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973: Metric Mondays: New Patient by Referral Source – Miranda Beeson

You spend a ton of money on marketing to attract new patients. But how do you know if it’s working? In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Miranda Beeson, ACT’s director of education, to break down new patient by referral source, what it reveals about your marketing strategies, and where to focus your time and energy. To learn how to market more to your ideal patients, listen to Episode 973 of The Best Practices Show!

 

Learn More About Miranda:

Learn More About ACT Dental:

More Helpful Links for a Better Practice & a Better Life:

Episode Resources:

Main Takeaways:

  • Where are new patients coming from? Knowing this helps you focus on what works.
  • Tracking referral sources helps you align your messaging with your ideal patients.
  • Build strong loyalty and relationships. It is the most cost-effective way to grow.
  • Dig deeper when asking patients how they found out about your practice.
  • Appoint a team member to track and report the data. Review it monthly.
  • Create a system to celebrate your patients who give referrals.

Quotes:

“Knowing where your new patients are coming from really allows you to double down on what's working and stop wasting your time and money on what doesn't. And when I say what's working, like you just mentioned, you can look at revenue, you can look at avatar, and you can look and say it's not just how many new patients are coming through the door from each source, but you can get as granular as you want once you are tracking the referral source to be able to see . . . like, if 50% of our patients come from internal referrals, of those 50% that are coming from internal referrals, what percent of them really fall into our avatar bucket? Meaning, maybe they move forward with comprehensive dentistry if that's something that's really important in our practice. So, you're able to really get as granular as you want to. This is the most high-level way to look at this information, which is just knowing, how many did we get and from what sources?” (3:25—4:23) -Miranda

“A high number of new patients that are coming from trusted referrals — such as your current patients, professional referrals, professional partners, or maybe specialists that you work with in your community — typically means that you're building really strong loyalty and strong relationships with your patients and/or your community. It's the most cost-effective way to grow your patient base, not only in dollars and cents because we're not having to pay or invest in marketing strategists to help lead the way or support SEO, search engine optimization, but it's also going to be one of the most cost-effective ways because these patients come in with a level of trust already that our team doesn't have to exert time or energy to build. It's like getting a head start in the race when somebody comes to us from one of these internal referral sources.” (4:23—5:18) -Miranda

“Tracking new patients by referral source is also going to help to make sure that your marketing efforts and your messages are aligning with your ideal patient type. We talk a lot around differentiation and vision, our core values, and wanting to attract patients that value the same things we do. When we really home in on who is the ideal patient for our practice, we're able to look and say, if most of our new patients come from an insurance list, that's our documented referral source and not from maybe an internal patient referral source, then maybe that's a signal that we need to improve our patient experience or what's happening inside of our office because the only way, right now, that new patients are finding us is if we're on the back of their insurance card — and that's not who we're trying to draw in. So, we can really look at this data and pinpoint, where do we need to apply countermeasures? Where do we need to double down? What's working and what's not? But it all starts with making sure that we're tracking it properly.” (5:19—6:20) -Miranda

“Say you're a dentist listening. You're like, ‘I assume my team is documenting referral sources, but I'm not really sure.’ Go into your practice management software and run a new patient report. Look at the last month or the last quarter. When you run that report, pretty much every practice management software I've ever seen, there's generally a column that says “referral source”, and it's either going to be blank because our team isn't documenting referral sources, or we're going to have some here and there but not necessarily all of them documented, or we might look and see that there's just Google, location, and a couple of key [sources]. Now, if things are going really well in your practice, you're going to see every new patient has a referral source and it's specific. It's documented and built out in a very specific way.” (6:35—7:24) -Miranda

“What you really want to do is make sure that your team has it set up in the software . . . You're going to have referrals going out, meaning you set up those referrals to your specialist or the orthodontist down the street. This is a different referral section in your practice management software that's for those referrals of patients coming in, and you can actually customize what you want in that list. So, you might have location, you might have Google – dentist near me, Google – veneers, Google – ortho, if you have a specialty practice, not just Google. You can ask them like, ‘What were you searching?’ and you get so much more out of that conversation. You may say, “patient” or “referring specialist”. Get really specific so that when this question is asked, ‘Whom may we thank for sending you our way on that new patient call?’ your administrative team can quickly and easily go right into that list and pinpoint how this patient heard about you. Now, if a patient does say, ‘Oh, I looked you up on Google,' ‘Oh, tell me a little bit more about what you were searching, if you don't mind.’ Now, they might say, ‘Well, I looked you up because my neighbor Sally comes here, and she told me she loves coming here.’ So, actually, that's an internal referral. As an admin team member, I don't want to mark that with Google. But if I hadn't asked, I wouldn't know. Or maybe they're going to say they were just looking for “best dentist near me”. We know that their buy-in is a little lower than if somebody was looking for “best cosmetic dentist near me” because now there's this level of IQ or interest or motivation that we've learned from just this one simple question around why and how that patient came to find us.” (7:25—9:12) -Miranda

“We also want to look at this monthly because, like I just shared with you — and I'm not perfect. I've missed many new patient referrals and taking new patient calls. We get busy. The admin team is so busy. You're answering the phone, you're checking people in, you're checking people out, you're filing that insurance claim, you're responding to the patient who said the bathroom is out of toilet paper. You're doing all kinds of things all at one time. So, once a month, you have somebody who is accountable for running that report. In Dental Intel, it's super easy. It's a click of a button. Then, looking at that column and going back, anybody that's missing a referral source, do your best to look at the notes or the intake form and fill in the gaps on where that patient came from. We want to try to get to 100% accountability for where each of these patients is coming from. Ultimately, if you do that and you see that your internal referrals are the lowest percentage on the list, that's when you really want to dig in with your team and work on some of these elements within the practice so that we can build this referral culture.” (9:14—10:20) -Miranda

“Encourage our team to celebrate those word-of-mouth referrals. Maybe you're going to start sending out some handwritten notes or shouting out new patients when they do send somebody to the practice. Maybe you have a little thank-you system. But how are we going to create systems in our practice to create an experience that makes people want to send their friends our way, and then we also personalize the celebration and thank you to those people when they do so.” (10:31—10:58) -Miranda

“Have somebody on your administrative team that owns this as an accountability. Talk with the team, maybe listen to this together, and say, ‘Hey, can you be the one that runs this report every month? Give me a rundown like, where are we? Did we get them all tracked?’ Most of the team really wants to do a good job and hit that 100% mark on having the referrals in there. We just need somebody who owns it and it's on their checklist so that it gets done on a regular basis.” (13:20—13:45) -Miranda

“The most important metric of new patient referral source is the percentage of times that field is filled in, as all of these metrics are. If you start filling it in and looking at the number of fields that are actually filled in, it'll start to tell you things. It'll give you great information on what's happening in your practice. So, I agree with what Miranda said. Make it an accountability for one of your team members, and it'll help everybody.” (13:49—14:16) -Kirk

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

0:50 What new patient by referral source measures.

2:47 How this metric impacts the practice.

6:20 What you can do to impact this metric.

13:19 Final takeaways.

Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH Bio:

Miranda Beeson has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.

Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.
ACT Dental Team

ACT Dental Team

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