Four Core Systems Every Dental Practice Owner Must Implement

1. new client acquisition
2. cashflow management
3. client retention
4. team development and training.

Client Retention

• Reappointment – This is a component of client retention. It includes tracking who did not book appointments, when they need to be contacted and other steps in nurturing your patients to ensure they book their next appointment.
• New patient experience (including treatment presentation protocol).
• Customer service protocols/wow experiences.
• Painless, efficient and durable dentistry.
• Reactivation – Reaching out to patients who have not been in the office for 18 months or longer. Attrition should be monitored regularly and lists maintained.

New Client Acquisition

• Internal marketing – What forms do you use? How do they look? What materials do you provide patients? This also includes patient onboarding, presentation of available services, target marketing to your active patient base and referral generation from the existing patient base.
• External marketing – Strategic positioning (authority status), how all of your digital assets are developed and used (web site, social media, etc.), advertising (on-line and offline), media, collateral (brochures, sell sheets, etc.), events and trade shows, lead generation and Google review strategy, to name a few.

***Everything you do is marketing. All touch points matter! You must begin to think of yourself as a marketing agency that provides dental services

Cash Flow Management

• Overhead control
• Accounts Receivable and Collections – Collecting copays from patients, cheque insurance reimbursement negotiations and embezzlement protection.

Professional Development and Training

• Onboarding new staff, ongoing training, continuing education, bimonthly performance evaluations.

This was really difficult for me when I decided I wanted to build a high-performance practice, so I can appreciate how daunting this might feel for you. The good news is that you don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, I am suggesting that you don’t. You would be absolutely normal if you also felt that all this management will be overwhelming. The good news is there are lots of software tools that can manage and even automate much of this for you.

The work for you and your team will be in understanding your practice–how each of you work within it to fulfill your service promise to your patients and then living up to it. The software is only as good as the people using it.

There are tools to manage your marketing efforts. Some require a little bit of effort while others are as simple as a push of a button. There are also highly-trained and qualified advisers who can do this for you. There are accounting tools and patient-tracking platforms that can provide you more information about your practice than you can probably use, all of which can be very effective when you have implemented strong systems, policies and procedures.