127. How to get more patients and guide them to saying yes with Dr Chris Phelps

In this episode, I chat to Dr Chris Phelps a dental practice owner and an expert in the Science of Influence and Ethical Persuasion. We discuss ethically marketing your practice, decreasing no shows and getting a higher case acceptance rate for your practice.

An entrepreneur and Amazon bestselling author, Chris is also a general dentist practicing in Charlotte NC. In his first seven years of practice Chris grew his practice revenue by a factor of 10X: growing from one practice location to four. After selling two of those offices for profit, Chris focused on maximizing the capacity of his remaining two practices and enjoyed two consecutive years of $1,000,000 revenue growth in each of the two practices, effectively collecting with two offices what he had collected when he owned four.

The Call Tracker ROI program he developed played a major role: decreasing missed calls by 90% and increasing team conversions of new patient appointments over the telephone from 24% to over 86% which helped increase his new patient numbers from 60/month to averaging over 300/month; all the while decreasing his marketing expenses by 74%.

In 2016 he launched Golden Goose Scheduling to help practices answer and schedule more new patient calls so they didn’t have to pay more in marketing money to get them.

Dr. Phelps is also an expert in the Science of Influence and Ethical Persuasion. He has studied under the authority in this field, Dr. Robert Cialdini, and is the only dentist in the world to be named a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer (CMCT). Chris uses Cialdini’s Principles to ethically steer patients to more referrals, decreased no shows and higher case acceptance.

In this episode, we discuss:

04:45: How Chris began his early career as a dental practice owner
06:46: How he grew multiple practices
12:34: How Chris took the two worst performing practices made them high performing
23:14: How to ensure patient commitment to appointments and decrease no-show rates
27:39: How to use the contrast and compare method to increase patient case acceptance rates.
28:56: The art of turning someone’s dental need into a dental want
32:15: Why walking people down the price stairs is more effective than up
38:27: One handy trick you can use on your intake forms to encourage a proactive patient mindset
41:45: Are membership models the future of dental practices?