Playing Plinko with your dental practice

Growing up, I watched the game show The Price is Right. I loved it—the bright lights, the wacky noises, the screaming audience members . . . But there was one game that I loved more than anything: Plinko.

If you aren’t familiar with Plinko, a contestant climbs a set of stairs up to the top of a vertical game board, which has pegs sticking out of it. The contestant then drops a series of disks, one at a time, down the board. As each disk falls, the disk slips and slides through the pegs in a random pattern. Its path is defined only by chance. When it reaches the bottom, the disk lands in one of several slots, each of which has a dollar amount attached to it: $10,000, $1,000, $500, $100, or a big fat $0.

Every time I watched the contestant climb the stairs, step up to the board, and release the disk, a surge of electricity ran through me. I would yell at the TV, “C’mon, $10,000!”

Plinko is great for a game show. However, it is a horrible way to run a dental practice. But most dentists are playing Plinko with their businesses. They climb those steps, let go of the disk, and allow chance to do the rest.

Not smart.

The top dentists—the ones who see consistent profits, experience steady growth, and are poised for early retirement—know that they cannot leave revenue and production to random forces of nature. They know something that most dentists don’t: you can control the flow of patients and levels of production in your practice. It all starts with having a well-defined patient lead-generation system.

Achieving predictable new-patient numbers and profits is not an accident. It involves your creating a pipeline in which a defined number of prospective patients see your marketing materials each month. A percentage of those prospective patients will contact your office for more information. From that pool, a percentage will become new patients. From that number, a certain will number become repeat patients who pay, stay, and refer.

Your job is to do the following:

1. Know what the prospective patient numbers are at each stage of the pipeline.

2. Focus on raising the number of prospective patients who enter the pipeline.

3. Continue to provide top-level service to increase patient retention.

Of that list, the second item is the most important. Without a steady flow of prospective patients (new leads), your business will dry up.

How do you maintain an influx of prospective patients? In a word, the answer is marketing. Good marketing is designed to attract new patients and keep them loyal to your practice. More than that, marketing is a tool to create evangelists for your practice. These are the people who talk to their friends about you and who post on review sites. With good marketing, you create a ripple effect: you build a pipeline that starts with high-performing attraction tools, and your raving fans will talk you up and create referrals long after you first attracted them. This results in more prospective patients, higher production, and lasting revenue. Sounds pretty good, eh?

You may think, “Marketing isn’t for me. I’ve been burned before.” Think again. Just because something didn’t work before doesn’t mean you should abandon the entire concept. It just means you need to do something differently.

What should you do now? The best place to start is with Google Reviews. That is where prospective patients look for dental services these days. It’s the greatest source of qualified leads, and it’s only growing. The alternative is to play Plinko with your business and hope that Bob Barker (or Drew Carey) will save the day.

Author’s note: Don’t play games with your dental practice. Learn how to build a consistent, predictable income with our new web series, Beyond the Chair. We put three top dental marketing thought leaders in a room and discussed the most pressing issues facing the industry. The series is designed to help independent dental practice owners in today’s competitive market. It’s available for a limited time and can be found at localsearchfordentists.com/beyondthechairseries.