Let’s assume you are a dentist with a 5 year old practice and your database has 1500 people in it. These people have come into your practice for treatment and spent money with you. However, since you are currently treating everyone willing to come in, you might not be maximizing your revenue.
Generally speaking, only 10% of the treatments you provide will bring in most of your revenue.
For some practices that would be crowns.
For others it might be Invisalign.
For others it would be a full mouth reconstruction.
However, you currently don’t know which kinds of treatments generate the most revenue every month.
You wonder, “Does it make sense for me to get 50 low-cost procedure patients (teeth whitening, cleaning etc.) every month or would I make more money (and spend less time working) if I just get 10 high-cost procedure patients (implants, crowns, veneers, full mouth reconstruction)?
Chances are that you can 2X your monthly revenue in 12-18 months if you just found out where most of your revenue comes in.
This is where a little research can help immensely.
Since you have the name, phone number and/or the email of the people in your database, you can upload the patient database into TowerData.com and the platform will research and give you a lot more information about these people.
Here’s what TowerData.com can tell you about the people in your database:
- Where they live
- Their age
- Marital status
- Their educational level
- Income levels
- What industry they work in
- Net worth
Once you have this information, you will know the answers to these types of questions:
- “Which of the people in my database do I want to serve more?” For example, if you need more patients who are able to pay you more for specialized procedures, you should advertise only to people in higher income zip codes.
- “Is my ideal patient single, in a relationship or married with children?” In my personal experience, advertising to women who have children have the best results because once that person comes in and loves their experience, they will get their significant others and children to come in as well. Remember, it is women who make most of the health related decisions in a family.
- “Will people be able to afford my most specialized services?” Let’s assume you would like to get more patients for full mouth reconstruction. This is a specialized procedure costing anywhere between $15,000 to $45,000 so it would make sense to advertise it only to people earning over $100,000 per year. Once you check the income levels provided by TowerData.com, you will know what zip codes to advertise in to get more patients.
Most dental offices never know for sure who their most ideal patient is and for that reason they are open to accepting everyone who shows interest.
Once you understand who you’d like to serve and how much they can afford to pay you, you can considerably scale up your yearly revenue.
When this research is done properly, you will come to some major conclusions:
- “I see that I make most of my revenue from women who come in with children…”
- “It is mostly men and women over 45 who go for specialized procedures because they have a higher disposable income…”
- “People 20-25 contribute the least to my revenue and take up the most time…”
- “People who come in for regular cleaning sessions contribute the least to my revenues and also take up the most time…”
Action: Go through your patient database and get your staff to export all the results into a .CSV file. Then go to TowerData.com, select a package and upload this file there. Soon you will get more data associated with the records you uploaded. This will allow you to optimize your marketing efforts to only go after your ideal patient.
