3 Steps to Uncover Hidden Revenue Opportunities in Your Practice
We get it. Securing revenue is hard work, and your team’s already dealing with enough as it is.
You don’t have time to overhaul your marketing efforts, and you want to focus on your existing resources.
But what if we told you many practices have tens of thousands of dollars in untapped revenue sitting right under their noses?
Want to know the best part?
Capitalizing on those opportunities doesn’t take much time or effort. As long as you know where to look, uncovering hidden revenue opportunities is easy.
Keep reading, and we’ll walk you through three simple steps for finding hidden revenue opportunities in your dental practice.
1. Focus on the patients you already know
Big marketing projects and ad campaigns are valuable, yes. However, it takes time to build new client relationships -time that your team might not have right now.
Here’s the thing:
Your database is already filled with tons of easy-to-schedule, revenue-generating patients.
Maybe they:
- Are inactive,
- Haven’t given you a final decision on a treatment plan or
- Forgot to follow up with your team to schedule an appointment.
Whatever the case, you should be focusing your efforts on these types of people.
Spending time on these pre-existing patients is one of the easiest ways to generate revenue. Wanna know why?
They already know you. They’ve seen your team’s smiling faces. They trust you.
Connecting with current patients is way easier than reaching out to total strangers. You already have their contact info, and you know what treatments they might benefit from. It’s just a matter of connecting with the right ones.
2. Identify ideal, high-potential patients for reactivation
Let’s be clear here:
This step isn’t just about hygiene reactivation (though it can be if you need it). It’s also about unscheduled, unaccepted treatments.
Here’s an example:
We recently worked with an office that was doing great by their metrics. Their schedule was booked for quite a ways out, so they didn’t want to focus on reactivating overdue patients.
Instead, we opted to take a look at unaccepted treatments.
We asked them to guess where most of their unaccepted treatment plans were. They figured most of those cases lay in optional, cosmetic treatments -things like Invisalign, crowns, veneers, etcetera.
With that in mind, we plugged their data into Dental Intel to generate a snapshot of what they were missing out on.
Here’s what we found:
- Over a dozen unaccepted veneer treatment plans. Ok, great -but not groundbreaking.
- Over 70 unaccepted Invisalign cases. Much better, there were some real opportunities here.
- Over 300 patients with unaccepted crown treatments.
Woah.
The office thought they were great at closing crown treatments, but the numbers told a different story. They had more than $300,000 of potential revenue sitting in their patient database, and they didn’t even know it.
Technically, you can sift through your practice management software to find these opportunities on your own. However, it’s easiest to use comprehensive analysis software like Dental Intelligence.
If you’re interested, you can request a free snapshot of your practice’s opportunities here… Opens in a new window to roadside dental marketing’s website… . We’ll plug your practice data into Dental Intelligence and give you insight into hidden revenue opportunities.
3. Follow up, follow up, and follow up again -and again
So, you’ve identified patients to reactivate and schedule. Now, you have to follow up with them.
Seriously:
Oftentimes, offices will recommend a treatment plan to their patients – and that’s it. No follow-up, no reminders. Surprise surprise, these offices usually don’t schedule many people.
Other practices only reach out once or twice to talk about their treatment plans and recommendations. That’s an improvement, but not by much.
You need to do more.
Now, you might hear that and say, “Wait! I don’t want to be pushy and risk losing the sale, so why would I pester my patient more than once or twice?”
However, that’s the wrong way of looking at it.
Fact is:
On average, most customers need anywhere from 5 to 12 “nudges” / communication touchpoints to commit to a purchase. Before they can buy anything, they need to remember that they have a treatment to think about in the first place.
Seriously.
This stuff slips from people’s minds all the time. They don’t commit during their appointment for one reason or another, and then life happens. They forget.
Giving your patient reminders doesn’t have to be annoying, “salesy,” or insincere. Instead, it’s all about building authentic relationships and understanding their needs.
You don’t need to fill their inbox with spam, but periodic reminders can be very helpful.
How to connect with patients without breaking the bank (or your back)
Ok, let’s be honest with ourselves:
You aren’t going to call 300 patients to follow up with them about their incomplete and unaccepted treatment plans. It’s just not realistic. However, you do need to follow up somehow.
The solution? Two-way text messages.
Text messages have a 98% open rate. Compare that to emails, which have an 18% open rate. Plus, writing a text takes a fraction of the time that composing an email does.
Now, you can definitely include emails and calls as part of your outreach strategy. Still, texting is the fastest, easiest, and most effective way to follow up with patients.
We really can’t overstate how valuable text messages are – take another client we worked with, for example.
With just 100 preliminary text messages, they secured 11 leads worth $600 to $5,000 each. When applying that to the rest of their inactive patient database, they were looking at $10,000 to $31,000 of potential revenue. And all this was without having to spend a dime on ads or other marketing campaigns.
When writing texts:
- Stick to friendly, authentic language. Address your patient the same way you’d talk to them in person at your practice.
- Include valuable, interesting offers that entice engagement. Think about treatment benefit information, Q&As about financing, or explicit offers like free whitening. Anything works, as long as it provides real value to your client and doesn’t come across as salesy.
You can often set up two-way texting on your own, or better yet, you can have your marketing agency handle it on your behalf.
Here at Roadside, we actually automate the texting process and do the writing for you. Our all-in-one communication platform, Roadside Connect, handles all that and more.
I’m always happy to chat about what Roadside can do for your practice, so I invite you to schedule a free demo of Roadside Connect here… Opens in a new window to meetings.hubspot.com website… to learn more.
Final takeaways for maximizing revenue and minimizing work
Uncovering and acting on hidden revenue opportunities doesn’t have to be hard, as long as you’re:
- Finding the right patients in your practice, and
- Following up with them in an authentic, enticing, and frequent way.
Of course, your team is going to have to take a few calls to close things out and schedule treatments – but we have you covered there too.
To help, we’re offering you a free cheat sheet to help your team be more effective when enrolling patients. It covers six simple steps that simplify the process of securing appointments and improving show rates.
Interested? You can access your free cheat sheet here… Opens in a new window to tools.roadsidedentalmarketing.com website… .
Meet the Author
Angela Byrnes
Director of Client Services, Roadside Dental Marketing
Meet Angela! Angela Byrnes loves practicality and efficiency and works to pair client goals with simple solutions. Before Roadside, Angela devoted 23+ years to the dental industry, leading high production at multi-doctor practices.
Eventually, she honed in on her passion for practice management and consulting, and naturally gravitated toward Roadside due to their specialization in dental marketing.
In her years with Roadside Dental Marketing… Opens in a new window to roadsidedentalmarketing website… , Angela has helped transcend all previous profit margins at rates her clients have never thought possible! She problem-solves intimidating challenges with interactive, easy, and rewarding action plans.
Simply put, Angela loves to share her marketing knowledge, tools, and expertise to help dentists grow their practices!
