I recently presented a seminar in Wisconsin called 100% Case Acceptance: It’s a Team Sport. What was evident at that seminar is that most people attended looking for tactics and closing techniques. What I offer is neither: I offer a process and a protocol.
In my previous post, Focus on Repeat Customers, Not Single Transactions, I stressed the importance of building a practice through quality referrals. These referrals have a higher propensity of accepting needed treatment because the Dentist and team have an endorsement from a friend or “trusted advisor.” I want to take that idea a step further and suggest that you’ve already got access to all the clients you’re ever going to need.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?
You’ve probably heard the theory of the Six Degrees of Separation (also the basis of a well-known game invented in 1994 to determine how many connections it would take to get from any actor, like Robert DeNiro, to Kevin Bacon). The theory states that any person is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world; a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. Well, have you ever heard of Joe Girard?
For fifteen straight years in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a used car salesman named Joe Girard held the Guinness Book of World Records title of World’s Greatest Salesman. The foundation of his success was Relationship Marketing; exactly the kind of marketing we should focus on in Dentistry.
Girard’s famous book, How to Sell Anything to Anyone, is based on a simple idea called the Law of 250. The idea came to him while attending a friends’ wedding. He asked the caterer and wedding planners how many people tend to get invited to these events and the answer was, “about 250.”
Soon after, Girard then went to a funeral and asked the same question of the funeral director. He got the same answer. Girard continued to ask that question at various social events and the answer always came back the same: about 250.
Now let’s take a look at your practice and apply the Law of 250. Assume that you currently have a thousand patients. If each patient knows 250 people then collectively, your active patient base knows 250,000 people.
When I bring this up to folks, the standard response is, “Well, Wes, we’re all in the same neighborhood so a lot of our patients know the same people.” So I say, “OK, cut that number in half.” You still have 125,000. Cut that number in half and you’ve got 62,500.
Even if you cut that number in half again you’re still over 30,000 people. Add social media and automation to the equation and your current patient base already knows everybody who’s ever going to be a prospect for you. If you focus on doing a great job and asking for quality referrals, I can’t imagine how you would have to do any additional marketing.
It’s a Small World After All
By the way, according to an article in Southwest Airline’s Spirit Magazine (2012), a study by Facebook (November 2011) found that with the advent of social media, the degrees of separation between two strangers is now at 4.74 (that’s nuts!).
Reach the People Your People Know: Be Awesome!
Most Fortune 500 companies use a metric called the Net Promoter Score (a loyalty metric for measuring customer satisfaction developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld). They ask clients to rate the probability on a scale of 1-10 of their talking positively about the company or making a referral to friends or colleagues.
This is similar to those comment cards you’ll often find on the table at a restaurant, the ones that ask you to rate the service you just received. I want you to ask yourself, when are you most likely to fill out that card? For most of us, if the service was only so-so, we probably won’t bother to write anything down. But if you had a terrible experience or an extraordinary experience, you’ll share it.
If your patients have a 1-3 experience, you can bet they’re going to talk about you to friends and it won’t be good. You want your clients to leave the office talking about an 9-10 experience to their connections (learn how to effectively "ask" for a referral).
Take a moment to give your practice a Net Promoter Score. Be Ruthlessly Honest: what do you think you’re doing right? What can be improved upon?
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