Today Jonathan Fashbaugh talks with Bill Fukui of MedShark Digital about the #1 thing that costs dentists money with their marketing. Here are some clues: it’s not your website. It’s not your ads. You have control over it and you pay for it every day your office is open for business.
Transcript
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us on Marketing Chairside. I am so glad to be on today with a friend and mentor of mine, Bill Fukui. I almost put “doctor” there in front of your name, Bill, because I just think you’re that good at what you do. From MedShark Digital, Bill, thanks for being with me today.
Bill Fukui:
Hey Jonathan, thank you. Obviously, it’s more my pleasure than… I think you’re giving me more credit than it’s worth and I appreciate it.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Well, I know that your clients love working with you because you’re a brilliant marketer, but I also think you’re a brilliant businessman and salesman. And today I wanted to just chat about something that service businesses in general, and I know that you’re a master of many of them, all have in common and that’s our job as marketers is to make the phone ring, but the wheels can fall off right there, isn’t that right?
Bill Fukui:
The interesting thing is, Jonathan, we go back a long time. Even before digital, you and I both worked at a media agency that did television, radio, print advertising for medical and dental professionals. And telephone intake, I’ve actually had to turn away clients when they really weren’t built to take leads, when we’re spending advertising and marketing dollars to get the phones ringing. Because back then you didn’t have the web, you didn’t have a lot of email marketing kinds of stuff. Everything came through the phone.
Bill Fukui:
And so, no question. The phone calls, when we would train staff, half of them didn’t have any idea, number one, that they had advertising running and that what the cost of those leads were costing them. They didn’t see a value. That’s the sad part. What we found was that the average cost, even back then, to generate a lead was upwards of about a hundred to $150 per lead. For telephone calls, often a hundred to $150. And when you put a dollar on it, it changes the landscape. And it is still, I think today, the biggest void when it comes to ROI and marketing return, they think it’s the marketing agency. I’m going to tell you, generating phone calls and leads is probably easiest and least expensive part of this. Getting business-
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And when there’s a problem anywhere along the way, and it can be on the agency side, but I’m like you, where a lot of times I’ll end up looking at what a company has going on for a dentist then. And I’m like, “There’s not a lot of glaring issues here, but you’re telling me that new patients are the problem.” Right away, alarms start going off in the back of my head of, is the ball being dropped after we get it to the goal line?
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And that’s just a painful thing there, because you’re losing out on money twice, the way I like to talk about it, because you’re paying for the marketing, so that a hundred, $150 to generate that lead, but that new patient revenue just went out the door and to your competitor. So what are some of the most common problems that you see when it comes to phone intake at a dental office or like I said, any kind of service business really?
Bill Fukui:
Well, I think for in general, I think part of the biggest concern is that you’ve got somebody handling the phone calls who’s not prepared to handle them. Whether it’s their experience or their personality or just their skillset, but also it’s even if they’ve got the right person, sometimes they actually don’t… They’ve got them doing so many different things, and in the middle of getting a phone call, they’re doing five other things. They really do need to somewhat focus on those phone calls because they’re that valuable. This is the first impression that they’re going to have of your practice and it’s worth the being in the present. There’s a book called The Present, and it is about being there, being on the call, giving them a hundred percent of your attention, which I think is probably the number one thing that happens in most medical practices. There are people handling the intake, generally just too busy to focus on the phone call.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right, and then I’m just curious what you see as the best way to mitigate that. When you’ve got these inexperienced people, I think they can tend to become order-takers or fixate on certain aspects that they kind of know. How would you go about retraining that or how do you know if you need to make a personnel change?
Bill Fukui:
Good question. I think you can actually create a process. When phone calls come in, you can do one of two things. You can have a designated marketing line because if they’re existing patients, it’s less of an issue. It’s for the new patients that you’re trying to get in, and you’re spending a lot of money to get in, especially those high-end cosmetic or neuromuscular or apnea types of patients, we’re spending good marketing to get. Those are the ones we need to capture. And we need to separate sometimes those people from our general hygiene patients and stuff like that.
Bill Fukui:
So, number one, I would say if at all possible, set up a designated marketing line where you have all of your marketing going to a specific line. And if you have a rolling… many offices they’ll have rolling lines, you have the bottom line that doesn’t roll and go straight there, you know that’s a marketing call. You know those people that are calling, that’s the back phone. So, separate your rolling lines. One of them, the bottom line, that’s the marketing line. If all the lines are empty and that one’s ringing, you know that’s the marketing people. Okay?
Bill Fukui:
Another thing is, if you don’t have that capability or whatnot, then use your initial receptionist to triage and direct those calls. So if it’s a hygiene patient that she needs to rebook, great, separate that. But if it’s somebody that says:”I’m interested in porcelain veneers, or I’m interested in dental implants, is there somebody that can help me?”, have that person pass them along to the person that’s going to deal with those marketing leads. Usually a patient counselor, somebody that’s cosmetic, or one of the people that are really trained to deal with those types of leads. Now I’m separating them. Bring them in and I’m [inaudible 00:07:43].
Bill Fukui:
Even if that person is not available because they’re busy and get the contact information for them so that they can follow up. You need to have the right people talking to those consumers because they’re going to go away. Otherwise, you got one shot at them and if you can follow up with them and say:”Hey, Susan’s on the phone right now, but I’ll have her come right back. What’s a good phone number? And what’s a good email that I can get for you. And then I’ll have her get with you as soon as she gets off the phone.”
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And that works. I can’t believe that this is a problem at dental practices that invest good money in marketing, but we see calls go to voicemail all the time. And while you will have someone, if a human being answers and says, “Susan’s not available, let me get your info information down because she’s going to be the best one to answer all your questions and get you well taken care of. So let me get your information.” They’ll give it to a human, but that same kind of message in a machine. It just… I’ve talked to practices that are just so married to a call tree. Can you talk a little bit about what voicemail and a phone tree does to sales?
Bill Fukui:
No, there is absolutely no question. There are statistics done in terms of how many rings it takes for you to pick up that you’re going to lose leads. But definitely, especially when we’re dealing with a commodity. And I hate to say it, dentistry is a commodity for elective dentistry, I get a chance to choose who’s going to do this. I’m a consumer. And whether it’s price, convenience and I think convenience has become a much bigger influence on people’s decision-making today. Bigger than price. How do you make it easy? How do you make it quick. It’s the easy button. And it starts from that first phone call.
Bill Fukui:
It is about relationship building. So many practices are spending more and more dollars on digital, on internet marketing. What I’m going to tell people, where do you think most of the consumers are spending their time on digital, it’s on social media. So even websites have a more social slant and people want to get to know you on a more personal level. That’s why when we do heat mapping on websites, why the Facebook and Instagram links are some of the highest clicked things, because they want to know who you are. And yet when they pick up a phone and call, get some automated thing, wow, you have just missed the boat. The relationship building starts on the website and in social media, you’ve got to carry that through when you actually pick up the phone and call you.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. So when they pick up the phone… I like your convenience take there. And a lot of times I think that some people can mistake questions about insurance as a cost question. When I think it’s probably more just that’s how the dental industry overall has trained them, first of all. But I think it’s also a convenience thing too, because they assume that it’s going to be just a headache to deal with anything outside of their network. So if I’m a patient and I’m calling up your dental office bill, and I say, “Hey, I just wanted to know, do you guys take Blue Cross Blue Shield?” And let’s say, you’re fee for service. How do you recommend dentists handle that very common question?
Bill Fukui:
Yeah. And even if they don’t take insurance, they can actually address that insurance. Yeah. We actually can help you with that. I can help you with that. I think the question as with telephone intake, it is not about just answering questions and triaging questions. This is where you now have the opportunity to what we call you got to take control. And it’s really easy. It sounds hard. How do you rearrest control of that call? It sounds intimidating, but it’s as simple as, right? What exactly are you looking to have done? Yeah. And if it’s things like porcelain veneers or things that we’re marketing for, they’re not going to be covered by insurance anyway. Okay. So I think that’s where you address it. And if they’re just saying:”Oh, I just want a cleaning or something like that”, that immediately changes the conversation.
Bill Fukui:
Okay. But if it’s a marketing driven call and I’m wanting to get those porcelain veneer cases or the dental implant cases that are at the end of the day, the cosmetic stuff, then those are generally either not covered or they’re not really reimbursed very much. They’re still paying 90% of the out of pocket anyway. And the consumers don’t even know that. So part of it is just asking better questions when they ask:”Do you take insurance?” Don’t be scared about that. We actually will file claims. We don’t take it. They don’t have to know that we don’t take it, but we can file the claims for them. But at the end of the day, I just need to know who this person is and what are they really interested in because insurance, in many cases doesn’t even apply. They’re asking the wrong question.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
You definitely hit the nail on the head with the taking control of the call thing there. Because I think that a lot of the front desk people, I can almost hear them saying, would you like fries with that? Because they’re just so order taker. So, we’re just about out of time Bill, but there was one thing that I know that you advocate for in your client processes and that’s secret shopping and I didn’t want to close out our time today without hitting on that. So how can dentists secret shop their own practices? How do you work that?
Bill Fukui:
Well, I think a couple of things. Number one, you can today it’s easy to do in the sense that with cell phones and stuff, you can secret shop practices over the phone. But I also encourage you to secret shop through the website forums and through chats and through other things. And not just do it for your practice, but do it for the competitors. It’s as important to know what your competitors are doing for two reasons. When we used to train, you know this Jonathan, when we used to train staff members on telephone or other types of intake, we would do it in a group setting. So I would call up and they would hear the call. And we’d get off and they’re going:”How did you know they were going to do that?” And I said:”I didn’t, I didn’t know what they were going to do.”
Bill Fukui:
And they’re going:”Isn’t that kind of risky because what if they didn’t do what we wanted to do?” I win either way. When I secret shop a competitor, if it’s really good, guess what it says, you guys got to sharpen the needle, sharpen the pencil. You’ve got to get much better at what we’re doing. And if the intake is really bad, this is your biggest competitor. Look at, they are humbling opportunities all the time. We need to steal that business from them. And we can do that easily because consumers are shoppers today. So shopping competitors is number one, important as well as shopping your own practice. And just having a friend call in. And there are so many ways to record calls and you can actually record those things. And one of the things we talked about was if I’ve got the wrong person answering the phone and were secret shopping. Secret shopping is great way of peeling back, opening the eyes of the person in the practice, that I’ve got the wrong person there.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. Right. And you better be recording the calls with your call tracking system.
Bill Fukui:
I know you guys do call tracking. If you’ve got that, that’s an easy way to address the problem. And if they’re really not, they know it. I think it becomes pretty obvious. This is not what I’m cut out to do. I think it eases the either get them in a different seat on the business or they need to find another bus.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. Right. And that’s a tough thing to do when someone’s been with you for 10, 15 years, but it’s big enough problem to fix, Bill?
Bill Fukui:
It’s definitely a big enough problem to fix it. If nothing else, get them away from client facing. Get them to do other stuff in the practice and not client facing, customer facing, patient facing. They can’t be there. Right?
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yep. Well, Bill, thank you so much for your time today. It has been a great pleasure as always to chat with you and we’ll talk again soon, I’m sure.
Bill Fukui:
That sounds great, Jonathan. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and your friends.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Thanks so much.
Bill Fukui:
Take care.
[end transcript]
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