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.

How the Emergence of Digital Local Affects Dental Labs in 2016 and Beyond

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The philosophy behind dental lab marketing used to be relatively simple. Digital marketing strategies made sense to raise brand awareness, but to get people in your neighborhood, more traditional methods were most reliable. A print ad in a community magazine, sponsoring a local event, or even a telemarketing to get the people around you to pay attention to your products and services.

But increasingly, digital marketing seeks to compete with these traditional methods, creating local advertising possibilities that you should not ignore. As we move into 2016 and beyond, these digital marketing opportunities are becoming increasingly easy to access, meaning you should give them serious thought as a part of your budget in the new year. Let's discuss digital local marketing opportunities relevant to small businesses today.

Local Search

When Google first introduced its Pigeon algorithm update in 2014, it changed the game for local search optimization. Without boring you with the details, the update prioritized local results over national results as appropriate for search queries related to your business.

Today, search is ubiquitous among your audience. Especially thanks to the rise in mobile, a potential customer who is looking for a way to get your product or find out about your opening hours simply pulls up Google and types their query into the search bar. Do you know what shows up when they do?

As it turns out, the search engine actually lets you control the result to some degree, by allowing you to set up and optimize a My Business Profile. If you have not done so yet, you should make it a priority before 2016 or, at the very least, a New Year's Resolution. Potential customers will search for your dental lab, so you want to be sure you can be found easily.

Local Targeting Possibilities

But your opportunities to go local go beyond mere search optimization. Thanks to the in-depth targeting options of many digital channels, particularly on social media, you can now target very specific areas, neighborhoods, and even individual blocks with distinct advertising.

Facebook, for example, allows you to set targeting parameters for its ads to a specific zip code. Google, on the other hand, lets you engage in geo-targeting, even allowing marketers to target based on specific IP and household addresses. This hyper local targeting means you can be sure to reach your audience, no matter how geographically restricted it may be. 

Combining Digital with Traditional

Here, email marketing can come into play. If you use your digital ads as an opportunity to gather leads, or if you request email addresses from customers for post-sale nurturing opportunities, emails can be crucial tools to connect your initial ads and your customer experience. By allowing you to reach out to your target audience in a personalized way, it establishes your dental lab and brand as an important part of your customers' mindset and consideration point for future purchases.

How can email marketing become a part of your local marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.

DLS Sponsors:   GuideMia.com  your turn key solution for implant treatment planning and surgical guides.

3 Adjustments that will Instantly Build Your Dental Lab's Online Presence

Dental lab marketers who ask the question "what can I do to help my business right now?" are often disappointed. Many strategies, from optimizing your website for search engines to building your social media presence, require dedication and resources, and often take months to bear fruit.

But fear not! As it turns out, you can do a few things that will help you market your business successfully without delay. So instead of wasting more of your valuable time, let's jump right in: here are 3 adjustments that will instantly build your online presence.

1) Write for the Web

Perhaps the single biggest issue dental lab owners face when beginning to market their products or services online is one of which they may not even be aware: adjusting their writing for the web.

Even if you have some experience writing text for local ads or newsletters, make no mistake: writing for the web is an entirely different animal. Just knowing that, and adjusting your writing accordingly, can instant improve your online presence.

As you probably know, Twitter has a character limit of 140 characters on all of its tweets. In fact, that may be the exact reason you've stayed away from the network! But what if we told you that you should treat your Facebook presence as if it had the same limit?

As it turns out, the text in your Facebook posts starts getting cut off after 90 characters depending on your readers' device of choice, so making sure you put the most important, convincing part of your message in those first 90 characters is absolutely crucial.

And that's just one example of the need to adjust your writing. Web users have little patience; they won't stick around to read a paragraph that's longer than 3 or 4 sentences and looks like a "wall of text" on their mobile device. By shortening your sentences and paragraphs, and directing them to "you" text rather than "I" statements, you ensure that a much greater percentage of your users read and share your text, and your online presence grows.

2) Quality over Quantity

Many dental lab owners mistakenly think that to be successful in the digital realm, they need to push out content as often as possible when in fact, the opposite is true. Yes, Google loves regular content updates, just as regular exposure on social media is important. But that doesn't mean you should emphasize the quantity over quality.

Again, take Facebook as an example. Thanks to its EdgeRank algorithm, the network only shows your posts to a portion of your "likes" who have engaged with past posts of yours. Because your audience is much more likely to engage with posts that it deems interesting and relevant, businesses focusing on quality content reach a much larger audience than those who simply push posts.

The same is true for Google. Increasingly, the search engine seeks out quality content to rank highly, determining its relevancy in a scoring algorithm that continuously updates itself to maximize user satisfaction. If your individual page updates aren't exciting enough for your users to interact with and share, you won't get to take advantage of potential exposure on the search engines.

3) Connect Your Efforts

Finally, you should absolutely encourage your offline consumers to visit your online presence, whether that presence is a website or a social media profile.

Asking for (honest) reviews, administering a survey, or even offering small rewards online that you can promote in your storefront all drives new users to your web. And if, once they're there, they discover the quality content you have developed with your newly-acquired web writing skills, they'll be likely to stick around and ensure that your online presence keeps growing.

BONUS: Capture Your Online Visitors

So if you're beginning to grow your online presence, what's next? Ideally, you should capture your visitors, encouraging them to give you their contact information become leads in exchange for your quality content. Then, you can begin to engage in targeted marketing campaigns which will increase your customer base and benefit everyone involved.

So if you need any help with making sure that your newly-grown online presence turns into actual revenue, contact dentallabsupport.com! We'd love to talk to you about our services and how it helps you move leads toward becoming customers.

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.

8 Tips on Better Task Management for Dental Labs

By:  David H. Khalili
Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The more we try to accomplish -- run a profitable business, care for a family, stay active in our community, develop our personal and professional selves, ect. -- the harder it is to try to manage the many tasks that make up our lives.

There are two basic axes on which we measure our tasks. On the first axis we must note that different tasks have different priorities. On the second axis we must note that different tasks take different amounts of time to complete. Improving our task management requires getting a better handle on both axes. These 8 tips for better task management for your dental lab will help you do just that.

You can improve the task priority axis by:

1. Prioritizing tasks based on their importance. Assess the importance of each task in your set, but do not mistake urgency for importance. Note that some tasks must be done, while others should be done, and most can be done. When assessing importance, weigh the consequences if a task is not completed to determine which consequences you can't bear, which consequences you don't want to bear, and which consequences you could bear if you must.
2. Prioritizing tasks based on their urgency. Assess the urgency of each task in your set. Once again, do not mistake importance for urgency. Note that some tasks need to be done today to be valid, while others need to be done this week (or month or quarter) to be valid, and that many will be valid regardless of when they're done. When assessing urgency, weigh the effectiveness of a task relative to its timing to determine when a task must be done by to matter.
3. Putting your priorities together. List tasks that are both most important and most urgent first. Add any important tasks that you want to do today. Add any urgent tasks that you want to do today. (Note that importance is a higher priority than urgency.) Continue to add tasks based first on importance and then on urgency.
4. Breaking down goals into discrete tasks. When listing tasks or things to do, often you list things that involve multiple steps. For example, you may need to report your quarterly earnings; but, upon further examination, you realize it is a goal that is accomplished by performing a set of discrete tasks. By breaking each goal into discrete tasks, you can find ways to improve your task management capabilities by turning to the task time axis.

You can improve the task time axis by:

1. Managing each task as a discrete unit. Some tasks you will need to perform yourself. Other tasks you can delegate. Some tasks will be different each time you perform them. Other tasks will be repeatable and can be standardized to expedite the task completion process in the future. By managing each discrete task, you can accomplish your goals more effectively and efficiently.
2. Delegating tasks others can do. Delegation is most effective when you set standards for task completion, but do not micromanage the completion process. If a task must be micromanaged, then do it yourself. If you delegate a task to an employee or freelancer, empower your worker to complete the task in his or her own way.
3. Standardizing tasks that are repeated. By creating standardized methods for completing the tasks you must perform, you can perform tasks more quickly. You also increase your ability to multitask, because you reduce the chances for mistakes when you standardize a task.
4. Following your personal rhythms. Learn how you work and when you work most effectively. By assigning complicated tasks when you are most focused, you can perform more effectively and efficiently. By assigning multiple tasks for when you tend to be more scattered, you can leverage your reduced attention span by using multitasking to stay productive when you need to change up your focus.

Task management is most effective when you address both axes when improving your skills. By learning to effectively and efficiently manage your own tasks, you also learn how to help your employees do the same. Contact us today to learn how!

Dental Lab Tools to Manage Your Busy Schedule

Dental Lab Tools to Manage Your Busy Schedule

By David H. Khalili, CEO DentalLabSupport.com

Dental Laboratories need to use proper tools to manage their time and schedule in order to maintain competitive excellence in the industry with much larger players. Because of advances in IT programs and infrastructure, the tools for time management normally reserved for large corporations are now available for small dental labs. Many of these tools come in integrated packages which provide the tools you need to run your dental lab in one affordable package. 

The following 4 tools provide you systems management for your dental lab to increase your available time.

1. Workflow Planning/Whiteboard

One of the most powerful business tools of the 20th century was a whiteboard. Work planning, task assignment and scheduling, and goal setting were all managed efficiently from whiteboards. For modern business systems, a physical whiteboard is no longer the best method for workflow planning because the time lost in transferring items from a whiteboard to your computer systems increases both time necessary for planning and the chance of items not being copied into your computer system. 

A modern workflow planning system will give you tools to manage planned activities, assign tasks in specific order, and plan in such a way that everyone on your team knows where you are going, the time-frame to get there, and who takes the lead at any given time. 

2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

An essential part of any dental lab sales or marketing system, a CRM is a software program designed specifically to track and manage contacts with your customers and leads. A CRM saves businesses time in multiple ways. Preventing lost leads, reducing redundancies in customer service communication, and managing your customer database from a centralized place are all part of how a CRM saves you time in your business. 

A good CRM for time management will be accessible from your sales team's mobile devices. This saves time and data as you are able to capture leads and store them directly into your database without carrying business cards in your pockets, transferring data from notepads to excel, or any other of a variety of systems people attempt to use to manage contact information. 

3. Automation Software

Although automation software is an obvious time-saver, many small dental lab owners do not know how affordable and accessible modern automation systems are. Many software programs have automatic processes for marketing emails, follow-up responses, integration with multiple software systems (ERP, accounting and financial, CRM, WMS) to give your business accurate and timely information across your software platforms. 

While automation software and hardware used to be added to a business's IT systems, this has changed. Advances in cloud computing and storage have moved many business process management systems online. Online clouds enable many software providers to integrate automation systems and API's within their core software at an affordable price for small businesses. 

4. Cloud-Based Software

Although not a specific tool, cloud-based software programs offer small dental labs several time saving tools that traditional in-house platforms do not. Cloud-based software offers reduced install times, gives you universal access to your software, and reduces your costs involved with in-house data centers. 

A cloud-based software system is accessible via an internet connection, meaning any web-connected device can be used by you and your team to get work done. From a quality software company, it also provides you better security and infrastructure than most small businesses can afford to put in on their own. 

Workforce planning, CRM, automation and cloud-based software can all be found in separate platforms or integrated into one. Because of advances in technology, these 4 tools are all available to small businesses at affordable prices and in good time. For more information about how our CRM fills all the roles of these tools, please contact us today.

DentalLabSupport.com 

1-888-715-9099

Dental Lab Solutions: Solving the Problem of Dental Techs' Attitudes Towards Certification

Thank you for reading last week’s post about the problem and solution to USA dental tech certification becoming increasingly unavailable. This week we tackle the problem of dental technicians' attitudes towards certification; chiefly, modern dental technicians don't care to be certified.

Problem #2: Dental technician certification is either not required or unimportant to dental techs

Unlike their predecessors, new dental technicians do not consider certification important and instead reason that gaining several years' experience will enable them to sufficiently perform their duties.

Solution: Dental lab owners must emphasize the benefits of certification through their hiring decisions.

Although the problem of dental techs' attitudes towards certification go hand-in-hand with the problem of dental tech certification becoming increasingly unavailable, dental lab owners do have some power in this situation. Dental lab owners must publicly announce the beneficial differences between what an uncertified and a certified tech can earn at their dental lab. 

In your job ads, don't be shy to display outright the salary range you're willing to offer to a certified dental tech vs an uncertified dental tech. Make it clear that certified technicians will require less micromanagement, have more freedom, and be placed on a faster track to salary increases and bonuses. Explicit salary increases and the opportunity to eventually operate their own dental lab are great incentives to reshape dental lab technicians' attitudes towards certification.

Dental tech certification enables the dental community to have faith in the quality of custom crowns being produced. Dental lab certification is especially necessary now more than ever as offshore dental labs and digital machines threaten the existence of the dental technician industry.

By explicitly announcing your dental lab's need for a certified dental tech, you are asserting the importance of a quality-controlled set of skills and requirements to your business. Plus, dental technicians who feel they must be certified are more likely to take greater responsibility for their designs, thereby branding your dental lab as a reliable lab with highly skilled technicians and unbeatable product quality.

Thank you for joining us again this week and please stop by on Thursday, July 23 as we address the 3rd problem of the 4 Major Problems in the Dental Laboratory Industry: offshore dental labs grow, creating unequal competition with USA dental labs.