Do you want to establish accountability and improve practice performance? DenGro explains why using a dental-specific CRM is the key.
In a busy dental practice, it can be hard to keep track of how critical elements of the business are performing at any given moment. Are current levels of performance in line with expectation (on track to hit or miss any targets set)? Is performance better or worse than last week, last month or this time last year?
If you’re investing in marketing to promote treatments and attract new patients, wouldn’t it be good to know:
- Is the money spent delivering any returns?
- Is there an increase in the number of treatment/new patient enquiries?
- Are these genuine, quality enquiries that you’re seeking to attract?
- What happens to these enquiries when they reach the practice?
- Are they automatically acknowledged?
- How quickly are the team getting in touch?
- Are the team following up and staying on top of existing conversations?
- Are new enquiries resulting in consultations being booked and attended?
- How many have started treatment?
How to find the answers
There are several questions that really need answers if you’re to have any hope of tracking performance well. These answers also need to be accessible, accurate and from an objective source. Get that right and you’ll have transparency, the ability to hold everyone (including yourself) accountable for their performance and ultimately a greater understanding of performance. Then you see where your time and energy are most needed to exploit opportunity or take corrective action.
When it comes to accessing clear, up to date and objective key performance indicators, a fit for purpose dental-specific customer relationship management system (CRM) provides the solution, here is the minimum you should expect from this critical piece of software for dynamic growing dental businesses.
1. See where all your treatment enquiries are coming from
Reports that detail the origin of your enquiries (eg by campaigns, by ad, by channel, by source) will show you how well your marketing activities are performing. By seeing which are working and which aren’t, you can make investment decisions based on hard data not a hunch and allocate your finite budget accordingly.
Don’t rely on spreadsheets sent by your marketing agency! With the impartial reporting available in a dental-specific CRM, the practice and its principal can hold their agency to account for lead generation. Equally, the agency can hold the practice team to account for how well they are managing the enquiries that the agency has generated.
DenGro is a single source of truth with objective reporting. So, both parties in this example can take positive action to deliver the best results. Its reporting not only tells you which campaigns/ads are delivering good quality enquiries, but also which ones are attracting those patients with a higher propensity to start treatment.
2. Monitor how well the team is performing
You will also want to know how well the whole team is performing when it comes to acknowledging and following up on treatment enquiries. How responsive are they? Are prospective and existing patients interested in new or further treatment being booked in for a consultation? How are your practitioners performing? What’s their conversion rate from consultation attended to treatment started? It’s not just the TCO’s job to win new patients, at some point the patient meets the dentist.
A good CRM will provide owners and principals with a clear view of team performance, both overall and by individual team member. However, to build trust it is important that the team can easily demonstrate how hard they’re working too.
DenGro’s team effectiveness report offers peace of mind for busy practice owners by showing overall and individual effort. For the team, it captures their hard work; how many contact attempts have been made, how many consultations booked per user and at what value and more.
3. View your sales pipeline end to end – know your conversion rate!
If you can see where your treatment enquiries are coming from and how well these are being managed by your team, you can then see what impact the marketing performance and the team performance is having on overall practice performance.
This is where you can get to know your numbers. What does the current pipeline of treatment enquiries look like (volume and potential revenue)? How much of that can we expect to convert (based on your conversion rate)? How many prospective or existing patients have started new or further treatment (what’s our confirmed revenue)?
DenGro’s reporting will show you all the above as well as what stage every enquiry is at, where some people drop out of the funnel and which marketing activities delivered the higher quality enquiries.
Transparency is a pre-requisite to accountability. Having a clear view on performance can be both enlightening and alarming at first. As well as seeing all the things that are working well, you’ll see where opportunities are missed or squandered. Better to know where improvements are needed so you can grasp the nettle!
Using a CRM to objectively monitor performance will soon bring teams closer together and builds trust with everyone focused on improving the same set of numbers. If all stakeholders (the team, the agency, you) are clear on what is being tracked, why and who is accountable for each metric, then you are along way down the path to making performance tracking ‘business as usual’.
If you want to improve performance and grow practice revenue, DenGro has been built for dental practices. Its reporting lets you monitor trends and track performance. Track, nurture and convert your treatment enquiries in one place. For more information, visit DenGro’s site to book a demo.
