time into the buyer’s qualification stage. During this period, the buyer needs to ask the right questions and find out how their product addresses the sellers’ needs.

Tips to Avoid Lost Sales
Chasing unqualified leads is a major time waster for sales reps. Asking questions and reviewing company data will help to weed out prospects unsuitable for your product. It’s important that you invest your time wisely and qualify your leads before starting to court them. InsideSales.com reported that when a lead is called within five minutes of sending an information request, they are ten times more likely to respond and four times more likely to be a qualified lead. Sadly, the same report indicates that 71% of Internet-generated leads are not called. The presentations you give to your prospects should be efficient and brief. As noted earlier, everyone is busy, so you’ll want to keep your presentations short and to the point. If you’re using PowerPoint, try not to overload your slides with data.
And finally, be authentic when speaking with prospective clients. If you’re using a script, use inflection in your voice to avoid sounding like a machine. Showing your personality portrays your uniqueness and humanity. As Bryan Kramer says, it’s all about human to human (H2H) connections, not business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C).

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099