Marketing Mistakes in the Dental Industry

The competition in the dental industry is very tight. A dental profession functions more like the typical business does. It

Jay Geier
                                  Jay Geier

needs to generate new patients and retain the old ones in order to boost the business profit. To do this, the dentist and his/her team should come up with effective marketing strategy. Many dentists today are not aware that they are literally doing mistakes that badly hurt their business. The Scheduling Institute by Jay Geier aims to help dentists and their team in coming up with effective marketing strategy, which leads to both career and business growth.

Below are the common marketing mistakes in the dental field

Entrusting the business to the advertising representative

A lot of dentists would tell that they are busy with their practice and that they don’t really have the luxury of time to personally manage the advertising campaign of their business. So, what they usually do is they hire an advertising representative and entrust everything that has something to do with the marketing campaign. Always keep in mind that the advertising company is in the process of advertising business and not really to help it grow. Many advertising companies today will make you believe that you need to spend more to get more.

Entrusting your business to the practice management expert

Practice management experts will make you feel that they know it all, but in reality many of them do not even have a background in dentistry. In fact, they don’t have any idea on how to run a private practice, which also means that they are not that really effective in helping you with your dental marketing. If you are planning to entrust your business to practice management expert, you have to make sure you ask the necessary questions including their previous dental marketing campaigns. That way, you will have idea whether or not they can be of any help to your business.

Not paying much attention to potential new patients

This is the common mistake made by the dental staff. Almost 90% of patient calls the dental office to make inquiry and eventually set an appointment. However, majority of these calls are not converted into actual patient because of mishandling of calls. This has something to do with the front office and what’s even alarming is that many dentists are not even aware of it. Not only that you are losing potential patients, but you are as well losing potential income.

Jay Geier’s Scheduling Institute focuses more on improving the ability of the dental staff in handling patient, which include scheduling institutepatient’s call and actual patient interaction. In response to this, the company has come up with a 5 star challenge, which successfully generate a dramatic increase of 60% in new patient generation every single month. If you have been in the dental practice for quite long now and are not seeing improvement in patient generation, then it is now time to get in touch with the Scheduling Institute.

Scheduling Institute

Scheduling Institute: More than Just a Training Center

The Scheduling Institute is a private firm owned and personally managed by Jay Geier. It aims to help people in the medical field grow their business through practice development methods. The majority of its customer base is dentist. Its headquarter is in Alpharetta, Georgia, but it does have a few training centers all across America. Today, the Scheduling Institute is one of the biggest dental training firms in the world.

Services offered by SI

The Scheduling Institute provides various services that could certainly help you grow your practice such as workshops,

Scheduling Institute
Scheduling Institute

training, coaching events, and the likes. The Scheduling Institute has a humble beginning. It started out in 1997 with one goal in mind and that is to improve the way front desk officer handles calls. Geier found out that one of the primary reasons why a private practice is not hitting its target clients is because of incompetent way of handling inquiry calls. So, he came up with a telephone handling system, which had shown dramatic improvement in the daily patient turnout.

The system used by Jay Geier in handling client calls took him years to perfect. He has tried on several methods for dealing phone calls, fine-tuned the method before finally introducing it to private practices. The telephone handling system used by Geier has successfully generated more than 600 actual patients in just one week.

New Patient Generation System

The New Patient Generation System was the very first product launched by the Scheduling Institute. This product aims to educate the dentists as well as medical professionals on how to use their staff in leveraging their practice. The New Patient Generation System is a self- study kit, which was introduced in 1997. The product was doing perfectly fine and a lot of private practices are benefiting from it. However, Geier thinks that the self-study kit alone is not enough to highly motivate the dentists and their staff. It was in the year 2005 when Jay Geier started a membership program. It includes an in-depth analysis, products, and tools dentists can take advantage into to make their business grow. This is where Geier introduced telephone liability, which does not only include dentists, but most importantly their staff. This has been proven beneficial to dentist all across America.

In-office training/on-site training

Although the system implemented by Jay Geier is working perfectly fine, a physician personally approached him and asked him if he and his team can personally visit his office and conduct training from there. He said that he does not have the luxury of time to implement the self-study package on his own. Geier has seen this as a perfect opportunity to even grow his business. He granted the request and found out that face to face training in the actual work setting was very efficient. So, from then on he began offering on-site training and formed his team of certified training specialists. These are the people who personally conduct on-site training in any parts of the United States.

Creating More Profitability in Medical Offices Through Sensible Scheduling

Any patient can tell a horror story or two about the lengthy waits in a specific office. They can probably also explain why those waits became the reason for finding another physician, or dentist or eye care professional. People live busy lives and when something becomes a roadblock to their schedules or forces them to lost work or be late picking up the kids after school, they have to find a solution. Unfortunately the solution is often to find another doctor because most see the delays as a lack of respect or appreciation.

For many doctors this all often comes as a surprise to them. Many are unaware of how long their average patient waits, many do not realize how frustrated and upset these people become while they are waiting. In truth, many are not even spending as long as they would like with each patient because they are already feeling rushed.

The Scheduling Institute
These problems do cause issues with the profit each office is able to make and if it is left to continue without addressing it properly, it can eventually become something that leads to an office needing to close due to lack of profitability.

There is help available. The Scheduling Institute was actually designed to assist medical offices with just these types of concerns. This program can teach employees how to schedule appropriately and comfortably fit in the amount of people necessary without overbooking.

What it also does however, is to teach these same office staff to use their time wisely when talking with callers to the office. The statistics show that a large number of potential patients will call each office for information, but end the call without making an actual appointment.

This is lost business and something that every office should avoid. These calls take away time from patients that are in the office and provides no income in the end. To avoid this, these courses teach people how to convince those callers to make appointments and to use their time in the office and on the phone more efficiently.

The questions, of course, is whether or not the program does what it says. The Scheduling Institute Reviews have been positive regarding the benefits it has provided many of the medical professionals who have had their staff take part in the program. If you are interested in seeing if this could be the answer for you, check out the program and learn more about what it has to offer.

Additional Resources: The Scheduling Institute Wikipedia