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.

The Right Email Timing Can Help Your Dental Lab Close More Sales

Closing sales opportunities in your dental lab probably is and absolutely should be among your major priorities for your business. If you have contacts in your database, why not do everything you can to make sure they convert to customers?

While the above is a simple fact, it can also be difficult to achieve. Again and again, we hear from small businesses looking for tips and techniques to close more sales. Lead nurturing tends to be an easy answer, but how do you set up your automated nurturing emails to maximize their success? Here's one crucial part: get the timing right.

Timing Your Initial Inquiry Response

Timing matters from the moment a lead enters your database. Research has long suggested that when someone fills out the contact information necessary to become a lead, they require an almost instant response to maximize their chances of becoming customers.

In fact, a landmark study by the Harvard Business Review found that following up with a lead within 1 hour of their conversion increases your chances of that lead becoming sales-qualified by 700%. Subsequent research has confirmed just how essential that first email contact is to inspire a closed sale in the future.

Following up quickly will also set you above your competition instantly. One study found that 30% to 50% of dental lab leads are closed by the business that responds first, while between 40% and 50% of all sales leads never receive a follow up at all. If you send even a quick lead acknowledgement with a promise to follow up in more detail later, your chances of closing that sale will increase substantially.

Spreading Out Subsequent Emails

Of course, the initial follow up is just the beginning of your lead nurturing efforts. From now on, you should send regular emails that both invite your leads to learn more about your brand, and share new content alongside regular industry news.

But in what intervals should these emails go out? While the answer will ultimately depend on your individual audience, Marketing Sherpa found that hovering between once a month and once a week receives optimum results. In other words, if your nurturing emails go out between 2-4 times a month, your emails will work effectively to help your business close sales.

But you have to be careful. According to a survey by Technology Advice, the most common reason your audience marks emails as spam is because they received too many emails. Keeping your emails to no more than once per week, while also varying the days of the week at which your emails send, will optimize your nurturing efforts.

How Far Out Should You Go?

Finally, the third variable of email timing is just how far out your nurturing efforts should go. In other words, how long should you keep emailing leads that do not seem to move through the funnel?

This variable is also the most difficult to narrow down specifically. Ultimately, the answer depends entirely on the length of your sales process. If you sell convenience goods that don't require much thought or consideration, a month is enough to communicate everything you need for your leads to make a purchasing decision. But if your business depends on high-consideration decision processes, going further out (sometimes to 3 months and beyond) may make more sense.

And of course, don't discount the idea of sending up infrequent follow-ups even to cold leads. They may just not have been ready to buy in the past, so checking to see whether they are now makes business sense. 

To learn more about optimizing your lead nurturing efforts to close more sales, and to find the right software to set up automated emails that increase your chances of success, contact us at 1.888.715.9099 or DentalLabSupport.com

Identify and Remove Clogs in Your Sales Pipeline

Lead nurturing is essential for moving dentists through the sales pipeline. With targeted emails, relevant content, and social media interaction, you can encourage dentists to take the next step in the buying process. There's a lot that can go wrong with the sales pipeline, so it's important to find the source of the problem rather than trying to fix its leaks with band-aids. Dental Lab Sales pipeline management isn't a perfect system. Even with a great strategy, your pipeline will get clogged from time to time. When this happens, it's important to identify the cause, find a solution, and prevent the same problem from happening again. In the end, you'll find that you have to do regular maintenance to keep your sales pipeline healthy. 

Keep a healthy pipeline with relevant leads 

The single most important factor in regard to sales pipeline management is lead quality. To attract new customers to your business and move them along through the sales process, you need to market exclusively to your target audience. 

Irrelevant leads are the most common source of sales pipeline clogs. Because these dentists aren't interested in your products, they just sit at the beginning of your pipeline until you remove them. 

This Business 2 Community article explains the process of qualifying prospects. According to the article, it's essential to first identify your target audience:

"Qualifying prospects is at the heart of a healthy lead generation system. First, you need to paint a clear picture of the types of prospects that fit with each of your solutions. Doing so establishes the types of buyers that could flow through your pipeline in the most efficient way. When you know who to target, you qualify by asking questions that allow you to detect whether a buyer fits well into your pipeline."

Lead nurturing tactics won't be effective if you're trying to convert irrelevant leads. In this respect, the first step of the journey is the most important one. 

Align your marketing and sales teams 

It's well-known that marketing and sales teams don't exactly mesh well together. Each team sees itself as the more important counterpart and is therefore unwilling to compromise. 

It's up to lab management to get these teams to understand that they're part of a dynamic duo. A marketing campaign would be ineffective without a sales team, and sales representatives would never have any opportunities without a solid marketing campaign. 

In this light, aligning your marketing and sales teams should be your first priority. According to this Forbes article, you can do this by creating a service level agreement between the two departments: 

"If you haven’t noticed yet, integrating your marketing and sales departments is vital if you want a contribution from your marketers in the sales pipeline. You can encourage these departments by drafting a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA should describe the lead requirements like the target market and interest, the marketing contribution to the sales pipeline, support options, and how data and content will be shared."

It's a give and take. Don't expect perfect coordination overnight, but you also want to nip bad habits from the very start. 

Move Dentists along with lead nurturing 

Once you refocus your lead generation strategy and align your marketing and sales teams, you can move on to other matters in relation to the sales pipeline. At this point, you should at least have a steady stream of dentists coming in. 

While some businesses have a knack for generating leads, it's rare to see a company naturally good at converting them. If you fall into this category, then you should concentrate on lead nurturing. 

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.

How to Run a Productive Dental Lab Sales Meeting

Meetings are an essential aspect of running a successful dental lab sales operation, but too often are thought of as necessary evils. There are numerous ways they can be sabotaged — there are no-shows, people spend the meeting twiddling their thumbs or on their phones, big talkers dole out too much, others spend time hiding and counting down the clock, and so on.

Meetings have long been considered a curse in the business world, eating into an extraordinary amount of a dental lab’s most valuable resource — time. The good news is: There are still ways to conduct productive sales meetings. Adopt the following tips and you’ll increase your chances of promoting your sales objectives in meetings. Just as importantly, you’ll also spend less time in meetings and more time selling.

Find your purpose

Why are we here?

Productive sales meetings have a purpose. Can you identify your main desired outcome?

• Are you dealing with short-term or long-term sales objectives?
• Are you going to discuss the company’s latest sales reports?  
• Are you enhancing your sales negotiation skills?
• Are you creating a sales contest?

Get with the agenda

If it’s not important enough to create an agenda, is it important enough to attend a meeting?

If you don’t have an agenda, then your meeting will probably just turn into a “conversation” where the most dominant people speak.

An agenda should go beyond just laying out the obvious, namely:

• Purpose of the meeting.
• Attendees (both required and optional attendees).
• Location (or alternative method of attending).

The agenda should also detail:

• Topics to be discussed.
• Decisions to be made.
• Allotted time for each topic/decision. 

Share some successes  

Who’s winning?

One straightforward way to kick off a sales meeting is to encourage attendees to briefly share a success they’ve had since the last time the team met. This reinforces a sense of optimism. It also helps people feel like they’re part of the meeting, instead of just an observer. And if there are negative topics to cover, this puts any problems in a wider context.

Harness the power of recognition and praise

Who’s ready for some encouragement?

People crave acknowledgement. Also, there’s more than just anecdotal evidence that recognizing good work and saying thank you is a great idea; research shows that when sales managers use praise, their employees are more productive overall. So if you’re leading a meeting, don’t miss an opportunity to motivate your team by letting them know they’re appreciated.

Prevent the meeting from going off course

What were we just talking about?

It’s better if everyone chips in to make sure the meeting stays on track — not just the boss or most senior person in the room. To prevent well-intentioned people from derailing a meeting:

• Rein in the ramblers and ask them to keep their comments to a minimum.
• Beware of tangents that stray from the agenda — be ready to put tangents in their place.
• If a topic comes up that only relates to a few attendees, move it offline so that everyone’s time is respected.
• Balance the need for everyone to feel heard with the need to accomplish the goals of the meeting.

If no matter how hard you try, you still can’t keep meetings on track and on time, there is a nuclear option: meetings at the end of the day. If you schedule a meeting, say, 20 minutes before your salespeople are supposed to knock off, this might be the saving grace that prevents them from straying off topic.

Confirm next steps

OK people, who is doing what?

Recap, recap, recap . . .  before leaving the room.

In a TED Talk, Jason Fried says: “Meetings are places to go to talk about things you’re supposed to be doing later.” With that in mind, just before a meeting ends, make sure you agree what are each salesperson’s next steps. Ideally, these steps should be concretely linked to activity goals. Leaving the meeting, each salesperson should be clear about the decisions made and deadlines set during the meeting that impact their activities.

Track progress

How are we tracking decisions and outcomes of this meeting?

You should check on the progress being made between meetings, either using a central checklist or process document. Because each salesperson’s objectives were properly defined in the first meeting, you now know the goals and deadlines to track. One of the key goals of tracking steps is to identify any roadblocks or other issues impeding progress — of individual salespeople, or the team-at-large — and address any problems that protects your overarching sales goals.

To make sure your salespeople hit their activity goals, encourage them to use block logic to book slots in their calendars. Block logic allows salespeople to manage multiple demands and their time more effectively, to aid focus and achieve more.

Now to get all your sales ducks in a row …

DentalLabSupport is all about productivity. Our sales management software helps you focus on the most vital parts of your business, so you can bring in more money, faster. But software alone can’t transform your salespeople into an efficient, effective sales team. In terms of meetings, it takes discipline and leadership to improve structure and order — and ultimately their quality. Incorporating the above tips into your sales meetings so they become habits is a strong step in the right direction to gaining control over your sales meetings.

But whatever you do today, make sure you don’t let your salespeople or your company down by holding unnecessary, ineffective or inefficient sales meetings.

For more information, visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 

Never Give Up On Your Prospect: Reviving Cold Leads

The lead has been in your organization’s sales pipeline too long. You know it. Your manager knows it. Maybe it was a hot lead at one point, but something happened. The holidays, maybe. Or maybe it was another person’s lead and you inherited it. Maybe the prospect has been putting you off. Or maybe you just went a little too long without contacting them.

Leads go cold for a variety of reasons, but that doesn’t mean you ought to abandon them, according to David H. Khalili, Founder of LabCell Dental Lab Software: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers. David said 56% of the people who indicated they are looking to buy a product are typically still in the market within six months of contact; within one year, 35% of those potential buyers are still in the market.

“Leads do not go cold as much as it is not yet their time to buy in the one-year cycle,” David said. “A rep may approach them before they are ready.”

Don’t let it get cold in the first place

According to David, leads often go cold because a sales rep fails to follow up with a prospect early enough in the sales cycle, and the prospect doesn’t remember inquiring about the product in the first place.

"if the salesperson has a comprehensive email ‘drip campaign,’ where they first get permission to stay in touch with the prospect, and then in defined intervals continue to stay in touch with that prospect — by delivering value to them in the form of articles their prospects may find valuable, inviting them to different events, delivering value-based webinars (rather than a pitch) or updates within your company through a newsletter — they are not only the first to know when changes are happening within the prospect’s business, but they are also insulating their prospect from the competition, while maintaining the integrity of that relationship,” David said. “This way, the prospect doesn’t feel, ‘Well, the only time you call me is when you want something from me.’”

Of course, despite the best effort of salespeople, leads often do go cold. And that’s when reps have to spring into action.

How to talk to a cold lead

“You should definitely review every lead again in the future,” David H. Khalili, president of DentalLabSupport.com, said. “Think of it like a ‘cold case’ that gets reopened by a detective. With a fresh perspective plus new clues, new witnesses and new technology, there are often breakthroughs. The same is true with leads that were once cold.”

Not all cold leads are worth a second glance, however. If a lead wasn’t properly qualified in the first place, Art Sobczak of Business By Phone said, it’s not worth your time to follow it up. But if a lead was pre-qualified, you should definitely give it another look.

“I suggest the more time and the further you have gone into a process, the more emphasis should be placed on revisiting a lead,” he said. “You’ve already done a lot of heavy lifting, another attempt might break the logjam.”

David suggests that reps email a cold lead first, then call. That call should remind the prospect that the last time you spoke, they didn’t seem ready to buy, so you are following up now. If they still seem non-committal, ask them a simple question: “Should I close your file?”

“No one wants the rejection of a phone call,” he said. “But for a real lead that has contacted you in the past, the most courteous thing to do is call.”

It might not be easy, but not following up is the biggest mistake a rep can make. “Only 10% to 25% of all leads are followed up,”David said. “By following up, you stand a chance of standing out.”

Following up and being too aggressive is another common error. Reps should not follow up on a cold lead and immediately ask if that person’s ready to buy.

It should be a simple follow-up, reminding the prospect they contacted you first, and updating them on what’s changed since your last interaction — a new product, for example, or a price reduction, new terms, or new features.

You should always plan to discuss something with a lead, David said. It’s a mistake to say: “Uh, I’m checking back in with you.”

“Remind them of what they were interested in previously, and then bring some new possible value to the table to re-engage them,” he said.

For more information on Lead Management, Contact DentalLabSupport.com.