5 Ways to Close More Sales

No matter how great your dental lab marketing strategy is, if you cannot close your leads, your efforts will be for nothing. Ultimately, if the goal is to acquire dentists, only a great closing strategy can help you grow your dental lab.

But how do you get there? How can you make sure that when your sales team makes the call, they have a high chance of converting a dentist on the fence into a reliable long-term customer? A number of complex strategies can help you get there. But ultimately, even simple tips like the five below can help your dental lab effectively close more sales.

1) Embrace a Focus of Helpfulness

When it's time for the closing, the time for selling is over. At this point, you have already made your arguments, and provided your evidence, for why your product or service is a good choice. Now, you need to make sure that your customer actually agrees with you.

To accomplish that goal, change your focus from selling to helpfulness. Embrace customer questions, and try to answer them as honestly as possible. The more understood they feel, and the more confident they are in your efforts to help them reach their goals, the more likely they'll be to close. 

2) Understand (But Don't Cling to) Price

Competing on price alone is the death knell for almost any dental lab. As soon as a cheaper product comes along, you'll be out of the running. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you should ignore the issue of price when looking to close a deal.

For your audience, price is an important consideration. To become your customer, the dentist has to believe that what they pay will get them at least equal value in return. Present the price honestly, and connect it directly with the value that your customers will get in return.

3) Listen to Your Prospect

One lost sale is the opportunity to improve the next one. Not every sales pitch will close successfully, but it's what you do next that determines future successes.

Listen to your audience, and evaluate why they might say no. They could have reasons that are out of your control (such as bad timing or a need that went away since the time they become a lead). But more often than not, they'll tell you what went wrong, which allows you to fix it in the future. The more you listen, the more improvements you can make.

4) Apply the Scarcity Principle

Being honest, and focusing on being helpful to your customers, does not mean you can't apply some psychological tricks to close more sales. Among them is the scarcity principle: if your audience believes that supply for your product or offer is limited, they'll become more likely to buy it.

As mentioned above, the close is not the time for selling. But subtly, you can apply similar pressure during your pitch. Mention limited supply, or the ideal timing of getting your product right now. The more credibly you can sell that scarcity, the more likely you'll be to close more sales.

5) Come Armed with Information

Finally, don't underestimate the simple importance of information in closing more sales. The more your sales team knows about potential prospects, the better. That, in turn, necessitates a software platform specifically designed to gather prospect information and improve your sales effort.

For more info please visit us at DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099

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

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.

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.

Call Tracking for Data Driven Dental Labs

Call Analytics is used to refer to the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of phone call data. Marketers and sales teams use insights derived from call analysis to optimize marketing campaigns and call handling. Marketers use call analytics alongside web analytics to understand which advertisements are driving qualified calls to their business. The goal of implementing call analytics is to better measure, manage, and analyze marketing performance to maximize effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Key performance indicators from call analytics come from both call tracking metrics (like call source) and call recording metrics (like automatic lead classification).
Call Analytics Features

Call Analytics are used at the reporting stage of marketing campaigns that use phone numbers as their central call to action. This allows businesses to view which online and offline marketing channel are driving phone calls to their business while giving them a deeper understanding of what took place during the phone call for lead qualification and campaign optimization. Some call analytics features:

Call recording: Call recording allows you to listen to conversations that take place during your inbound and outbound phone calls. This feature not only gives you insight into what takes place during a call but allows you to qualify leads based on the content. By focusing your ad spend on campaigns that drive quality conversations that convert you can streamline your efforts and increase your conversion rate.
Call transcriptions: Depending on your call volume, listening to every call recording isn’t always feasible, another option is automated call transcriptions. These transcriptions give you a visual, speaker-organized text that you can read giving you full visibility into what’s happening during inbound phone calls.

Lead Scoring: Lead scoring allows you to quickly view which leads are qualified so you can focus on what is driving conversions to your business. Automated lead scoring, based on machine learning technology allows you quickly identify which can show you which leads to focus on.

Advanced Reporting: Reporting with call analytics gives you the opportunity to view which channels are actually working. Instead of just attribution, call analytics allow you to view calls by overall count, the time of day they took place, geographic information and even by the duration of the conversation.
How to Use Call Analytics
Pinpoint Profitability: Call analytics reporting allow you to view good leads as a percentage of overall phone calls, giving you insight into which channels are actually driving qualified calls.

Optimize Marketing Messaging: Understanding the quality of your inbound calls allows you to adjust campaigns to improve marketing efficiency and sales performance.
Save Time: Eliminate manual management of calls by using automated call scoring and transcription features.
Summary

Call analytics is incredibly useful for dental labs who want to get to the root of who exactly their customer is. Gaining in-depth insight into caller demographics and behavior gives dental labs that use call tracking an enormous edge over their competition, and can ultimately help them capture more leads and win customers.

To learn more about how call analytics can improve your dental lab contact us at 1.888.715.9099

How to Build a Lead Infrastructure and Grow Your Dental Lab With Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective and least complex digital channels for dental labs of any size. So naturally, small dental labs look for the tool to help them grow and expand their customer base.

But here is the problem: in isolation, email may not be successful in helping you accomplish that goal. If you want to grow your dental lab with email marketing, you have to build a reliable infrastructure around it.

Focus on Organic Leads

The success of your email marketing efforts only goes as far as your audience. If you send even the greatest emails to recipients who simply don't care or who your selling proposition doesn't apply to, you may as well never hit the 'send' button.

But how do you reach this type of audience? Despite conventional wisdom, buying lists of recipients within your industry is not the answer. Instead, focus on a marketing strategy that helps you grow your leads organically. If you only add contacts into your email software who have actually stated their interest in your company, you know that your emails will reach the most relevant audience possible.

Define and Segment Your Audiences

Of course, even using the above strategy, not every email will be relevant for every member of your contact database. That's why contact management and segmentation is absolute key for successful email marketing.

Instead of sending email blasts to every member of your database, consider segmenting your contacts into relatively homogenous groups. For example, for a local dental lab, you may want to consider separating your recipients into groups that might be interested in specific products, or live in individual neighborhoods. That way, you can design emails that are more uniquely relevant to these audience segments.

Build Beautiful Emails

Speaking of which: at the core of every email marketing strategy is the actual message. We now receive more than 100 emails every single day, which means that your emails absolutely have to stand out from the crowd in order for your audience to actually pay attention.

A beautiful email starts with the subject line, but it certainly doesn't end there. The best marketing emails are short, to the point, and actually valuable. They're also designed with at least one visual, and attractive enough to be readable (and enjoyable) on any screen.

Automate Your Lead Nurturing Flows

Finally, consider building a framework that doesn't rely on you sending individual emails out each time you want to reach your audience. Instead, build an automated lead nurturing workflow that sends emails to your target audience in pre-defined intervals to slowly nudge them toward the sale.

We've discussed lead nurturing in this space, and the core benefits remain the same. If you can build an automated flow of relevant emails to your current contact, you can build credibility and make sure that when your leads are ready to become customers, they'll remember you.

Find the Right CRM

All of the above tips can help you integrate email marketing into your dental lab promotional strategy. But we have not yet discussed the final step of building a consistent and reliable email infrastructure: your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Here's the thing: your CRM can make or break the success of your email marketing. Choose the right one, and you can easily implement all of the above initiatives without significant external help or budget. Choose the wrong one, and you complicate the issue to a point where successful email marketing is difficult or impossible to accomplish.

That's why we'd love for you to give us a shot. DentalLabSupport.com offers an affordable email and contact management solution that's specifically designed for dental labs To learn more about how we can help you successfully use email marketing to grow your dental lab, contact us.