As a dental practice, there is typically a lot of demand from potential clients enquiring to explore your service offering. Practices that we have spoken with recently are still getting an influx of enquiries each day, despite seeing a contraction in demand from this time last year, and so this may lead you to think that additional sales measures are not required. Whilst this may be the case for some, it is important to look at what services those enquiries are for and if your conversion rates on high value treatments (HVT) is as efficient as it can be. If not, you need to be implementing further techniques into your sales process.

Of course, there are a lot of additional sales techniques that you can (and should) implement, however, today I want to talk to you about implementing a nurture programme.

What is a nurture programme, you ask?
Many years ago, Hive implemented something that we call the ‘nurture programme’. This is a database of people that once enquired for our services had either advised that they were not interested in proceeding just yet, or in some cases, we never heard back from at all.

Each day I make it my most important job to contact a handful of people (at least) on this database to try and ignite a further conversation about our offering and to see if they are now in the position and are interested in resuming conversations with Hive.

What are the benefits of running a nurture programme?
By contacting older leads, it can very easily reignite a conversation and interest that the individual once had in your services. Sometimes, when people first enquire, they are not truly in the right position to proceed, just simply scoping out their options for the future. In a dental practice, this could look like someone enquiring about a HVT to get an understanding of how much they will need to save.

With a nurture programme in place, when a member of your team calls/emails/texts to check in a couple of months down the line to see if they are still considering the treatment, you are instantly more likely to reopen this opportunity. They could either respond to you right away with the go ahead to proceed, or advise that they just need a month or so longer to save the money, at which point your sales team knows to check in at the perfect time to capture the lead.

If you were to mark this lead as lost in the first instance, and never check in again, they may well forget about you and go to the practice down the road once they have saved the money they needed for the treatment.

At Hive, we must see on average 2 leads per month that have been reactivated through this method, so why wouldn’t you give it a go? If you put that into perspective, that could be 2 payments of your top end treatments ( 2 x implant treatments at £2,500 each = a further £5,000 a month for 5 minutes a day investment).

What nurture activities can your sales team implement?
Nurture activity can look different on each attempt, it is simply a matter of trial and error to see what works for your clientele. Simple methods include emails, texts and phone calls, but why limit yourself at that?

Why not try some of the following?

• Sending paper invites to your open evenings
• Sending Christmas cards via email or post
• Keep them updated with new services and offers
• Invite them in for free consultations
• Send then an information pack via email or post

The key point is that anything you try could be of benefit, it is a matter of catching the individual at the right time, with the information that catches their interest. You can not always know what this looks like, and that is why it is good to experiment and be resilient with your attempts at contact.

I typically contact leads once every 2 months as a rule of thumb, but this can differ depending on the correspondence that we have had with them, and their situation. The length of which I continue to try to make contact is infinite, unless of course I am told that they are no longer interested.

Yes, there is every chance that they may simply just no longer be interested in the service, but what have you lost in trying? The worst that can happen is they come back to tell you that they aren’t interested, and then you can mark the opportunity as ‘lost’ and remove them from your nurture list. But without trying, you may be losing valuable leads over the lack of a very simple sales task.

Who is best placed to implement this activity?
I would suggest that your Treatment Coordinator (TCO), or Sales Manager, is the best person to take on this task.

Yes, they are likely to have a busy work schedule and a lot of work to do as it is, but this needn’t take more than 5 minutes a day! Once the database of appropriate people are in place, and with the correct task management tool set up, it is more than achievable to contact at least 5 leads a day.

If you want to find out more about how to implement a nurture programme into your practice, or boost the sales performance within your practice, then please do get in touch.