How a Focus on Relevance Can Help You Close More Dentist

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

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

Approaching a Sales Pitch From the Prospect's Perspective

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

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

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

The Difficulties of Achieving Relevance in Practice

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

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

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

Using Your CRM to Increase Relevance and Drive More Sales

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

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

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

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

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

Using the Customer Journey to Help You Achieve Sales Success

Every dental lab can benefit from reaching a bigger audience of potential dentists. 

But how do you make that a reality for your dental lab and sales team? The key is in using smart, automated campaigns throughout a customer’s buying journey. Automated, event-driven campaigns that recognize the stage your leads are in give better results than run of the mill “one message to everyone” campaigns. It is definitely worth it, so where do we start? Well, the customer journey provides a guideline for plotting a successful email marketing automation roll-out.

Understand how the customer journey works for you

If you sit down to think about it, all of the moments where a customer interacts with you are a potential point for marketing automation. In the customer journey, we describe the complete set of interactions between a customer and a company.

There are three main groups that we could focus on based on their stage of the relationship:

1. Known prospects
2. Active Customers
3. Ex-Customers

The known prospects group will be your focus for new sales. They have shown interest and you are in touch, but they aren’t customers yet.  The challenge is to draw them in and progress them through the sales funnel.

Goals we want to achieve with the known prospects:

• Drive engagement
• Educate and Inform about how you can help their problem.
• Describe your brand and your products
• Build trust and a relationship
• Offer an ‘added value’ proposition
• Understand them better and enrich their profile
• Listen very carefully for buying signals.

Notice I didn’t include the actual conversion as a goal? The trick is to not ask for too much at once, but rather go for small wins and build up the relationship.

There are typical campaigns that can make a real difference, usually tied to a direct interaction. These are what you call moments of truth, the ideal place to start. Here are some examples of strong campaigns to start with.

1. Give all of your best your knowledge away

The customer journey is such a good starting point because it allows you to go through your (potential) customer’s experience and the steps they make there. It allows you to explore if there is anything you can hook onto (on their buying journey) and help with. If you execute well, it creates a relationship that could never be achieved with traditional marketing tactics.

Education is an excellent way to build up your name with your audience. Instead of a hard sell, you’re getting attention by providing a (valuable) service. For instance, DentalLabSupport offers a two-week Sales Pipeline Academy  It is a win-win so to speak, and most people remember those that have helped them in the past.

2. Download follow up

If you have any whitepapers, downloads, tip sheets, checklists on your site, be sure to ask for email and contact data up front so all downloaders enter the realm of “known contacts”. But for most companies, it stops there, a missed opportunity to nurture the initial interest.

Here is an outline of a four email “drip campaign” after a download form is filled in.

1. Immediately send an email with the download link.
2. Make initial contact with an automated (personal) email. Include a warm greeting, the description of the download, explain follow up and contact info.
3. If they haven’t downloaded yet, you can send a reminder a few days later.
4. Send over some more information/resources.
5. Ask a simple associated question – in order for them to respond.

You can mix this up to be a combination of personal looking emails and more designed/marketing looking emails. Tor Refsland seems to have this down to an art. His popular blog on influencer marketing has a registration that triggers a conversational email flow of tips that encourages customer response. He even has an online blogger outreach course.  

You want to make sure you get some feedback and/or more information from your contacts at this point. It is better to start scoring the contacts at that moment. When it comes to sales, being persistent with your follow up messaging is often what drives success.

3. Events, presentations, and Webinars

Live events, presentations, and webinars are a great way to raise awareness and engage with prospects. They give you the opportunity to show your expertise and get more opt-ins. It doesn’t have to be your own event either, it works just as well if someone at your company or a client is a guest speaker at an external event. Most companies, however, don’t take the opportunity to reach their full audience via direct campaigns. Here is an example of a small campaign/automation sequence you can use.  

1. During event promotion: Send invitation emails, give attention to the event and lead to registrations.

2. Post-registration but pre-event: Inform about the content and practicalities of the event, build anticipation, reduce no-show.

3. On the day of the event: Any type of last minute reminder doesn’t hurt.

4. Post-event: Send a thank you note, send slides, tips, a video and continue following up with information about future events.

If you don’t manage the registrations, try to get the organizer to send the follow-up.  A generic call to action such as “to learn more” or “for more information” will surely be ignored. Instead, provide specific, tangible options for engaging with your company such as “download our presentation” or  “watch our 3-minute overview video.”

A mix of different content types keeps things interesting for your current email subscribers. You can create online events or webinars, put them on your marketing calendar and later on publish them as “gated” content on your website.

Starting Smart

Through the customer journey, we can understand the steps your leads and potential customers go through and “walk a mile in their shoes”. With all the digital touchpoints of today, interactions aren’t static, there is a seemingly infinite number of variants. But you don’t want to look like an overeager-journey-stuffing-inbox-filler. Start off with a few campaigns that really make an impact. When a lead shows activity and more interest, they will become more receptive to your messages, so take those as a starting point and work on from there.

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

David H. Khalili, Founder & CEO of DentalLabSupport.com

We won't deny it: it's tempting to consider the success of your marketing and dental lab success through lenses that focus on customer acquisition. The amount of new dentists per month, along with other metrics such as lead conversion rates, gives you a great idea about your growing dental laboratory and what you can do to accelerate that growth.

Unfortunately, while these metrics are undoubtedly important, they may not be enough if you're looking to accurately estimate the success of your dental lab, for one simple reason: retention. None of them actually measure how easily you keep current dentists on board, which is a core component of any dental lab success. 

 That's why when considering Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for your business, you may want to look beyond acquisition metrics. Instead, here are some alternatives and additions that can help you measure, and ultimately improve your customer retention efforts.

Average Customer Life Span

On its surface, this metric is relatively straightforward. Once a member of your target audience becomes a customer, how long do they stay on?

Of course, it's also much easier to measure for businesses with recurring revenue models than it is for merchants selling consumer packaged goods. In that case, your customers generally show less loyalty, and purchase more infrequently. Other metrics can better help you evaluate your retention metrics.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV, takes the concept one step further. Instead of focusing on time span, it helps you understand how much revenue an average as well as individual customers actually brought to your business. Because of its value-focused nature, this metric can be applicable to companies in any industry.

Calculated by simply adding up the average purchase values over their life span, CLV helps you compare individual customers and better determine the long-term success of your marketing efforts. If, for example, customers gained through Facebook have a higher CLV than their counterparts gained through a Google Search, you know where to focus your efforts for maximum retention.

Repeat Purchase Percentage

Where life span-based metrics work particularly well in recurring revenue pricing models, repeat purchase percentage is most beneficial as a retention metric in industries where customers buy irregularly. Again, the metric itself is straightforward: what portion of your first-time customers comes back for more after a while?

Repeat Purchase Percentage takes timing completely out of the equation, which can be helpful depending on your industry. You can, for example, more easily track loyal customers, even if they only buy from your company once a year.

Post-Purchase Engagement

Finally, don't underestimate the value of post-purchase engagement as a customer retention metric. A one-time customer may not need to buy from you again in order to remain valuable to you. If they simply continue to engage with you on social media or via email, they can still remain a valuable brand advocate helping you to grow your business.

Imagine, for example, a one-time customer who continues to share your Facebook posts on social media. According to each of the above metrics, this customer is no more valuable than one who buys your product only to never be heard from again. But through tracking post-purchase engagement, you can determine those who loved your product, and turn them into loyal brand advocates over time - even if they don't ever have need for your product again.

Optimizing Your CRM for Customer Retention

By incorporating some or all of the above metrics, you can more accurately track not just how many new customers you gain on a regular basis, but also how many of them become productive and valuable repeat customers and brand loyalists.

Of course, you also need a CRM that can help you in these efforts and make a tangible impact on your retention strategies. For help in that regard, contact us. We'd love to talk to you about DentalLabSupport.com, and how it can help you retain more Dentists.

Contact DentallabSupport at 1.888.715.9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com