The Phone Butterfly Effect

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This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.

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think about the butterfly effect for those who don’t know what that is. It’s like they say a butterfly flaps its wings in one place and then it can create like an earthquake or tornado. It creates something on the all the way on the other side of the world because of the cause and effect. And it’s the same thing with our dental practice phones. I mean, if you think about it, it’s not just the phone conversation that takes place right then and there. It’s so much more than that because the amount of

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time and effort that you’ve maybe you’ve spent money on marketing or put time and effort into cultivating patients, know, referrals, word of mouth, whatever it is to get somebody to then take time out of their day to pick up the phone, call your office or to inquire about an appointment. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Stars Dental Academy. With me is Heather Nottingham, the co-founder and VP of training at All-Stars Dental Academy. And we’re talking about

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The phone butterfly effect. Please welcome Heather. Thank you, Alex. Hi everybody. How are you? I’m good. Yay. The crowd goes wild. Oh, uh, just for fun. the listeners it to get Heather prepared for you. It’s hours and hours of makeup and preparation and,

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And Alphys. Same for you though, just kidding. No, I roll out of bed and throw on a shirt and she tells me what I’m gonna wear. don’t have to do your hair. And yeah, and then getting all the exit, well, and then getting all the, the mic situation up because she’s gotta be in the studio. I can’t put her somewhere else. So that means more editing for me, but that’s okay. What is it? Happy wife, happy life. Okay. So the foam butterfly effect. You are.

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You created the phone skills program, which is groundbreaking program in dentistry. Quite frankly, it could be used in any business. This is phenomenal. What you’ve done is still so relevant today. Thank you. tell me about this phone butterfly effect. I that’s a cool title. what- Well, that was your idea for the title. Yeah, I like the title. I just knew we wanted to do something with phones because we’re-

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very passionate about phones. I’m very passionate about phones. And it’s just, I don’t know, I was like sleeping and I woke up in the morning and it just popped into my head something how it’s just amazing how everything literally ties back to phone skills, to phones, because that’s where everything starts. So your idea was the phone butterfly effect. And I think it’s really relevant because if you think about the butterfly effect for

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those who don’t know what that is, it’s like they say a butterfly flaps its wings in one place and then it can create like an earthquake or I don’t know if it’s an earthquake or a tornado, tsunami, whatever it is, it creates something all the way on the other side of the world because of the cause and effect. And it’s the same thing with our dental practice phones. I mean, if you think about it, it’s not just the phone conversation that takes place right then and there. It’s so much more than that because

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the amount of time and effort that you’ve maybe you’ve spent money on marketing or put time and effort into cultivating patients, know, referrals, word of mouth, whatever it is to get somebody to then take time out of their day to pick up the phone, call your office or to inquire about an appointment. So it affects your marketing, right? Because if you’re spending money on marketing at all, and we know that good marketing doesn’t, isn’t cheap, that

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If you’re not converting the calls to appointments, then that affects your marketing and it affects your spend for that. And so then it can affect things like your call conversion. If you’re not, you know, you’re spending the money on marketing, you’re not getting people to convert to appointments. And then from there, the phones can affect your show up rate too, right? Because we’re on the phones to confirm appointments or to get people to show up.

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If they’re not showing up, it’s usually a result of how it was scheduled initially over the phone. Sometimes it can take place from the chair, but usually it’s the phones. And then the phone, it’s like, you keep going down the process, if they’re not showing up, they’re not coming into your office to see how amazing you are. They’re not getting to meet typically the clinical team at all. They’re not going to get treatment presented. So it’s…

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It’s literally the precursor for case acceptance because how you do, whether it’s good or poorly on the phone, ultimately down the road affects case acceptance. If you build trust and if you build rapport, they’re more likely going to show up. They’re more likely going to accept treatment. But if you don’t do those things, so that’s why it’s the butterfly effect because it affects things all the way down to then later, them having a good experience, reviews, referrals, and then it

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circles back again. it makes a lot of sense because in any business process, you have to see where does it all begin to cause the principal cause and, that we may think that small things that the butterfly effect can have huge impacts because they’re so early in the process. Right. So we’re so excited about case acceptance, just spending money on marketing, but just that simple ring and how we handle the phone call sets

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up the entire process, we can say, okay, in the beginning, it’s just converting the phone call to show up. then from there, it’s case acceptance. And then from there, referrals. And then from there, it’s going to be revenue for the practice. And from there, it’s the salary of the doctor and the team. And from there, it’s your investments. from there, it’s… Right. Collections, production, it affects everything. And so just for some numbers that we talk about in our webinar, and we really wholeheartedly believe…

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that you, if you haven’t already, or if you’ve seen it before and you forgot, check out our webinar, Dental Practice Excellence. You can go on our website, UlsterGentalAcademy.com backslash webinar, and you can, or click on it, button webinar, you can see. Because we talk about the cost of where it begins in phone skills if we’re not converting oh those phone calls. Because we’ve audited practices and saw on the call tracking research that the average practice misses 87 calls. And not just missing the call, they don’t convert them.

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And we say, if you just miss one per day, okay, and the average value of a new patient is $642, it’s more than that now, but this is data before, I’m trying to go easy on all of you, and you multiply that for the month, that’s $10,000 in missed opportunities. And then that $10,000 starts compounding because in the lifetime value of the patient being 10 years, it’s $100,000 for that one month, okay? And then that’s 1.2 million that year.

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And so every year you’re missing out on 1.2 million in lifetime revenue. And if you, the doctor take 30 % of that, it’s going to be millions and millions, probably five to $7 million in your lifetime just by not doing phone call conversion. And if you invest that in the stock market and treasury bonds and well diversified situation, that’s $20 million in your retirement right there, doctors, from just one uh call uh a day that’s not being converted.

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So that’s pretty… And that’s the tangible too. mean, there’s the intangible of just being able to serve people better. And it’s like, if you think about how many opportunities that they have to go to all these other different dental practices, and they’re calling and potentially choosing your practice, if we can help them, if we believe in our practice, we don’t want them to go somewhere else. We want them to come to our practice because we know…

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that if, of course, if you believe in your practice, you know that you’re going to take the best care of them. And so you don’t know what’s going to happen if they go somewhere else and what kind of care they’re going to get. So if you have a lot of dentists that I talked to have amazing mission statements, vision statements, values for the practice. So talk about those things on the phone. Convey that to the potential patient. And it’s just amazing how starting off things in that way, it

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It always comes back in a good way later for the business. a lot of sense. we definitely demonstrated how fantastical the phone skills can relate from a few phone calls a month to millions and millions of dollars. The butterfly effect. Now, that’s the important point is that the phone is so important and we keep seeing the numbers.

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And I know there’s things that are more sexy and we have to do it case acceptance and so on. That’s later down the road or whatever, or definitely more clinical stuff is more interesting to dentists and so on. But we have to say, what is the one thing in your practice that we can resolve to create the biggest impact? That’s why we teach self-funding coaching in our coaching program that our coaching should be paying for itself, any coaching within 90 days.

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And so how do we do that? Well, we’re to look at stuff like phone skills, which is the lowest hanging fruit that if we able to improve everything starts to improve. So you look at it on two sides. One, how powerfully impacting can be on the negative side of what you’re losing, but also on the positive side, what you can gain by phone skills. And so we have to continue to remind you being the creation of, of, of the training is that it’s so important to come back to.

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And we see dentists that start it, they get results, then they go, oh, it’s too easy, or I forget about it. And we go back and why am I slow now? What’s happening? Well, we forgot doing the foundation and, and, and so we can, on this call, we’re not going to go into detail about what to do on the phone because the webinar that we’re talking about, we’ll put a link in that notes. can go to the webinars completely free. We also have eBooks that tell you exactly how to do it. We believe that

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A lot of our material, the core of our material, we give away for free because we believe if you like what you see, it’s free. Imagine when you pay, but what we give, we’re not holding back. We want to give you things that you can enjoy and use right now. We’ve been blessed to have a great company. We believe that if you’re a go giver, that it all comes back to you. So we give you a lot of information. The problem that we see is the information is important. And we’re going to do another webinar about the three eyes or another podcast.

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But the information is important and we’re going to provide that. But the problem is how do we implement it? How do we, and how do we overcome the barriers? One is recognizing the importance. So we told you the butterfly effect, what’s going to happen, but how do we get past the resistance, Heather, into starting to, cause so just give me an example, give me some what you’ve heard. You talked a lot of dentists of resistance. Like what are they saying?

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Why I can’t do the phone training, why I can’t implement it. What’s happening? Why is, why is that? Um, I mean, some people have excuses, genuine excuses. Like they, you know, maybe it’s hard for them because they are lacking team members, which is pretty common right now. Um, and so to that, say all star has a hiring service. So if you weren’t aware of it, we can help you find amazing team members. And that’s how it started is.

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People kept trying to hire me or our team members from All-Star. Can you work for my practice? We would love somebody like you for my practice. And I’d say, I’m running All-Star, so I can’t work for your practice. But we can find you people like that, good quality team members that care, that take it seriously. They treat the practice like it’s their business. And so our hiring service is amazing for that. But

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Even if you have less team, you still have to commit to training. It’s like anything else. It’s like sports teams, they’re down players, you people get injured. I don’t, I don’t watch a lot of sports. I know you do Alex. So like, it’s like, whatever the analogy is, you have to keep the business moving along. can’t stop doing the fundamentals just because there’s a person out. You know, maybe you can’t do it as much or as often, but you still have to commit to the basics.

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because it’s part of what keeps the business running and going strong. It’s like saying, you know, if you’re an elderly person and you’re taking medicine, it’s like saying, well, I’m too busy. I can’t take my medicine today. But that’s what you need. It helps you. The training is like the medicine. I was just reading, I think it’s Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about, it can take anywhere from oh

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I don’t know, a couple of days up to like 254 days to create, to learn a new habit. So something simple like drinking water, if you need to increase your water intake, that could be like 66 days is usually the average that they say. But for more complicated tasks, which would be like learning a new skill for your team member or, you know, training a new team member, it can take 254 days. And he always says, don’t focus on.

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The end goal, continue to focus on consistency and just little even like if you’re trying to exercise, if you’re trying to get in shape, even if you do a couple pushups a day, it’s better than saying, I’m just gonna do a whole bunch of working out in one day and then that’s it. And that’s what a lot of dentists do with their teams is they’ll say, we’re gonna go to this one seminar and then think that they’re good for, we’re good, we trained with this one seminar. And we do seminars and we love seminars.

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But that in itself is not enough because it’s not the ongoing consistency that people need to improve their verbiage, to improve their training skills for the entire practice. And so even the rest of the team, I know we’ve done webinars and podcasts before talking about how phone skills is not just something that’s applicable to the admin team. It’s for everybody because really it’s not phone, it’s communication, verbal skills, like

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I talked to a dentist earlier today and she’s like, well, I just have this one new person that needs to be trained because everybody else is like already kind of knows what to do. And I said, then you’re going to have a disjointed process in your practice where you have this one person that has amazing, savage, not savage, savage, amazing, savvy Bloomingdale’s verbal skills. And then maybe it is savage in a good way.

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And then you have the rest of the team that doesn’t have good verbal skills. And so that’s one thing that used to happen in your dad’s practice and my father-in-law’s practice is like, they get this Bloomingdale’s experience over the phone, come into the office, and then it was not so much a Bloomingdale’s experience until we started doing the verbal and phone skills training as a team. So, I mean, that can be an excuse. It can be that…

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Um, you know, we don’t have the time. You have to make the time. If you don’t have the time, when can you, what is that saying? If you don’t have the time to do it right. Right. When will you have the time to do it over? Right. And it’s like, we don’t have the time because we are, you know, whatever it is, like we’re, but then you’re taking more time and you’re less efficient and less effective. You’re spending money on marketing to get patients, but then we don’t have the time to train.

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but you’re spending all this money and then you have to pay people to make up for that money. So to me, it’s just like do a little bit phone skills, verbal training, do a little bit each week. Doesn’t have to be a lot of time, but it really does. Everything boils back to it. I see offices that are like, you know, we are getting patients on the schedule. We’re booking them and they’re showing up. So they’re doing enough to get them to show up, but then they’re not accepting treatment.

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And a lot of times you look at it and you say, no wonder if they don’t have great verbal skills on the phone that, you know, yes, they’re converting them to an appointment, but is it a high quality conversion? Is it a high quality booking where the person is like, yes, this is the office. I don’t have any doubts. Trust is built. I’m ready to go with them. Or is it kind of like, well, I’ll just, you know, come in and kind of feel them out and see.

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And then it puts so much pressure on the rest of the team and especially the doctor and the clinical team that you haven’t pre-qualified that person from the get-go to know like, is this person really interested? Like what percentage are they wanting to move forward? So it really does make the entire process smoother when you can go in and say, this is what we talked about. It’s just amazing. Like how everything literally

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bonds from the phones. It goes back to it. what I like to point out, cause you, you alluded to it and we talk about this in the webinar, but for those, and we also have it on our website if you go to about us, but like where we came from, but my father’s a dentist. He was facing financial difficulty and we brought you in. I’m an MBA lawyer, Tony Robbins guy. I brought you out of Bloomingdale’s brought you into the practice.

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I was doing the marketing, you were answering the phones. We took a $1 million practice, brought it to, what is it? 2.4. Thank you. Within 18 months. And a lot of it was just conversion, phone skills, because it’s such a big difference. So I’m not saying that it has to be more than doubling your business, but if you can make incremental improvements, that’s the idea of the butterfly effects, the reverse is when you start making these small incremental improvements, atomic habits you talk about.

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and the butterfly starts to work in your favor. So I really appreciate it, Heather. Thank you for helping to identify this issue of the phone butterfly effect and then how we can really overcome some of the implementation issues, which are the hard part. And then from there, like I said, the training is all available to all of you. Go to allstradenolacademy.com, click on a bunch of things. You’ll see past webinars where we talk in detail about

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the great call process, you can on the webinar, which is the best thing, because I’m going to go into detail about each of those, that you’ll have that training, if your team watched it as well, we also have eBooks. So we’re throwing a lot of stuff at you because we want to make sure that you have good information, but information isn’t the only, it’s the next I, which is how do you implement it? And we’re big on that and supporting you with that. That’s really more about.

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the All-Star membership and the coaching and the mastermind and the events. Those are all really more about implementation, giving you the support system to be able to get it done and have everything pay for itself. That’s the whole uh idea of investing is that what you do pays for yourself. You’re, you’re investing in you and your team and your business. And as long as, as the people that you’re, you’re hiring have good values, training with integrity.

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and you enjoy them, then keep doing it. So Heather, thank you so much for being on the program. pleasure. Remember to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, all the fun places. Get the episodes as they release. Yeah, and if you’re on social media and you’re posting and…

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and responding, Heather will respond and like and answer questions. So that’s always on social media. I will talk to, anytime anybody has a question, I’m happy to jump on a call. Yeah, as well. You got on the call, you got us over media. So you have like a lot of great things for implementation. Definitely take use of it. So thank you so much. Share with your friends, of course. And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.

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We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com