Tips for Upselling Services and Products at a Dental Office
By: Brandon Schaefer
Tags: Dentistry, Dentist

Tips for Upselling Services and Products at a Dental Office

If you’re a dentist, or if you work in a dental office as an administrator, increasing your revenues in your office is flat out easy to do, but you need to know what to do to make it happen!

Continuing to increase the amount of patients you see on a daily basis is not going to work because there’s only so much time in the day and each patient actually requires a certain amount of time to get the job done. Adding another doctor is not always the best bet because that comes with a long term commitment, and at a high cost.

So here’s how you’re going to increase revenues at your dental office with minimal effort. You need to start upselling add-on services that you offer outside of your normal billable insurance ie: teeth whitening, additional quarterly wellness checkups, custom sports mouthguards, custom nightguards, electric toothbrushes, and so forth.

Even better than billing these premium services on a one-time basis, you need to put them on automatic renewal plans. For example, when a patient signs up for one of your quarterly wellness visit plans, you’ll notify them via their choice of communication, physical mail, text, or email, well in advance of the appointment, and in that follow up reminder communication, you’ll plant the seed for the additional upsell product that you’re going to happen to mention when they’re in for their next visit.

As a dentist, you have access to a lot of different information on your patients, and if you’re not using the public information that you do have to provide upsell products and services that your clients are already buying somewhere else, you’re flat out missing the boat. Ask yourself this, “Why is your client going to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy an electric toothbrush,” when you can actually make the recommendation for them while their at your office, and you can collect the revenue as well.

Now here’s the key that most dental offices make, they don’t setup the sale before the patient arrives, and when the topic of buying an electric toothbrush comes up, the patient feels like their getting the old sell job and they get turned off. You always want to be planting the seed of the sale, before you’re actually trying to sell something. In fact, when you do the setup properly, you’re not even selling, your just providing a value add service to a targeted audience that actually wants want you have to offer.

If your office is hitting people over the head by not setting up the sale ahead of time, stop doing it now, it’s hurting you. What you need to be doing is the following.

Educate Your Patients on what Additional Value Add Services and Products You Provide Educate Your Patients on the Value of the Services and Products that You’re Offering Educate Your Patients on the Value of Buying the Services and Products that Your Offering through You

You notice how all of the above steps are about “educating” your patients, and none of them are directly about selling. The more you can educate your patients, the more money they’re going to spend with you, it’s that simple. Every invoice, whether it’s electronic, or in paper form, needs to have some type of personalized value add educational content on it.

This means that if I’m a man and I come to your office, I’m going to receive educational content on the invoice that I receive that’s relevant to me, such as, what men my age typically see in regards to their dental health, and the same goes for any woman coming to your office.

Here’s another great upsell opportunity, how about asking your patients if they play any sports, and if they do, what sport it is, and when their season typically starts. Once you have this information, put a tag ie: football, soccer, lacrosse, or any other sports, in your CRM (customer relationship management) system, and then a few months before the sport starts, send the patient out an email on the value of having a custom mouthguard made to protect them while they’re playing their specific sport.

Boom, there you have it, you set up the patient for a sale, by sending out helpful, valuable, and useful information about what’s going to help keep their teeth in their mouth while they’re playing sports. Not only that, but because you new what time of year the sport started, you’re were able to send the information out at the perfect time!

Lastly, any paper documents that you currently use to collect information from clients ie: address, name, email, insurance, family members, emergency contacts, immediately needs to be changed into an electronic searchable form. This means that whenever you want to, you can run a report and sort your patients by different search criteria. Remember, the more you can personalize your communications, the more you’re going to sell, so this is another vital piece of the puzzle.

Listen, upselling services at your dental office will work, you just need to learn what to do, and how to do it. And if you don’t know how to upsell, or you don’t have to time or resources to do it yourself, our team at MyVirtualSalesForce has the perfect “do everything for you” solution. Stop messing around, and start increasing your revenues today. Insurance has changed, billing has changed, and it all means less money for you in the end, so by investing in upselling services at your dental office, you’re going to make back the money you’ve been losing, and very quickly!

Need help with forming a strategy, increasing your sales, or implementing a new software solution? Call 1–888–370–9917anytime, or open a support email ticket, and one of our specialists will get you all setup with the best service for your specific needs.

MyVirtualSaleForce provides unparalleled service and support, 24/7, 365 days of the year. Regardless of the job, short or long-term, big or small, simple or complex, MyVirtualSalesForce has it covered.