Increase New Patients – For Free
Eric Vickery, President of Coaching at All-Star Dental Academy and Mastery Coach, Karen Raymond discuss using patient referrals for free marketing in dental practices, emphasizing personalized asks, tracking referrals, and rewarding patients to boost new patient growth.
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About Karen Raymond
Karen Raymond graduated from Indiana University with a B.S. in Health Information Management Administration in 1977. She began her career at the I.U. School of Dentistry as Director of New Patient Admissions, where she also developed and implemented a new dental charting system. In 1981, Karen began her position as Patient Relations Administrator in her husband’s dental office. She and Dr. Raymond quickly realized the importance of empowering their team and attended numerous seminars and workshops on team building, trust and leadership. Karen became a passionate presenter for the Dental Boot Kamp Masters Program and inspired doctors and team members to set their office and personal goals and vision. Karen particularly enjoyed teaching enhanced communication skills between the dental team and patient. Including transitioning a new patient from the initial phone call and subsequent appointment to accepting their treatment plan. She is excellent at coaching teams on becoming insurance independent by handling patient objections and offering various financial arrangements.
About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy and my friend and fellow coach, Karen Raymond. So excited to have her with us again this week and we’re talking about free marketing. Who doesn’t love free marketing through referrals? Is that right, Karen?
00:21
Yeah, Eric, thanks for having me. Yes, I think so many dentists and spend so much money on marketing, what, you know, through social media or just ads or however they do it on Google. And there’s, and we have found that one of the very best ways is actually through patient referrals, the patients in our office. And those are our best patients.
00:50
and they refer us our best patients. And I know that for a fact. So one of the hardest things to do is team members feel funny sometimes when they ask patients. They don’t know how to ask them. They don’t wanna, they hate rejection. Their friend they’ll say no. So we have, again, we have another little system that works really well. And we like to role play it with each other. And we can laugh about it because we know that when we laugh, we learn four times.
01:20
faster. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, this is what we want to do. So the first thing that we’re going to do, we’re going to pick out in our morning huddle, we’re going to pick out a patient, each person assistant front office is going to pick out one or two people that are our top patients that they’re going to have that day. And at the end of the appointment, there I would say to again, Jenny.
01:47
I will compliment her and I will say, Jenny, so excited to see you come in today. Actually, the whole team and Dr. Raymond love to see you on our schedule because you just make us happy and it makes our day so much better. And so we are always looking for more patients like that and would love to have more patients like you. So how would you feel about perhaps asking friends or family?
02:18
to join our practice or become a patient because we know that that’s something that they would love to. And if they say no, then I’m gonna say, okay, that’s okay, Jenny. They can always do a Google review or get on Facebook and make a comment. And I understand that’s not a problem. But if they say yes, I’m gonna say, great.
02:45
I’d love to give you some of our cards that you can pass out to your friends. And we will be so excited to see them and treat them every bit as well as we’ve treated you. At least I know I think you think that because you seem to love coming here too. So, just end it with a really fun thing. Yeah, that’s good. It’s important to keep track of who you ask. That’s right, Soki.
03:14
Yes, if you need a little pop-up in your system, you know, Karen, ask her today so that nobody else the next time ask her. That’s right. I don’t want to see that patient two weeks later on the doctor’s side forgetting that you asked her and then I do the same exact conversation with her. That would be awkward. You’ve got to track this. Track it in a place that everybody would see. And then what about the reward part? What about, let’s say you ask Jenny. She leaves with some referral cards.
03:44
and then Ricky Bobby comes in, Jenny referred Ricky Bobby in, what do you do for Jenny in response to that? Well, this is extremely important. I love the idea of making sure that you keep track of any referrals by patients. I automatically send them a thank you letter. And what we did also too, what we do also is if you get more than one, say they…
04:11
refer to or three, get something like a bit Amazon card, something that you can send to them besides just a thank you card. You wanna make a big deal about it because that’s a big deal. There’s something about getting that thank you card signed by everybody that says thank you for entrusting us with the care of your friends and family. And then just, don’t even mention it, just this Amazon, I don’t know, $20, $25 gift card in there. And they get that and then they go,
04:41
Every time I send one of my friends to them, I get this. And now they’re more likely to use those referral cards. And even put some referral cards in there with that Amazon gift card, right? Definitely. Yeah, this is good. When they come back, say six months later, you thank them again in person and just say, we loved Joe when you sent him in, he was great. If you need more cards, let us know, but thank you, we appreciate it. That’s so good, oh, that’s so good. So you’re not asking them to the whole system again, you’re just doing a follow up and saying, would you like more cards? This has been really good, Karen.
05:10
Thank you so much for sharing this. Free marketing, free relationship building. Let’s get more high quality new patients in your practice. Go after your best patients to see who do they know that they think would be a good fit for our practice. Let’s see what they could do for us. And then track your new patients by source. See if it’s working in your KPI tracking with your coach. Awesome, thank you so much, Karen. Everyone go out there, make it a great week. Pick one or two people every day for the next week. All right, guys. Thanks, Harry.
Questions? We would love to connect with you!
