Heather Nottingham highlights the critical role of phone skills in dental practices, focusing on effective communication, patient engagement, and building trust to enhance case acceptance and practice growth.
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About Heather Nottingham
Heather is the VP of Training & Phone Skills Instructor at All-Star Dental Academy. She is a former retail sales trainer and manager for Bloomingdale’s, Kate Spade, and Theory, and a top new patient coordinator for a multi-million-dollar high-end dental practice where she personally increased revenue by over a million dollars in less than 18 months. She has over 24 years worth of customer service, training, and phone experience, and designed the All-Star Dental Academy Phone Success Course as well as the GREAT Call® Process.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hey everyone, I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I have Heather Nottingham, co-owner of All-Star Dental Academy and our VP of training, phone skills instructor, welcome Heather. Thank you. Hi Alex, hi everybody. Hello. Our topic today is the importance of phone skills. It’s important.
00:31
Yes. Very important. It’s interesting because I know we talk about this on the side. You’re the, the phone skills instructor and there’s so many exciting issues out there, case acceptance, which is important, but there’s a lot of topics and they kind of grab our attention, um, you know, and dental space is going to be clinical stuff and there’s even things in the practice management space that are attractive to want to talk about. What’s amazing.
01:00
is it always comes back to the phones for a successful business, successful practice. And I know that you’re always reminding us phones are still important and they apply to everything that you do and not to forget to do that. And what’s interesting is all the interviews I do with you, it could be phones or just because they just love you. It’s either you or the phones, but they get great viewership. A little bit of both. A little bit of both. So tell me about
01:24
about the importance of phones because you’re talking to a lot of dentists, hundreds of dentists every year. What are you hearing and what’s going on? Tell me. Yeah. I mean, it just, it always goes back to the basics. It’s like you were saying, I hear people always want to have that next, you know, what is it? The silver bullet or the shiny new object. It’s like, oh, this is really hot topic right now. And there are so many things like, of course, going out of network with insurance and different things like that.
01:54
newest technology. But it always comes back when I talk to dentists, no matter what the technology, the presenting treatment, if we’re not getting patients booked. And I think somebody said, maybe it was Fred Joyle that said the most expensive or the most important piece of marketing equipment in your practice or equipment for that matter is the phone, right? Because
02:22
You do the marketing, you spend the money, you get people to call to inquire about an appointment, and then what happens from there, right? Like if we’re not successfully making the best first impression for them, they’re gonna go somewhere else. They’re not gonna get a good impression of the practice. And so I think it really, everything that we do, even case presentation, it all starts with the phones.
02:49
Right? Because if we can’t if we can’t even do the very basic answering of the phone and being polite with people, how are we going to present a $40,000 case to them? Right? Like, it’s like, oh, we’re trying to, you know, we’re learning all these technical skills for presenting treatment. It’s like, great. Can you answer the phone and schedule an appointment and have them show up? Like, you can’t do that, you don’t have patience. So that’s why to me, it’s so
03:18
personal and we saw it with your dad’s practice, my father-in-law, in that you did all the marketing. You were on the first page of everything. And we had all these different savvy tricks and techniques and people were inquiring about appointments. There were tons of people that were calling and texting and emailing to make an appointment. And he had the technology and the practice and all of these clinical accolades. But what was missing?
03:47
they weren’t converting those callers to appointment. And so that’s really like, no matter what industry you’re in, you could be in the food industry, you could be in the anything, any industry, you could be construction. It’s like, no matter where I call a place, you can tell if it’s gonna be a good experience right from the start when you talk to somebody on the phone. That makes sense. And what are you hearing from doctors you speak to regarding this issue?
04:16
There’s a lot of frustration, especially now, because I feel like they have, there’s one of two things. They either have a new team member or several new team members, because as we know, there’s a lot of turnover right now, which is why we have the all-star hiring service, a lot of dentists come to us for help with hiring, for, you know, not just hiring, but hiring really good quality superstar team members.
04:45
little plug for the hiring service. But also, they have new team members, and the team members don’t know how to answer the phone. And the first thing that they say to me when they call me these dentists is, I have these new people, they’re really nice, they’re sweet people, but I cringe when I walk by and I hear what they’re saying. And we’ve gone over these things again and again, I’ve tried coaching them. And it’s just…
05:12
not good. So that’s the first scenario is new team members, and just trying to get everybody on a consistent page. So you know, you have new people, you have existing people and making sure that they’re all communicating properly, especially with the phones. And then you have existing team members that dentists have frustrations with, where you have people that have maybe been there for a really long time and are very, very set in their way of doing things.
05:41
and they’re not open to necessarily changing the way that they say things or do things. And with all the competition and all the different dental practices and practices that are doing training, it’s important to make sure that we’re always working on ourselves. I mean, even me, I’m the phone skills instructor. I’m still always getting coached. We’re always learning. It’s like exercise. If you don’t keep…
06:07
doing it, you’re gonna lose it eventually. You have to continuously train. Even if you have people that have been there for a long time and that have had training, they’re most likely reverting back to their old habits and ways of doing things. So the existing people need the training just as much as the new people. And then like I said, bringing those two groups together so that the existing people and the new people are on the same wavelength. That’s probably…
06:36
the number one reason that when I talk to dentists, they’re looking for training or coaching is for those reasons. That makes a lot of sense. So okay, so phones are critical. And do you think that most understand the urgency? I mean, the doctors are speaking about they’re saying to you, you know, I’m hearing this, this is a problem. Do you think that most dentists and dental offices understand this urgency?
07:05
and if not, why? Some do. I think especially the ones that are listening to the call recordings, like if you have call recording, I recommend listening to it. It’s gonna be eye-opening. A lot of dentists have call recording, but they choose not to listen to it because they don’t wanna hear it. They’re afraid, because they know when they listen to it, they’re not gonna be happy with it.
07:33
So it’s almost like ignorance is bliss and they just kind of ignore it. Or they don’t really know what the team should be saying. And so, yeah, there’s different aspects there. Repeat the question again. Well, I was saying that when, do most centers understand the urgency or that there’s an issue? And I think you’re mentioning that that they’re not listening to the phone call that they’re not gonna know. So I think that tells us a lot.
08:03
And we recommend when those use our program, our training, that we include call grading. We do a real call grade every month with others out there. They do mystery calls. We don’t believe in mystery calls because they can be manipulated. We want a real call. And we grade it in a service-based philosophy, giving more points to did you follow a step that not just converts them, but sets them up for the future quality. We don’t want to manipulate. I mean, you can do that, but you pay for the long run.
08:32
But I would recommend that practices nowadays is so easy. Your marketing company will do call recording. Your Weave or other integrative softwares or voiceover IP will do recording. It’s like paperless office is like an old topic, like now everybody’s doing this. So everybody, most people have access to call recording. And if you don’t find out it’s not usually expensive to do, we offer even portable options for our clients.
09:02
So I think that’s a great point, Heather. For those that are All-Star clients, listen to your calls, we’re doing it, we’re working with you. But those who are not, start that, start listening and evaluate. And I’ll put a link to our webinar that I do, alls backslash webinar. And I talk about phone skills there, that’s all of your material that you let me talk about. And in one of the bonuses, I’m kind of giving it away, but.
09:30
we actually give you our call grading cheat sheet. So that what’s great, go to the webinar, then you can get the link to get the resources, whether you sign up or not for All-Star. But what’s nice is you can use that great call process that you teach in the grading sheet or the cheat sheet, and then listen to your phone call and see, based on what I taught you in the webinar, based on the cheat sheet, how are you doing? How are you performing? And if you’re not performing really well, we should have a conversation.
09:58
about providing you some of the training and support to be able to do that. Because that’s where it all begins, is the phone. And I think that’s so, so that makes a really good point Heather, step one, do we even know we have a problem? And so we could talk about it, but listen, and not just listen, because you can hear people that sound nice. But nice is, it’s better than not nice, but they have to have a process that leads to something. Otherwise, it’s funny, as we call customer service companies, we’re like,
10:28
Oh, you didn’t even ask my number. You asked my name. You didn’t do it. You know, you’re nice, but I don’t feel relationship with you. Right. It’s like they do one or one or the other. It’s like they’re really nice, but there’s no objective to get the person scheduled. So they’re like, oh, this team member is really nice, but they never like ask for the appointment or they don’t, you know, they just answer the questions and then the call ends or they’re rude. So I feel like.
10:56
they’re kind of hovering between these two extremes where it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It can be you’re nice and you’re helpful with the objective of getting the person booked for an appointment. And I think dentists, dentists, it’s funny when I talk to dentists, they have excellent verbiage a lot of times. Like I always tell the dentist like you recognize you probably have
11:20
some of the best verbiage that I’ve heard. And if you were answering your phone, you would know what to say and what to do. Well, that said, however, once you’re on a call and you’re like, go, hmm. Yeah, that’s true. So we have to be careful. But doctors, they’re used to studying, they absorb information really well, so they learn. Because what we’re teaching is not new. We borrow it from some of the best companies of the Fortune 500. I don’t think people know your story.
11:49
You were in Bloomingdale’s as a trainer sales manager and you work for my father’s practice and we helped turn that practice around from near bankruptcy to 2.4 million, more than doubling in 18 months. But anyways, with that is your history. You’ve seen how to do it right and we use some of that technology in what we teach. So doctors have seen it at some point because they love learning and they absorbed it.
12:19
I would build it just like how you did. I love that you did it for me because I needed that. I don’t have time to build it. I don’t have time to do all the training. You provided that support. It resonates with them. So that’s why they’re absorbing it. But then you have to understand it and absorb it, but then it’s application. How do we actually perform? And then also what you’ll talk about too in a moment is this can be applied to any position in the office. If you can learn phone skills.
12:48
Our program is we don’t design it per position. And you might say, well, why I want purpose? Because if you design it per position, then it’s like, this isn’t my job. This isn’t my job. We build All-Star as skill sets and phone skills are the basis of everything you do. And if you never answer the phone, having the phone skills training will help you with every other thing that you do. Absolutely, because the great call process and.
13:16
You know, Shelley will probably elaborate on this with you in another podcast or video, but great is an acronym for greeting, rapport, engage, ask for the appointment, and take information or thing. So even if we’re never answering the phone, we’re going to greet the person when they come into the office, of course, the first thing we do, we’re going to build rapport if we’re doing things. I’ll ask you this way. Let me ask you this way. So when they come in, do we greet them?
13:45
Yes. Does the hygienist greet them? Absolutely. Does the assistant greet them? Yes. Does the doctor greet them? Yes. So we have greeting going on. If we’re doing things the right way, like when you have a… Well, just sit in the chair. You still have to say hello. Well, so like, if they’re, let’s say they go, you go into a practice, there are some practices where, you know, you’re only being greeted by the person that you’re working with. But like in my dental practice, for example,
14:13
Every single person I walk by says hi and greets me. They’re like, oh, hey Heather, how are you? So that’s what we’re looking for. And there is gonna be some sort of a greeting, but you go into details of what has to happen. And then the biggest step is the R rapport in the great call process. And now, not everybody does this. Not everybody builds rapport, but we should. Every position is a step of building rapport. Actually, it all starts with your marketing.
14:43
and your internal, external marketing, your brand, what it stands for. And then the phones is where it shifts from the external into the internal, where now you’re bringing us into the family. And we have to be amazing on the phone. But then each step in the process, it’s verification. And if you break any chain in the process, I think humans have we have just like deer were programmed to like find anything that’s not does not match. We’re out of here. So if we’re coming through, we’re like.
15:13
and somebody messes up the process, we’re gone. Or it’s not a great experience. So every step of the process, we have to build rapport. And we can spend hours on that. And we spend a lot of time on the program. Just adding to that, I talked to a practice the other day. And they had concerns. They were like, well, if somebody calls up and they ask a question, to have to go through this whole rapport thing to get to know them, and then
15:40
to have them find out we don’t take their insurance, that’s just wasting our time. So I don’t know about that. And I said, it takes getting to know the person and understanding their needs, their wants, what they didn’t like about their last dentist, what they’re looking for in a new dentist to really properly answer their question and to put it in the proper context. And so if they call up and say, do you take my insurance? And you’re like,
16:07
yes, we do or no, we don’t, there’s no report. They don’t like you, they don’t know you, and they’re just going to commoditize you, they’re comparing you to all the other people that they talked to that gave a higher or lower price or yes, we take your insurance or no, versus like getting to know you as a person, you’re going to become a part of our practice. We want to make sure it’s a good fit. And a lot of times when I had patients that had an insurance they wanted to use or were set on a certain price,
16:37
and we weren’t that price, we were higher than that. After getting to know them, they were like, oh, well, you don’t take my insurance, but I really like your practice and I wanna come there anyway. So this is why I teach people that, because we do insurance freedom as part of our coaching process. Add to that with insurance freedom, Heather, many times we can accept at a network and that takes a level. Now, let me tell you, those are listening, because I know insurance freedom is very popular. And…
17:07
whenever we do insurance freedom, be very mindful of this and be clear. Very cutesy, very well, very mindful. That’s the whole thing. Very demure. You said right. So so what’s what is it? How does it go? I don’t know. Very, very mindful, very demure. When we answer the phone, we were very we listen, we pay attention. We’re respectful. We’re very mindful. We’re very demure.
17:32
That’s going to be a short. I’m pulling that out as a short. I just made it. I love it. I love it. That’s going to be great. So with, okay, with you got me. You broke my state. I was talking about, okay, we were talking about, okay, insurance freedom, then every step of the process. So with insurance freedom, we help people get off insurance. We work our practices on or off insurance with coaching. Now,
18:00
Regardless of whether you’re getting off insurance or not, all of our coaching focuses on insulators. We call it self-funding coaching because our coaching pays for itself within 90 days. Now those insulators are critical and that’s the phone skills, broken appointments and so on. You cannot, especially with insurance, you have to be on your game because they’re not looking, people don’t want to waste their time. And so we have to be mindful in that conversation.
18:28
to see. And in many cases, like you said, we can get out of network people to come. But we have to build a relationship. We have to take ourselves away from being a commodity. And that’s where the rapport aspect of R is so important. So that rapport basically is, you know, and like, and trust somebody. And the more you can, if you don’t build that, and here’s the other thing, it doesn’t mean that building rapport has to take a long time. We don’t create limits on the phone.
18:59
We’re not a call center. We’re not pushing low quality. If you’re just selling products and there’s no report, you don’t care, and it’s super volume, we’re not for you. You can still be quasi volume, but if you wanna be quality and service, that’s for what we teach, that’s what we promote. Right. And that’s said though, last point, even Walmart, they work on their customer service and they’re low price. So service always wins.
19:28
Right. If you think about like the places that you really like going or the people that you really like doing business with, most of the time, the people that you do business with are the people that you like that you have a rapport with. I mean, most people don’t go to their hair salon if they hate the person. You know, they like them, they chat. It’s the same thing. It’s like comparing like Burger King to Chick-fil-A.
19:53
Right? Like you go to Burger King, you’re lucky if the lights are turned on and if you get your order, that’s true. But you go to Chick-fil-A and they’re like jumping out of the bushes. Like there’s like somebody between the window and the car to like hand you your food, like that extra steps. You don’t have to like reach out the window too far. Like they they get it. They you know, my pleasure. They treat you well. So if somebody is coming to a dental office, which is already, you know, a nerve wracking experience for a lot of people.
20:22
and you can make them feel like they can trust you and they respect you and they like you, you’re gonna have a patient for life. You’re not gonna have to worry about them going somewhere else. Whether you take the insurance or not, it’s like if you choose to go out of network eventually, I always say that you have to have a good relationship with your patients and you have to know how to communicate with new potential patients to, like you said, build rapport and to be able to express the value
20:52
of, hey, I heard all the things that you said and that are important to you. Here’s how our office fulfills those things. You have to be able to match that. And like Eric, our president of coaching always says, it’s all about relationships. Everything that you do, it’s about relationships that, you know, like, like ability, trust, like ability, all of it. So, okay. So every position is rapport. Hygiene, assisting.
21:20
and you want to build more and more rapport. They like you, trust you, respect you, we move along. And that helps case acceptance. Then it’s engaging the patient. It’s answering their common questions and concerns. And that often will either come up too early or too late and it’s not dealt with. But ideally, just kind of running through the great call process briefly is every position, hygienist is gonna ask the same concern that the patient’s gonna ask the hygienist.
21:49
ask the assistant, the front office, and the doctor multiple times because they want reassurance and we have to be able to overcome their objection or their question or their concern and be prepared for that. And we’re all saying the same thing. If we all say something different, like you had an assistant answer the phone at my father’s practice once and she wasn’t trained to do that. And very nice, but she gave a whole dissertation.
22:15
about what’s going to happen to your teeth and gums and how everything’s going to fall out. She had her clinical assistant hat on. Yeah, it was too much. And she was going into details about the implant process and all the surgical and it was like TMI. They didn’t want all that and she literally scared them away. And I’m like, you can’t say all that. Like just we’re going to take care of you. We’re going to you know, you’re going to be comfortable here. Happy.
22:42
Like don’t go into all of that. It wouldn’t be nice. It wouldn’t be nice if we had all star back then to give to her to train. Well, and I think that’s an interesting point to bring that up because that was before we developed all star, right? But a doctor would say, why would I have my clinical assistant do phone skills training or even your all star program? That’s for front office, right? No, as I’m explaining, this is a skillset that builds every area as you go.
23:09
And you look at like the Olympics, we had synchronized swimming. We all have to be synchronized. Otherwise it looks silly. And I don’t think we are. And everybody’s got to have a similar answer and similar verbage when it comes to an objection. I’m scared of something. I’m concerned about the price. Not, oh, I don’t know. At least say something as much as you can and then find the person that can answer. But it’s reassuring them. So we have to engage there appropriately. And then.
23:38
A, ask them for the appointment and taking information is we have to have an objective of what we’re doing. It’s team case acceptance. We have a whole one-day program that we teach every year or multiple times depending on the country. We’re having one in Austin on team case acceptance. The entire team is in the process and they all have to know what goes on. So you can use great. Great is a foundation for everything that we do.
24:06
And then we build on with the patient experience, case exceptions, case acceptance and scheduling and so on. But that’s a foundation. So I mean, I know you rally or scream across the mountaintops that everybody needs to be doing this type of training. Well yeah, because it like you said, doctors tell me consistently that one of the biggest things they’re looking for is consistency with
24:34
respect to communication amongst the team. And so it’s almost like we’re running a relay. The person on the phone is the person going first, right? Like they have to start and then they have to pass the baton to the next person. But if they don’t get a start, if they fall over, nobody else is going. So we have to be the one to carry the baton first. And then when I would have the conversations with patients and I’d take all my really great notes and get them scheduled.
25:04
We review all that information before the appointment. So we were prepared with the whole team. And then I would actually be the one to do the preclinical interview with the person when they’d come in, show them a little office tour. And then when I would pass the baton to the assistant or hygienist or my father-in-law, they knew exactly who the patient was, what their concerns were, what they were interested in. Don’t talk to them about this. This is what…
25:33
You know, sometimes even knowing how much they had allocated or budgeted towards their dental treatment. So people on the phones can make a big impact, qualifying, pre-qualifying patients. There’s a lot that goes into it, but you’re right. Like if we don’t start things off and then have it consistently throughout the team, you know, I could have put on this great presentation over the phone and whatever.
25:58
They come into the office and the rest of the team isn’t trained on the same communication and verbiage, you’re gonna lose trust really fast. That’s one of the number one things I see in reviews, negative reviews of offices online on Google reviews is like, and I’ve done this myself, the doctor was great, the person who was on the phone was great, but they just don’t have their stuff organized. They’re all over the place, communication is off,
26:26
timing is off, whatever it is. So that’s consistency and training. Yeah, every step of the chain has to be shored up. So that’s really helpful, Heather. I mean, just kind of in review, what we spoke about is bone skills are critical and we may not even know. I consider it one of our silent killers. I talk about that in the webinar. And as I mentioned, that would be something great for you if you haven’t seen it already, or if you want to see it again, alls backslash webinar.
26:56
And one of the silent killers is phone call conversion and really being aware of it. And I like that idea that all star members listen to your phone calls, all star non-members listen to your phone calls. And also in the webinar, get download or access that grading cheat sheet so you can see, are we doing GREAT in the process? No matter how nice we are, if we’re not, we don’t have a clear, we’re not hitting those objectives, our conversion is not going to be ideal. Customer service is not going to be ideal.
27:26
And then the second part of the conversation was that GREAT applies to every position in the office. You can apply it and everybody should be doing phone training or the skill sets of phone training because that sets everything else up versus having to be repetitive. Everybody’s got to be on the same page. Is that right? I see you smiling, phone skills instructor. Like that’s correct. I’ve been wanting to make sure that people hear it. They got to hear it again and again.
27:53
I know I’m that’s my yeah, that’s my big thing that I stand up on my is it my podium or yes and talk shout it from the rooftops just because I feel so passionate about it and I’ve seen offices where they do training and then they get to a certain really high level and then they’re like oh we’re good and then they stop and it’s like now the person revert it’s like can you work out for you know once a month and stay in shape no
28:20
like highly unlikely you have to keep doing it. You got to keep doing it and doing it and sticking to it, making it automatic, building that habit. And that’s part of the community at all of All Star Dental Academy. We continue to do podcasts, our coaching, our events. Always be training. Always be training. ABT. Thank you, Heather Nottingham for being on the program. And for those who are listening, make sure to like, comment, share, share with your friends.
28:48
And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star. Woo! Yay. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
