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

Engage Your Clients

Strengthen and maximize current relationships with a variety of strategies

By David H. Khalili

For many dental laboratory owners, marketing campaigns focus primarily on seeking out new dental offices and engaging them to try the laboratory’s work for the first time. The belief is that the key to growing the business lies in accruing as many new clients as possible and convincing them to send in cases. However, this type of front-end marketing strategy overlooks several key factors for sustained revenue growth.

New Client Engagement

One restoration created by an unfamiliar laboratory is only the first step to building a client relationship based on trust, loyalty, and communication; it is not enough to convince a dentist that your laboratory is the best choice for serving the patient’s needs. However, through well-thought-out protocols and built-in incentives, new clients can be encouraged to try multiple cases while getting to know the laboratory’s range of products, service standards, and company culture. Once dentists get in the habit of sending cases to the new laboratory, they are more likely to continue.

Re-engaging Lapsed Clients

A mid-sized laboratory with a client base of 60-80 dentists may have serviced hundreds of individual clients over its lifetime. These former clients may have tapered off for a number of correctable reasons, including: dissatisfaction with a laboratory practice that has since been improved, the lack of a product or service that has since been added, a perceived indifference to their needs that can be remedied through communication, or a better offer by another laboratory that may no longer be in business. Reaching out to these former clients and letting them know how the laboratory has improved since they last sent cases will often persuade them to give it another try.

Incentivizing Low-Volume Clients

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule, when applied to business predicts that 80% of a company’s sales come from only 20% of its clients. This rule rings true for dental laboratories. The vast majority of an average laboratory’s monthly sales volume comes from just 20% of its dentists. This means there is an opportunity to increase case volume from the 80% of existing clients through marketing efforts. Learning more about these under-producing clients and targeting messaging to address their specific concerns or needs can quickly boost sales and develop high-quality client relationships.

Cross-Selling Limited-Service Clients

Most dentists use multiple laboratories. For example, they will use one laboratory for removable cases, another for fixed restorations, and a third for implant work. Without research and communication, a laboratory producing PFMs for one of these dentists might assume that the practice does not need denture services. It is important to let existing clients know about all products and services the laboratory provides, including material options, special offers, and new improvements.

Strategies for Engagement

Client engagement is a long-term marketing strategy designed to build brand loyalty, instill trust and confidence, increase order frequency, and address issues efficiently. The goal of client engagement is constant communication to make dentists feel understood, appreciated, informed, and sympathetic.

The first step to client engagement is segregating clients based on categories to focus marketing efforts—for example, New, Lapsed, Low, or Limited. These categories can be further refined to provide a tailored marketing experience designed specifically to the target audience. Each group of clients then must be entered into a marketing contact list for efficient tracking and communication. This list can be a Word document, spreadsheet, or client relationship management (CRM) tool. Next, as much information as possible should be gathered about each client in the list. Record staff names, complete contact information, websites, social media, hours of operation, average monthly case volumes, types of cases ordered, lengths of client relationships, and other information that will be useful for targeting communication. Update these records each time the dental office is contacted, and add notes that will inform future communication. Use the laboratory case management software to track order trends. What types of cases are most popular with this group? What underused case types could benefit them?

Listen and Encourage Feedback

Often, dentists consider switching laboratories when they feel their current laboratory is not meeting their needs or is indifferent to their feedback. Providing dentists with ample opportunities for feedback and making changes based on the feedback will make your clients feel understood and in control. This strategy will encourage dentists to work with you to correct shortfalls, rather than look around for another laboratory.

Effective client feedback requires an organized approach. As a first step, include a survey card with each case that has both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Be prepared to receive more negative feedback than positive; volunteer response bias tends to highlight shortfalls over strengths. It is important to not react emotionally to negative feedback; taking things personally will not help the laboratory grow.

Identify one staff member as the feedback liaison who collects the feedback, analyzes it to identify trends, and makes recommendations to the rest of the dental laboratory team. The feedback liaison should regularly call clients to ask how things are going and relate the trends back to the team. When dentists contact the laboratory to complain or comment about a case, this information should be tracked and routed to the feedback liaison.

Once an effective feedback system is in place, dentists will feel more comfortable sharing their perceptions about the work they receive, and the laboratory will have an opportunity to make adjustments before the dentist begins to consider using another laboratory. When dentists are encouraged to provide feedback and feel that their concerns are taken seriously, they feel a sense of ownership in the laboratory and thus become more loyal.

Develop Protocols and Open Lines of Communication

Regular communication builds strong client relationships. Stay in touch with clients through phone calls, social media, email newsletters, mailings, case stuffers, or a blog. These methods remind dentists that the laboratory is available to meet their needs and are a constant reminder that your business is a go-to for services and information.

Most dental offices have their own website and social media page. They are very appreciative when a laboratory “likes” and “shares” their pages and content, provides positive reviews, and engages by leaving friendly comments. This will encourage the dental office to reciprocate by “liking” and “sharing” your laboratory’s content.

Any client marketing campaign, whether by phone, web, mail, or email, should be tracked to gauge effectiveness. Analytical software can help gauge how dentists engage with your content and what piques their interest.

Inform and Educate

The dental laboratory industry is in a constant state of flux with new technologies, materials, and technical processes debuting routinely. Dentists rely on their laboratories for information on these new products, their indications, and applications. When the laboratory proactively provides dentists with valuable information about these new restorative offerings, dentists will feel more confident prescribing them. This strategy will also help establish the laboratory’s image as one of expertise, confidence, and reliability.

David H. Khalili is CEO of DentalLabSupport.com, Inc. in Los Angeles, California.

See more at: http://www.dentalaegis.com/idt/2017/02/engage-your-clients#sthash.o3CHH9ZR.dpuf

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.

Top 8 Marketing Tips for your Dental Lab

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Being a dental lab is difficult for some. You must find a way to get your name out there and make sure that consumers know exactly what it is that you do. To make this a success, certain techniques and tips have been created for small businesses of all industries. Regardless of your goals or outlook for the future, you can definitely find ways to benefit from these top 8 marketing tips for your small business.

Tip 1: Give Samples

People love trying out free things. What better way for you to get dentist's to try out your products than by giving them free samples to try? This is something that many industries can rely on and have always found great success when customers come back for purchases in the future.

Tip 2: Focus on your Target Market

You have to know where your potential shoppers are. If they are online, that means that you should develop ads on popular social media sites and websites that they might visit. Sending them a brief message on a postcard in the mail is also something that can help drive them to your business or website.

Tip 3: Give them a reason to click

When you are developing social media ads, make sure that consumers have a reason to click on your ad. If consumers are not enticed by what your ad is offering, they won't go any further than glancing at it in passing. The goal is to get them to your website. Your ad should be what drives them there.

Tip 4: Update your Ads

Keeping fresh content and ads available for your potential customers is also an important part of the process. Nothing is worse than stale material that your customers get tired of seeing quickly. Make sure that you are making updates regularly to keep them interested.

Tip 5: Offer a better or less expensive option

If you are looking for ways to compete with other business, you should always offer something different from what your competitors are. Typically, this means that you should offer a better quality or less expensive option than what they are offering.

Tip 6: Have a Slogan

The goal behind this is that you are looking for something that will get caught in the minds of your potential customers. The slogan that you select should be something that is catchy and memorable. You should also make sure that you use the slogan in a number of locations. For example, it should be on your website, any ads that you print and you may even want to answer the phone using it.

Tip 7: Be Unconventional

It is always best to be different. While many marketing strategies are used regularly and are successful, you should also look for ways that you can market unconventionally. These methods should be ones that appeal to your target market and that help to showcase your business's personality and mission.

Tip 8: Become a Sponsor

If you are looking to increase your local market, one of the best things that you can do to get your name out there is to become a sponsor for a local event. Not only will this show off your company, but you will be able to support your local community as well. Consumers will take notice of this, especially those who prefer to shop locally.

Marketing is something that is crucial to the success of any business, but it is especially important for small businesses. Without a strong marketing plan, small businesses will not be able to compete with their competitors and may struggle to survive in the business world. If you are looking for ways to improve your marketing plan, be sure to contact us today.

For more info please contact DentalLabSupport.com or call us at 1-888-715-9099.

5 Ways to Develop Prospects for Dental Labs

5 Ways to Develop Prospects for Dental Labs -- By David H. Khalili, CEO DentalLabSupport.com

In the digital market, there are many dental laboratories vying for the same dentist. As web offerings increase, the potential customer base essentially stagnates, or at best, grows more slowly than the products and services offered, it will become increasingly difficult to find new prospects. To stand out from the crowd, your business has to do more than just offer a product. It also must do so in a unique and memorable way. Your dental lab must think about more than the current sale, it must also consider how to make a one time purchaser into a long term customer.

Offer something unique. Your product and services may be something which is available in one form or another from a variety of dental labs, but that does not mean that you cannot have, or create, a unique marketing draw. Perhaps you feel that you have insight into the industry which other dental labs do not. Blog about your knowledge, or if you have enough detailed technical information to do so, write a whitepaper. This demonstrates your specialized knowledge, it makes you an expert in a crowd of websites who limit communication to generic FAQs.

When you offer something, get something back from a potential prospect in return. For example, if you have something on your website that you offer to customers as a free download, such as a whitepaper, request their email or other contact information. This contact information does not automatically translate into a prospect, but it does indicate specific interest in your product by at least one specific user.

Ask permission. There's a saying that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission, but just the opposite may be true when gathering potential prospects. Do not subscribe people to your mailing list without expressly communicating your intent to do so. It may seem like an obvious match from your perspective, but you need to consider the perspective of the potential customer as well. People sometimes spend their first couple of minutes with morning email weeding through the junk mail. It's an annoying reality of email, but don't be an annoyance to someone who may one day become a customer. Consider how many times you have added an email to a spam filter versus how many times you have gone into your spam filter and removed an existing entry. Once you are in someone's spam filter, you are likely to stay there permanently. Don't get into the spam filter in the first place by sending unsolicited emails.

Build on your reputation with existing dentists. This sounds simple, but there is a wrong way and a right way to do it. The right way is to be completely open and forthright about it. If one customer is happy with your service, tell them directly that you value them and their ideas about other potential customers. Facebook received some negative publicity when it went about this process the wrong way: Facebook decided that if a customer used a product, they could be translated into an unintended spokesperson for that product. Public reaction was terrible. Build a relationship, not a database.

Ask satisfied customers to let you mention them. In a business to business relationship, this is a win-win proposition. The customer expands their presence and your product gains legitimacy by actual testimonials. It may be tempting to rework the statement you put on your website in a testimonial, but resist the temptation. Ethics issues aside, the customer may be able to address potential customers better than you can simply because they are both in the same, or nearly the same position.

For more information on how to identify and gain prospects, and turn them into long term and loyal clients, please contact DentalLabSupport.com or by calling 1-888-715-9099.

4 Major Problems in the Dental Laboratory Industry

Dental laboratory owners have been feeling the ripple effects of the dental lab crisis over the last several years as dental lab schools have slowly but surely shut their doors one by one. While not all dental lab schools have closed down, the smaller availability reflects the population’s interest in pursuing dental lab technology as a career.

Dental lab owners have approached this problem of fewer dental lab schools in different ways. Some dental laboratory owners remained optimistic about the changing tides while other lab owners despaired and prepared for the worst by more carefully selecting their dental lab tech team. 

Regardless of whether you’re a dental lab owner who fought tooth and nail against the struggle or simply allowed your dental laboratory to adapt to the changing conditions, the fact of the matter is that fewer and fewer people choose to pursue dental lab technology year over year, and this has caused 4 major problems in the dental laboratory industry:

1. USA dental technician certification is increasingly becoming unavailable
2. Dental technician certification is either not required or unimportant to dental techs
3. Offshore dental laboratories continue to expand, causing unequal competition with American dental laboratories
4. Relationships between American dental technicians and dentists is seriously lacking 

As a result, currently large-sized dental labs have continued to increase while many medium- and small-sized labs - other than the boutique dental labs - have shut down.

What most dental lab owners don’t realize, however, is the one-two punch to the dental industry: lack of dental lab schools and lack of practical experience in dental education. 

Three or four years of dental school is not enough to prepare new dentists for real world dentistry because new grads severely lack real-life practice, and instead these dentists completely depend upon their dental technicians’ knowledge of technical aspects of all dental procedures. 

All four major problems within the dental lab industry combined with the dental education crisis are a double whammy: new dentists don’t yet have the right practical training, and there are less dental lab technicians available for them to rely on.

Now, how can we in the dental lab industry address and correct these issues? Check back next week for our blog post where we cover simple solutions to the 1st major problem in the dental laboratory industry!