The other day I was having a fairly typical conversation with a practice owner in southern Ireland. He was telling me how since the changes to the medical card and PRSI (The Irish equivalent of the NHS) his patient numbers had plummeted and his income had dropped by 50% .As a dental business coach, he wanted my advice on printing some leaflets and doing a mail shot to attract new clients.
I then elicited that he had a data base of over 14,000 patients, that he was not communicating with.
Dan Sullivan tells us “All the money you need for the rest of your career is in the pockets of the people you already know and those they can introduce you to.”
Let me show you why this is true.
Accepted wisdom is that everybody has on average a network of 250 people they know, these could be friends, family, colleagues or other contacts.
Of these contact we have 5-10 who absolutely trust us and will follow our advice or recommendations without question. For example I know you have 5-10 friends or colleagues that if they suggested that you try a particular restaurant, holiday destination, hotel etc you would go there too based on the fact that you know them, like them and trust their judgement.
I know also that you have another 50-75 people in your net work that you have influence over, that is they know you, like you and don’t yet know you well enough to trust your judgement implicitly. For these people you may suggest that they try a certain restaurant, see a particular film, or show, they are interested in your opinion and they will ask you more about why your recommendation. They will then make a decision and if you have made a great case for your recommendation the chances are that the will follow your suggestion.
Your remaining 165-195 contacts are aware of you, and with these people you have less influence. However these people know you like you and trust you well enough to listen to suggestions and recommendations that you make, they will usually then speak to other people they know to verify if what you say is true, before they make a decision.
The great thing is every time that you make a recommendation to a family member friend or colleague and what you say holds to be true their level of trust in you goes up and you become more influential.
Another often quoted figure is that there is of average a minimum of £1,500 worth of treatment in each of your patients mouths that they want to have done if you offered it to them.
I was doing some training in a practice the other week, and we decided to test this theory. I asked all the team to complete a dental menu and a wish list of the treatment that they would choose to have done. Now this is a group of people who know what is available and have easy access to dentistry,and are still not recieving all the dentistry they want to. In that one exercise the elective treatment it had a value of over 20,000, on average £1,6000 per person. Just imagine what that would mean to your practice if I was able to show you haow to access that value of treatment.
So let us do some calculations about the potential value of a data base of 14,000 patients
14,000 patients each with 5 -10 contacts that if they suggested they visit you would come based on high level of trust that they have. That equates to a potential pool of new patients of 70,000 – 140,000.
If each of these new patients is like the majority of patients and wants the average £1,5000 of treatment there is a potential pool of income in a data base of 14,000 patients of an awful lot of money.
14,000 X 5 = 70,000
70,000 X 1,500 = £105,000,000
I would like to suggest that even a targeted mail shot could not generate that level of income.
For most of you your database probably has 1,500 – 2,000 patients the potential income from your existing patients is therefore in the region of
(1,500 X 5) X £1,500 = to (2,000 X 10) X £1,500 =
I will leave you to do the arithmetic as the numbers are staggering.
At this stage we have not even begun to consider how you could utilise the contacts your patients also have influence with only those who they trust implicitly.
If you would like to learn how to mine your existing patient data base to generate new patients and treatment plans, while not increasing your marketing spend on expensive leaflets, call me to find out how I can help you now.
No comments:
Post a Comment