Metrics Can Help Your Dental Lab Close More Dentist

By David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Ultimately, the goal of any Dental Lab is to attract and retain dentists. Closing sales is a crucial part of that; if you get members of your target audience into your sales pipeline, but they never end up becoming customers, your efforts will be wasted. Marketing software can help your Dental Lab close more sales, but only if you know just what metrics matter in measuring your success. Here are 4 metrics to pay attention to as you optimize your sales process.

1) Lead Origin

Do you know where your leads come from? How did they learn about you, and where did they first made contact? If you gather this information, you can gain a better understanding of which leads are most likely to convert to customers.

For example, you may find that leads originated from your website are actually more likely to become customers than those who contacted you directly. Now, you can increase your focus on the former to maximize your success and close a higher percentage of sales.

2) Lead Engagement

Your LabCell Marketing Software can help you measure just how engaged your contacts are with your content after they sign up to become a lead. As you can probably imagine, leads who continue to open and click through your emails, or read conversion pages on your website, will be more likely to become customers than those who sign up initially, but never follow up.

Measuring lead engagement comprehensively allows you to categorize them into a number of groups, which your sales team can then use to prioritize its effort. Time is limited, and pitching your company only to leads who have shown continued interest in your product or service can be a valuable tool to improve your closure rate.

3) Average Lead to Customer Time

You may also want to consider measuring the amount of time it takes for a lead to turn into a customer. How many days, weeks, or months do they need in your system before they're ready for a sale? How many emails do they receive on average before indicating their readiness to buy?

Answering these questions helps you establish an average time line for your lead. If they don't become sales-ready until at least a month into the process, making the sales call a week after they enter your database will be of little value. Timing your sales-based communication means increasing your chances of reaching them at a time when they are most likely to make a buying decision.

4) Internal and Industry Conversion Rates

On average, how many of your leads turn into customers? Knowing that number, and how it compares with figures common for your industries, can go a long way toward helping you determine the effectiveness and success of both your lead nurturing and your sales efforts.

If you lag significantly behind industry averages, you may want to investigate just why that is, and how you can rectify the situation. Of course, simply running ahead of the average also deserves further investigation: you want to understand why, so you can replicate the process for future leads. Either way, knowing both your internal and industry conversion rates can help you close more sales in the future.

Of course, none of the above is possible without Marketing Software that tracks your interactions with your leads, and provides you with reports that help better understand the buying journey your leads take on their way to becoming customers. They can help your business close more sales, but only with the help of software that makes tracking them easily.

For information on LabCell Dental Lab Marketing Software please visit DentalLabSupport.com.

4 Steps to Lead Nurturing: Walking the buying path with your customers

Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture. The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

That said, I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not putting enough toward progression. Get out your walking shoes, and take a journey with your customers.

I define lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution), regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path, but along the way, you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.

Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support. If you’re wondering what kinds of content helps progress leads further faster, ask your sales team. Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with leads that helps them convert?” or “What’s the content you use to help take people to the next level?”

The first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.

Step #1: Walk in your potential customers’ shoes to build a customer journey map

Be the customer, and get as you close as you can to their experience by really observing the behaviors of your customer. After you’ve gaining a solid understanding, build your customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map? It tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.

The journey map is about helping you understanding the key interactions that your future customer will have with the organization. What are their motivations? What are their questions with each marketing touch point? Try to understand what they want and the concerns they’ll have along with peers they’re interacting with. The goal of customer journey mapping is to gain customer wisdom.

As you do that, consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:

• How will this product or service help my company?
• We’re doing OK, so why do we need this?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?

Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite-sized chunks.

Step #2: Plan your path to create content geared toward progression

Invest as much in forming creative and content for lead progression as you do for lead capture. I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not enough toward progression.

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

Read “Content Marketing Tips for Lead Nurturing” for ideas on content to use. Through the combination of all these, you’re providing relevant, educational and thought-leading content. For more ideas, read “Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content.”

It’s worth noting:

• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria, such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.

Step #3: Walk the path with your customer

In a complex sale, the journey can be long and challenging to help people move from initial interest to purchase intent.

Your only job is to make certain you nourish your customer along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.

Think of your marketing team as trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.

Slow down, and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along, you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.

“How you sell me is how you will serve me”

Most economic buyers subscribe to the notion that how you sell me indicates how you will serve me. Here’s where that little statistic I mentioned earlier comes in. A study of business-to-business buyers shows that salespeople who become trusted advisors and understood the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale.

The complex sale requires that your prospect:

• Must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Must believe that you and your company understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.­
• Likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.

Remember you can’t automate trust. Trust-building should be the theme of your nurturing efforts.

Building trust

By providing valuable education and information to prospects up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell; you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise and, as a result, become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.

Make your marketing program’s single point of focus be to develop trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price. Selling, per se, is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects. You win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.

Step #4: Keep marching

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from 20 years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40 to 70% of potential sales. Research compiled by the MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report showed, “marketing departments with a lead nurturing campaign reported a 45% higher ROI than marketing departments that did not utilize a lead nurturing track.”

If inquiries are simply passed on to salespeople, reps, partners or distributors for follow up, beware.  You may be leaving as many as eight out of 10 sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.

Now, get your compasses out and begin the long-yet-fruitful journey toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers will want to join you along the way.

Dental Lab Lead Generation With Inbound Marketing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Inbound marketing offers many opportunities to generate quality leads for dental labs. This technique represents an entirely different way of getting your dental lab's name out, at an economical cost. It has brought a different prospective to advertising. One author called it a shift from "rented attention" to "owned attention." The traditional outbound marketer would try to attract attention to a product by buying advertising, contacting mailing lists and waiting for the buyer to show interest. Buying advertising is like renting attention. The advertiser pays for the eyes of potential buyers, but the buying choices are completely beyond the advertiser's control.

The internet now provides an interactive opportunity. The inbound marketer offers some value added content that draws in prospective buyers who have a qualifying interest in a particular service or product. Once a viewer has decided to enter the site, the marketer owns his or her attention. The potential buyer now enters the outer rim of what inbound marketers call, the "marketing funnel."

At this stage, the buyer is given a series of choices, graduated levels of "calls to action" which call for greater and greater commitment to eventual purchase. At each stage in the process, there are opportunities to call for more contact information about a potential buyer as he or she chooses to receive more information and to move further along toward a buying decision.

Inbound marketing is essentially an automated version of proven "features and benefits" sales technique.

• Prospects qualify themselves by entering the informational content on the web site.
• Prospects' choices and directions within the site identify their needs.
• The site presents the features of products or services of interest to the client, and present those that have the requisite benefits.
• The site offers opportunities to close, repeating trial closes at intervals.
• The website meets objections with information about the benefits that meet those objections.
• The calls to action at the bottom of the marketing funnel add payment options to complete closing of the sale.

Marketing and sales are, of course, at the core of success for a dental lab. Nothing matters more. But finding sales is the most challenging part of a new business. Customers and clients have to get to know that your business exists and you have to have a chance to demonstrate your product and your expertise in delivering it.

Some kind of advertising is essential. However, conventional advertising takes money and that may be the very thing you do not want to risk, or don't have to risk. The internet and social media have supplied the means for you to turn the knowledge and expertise you gained from opening your business into a way of establishing your business in the community.

Establishing a presence in the community will take time and effort, but it need not require much money. As a small business owner, you have expertise that, in itself, has value. You can give out information and advice that many people will find valuable.

Make a website which features some of your interesting and factual material along with a catalog of your products and services. Make sure the site includes some way to order or contact you. Eventually, you will want to develop a full inbound marketing campaign. However, this simple start will get you on the road.

DentalLabSupport.com has the tools to help your dental lab grow and prosper. Please contact us to learn more. 

DLS Sponsors:  

GuideMia.com - Implant Treatment Planning and Surgical Guide Solutions

Dental Lab Tips & Tools For Converting More Prospects To Customers

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Let's start at the beginning. Let's identify what a real prospect is. When you open a landing page, you will get tire kickers just like any sales establishment online or brick and mortar. If someone walks into your store, say hooray, but that isn't necessarily a prospect. It could be just a person who is curious or even, sometimes, who likes to create needs in themselves.

A true prospect is a person who has a genuine interest in your dental lab and what you are selling. It is a person whose final passage down the sales funnel will depend on product-related decisions. Prospects will get much farther down into the sales funnel than tire kickers. They will make action choices that move close to the closing choice point.

Many Dental Labs are already generating as many prospects as they need. The problem is that too many leave the sales funnel at the late stages before they commit themselves to buying. The inbound marketing problem is not to attract more leads but to convert more to sales.

Even if you get prospective customers into your sales funnel doesn't mean they will automatically buy what you have to offer. We advocate inbound marketing. The methods work but they are not magic. There are many commonly used tips & tools to convert more prospects to customers. Sometimes the sales funnel needs a little boost to turn a nibble into a bite.  Many prospects enter a conflict which makes them vacillate between two alternatives or a conflict pitting the product negatives against the product positives.

1. Ask for the sale in a short follow-up email or phone contact. Simply ask your prospect if he or she is ready to get started. For a certain percentage of prospects, this will tip the conflict scale toward a yes.

 2. After the prospect has left your sales funnel, you can send a "no communication" deadline. These deadlines are "fish or cut bait" statements. It may say something like this: 

"We have not heard from you in 30 days. While this will be our final communication, feel free to contact us in the future if you wish to move forward."

Receiving this kind of statement sometimes gets the attention of a reticent prospect. If nothing happens at least you will not waste any more time and energy on a dead-end.

3. You can also send an e-mail asking a motivating question raises the stakes by asking for active renewal of the contact. You may say something like this:

"If has been over a month since we heard from you. Have you had a chance to go over the specifications for our product and make a decision?

4. You can answer objectives by adding a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on your website. Source the most often asked questions in consultation with your sales and marketing team. Send the prospect an e-mail with a link to your FAQ, asking if this information is helpful.

5. Offer a gift or discount as an incentive to tip the scale in favor of a sale. It doesn't have to be a large discount or anything really valuable. The attention and the offer may be enough to move your prospect into the buyer column.

6. A quick follow-up e-mail or phone call, personally asking a prospect if there are any additional questions or concerns, is often enough to bring a lapsed prospect back into the sales column. Many inbound marketers find that quick follow-up phone contacts (within the first 48 to 72 hours of the contact) is the key to many prospect to customer conversions. In many cases, quick phone contact works, but contacts delayed longer than two days do not.

7. Often information is the key. Many marketers believe that buyers are not interested in reading a lot of text about their products. The fact is that most serious prospects want as much information as they can get and need the information to make an informed sales decision. What many prospects are afraid of is marching into the unknown with their investment. They need reassurance, and in-depth information may be exactly what could trigger the buying choice.

DentalLabSupport.com specializes in the tools to help businesses grow and prosper. Please contact us to learn more.

Dental Lab Support Sponsors:

GuideMia.com - Turn-key Solution For Implant Treatment Planning & Surgical Guides.

Dental Lab Email Marketing Best Practices: Avoid The Spam Folder

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

In what's become a popular series among our readers, we have been focusing some of our posts on email marketing best practices for dental laboratories in the recent past. In fact, we've covered the importance of a good subject line, the body content, and the best time and date to send your emails. But none of that matters if you don't make sure of one thing: that your email does not land in your recipients' spam folder.

Being marked as spam is any email marketer's greatest nightmare. It can happen automatically thanks to spam filters or manually by your audience, but the difference is minuscule - if it happens, your emails won't be read any longer. Even worse, senders who are frequently marked as spam get blacklisted by email clients, which might mean that your entire email campaign will be for the birds.

Naturally, you want to avoid that happening. So here are 3 best practices that ensure your email remains compliant with all spam rules and regulations.

1) Avoid Trigger Words

Most email clients now have automatic filters in place that redirect marketing emails to the spam folder without ever letting the user see them. These filters check for a variety of things, but trigger words are among their chief priority. These trigger words (and symbols) can range from "$$" to "guarantee," and including them in your headline often means certain death (or endless purgatory) for your email.

You can find a full list of current trigger words at this link. But don't use it as your guide; instead, you should simply ensure that your email subject lines and content doesn't sound like click bait, making empty promises and aimed only at drawing readers in.

2) Include a Physical Address

The CAN SPAM Act of 2000 is a law that oversees all email marketing and should guide all of your practices. Among many other things, it states that every marketing email should always include the physical address of the business from which it is sent, in order to allow the recipient an easy way to contact the company if need be.

Circumventing that rule means actually breaking the law, but it also means your email will likely end up in spam purgatory. That's why you should always include a physical address at the end of your email.

3) Include (and Maintain) Unsubscribe Option

Another stipulation of the CAN SPAM Act is that every marketing email should include an 'unsubscribe' option for users who choose not to receive any more information from the company in question. Of course, that unsubscribe button is mutually beneficial; if your readers don't want to hear from you, you should not attempt to keep communicating with them.

But what many marketers don't know is that maintaining your list of contacts who have unsubscribed is just as important as including the button in the first place. Send another email to someone who has already unsubscribed from a previous message, and they won't just unsubscribe again - they will mark your message as spam, which, as we explained above, can lead to a chain reaction that ultimately leaves you blacklisted. 

Landing in the spam folder is the worst thing that could happen to your email. To learn more about how CRMs can help you avoid that dreaded situation, contact us today!

Visit dentallabsupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.

Dental Lab Lead Nurturing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Lead nurturing is an important part of any inbound a dental laboratories marketing efforts. After generating leads through the strategic use of content marketing and landing pages, you want to be sure that your leads actually turn into customers by providing them with regular messages that increasingly nudge them toward a sale. 

But of course, as is the case in any digital marketing initiatives, it's important to follow industry standards in order to be successful. So without further ado, here are 3 best practices that aid your lead nurturing efforts, with the help of CRM Software.

1) Segment and Target

A blanket nurturing strategy can be dangerous. Put simply, sending the same emails to every one of your leads risks annoying them with content that is not relevant to their individual needs. Instead, consider segmenting your leads into different groups, and targeting individual messages specifically to these groups.

Segmenting, of course, begins with a landing page that asks your audience for more than just their name or email address. While you need to keep your sign up forms relatively short, asking one or two distinguishing questions (such as their state of residence, their industry, or their job role) helps separate your contacts into distinct segments.

And once you set up that landing page, an effective CRM can do the rest. Now, you can set up targeted nurturing campaigns with emails directed only at the portions of your audience for which they are most relevant, ensuring a smooth experience for your leads and better chances or turning into customers.

2) Support with Content

You should also consider expanding your lead nurturing strategy beyond mere email marketing. While emails remain the lifeblood of any 'drip' campaign, what if you use them to promote content that is relevant to leads in a specific stage in the sales funnel?

Of course, this strategy can take some effort, as you will have to build content that relates to audiences who already know about you. But once you have this type of content, you can enrich your nurturing efforts by providing actual, valuable content rather than just a prompt to become your customer. It turns your emails into true nurturing efforts, rather than mere promotional messaging.

3) Time Strategically

Finally, you should pay serious attention to when you send out your emails. Individual studies vary on the optimal amount of emails you should send your audience per month, but most experts generally recommend a median between once and twice per week.

Finding the right balance in your email send frequency is crucial: if you don't send nurturing emails often enough, your contacts will forget about you or go with a competitor instead. But do it too often, and you will land in too many spam folders and unsubscribe lists to be effective.

If you're looking which exact send frequency can work for you, your CRM can help. In fact, you ran run reports on your open, click-through and unsubscribe percentages, which in turn helps you understand how your send frequency impacts these success metrics. Thankfully, most CRMs allow you to easily make changes to your automation workflows that ensure you get the most out of your email nurturing efforts.

Nurturing your leads to becoming customers can be incredibly valuable, especially considering its low cost and the high degree of automation available through customer relationship management software today. But even with this software, you want to be sure that you follow the above best practices.

By segmenting your leads and targeting your messages, supporting your emails with content, and implementing the right send frequency, your lead nurturing efforts will make a significant impact in garnering new customers. And if you're looking for a CRM that can help you throughout the process, contact us!  visit DentalLabSupport.com for more information or contact us by telephone 1-888-715-9099.

Flexibility with an outside agency

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Flexibility can have different meaning for different people in different situations. It’s more than just the capability of being bent or elastic. The same word is also often tailed with outsourced telemarketing, or even outsourcing in general. Because of it being such an ambiguous term, this question may have already surfaced your mind: just how flexible outsourced telemarketing can be?

Benefits of an outside Agency

• Adaptive to change and setbacks – Flexibility can be measured depending on the outsourced telemarketer’s capability to adapt to the fast shifting demands of your target prospects. More than just the cost-efficient advantage of outsourcing, a skilled outsourced telemarketing provider handles setbacks of the campaign effectively, allowing you to have the time and leisure to focus on your core business.

• Expertise – Experienced telemarketers practice their expertise just about every waking day. It wouldn’t be too hard to compare a trained in-house newbie to a veteran telemarketer. This sums up the possibility of you saving heaps of effort and number of staff to train, not to mention the added operation for you to work on.

• Follows new trends and approaches – While the new emerging approaches to B2B marketing is popularly utilized, outsourced telemarketing providers are also up to these challenges, continuing to implement its proven techniques while following to the new trends that optimizes the B2B marketing process.

In the end, flexibility of outsourced telemarketing depends on how the service is provided as well as your relationship with your provider. It doesn’t only take a flexible service for an outsourced telemarketing to work.

For More Information Contact DentalLabSupport.com - Info@dentallabsupport.com  1-888-715-9099