Products:

Done for Your Practice^TM Patient Newsletter

What is it? 

A 11x17 Printed 2 sides & folded to 5.5 x 8.5 monthly newsletter customized for your practice that you and your staff don't have to touch.  No work for you.  No added staff costs or waste of staff time on a low level task. 

What type of practice is it for?

Any practice with active patients needing a reminder of what you do and what they need to do as your patients.  Also for specialists as an added touch to stay at top of mind with their referring doctors.

Why a newsletter?

They are the easiest way to stimulate referrals without you or the staff having to think about it, to never stop telling your practice story (patients will never remember what it is that you do), and to boost patient retention rates.

Why should you use our "Done for Your Practice" Concept?

While newsletters are an important part of "mortising the marketing cracks," quite frankly, you and your team have more important things to do--like concentrating on the marketing and case acceptance in the practice.

How does it work? 

Information is gathered from your practice each month by Big Case to customize and upload to the printer along with your current mailing database.  The printer takes care of all the rest.  Returns/bad addresses come back to your office to recycle through your patient database and keep it clean.

What do you pay?

You pay only a monthly press fee and unit cost for handling, stamping, and mailing.

Here are the fees:

$97 per newsletter run per month for the set-up plus printing, first class live stamp, folding, tabbing & mailing  per unit cost:  100 "“499 ($1.13/unit)  500-999 ($0.93/unit) 1000-2500 ($0.89/unit)  2501+ ($0.85/unit)

Current First Class Postage rate is 41c per newsletter included in your unit cost above:

Click here for the Done for Your Practice Newsletter application 

In Case You Needed More Reasons to Do the "Done for Your Practice" Newsletter...

Britney Spears' Mother's Publisher Delays Release of Her Advice Book, Motherhood, In Light of Britney's 16 Year Old Sister's Revelation She is Pregnant.

 No, in case you missed this, it is a REAL news item.  Just in the last few weeks...

Yes, Britney's mother wrote a book of parenting advice and stories from raising Britney.  It was scheduled to release very soon AND the book wasn't a "you might be trailer park trash if" joke book.

It was written to be taken seriously, and probably would be and eventually with a little "water under the bridge" will probably be.  Even by the same media that has become unto themselves a bunch of ignorant a**es barely able to read a teleprompter and in a state of perpetual hyper-drool over celebrity.

The fact that THIS IS NEWS speaks volumes about the state of affairs and the state of affairs means a lot to us and our practices.  We can learn from this "œdumb and dumber" example and apply it (in short order) with our practice.

Here's what's REALLY comical, and yet also very instructive from this ménage-à-train wreck Britney's mom's statement expressing puzzlement at her 16 year old's pregnancy because, quote (honest to gosh)

Okay, we can all laugh.  Now let's turn the microscope around.

Yep, let's bring this baby full circle and look at what is going on in the operation of MOST dental practices. (Not yours, because I trust that you are taking action to fix it.)

Here are stupid statements, ideas, and actions or in-actions going on in a lot of dental practices:

• "Why should I spend money sending my customers a monthly newsletter? Holiday and birthday cards?  Postcards and weekly e-mails? They know where we are and what we do."
  
  
• "Why should I follow up on those prospective patients that inquire about elective  services?"
  
  
• "Why should I re-engineer my referral systems to focus on the top 20% of my referring doctors and start jettisoning the rest?"
  
  
• "Do I need to externally market if I need to keep a steady flow of elective cases in my practice?"
  
  
• "Why do I need to invest in my sales abilities and my understanding of the psychology of patients and how they buy?"
  
  
• "Why should I follow a case acceptance system?"                                      
  
  
• "I gave my front desk person the script and even went over it with her once that should be enough."
  
  
• "Why should I have staff record and self-critique their phone calls?"  "œWhy should I use a call monitoring program?"
  
  
• "I can't make my associate go out and network and market for patients."
  
  
• "She's a good employee who would never agree with a patient that my prices are too high, that treatment is too expensive and refer them elsewhere or use time at work to shop on the internet. After all, she's always here on time, worked for me for years and never misses a day of work."

How many more of these can I list?   Hundreds?

All dumb statements and assumptions, that way too many dentists all around us get used to using.

Because you are taking action, YOU are smarter than them, right? AND, just like our "hammering man" statue here in Seattle, there will always be some things that I will continued to hammer on.  Here's a few:

It is actually possible to be too cheap in marketing for patients.  Yes, I've seen a $500 post card mailing yield a $30,000 case BUT the patient on the list that got the $500 post card was put on that list by a $2500 newspaper ad from 3 years previous.  The $500 was the ongoing minimal investment to create more business from the list.  It didn't create the list.  With any marketing, there is a certain level of spending needed to generate enough response.  It is what it is.

We can not be negligent at going out and getting non-clinical skills that are as important or even more important then becoming a better "œmicrometer machine. We have to continually revisit and train ourselves on using the case acceptance system.  It is what it is.

We can not be negligent in managing employees (inmates in control syndrome) or training them.

We can not forget that great marketing can still be "sunk" by the staff.  If the staff drops the "phone ball," you will get nothing on the other side of the deal no matter how much is spent on the marketing.  If it isn't fixed, the result is not pretty.  It is what it is.

I've trained my staff on phone skills and how to close appointments on the phone for YEARS bi-weekly and continue to invest in their training every month and even individually with them and will continue to do so forever.  Why, because I understand that if I don't, they immediately revert back to doing things that don't work.   It is what it is.

We can not allow the staff to not develop the critical skill of closing consults from the calls from our marketing.  If the phone rings 40 times and the staff only closes 2 consults, the end result will be the staff telling the doctor that your advertising isn't working.  If the staff have been repeatedly been shown how to grow but haven't grown to the level required, then new staff may be necessary.   It is what it is.

With your staff, some of their job is basically forgotten every weekend, the relationship with you is often inherently adversarial, familiarity and longevity can breed contempt, you never get what you want if you don't constantly inspect, and your rules are viewed as arbitrary.  You will wage this battle as long as you practice.  It is what it is.

I laugh when I find dentists who still refuse to hold at least bi-weekly if not weekly staff meetings.  Just another reason those meeting are important.  BECAUSE so very little sticks with your staff, especially when it comes to the advanced skills needed to routinely close consults for large cases, do the right steps in the case acceptance system, and to follow up on the prospective patients going through the sales cycle.  You have to reinforce the important things every week.  It is what it is.

We can not forget that NOTHING "sticks" anymore in anyone's mind.

Nada, zip, zero.

With customers-patients, you re-create relationship (or you lose it) almost DAILY.  As assets, they are increasingly perishable.

"˜Patient loyalty' is a fiction at best and a big lie that many consultants will tell you is possible.  Blah blah blah... patient loyalty my behind.

Your (and MY) "story" is quickly forgotten even if told it repeatedly over and over and over.

How do I know?

Here's how:  I've had a giant external sign and window signage on every piece of glass at my office saying "œImplant" on it for over 10 years and guess what I still have patients I've seen for years say, "Gosh, I didn't know you do implants."  And I send a monthly newsletter EVERY month with Implant all over the thing.  That's 10 years of constant repetition that doesn't even stick.  It is what it is and I will fight it tooth and nail to remind them of what it is that I do.

Most dentists think their patients know their story.  Pfuiii.  They couldn't repeat your story if their life depended on it.  In the mean time, you have to repeat repeat repeat.  It is what it is.

Here's the deal with today's mind set in the information age.

All of your patients have other things on their minds, just like Britney news up-date.

There's a great book out called Made to Stick - orange cover with duct tape.  It contains useful stuff all about trying to make ideas stick, but even using every known strategy listed, you will only get stickiness, not permanent stuck'dness.   You can keep duct taping the message to the patient's forehead and it'll fall off next week.  What this means is you gotta' always duct tape it back on - forever.

I used to be a much bigger football fan so the following analogy makes sense to me.  In Lombardi's day, players wore coats and ties in public just because Vince Lombardi said so. Today, Jimmy Johnson, who left coaching, remarks, "at the pro level, when the player is paid a fortune, he'll do nothing without being sold on why it ought to be done, have to be micro-policed in order to remind him to do it, and THEN it's a 50-50 shot."

What SHOULD BE in the real world and in your practice isn't and guess what, it won't be, unless you adopt a mindset to counter all of the tendencies going on outside the practice and inside the practice with your patients and staff.  To prosper you must adopt this notion and act accordingly.  It is what it is.

To Your Success,
James

 P.S.  We'll duct tape it to their forehead for you.

Click here for the Done for Your Practice Newsletter application