Ken Newhouse, Founder of the online community FunnelTribes.com (and host) of the Get Clients Now Podcast. Ken created these platforms to pioneering marketing, persuasive communication and sales strategies for high-growth professionals and business owners. Ken is also the creator of Sales ControlTM ... a system that teaches you how to active your patient’s Genetic Buying TriggersTM, which increases case acceptance, production, referrals and retention.
http://www.funneltribes.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #1043 - Ken Newhouse
AUDIO - DUwHF #1043 - Ken Newhouse
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Howard: It is just a huge honor for me to podcast interview Ken Newhouse, DC. He’s the founder of the online community FunnelTribes.com and host of the Get Clients Now Podcast, which thank you so much for now you’re posting yours on Dentaltown, on the Dentaltown app. Dentaltown’s got a quarter of a million dentists on the website, but when Steve Jobs invented the app, we came out with the app, and sixty thousand dentists downloaded the apps and they were all the millenials, and that podcast section, I can’t believe, we’ve got about sixty dental podcasts going on and the number one podcast on that is Jamie Amos, he’s got six hundred and fifty thousand downloads on that app. Because these dentists have an hour commute and so many of the dentists tell me they listen to a podcast an hour each way, that’s ten shows a week. The views are just crazy.
Ken created these platforms to pioneer marketing, persuasive communication and sales strategies for high-growth professionals and business owners. Ken is also the creator of Sales Control, a system that teaches you how to activate your patients genetic buying triggers, which increase case acceptance, production referrals and retentions. Before we start, I just want to say one thing; when you look at the big publicly traded companies that sell to dental supplies and dentists like Patterson and Schein, they also are in vet and they’re not in chiropractic, you’re a chiropractor, you’re a doctor of chiropractic, because chiropractors don’t use many supplies, dentists use a lot of supplies. About 6% of cost is supplies, and vets is double that, vets just buy the most supplies, but those three; dentists, vets, and chiropractors, they are sophisticated small business owners. Then when I go over to the one million MD’s, their websites suck, they don’t market. You walk into a medical office, they’ve still got that sliding glass door and they hand you a chart to sign in like you’re a cow. My gosh, if you’re a dentist out there listening and you beat yourself up because you think, “I’m not very good in business,” dude, the worst dentist businessman is better than the best physician. I mean, they are horrible.
And, I probably shouldn’t say this, I’m probably going to get myself in trouble, but I know people who sit on the board at the Mayo clinic, and they just roll their eyes because they’ve got the best hospital in Arizona and it loses money every year, it basically runs on donations. Not only do they charge a lot of money, but they still run at a loss. So, dentists you are a light years ahead of physicians, and Ahwatukee, where I live, which is the southernmost part of Phoenix, with about eighty-five thousand people in this big cul-de-sac, and it’s really an isolated city between some mountains and Indian reservation and an interstate, there’s only four streets into Ahwatukee, Elliot, Warner, Ray, Chandler, and so it’s this big eighty-five thousand cul-de-sac with only four ways to get in and out, and my gosh, the dentists, the vets, the chiropractors, visible, marketing, websites, instagram. The physicians, oh my God, I mean it’s just horrible. So, who do you think runs a better business, your average chiropractor or your average dentist?
Ken: Now, go ahead and re-frame that question. When you say, “Who runs a better business?”
Howard: Who is more sophisticated in location, retail strategies, marketing, advertising, getting new clients, case presentation, case acceptance?
Ken: Okay, fair enough. Just a couple of quick points I’ll point out; dentists generally love to pool their practices close by, they don’t have a problem with that. Chiropractors have this innate fear that if there’s another chiropractor within a mile or two, sometimes even further, like when I was very, very young I was an associate doctor just for about six months, and the doctor that I was in the office with just had a conniption when I wanted to open my own office three miles away from his office, so I will say in that regard my top 10% of my dental clients as far as the successful ones versus the top ten 10% of my chiropractic clients by far, and the chiropractic clients that I work with are 100% cash, they don’t accept insurance. The last nine years I practiced I didn’t accept insurance, but I would say that the top 10% of my chiropractic clients on average make around two million dollars a year, and their overhead is about 37, 38%. The top 10% of my dental clients are probably up around a million and a half, and I know they have a lot higher overhead, so I think as a general rule in my experience, I think chiropractors may be a little more outgoing, but having said that, I like the professionalism that the dentists really carry throughout their practice. They’re just a lot more professional, whereas sometimes-- chiropractic can range from on one end of they're really strange and bizzare, to the other end where they’re super, super scientific, very professional, almost too uptight kind of like a medical doctor like you mentioned earlier, so that would be my response to that question I guess. Does that answer your question?
Howard: Yeah. So, the top 10% chiropractors do two million a year in collection and have a 38% overhead, so they would net 62% of that. And, so what’s 62% of two million?
Ken: About a million three.
Howard: About a million three?
Ken: A million two and a half. A million two-four, two-six.
Howard: And the dentists; your top 10%, they collect adjusted production, a million five hundred thousand, but the average dentist runs 65% overhead, so the top 5% of lawyers is a high number too. What percent of Americans will see a chiropractor each year versus a dentist?
Ken: You know, I can’t answer that question.
Howard: Okay, what I’m reading is that each year, and I say it’s about 5% of Americans will visit a chiropractor, and about half will visit a dentist.
Ken: That seems reasonable, that seems pretty reasonable.
Howard: So, when you look at the average dentist marketing campaign and promotions, what do you think of that, what do you think of what you’re seeing out there?
Ken: Well, without trying to insult anyone, I think most of the advertising and marketing campaigns that I see, whether it’s a chiropractor or a dentist, they’re pathetic, they’re terrible. They talk, specifically for dentists, they’re talking more on the technical side, more in the dentists would use versus-here’s an example, we talk a lot about social media, if you want to actually attract patients, your highest quality, the most qualified person you can get in your practice, you don’t want to talk about teeth whitening or veneers or things like that, you want to talk about the things those things will provide.
As an example, I know that I have some clients, and I guess their ideal patient that comes in for veneers is maybe a forty-five, fifty year old woman who’s just been through a divorce, her husband has ditched her for some younger gal, so she goes to get cosmetic surgery, maybe augmentation, maybe botox or whatever, then she’s looking at some dental veneers and on the high end, teeth whitening on the low end. But, mostly the veneers, but she’s not buying the veneers because she wants veneers; she wants self-confidence, she wants to feel better about herself, she wants an emotional injection. She needs an uplift of self-confidence and that’s how ads, and that's about campaigns should be crafted, so that they actually appeal to those emotional desires, those drivers if you will, that people have.
So, probably once or two a week I’ll get a postcard mailer or a giant oversized postcard mailer where the dentist is trying to compete on price, maybe offering free x-rays or this or that, and one of the things that I, I’m not adverse to free, but I think it’s really a bad idea to give away your services; it really devalues your services in the mind of your prospects. Now dentistry, even though I’m not a dentist, my wife is the one who introduced me to dentistry, she was an outside rep for Septident for many, many years. She actually took me to an event, and that’s the first time I met you, just very, very briefly, it was in Seattle at the convention, and you were speaking at some presentation, this is 2010, or 11, somewhere in that neighborhood, but I was just amazed at the lack of information that a lot of the people promoting marketing, that were marketing experts had when it came to dentistry, because dentistry offers, as far as health goes, I’m a health fanatic, but dentistry offers way more than it’s given credit for. All the diseases now that we know can originate in the mouth, from poor oral hygiene, I’m absolutely an advocate for dentistry not just to get clients but to promote it. It’s like chiropractic, I think it’s really undersold, it’s undervalued, which is unfortunate.
Howard: I always tell everyone there is one business I would never go into; it would be helping dentists advertise themselves. I would never want to go into a dental marketing business, because the dentist doesn’t measure anything. If you go to any dentist and say, “How many people land on your website each month?” “I don’t know.” “How many of them convert?” “I don’t know.” “How many people called your dental office last month that was a new number that hasn’t called your office?” “I don’t know.” “How many of them did your receptionist convert to come in?” “I don’t know.” “How many treatment plan presentations did you present?” “I don’t know.” “How many of those did you convert?” “I don’t know.” “So, what do you think of that new marketing company?” “It didn’t do shit.”
Ken: There you go.
Howard: It’s like, no way man, I’d only want to sell dentists something they can hold in their hand and count. I’d want to be like the donut man; “Here’s a baker's’ dozen, you bought twelve, I gave you thirteen, let’s count them out and I’m going to leave.” Because, they’re going to give you an F and not know that you got an A on your job, you got an A on the funnel, and then they failed all the way down.
Ken: If I had one problem in working with dentists, and I no longer exclusively work with dentists; I work with a lot of high converting businesses, high profit margin businesses.
Howard: Like what?
Ken: Chiropractors, a person that owns a glass company, they do construction glass, I work with a tree nursery, not a baby nursery, I work with a person who owns a Facebook marketing company, she’s actually the, she’s my regular host, I have a show called, “The Get Clients Now,” podcast, not Get Clients New, but Get Clients Now, I do that show where I interview people. This Friday I’m going to have Robbie Kellman Baxter, she wrote the Membership Economy, it’s a New York Times best seller. So I have guests from time to time on that show, and then every Friday we do an episode called, “The Facebook Fridays,” and so Debbie Ward is my guest on that, so she owns a Facebook marketing company, actually she’s called the legendary Debbie Ward because she’s phenomenal with Facebook, but to your question about dentists, I think it’s across the board.
It’s pretty rare that I come across a business owner, it doesn’t matter what industry they’re in, it actually keeps stats, but the one problem I think I could say across the board that was my biggest challenge in working with dentists, and still is to this day, and that’s why I’m very selective about who I work with, I don’t accept most people who apply to work with me. Dentists like to, from my experience, and this is very limited, but dentists seem to like to want to get everything to the office manager or the staff, and then my take on the staff, at least my experience has been, “Hey listen, if he’s going to be bringing more patients in here, I want a raise.” But, at the same time, a lot of these folks are real busy on, if it’s taking me off of Facebook or social media when there’s time in between patients and I actually have to do something, I want to get paid more money. So, for me personally, number one; I think having staff like that is pathetic, they don’t really respect the dentist. The dentist, male or female is due the respect.
When you're there at work, you should work. It’s like an inconvenience if they’re asked to do something, and that’s not all of them, but that gave me enough of a sour taste in my mouth and I’m now kind of on the watch for that. But, I do find that my best clients that are dentists really do take an active role in the process of making sure they’re not doing all the work; they’re doing dentistry. But at least they’ve got their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in their office.
Howard: Nice. Do you and your wife have any children?
Ken: I have three children, my son is twenty-five, he’s going as we speak, he’s texting me, he’s flying up to Gonzaga to get his Masters, he’s doing the ceremony this week. My daughter, Emily, she’s twenty-three, twenty-two, she’ll be twenty-three, she just graduated from Ball State, went to her graduation last week.
Howard: Ball State in Indiana?
Ken: Ball State in Indiana, yeah.
Howard: That’s where David Letterman went.
Ken: Really?
Howard: Yes.
Ken: How is David, I haven't seen David for a while?
Howard: He’s pretty neat, he hasn’t shaved since he quit his show, so he looks like MOses with the ten commandments, he’s a neat guy. Any of them going...and what’s the third one going to do? Any of them going to follow you into chiropractic?
Ken: You know, I don’t think so, but my youngest one is fourteen, she’s going to be a freshman, but she is on one of the top-ranked soccer teams at the academy level in the entire midwest, and so this last week she had her tournament, they haven’t lost any games this year which is remarkable. I’m really proud of that, and the coach is awesome too, but this weekend I have to take her to Indianapolis, I have to go back to Indie for that tournament. This week has actually been really, really crazy, but we travel all over the place, so that’s kind of why I’ve set my business the way I have, so I can travel and just have time when I want it.
Howard: Well, my hypothetical question was that, if you had one kid, and they’re at a fork in the road, and they graduated from college with a degree in biology and said, “Dad, should I be a chiropractor or a dentist?” What would you tell them?
Ken: Dentist.
Howard: You’d say dentist, and why?
Ken: It’s a lot easier to get patients, and given the fact that I know how to market, there would be no problem for them to get new patients whatsoever. They’d probably end up making a lot more money, they’d be looked upon with a lot more respect. Admittedly, I was a specialist, chiropractor of biophysics, I niched my practice so I saw patients who had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue while I was in practice, I didn’t treat those conditions, but I worked structurally. We take radiographs to verify or to justify care. I would take post x-rays to show the patient that three-dimensionally their spine had been corrected, and x-rays are two dimensional but we take opposing views. Long story short, I referred often to medical doctors, I worked with an orthodontist, I worked with dentists because a lot of the problems from headaches can come from bites, and so my chiropractic peers, a lot of them, really looked down on me because I would dare to send someone to an MD, or not so much the dentist, but an MD. If they needed some sort of medication, they had a problem with that. But, my average patient I would see for twelve months, three or four times a week until they were finished, and then I had a four to six week waiting list to get in to see me, so marketing really could do it. I wasn’t the best chiropractor, I just learned, I was fortunate to have a father-in-law who really understood marketing. He came here from Germany with a hundred dollar bill in his pocket, and he died a multi-millionaire, so the guy taught me a lot.
Howard: The same with dentists though, I remember one time I was on American Airlines, no it was on Delta, and they said, “Is there a doctor in the deal,” so I unhooked my deal and I walked over and I said, “What’s going on?” And they go, “Are you a doctor?” And, “Yeah, I’m a dentist in Phoenix,” and they go, “No, no, we want a doctor.” I thought, okay, you’re a flight attendant. So, the flight attendants were attending to this person, and the dentist was sent back to his chair. I just thought, un-flipping-believable. ANd people always have said to me over the years, “Dentists, that’s not a real doctor.” I say, “Dr. Pevre wasn’t a real doctor. Dr. Seuss wasn’t a real doctor, Dr. Dre is not a read doctor.” People are just done. But what pisses me off, and I wrote CNN letters on this, is that they would bring in Bernacki and they’d call him Ben. Ben is a doctor. I understand that the media thinks that only an MD is a doctor, but you can have a doctorate in law, they’re called lawyers, there’s doctors in history and English, and you’re a stupid journalist and when somebody has a Ph. D. from MIT and economics comes into your damn show and call them Dr. Ben Bernacki, because your stupid opinionated news show, you are almost setting this up like it’s his opinion. But, it’s not his opinion; he’s got eight years of college from MIT, he’s a doctor of economics, and his thesis was on the great depression. Then you’re having him talk and then some other journalist weigh in on what he thinks. I don’t care what the other idiot journalist thinks about what Dr. Ben Bernacki just said about economics. But anyway, I have to say the same thing, I’d say in the last year, Ryan how many in the last year, how many chiropractors, pharmacists, naturopaths do you think have been inside my front room?
Ryan: In the past year?
Howard: Yeah.
Ryan: About a hundred.
Howard: It’s really great marketing, because when I invite physicians over to barbeque of go to dinner or whatever, the response, first of all it’s almost nothing. 100% of the chiropractors in Ahwatukee and the naturopaths and the pharmacists that I invite over to my house for a beer show up. And, the other dentists, I can't believe, in any other industry you wine and dine the value chain. You wine and dine. Do you know how many people in Awatucki routinely go to Walgreens and CVS and say, “What’s best for a toothache, would you get Anbesol, or would you take Ibuprofen or Excedrin?” And they go, “Dude, call Howard. I have his number in my iPhone,” and then they’ll Facetime me, and then they’ll hand me the phone and I’m sitting there in my underwear looking in this guy’s mouth going, “Yeah, that’s totally abcessed, you totally have to pull it.”
But the chiropractors and the pharmacists and the naturopaths, I really think that they feel emotionally traumatized from the bullshit from the MD’s, and then the dentists who respect the MD’s, they always respect MD’s for other people. Because when a dentist goes to the doctor and they say, “Hey dude, your cholesterol is high, you need a Statin, your blood pressure is high, you need this, your weiner don’t work, here’s an erectile dysfunction pill.” They go, “No, no, no, I know what I gotta do; I need to start exercising,” they immediately turn into a naturopath. So, the dentist, all of my dentist friends turn into a naturopath as soon as something goes wrong with them, but then they tell their patients, “Go to the physician across the street, and you need to get on a Statin and a high cholesterol and a high blood pressure and switch from Marlboro to Marlboro Light, and try to switch from Bud to Bud Light, and try to sit up from the couch to walking around the block.” And then when it happens to them, they’re like, “Screw polypharma, I’m going to get my shit together and listen to these guys.”
So, let’s say your daughter did go to dental school then. And dad said, “Don't’ worry, when you get out I’m going to get you some new patients,” when she graduates and opens up her dental office, what would an effective dental marketing program look like and function like?
Ken: It’s certainly multi-faceted, there are a lot of different components to a successful dental marketing program. Number one; I hear and I read a forum specifically, they’re asking questions about, “Is this guy with SEO good?” Or, this or that. It’s multi-faceted, so number one I would say, “It has to be multi-faceted, so number one I would say it has to be automated, and I can expand on that in just a second. Number two, you’ve got to have a website that can convert.” The majority of dentist websites, they all look alike, and if you want to stand out, first of all you want to be found, and we’ll come back to that. There’s ways to get found other than being on the first page of Google. Actually, you go find the patients that you want through PPC, but your website, if you want to be noticed, imagine that you are a leaf on a tree Howard, what color would you not want--well, I don’t know if they have trees down in Arizona where you are, but here in Missouri we have lots of trees, if you were on a tree an you were a leaf and you wanted to be noticed what color would you not want to be in the middle of summer?
Howard: Well, I know you’re going for me in saying I wouldn’t want to be green, but how you should have phrased that is say, “Howard, if you were a prick on a cactus, what kind of prick would you not want to look like?” But, anyway.
Ken: So, that’s my point; they all look alike, they all talk in technical terms, there's not a lot of, I don’t want to say all, obviously it’s not 100%, the vast majority, they’re not engaging, they don’t stimulate emotion, they’re selling based on the merits of a clinical standpoint verses from an emotional standpoint. The websites aren't’ really set up to collect leads, so you should do lead generation and pull people through an automated system so that by the time they get to the point of wanting to schedule an appointment, they’re already convinced that you are the person to see, and they’re predisposed to say yes to your treatment program. A quick example, when I lived in Portland, I went to Portland for a very short period of time with Lisa with Septodont for about a year and a half, then we came back, but I had an injury and I hurt one of my teeth, and the dentist that I had been seeing wasn’t in, so I drove down and saw another dentist, and I said, “Listen, this is the only reason I need to appointment?” So what did I get? I got a treatment plan for eighteen thousand dollars when they knew ahead of time that I had another dentist, this was a chipped tooth from an injury and they tried to sell me on eighteen thousand dollars worth of dental care, and I didn’t resist, I sat and listened to the whole thing and I thought, “This person doesn’t get it.” Because I’m not a qualified candidate for that particular service. They didn’t warm me up, I didn’t express any interest or anything else. I think dentists would be able to sell a lot more, and I don’t know if selling is a bad word in dentistry but you convince your kids to do something, you’re selling. You had Ryan come in and start the show for you, you sold him on the idea that he better get his butt in and get everything set up for you so you can walk in and and sit in you chiar. So sales is not used car sales; sales is persuasion in a very ethical way. So, having a website that is, number one, effective and that it speaks to the emotions of people, that it’s optimized obviously so that the onboarding process of people visiting your site. And then SEO is certainly very, very important. You have to have SEO, if all else is equal, sure, why not be the top, page one of Google, but that’s very difficult to do because other people are competing with you, there’s a whole lot that goes into that. THen lastly, you’ve got to have a sales staff including the dentists, I know most dentists don’t like to talk about money, and maybe they shouldn’t. That’s something I can’t answer, but the staff, if they understand how to use very persuasive communications, how to actually talk to people. Dr. Bob Chiovini, he’s actually not too far from you, he’s the Regent Emeritus Professor at Arizona State University, he wrote the book--
Howard: Yeah, he was my instructor when I got my MBA from Arizona State University.
Ken: Super smart guy, and the book Persuasion, and there’s a lot of persuasive language you can use that activates what I call genetic buying triggers that persuade people ethically, they’re never going to do anything that they just wouldn’t want to do, like you can’t get somebody to do something that ethically or morally they would never do, it’s not like that. But, it’s really to help people make decisions, we’re not selling cocaine here, we’re selling dentistry which is great for people, it’s awesome, it’s necessary. So, if the staff could learn how to use persuasive language and how to communicate with people in a way that really made the process effortless and then they walked the patient through, number one with automation through a process so that by the time they get to the office, obviously you have emergencies, I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about more high-end services. They’re ready to go, you know?
Number one, I had a twenty-five dollar refundable deposit in order to schedule an appointment with me, I don't’ care if you were referred or not, you had to leave a deposit. Number two, I had a waiting list, I had an application process to be able to see me. Why did I do that? Was I the best doctor? No. I did it for positioning, I did it for the psychological aspect, by the time they got to me. I also had a ninety-two minute, which was actually neanderthal now, but my first video testimonial, social proof, websites should have tons of social proof, that way you as the dentist don’t have to sell your services, you let your patients share their success stories with you. Here’s an example; I was terrified to go to the dentist, and then my sister Mary got me to go see Dr. Smith, and after doctor smith I will never again be afraid to see a dentist as long as it’s Dr. Smith, that’s one example of an outcome based testimonial using social proof. They should have as many as those as we can on their website on the office. But, my patients, actually before, well, new patient prospects would receive a VHS tape, a 92-minute VHS tape with well over a hundred and fifty different patient testimonials on there that are outcome based, and as a result of that, people would come into my office and when I go in to see them and I would schedule them at the busiest time of the day when I had all these patients to adjust, because again, the psychology of that is, “Hey, this guy is really busy.”
When I came back for the reports, I did group new patients and group reports, so I would see five new patients at a time. Well, how in the world could you do that? I would go over all the generic information, so I didn’t have to repeat myself five different times, I did five new patients once a day, and then I would split them up individually, I would send one patient with my x-ray tech, I would send another with an assistant and then I would go with another one and we could move then through very, very quickly. So, it’s all about social proof, it’s positioning. You really must control the mental processes of the people coming in if you want them to say yes to your care. Just popping a huge treatment plan down on a patient rarely works when they come in for whatever.
Howard: You’re right, dentists freely admit that they hate selling dentistry, that they didn’t go to years of college to be a salesman, and I love the way you said that sales is just persuasion in an ethical way. You sell your child to brush and floss their teeth, you’re persuading them, and it’s amazing because the dentists who take the sales process seriously, they totally misunderstood Peter Dawson when he’s saying, “You only need fifteen new patients a month.” Well, Peter Dawson, those fifteen patients, they were qualified, they were referred, they were presented with big treatments, and you couldn’t do fifteen big cases a month. The dentist there says, “Well I need fifty of sixty.” Yeah, because you don’t convert half of them and the other half they were doing one-tooth dentistry, so yeah, that’s very interesting. Do you think they should hire a dental marketing assistant or hire an outside vendor?
Ken: I think it really depends on the individual practice, but a dental marketing assistant I’ve never heard of anyone talk about that before, and actually that’s something I’ve been working on for a long time, it’s not quite ready to go yet as far as being publicly introduced. Dental marketing university.com, it’s not actively up and running yet but a dental marketing assistant in my mind, in many instances going to be a better choice because number one they’re going to be trained, number two they’re going to be certified, number three they’re going to have a vested interested in the success of the practice because profit sharing. I am a big proponent of profit sharing. If the person does their job well, listen, as a dentist, if you don’t do your job well, you don’t get paid. But your staff still gets paid. If you don't have patients on the books, they still expect to be paid, and so I’m all for not giving raises not necessarily based on time with the dentist or actually with me, I’m all for performance based bonuses and profit sharing, so when you’ve got someone in-house whose intimately aware of all the nuances and all the subtleties of the practice, the dentist, the dislikes, the likes, I think that person could really tailor the program much, much better, on a more intimate detail basis so that the kind of patients that they’re pulling in, number one are going to be more ideal. The kind of patients, one of the things that too many doctors do in general, whether it’s a dentist or a chiropractor, I rarely work with MD’s, I worked with a couple.
Howard: Now the couple you work with, they were probably cosmetics, the non-insurance, the non-medicaid medicare insurance?
Ken: Yes.
Howard: What did they do?
Ken: I had one guy that came in, two were cosmetic surgeons and the other one was an integrated medicine doctor, and he was actually in Tulsa. It turns out the guy bailed out of his- he ended up, this was well after I stopped working with him, but he was doing bad things and I think the medicare people didn’t like what he was doing and so he ended up bailing out of his twentieth story building penthouse to I guess avoid embarrassment.
Howard: Can you send me that Medscape article yesterday on the….Medscape posted an article about physicians now have the highest suicide rate of any profession in the United States.
Ken: That’s crazy. That’s crazy. But, having said that, with a dental marketing assistant, or someone in office who is qualified, I think the dentist can actually have his hands-on, that’s something I would strongly, strongly suggest, like finger on the pulse at least so you know what’s going on. It’s like, I would never let somebody do my marketing, and I would never give somebody control of my check book unless I was watching it very, very closely. I know embezzlement is a big, big problem in the dental industry, it’s in chiropractic as well, and that’s because that again goes back to the problem I talked about earlier, the dentist saying, “Okay, you’re going to work with Sally or Mary or Sherry.” Wait a minute, you hired me, and so I’m having to try and communicate very technical, very important decisions with a person who really is adverse to the idea of doing more work, so that would be a problem. But, as far as someone in the office to help a dentist, there are a lot of qualified people that can do a lot of really good services. I know you had the people from the profitable dentist back in April, and I really, really like what those guys had to say, I used to read their magazine, I don’t know if the magazine even comes out anymore, but I’ve read copies when Lisa worked with Septodont, but he made a good point; the older gentleman, the first guy you talked to, was it Woody, Dr. Woody?
Howard: Yeah, Dr. Woody Oakes.
Ken: Yeah, he said that he learned very early on that if you want to be successful, go, watch, if you learn this from Big Tony, Tony Robbins, I call him Big Tony, but it’s called mirroring, so you watch what someone else is doing, and if you copy that, you’re going to to get similar results. If everything is essentially the same, you’re going to get very similar results, and so having someone in the office that is there 24/7, not literally, but you know what I mean, they’re there all the time, full-time, could actually be less expensive than outsourcing and paying outside vendors. Sometimes no, a lot of instances I think it’s a better idea.
Howard: Well, incentives matter, I mean we just had the World Economic Forum a month or so ago, even China, they’re slowing down and they’re realizing big time that a state-owned company is not as efficient as a privately-owned company. And, everybody has been asking CHina to open up with trade, and everybody said, “They’re never going to do it,” well actually, they’re going to do it because even they realize that when America didn’t let any foreign cars people sell, GM had 50% of the market, Chrysler/Ford had the other half, and their cars sucked. I tell these young kids, when I was little, in Wichita Kansas, on a Saturday when you walked down the street, every third garage would be a couple of guys in there trying to fix their damn Ford. Then when they opened up and started letting Japanese come in, and everybody was laughing at their little Datsuns and their little Volkswagens and they’re like, “What do those guys make, riding lawn mower go-karts?” And, they slabbed GM from 50% market share to 30% market share, and now a Ford F150 is actually a damn good truck.
Ken: Yeah, it is.
Howard: So, incentives matter, that’s a spinoff when you talk about the dental marketing assistant, they have incentives. If your office doesn’t have any incentives, if it doesn’t have a bonus plan, then you believe in state-run Soviet Union, Communism, China, I mean incentives matter, it’s the hallmark of economics that incentives matter?
Ken: Your staff sees you making, they’re working harder, you’re seeing a lot more patients, and you’re making money, they’re not stupid, they know what you’re making, and bottom line, they’re bothered by the fact that they’re really working hard for you and not benefitting from it? I’ve had a couple people say to me, “Why should I pay them, I’m not going to give him any of my profit.” They don’t understand that you’ll get the performance of your staff if they’re worth keeping will dramatically improve. If they have an emotional interest in emotional ownership of the practice, so they don’t literally, they’re not responsible for the bills and things like that, the overhead, but listen, they have a direct impact on how much money they can make over and above what their base is. If you have the right person in your office, they’re going to really work hard and they’re going to make you a lot more money, and your office is going to run a lot, lot better.
Howard: So, when you talk about marketing, you talk about marketing automation.
Ken: If you don’t have marketing automation, then essentially you’re doing rationary marketing, you come in on a Monday, you look at your schedule, it’s pretty light, and you’re like, “Where is everybody?” If you have an automated marketing system set up, first of all, dentists, at least in my experience, do a poor job and chiropractors as well, this is universal for almost all business but we’re talking about dentists, so it’s not unique to dentistry but I’ll just say, from what I’ve seen, they’re not real good about generating leads, so generating a lead that you can move through an automated funnel, so as an example with social media, produce something you could talk about, not about the benefits of having dental veneers, you could talk about how to emotionally give yourself an uplift after a tragic divorce or something, I’m just throwing things out. So you write emotionally compelling content, you put it out there in the marketplace, you track leads, you get people tapped in, they give you permission to email them. Then again, you don't just start emailing them, “Hey, come to my office, here’s a twenty dollar discount, here are free x-rays, here is free teeth whitening.” People are repulsed by that, they’re getting hit by that every single day.
You have to literally, it’s like a relationship with, like my wife, the beautiful and talented Lisa, as I refer to her on my show. I had to court her, I had to build that relationship, imagine when you were - you talk to Woody about marrying, that dentists, women dentists were better at marrying than men, and men go out and they marry the prettiest girl from the Waffle House they can find, so I thought that was great, and an analogy I used, whether I’m doing a live event or whether I’m online doing my show, as I say, “Listen, imagine if you were sitting across from a gal, it’s your first date, and if you’re a lady, imagine it’s a guy and on your very first date you’re having coffee and she leans across the table and says to you, “Listen, we’re having such a nice time, I can’t wait. When we’re done with our coffee, we’re going to head on over to my moms house, my parents house, you’re going to meet my parents and from there, oh by the way, I’ve already written out the names of our five children we’re going to have and after we leave my parents then we’re going to drive over to the house we're going to live in, and by the way, here are some pictures of the sweaters that I’m going to knit for you that you’re going to wear on Christmas.” And so, this gut response would be what? You’re looking for the door, you are literally, hey, this person is a whack job, they’re moving too fast, I’m out of here.
And when we actually do that with our patients, as an example, I go in for an emergency tooth injury from falling off my bike doing a faceplant, and I’m being asked to accept the treatment plan for eighteen thousand dollars when they already know I have a dentist? Mistake. That’s why dentists, they’re not converting nearly as many patients, but if you would move people from an automated system so that you’re not physically doing the work, the work is done on the front end when you create all the messaging, whether it’s the email series you send out that goes out in an autoresponder, whether it’s the lead magnets, or articles, things like that that are really compelling to people that they want to get their hands on. It’s not clinically driven, ti’s emotionally driven. Talk in terms of how to get hired in the job, things that are important about getting a job, and it doesn’t all have to be related to dentistry, but you tie that in. Hey, listen, if you like this, if you like this article, you can actually get this thing here by simply visiting our website, putting your name and email address, or just your email address or whatever, and then click the thing and you can have this cool thing which will help you get a job easier and better, so it could be the list of ten things to help you get a job, help your chances, increase your chances of getting a job. One of those could be teeth whitening, or whatever, so that’s how you approach this; you move them through the process, automation does it so that by the time these people get to your office with an appointment, just like they were with me, this was awesome to be able to say that patients would say to me, “Dr. Newhouse, I just know your’e going to be able to help me, I’ve read all of your literature, I watched the testimonial video, I just know you’re going to be able to help me.” Do you know how powerful it was Howard for me, just empowering to me to be able to say to them, “Listen Mary, let’s not get the cart before the horse. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don’t even know if you qualify.” Listen to my words, “I don’t know if you even qualify for my program. I haven't done an exam on you yet. You may not even qualify for my program, and if you don’t, then I’m going to have to find you someone who is going to be best suited to serve your needs.” And people at that point are selling me on why I should accept them as a patient, that’s how good marketing is set up and automation, I didn’t have all the automation, this was all done manually. I paid people to actually send this stuff out, now it can be done through automation. Facebook ads, Facebook is literally the premiere place to buy attention, it’s the most affordable place to buy attention on the planet. Facebook has more information on you and I then probably the central intelligence agency does. They have unbelievable amounts of data on all of us, and so, you could go into your practice, see who your ideal top 10% of your patients are that you want more of, get all the data points about them; are they married, single, do they have kids? It’s just weird stuff you would never think about. Do they own dogs, are they dog lovers? What do they do for recreation? Literally, and you look for all the commonalities and then you plug that into Facebook, you create lookalike audiences, and from there now you’re targeting, you’re sending targeted ads to people who are the most highly qualified, direct mail just goes to houses, what a waste of money. “Yeah, but I get patients out of it.” Yeah, you’re sending out postcard mailers for free radiographs, for free teeth whitening or free exam, what’s your time worth doctor?” Your time, unfortunately it’s a time-based business, I don't’ like that model, that’s why I don't’ practice anymore but, I like to leverage my time, but I think you understand what I’m saying; by the time someone walks into your office, they should be ready to go. Yeah, some people will say no, but virtually everybody that gets in your office should say, “I’m ready to go, let’s do this, I’ve gone through your entire process, I’m ready to go.
Howard: Facebook owns Instagram, and Google owns YouTube, and then there’s Amazon, and what’s funny is, when I was little and they wrote the book like 1984 and they were all worried about the big government putting cameras in your house, and who was it? It wasn’t the government, it was the gosh darn free enterprise capitalists, and they turn on your microphone all the time, people put Amazon Echo in there and they don’t understand the gazillions of conversations being recorded.
Ken: Everything you say is being recorded, everything.
Howard: Yeah, because what they’re doing is, if you’re talking about, “Well we should go to Disneyland on Memorial Day,” they’re registering that, but you also could be saying a lot of intimate thoughts that I could be having with my cat and they would be recording that. But back to Facebook, and that Cambridge analytical deal, do you think that’s going to..., the World News or somebody who was a credible source said that they think 9% of Facebook users in America deleted their account. Do you believe that, do you think this will have a material impact on Facebook or do you think the Americans will forget about it?
Ken: Short-term, well, people are willing to trade, I’m astonished, I’m on Facebook for business, but I’m never on Facebook for personal, ever.
Howard: Same here.
Ken: I find that people are willing to trade, even Gary Vanertruck, Gary V, when I talk to him, people are willing to trade privacy for access, to save time, think of Uber, who would have ever thought Uber would have worked? Well, people are willing to trade access to save time and for convenience and things like that, so in the short-term I think it might probably make things a little more difficult, maybe raise prices a little bit, but still, hands-down, Facebook is without question the best source, the cheapest purchase, the place where you can buy the attention of your ideal prospect for the least amount of money, hands-down. It is absolutely phenomenal what you can do on Facebook. Do I think it’s going to cause some people to leave? Who cares if 10% of the people leave? Who cares. There are so many people on Facebook.
Perry Marshall once said, he wrote his book on Facebook advertising, he said, “If you’re a business to business, Facebook is probably not good for you.” If you’re business to consumer, but quite frankly, that was a long time ago, he’s dead wrong. I’m sure he’s changed his tune by now. Facebook is awesome for virtually any type of business, especially for a service business provider, a professional like a dentist, a chiropractor, for what I do, Facebook is, it’s not the only, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, but certainly it is, I’m amazed at how few business owners in general, especially professionals, don’t utilize all that is available. It seems like when something that comes out is relatively new, or it doesn’t matter if it’s effective, people are, dentists specifically, are very gun-shy about adopting anything, so they’re really still in a postcard mailer, direct-mail era and direct mail does work, under the right circumstances, but it’s a huge waste of money. Maybe some of the younger dentists, unfortunately they don’t have the kind of money that they would need to hire me, but it seems like a lot of the older folks, like I’m fifty-two years old, and you’re about my age, you’re about the same age?
Howard: I’m fifty-five.
Ken: Right, you’re different, and I wanted to say this up front; I am absolutely just very impressed with what you’ve done with Dentaltown, I know you have staff and things like that, but listen, you have done more to advance dentistry than, I don't know dentistry like you guys do obviously, but I can’t think of anyone - you’ve created a platform that brings all these people together and the magnitude of what you have done, I think goes unrecognized because just trying to build, in my instance, a membership site just for a hundred people, I’ve limited myself to a hundred very successful people and quite frankly, and yes I’m getting hammered continually with people saying, “Add us, we want more, you’ve got to add more people in there,” but you’ve got like the vast majority of the dental profession and what you have created is overlooked, and I study very successful people and I have to say that more so than anything else, doing this podcast is because I wanted to meet you and talk to you and I wanted to tell you how impressed I really was. I am an astute marketer, I’m really good at what I do, and what you have done Dr. Farran is absolutely, I think history is going to actually demonstrate over time the impact that Dentaltown has had, you’ve brought all the different clinical, marketing, you name it. All these different, the platform you’ve created, yeah, I’ve got suggestions of what I would like to see on there, and I think you could monetize, but it’s your site, it’s your deal and listen, I don’t think I could have done it. I just don’t. You’ve done something remarkable with Dentaltown and I wanted to interject that and just throw that in while I had you here.
Howard: Well thanks, you’re too kind. One thing that is pretty cool is, I’m 100% Irish and we launched it on St. Patricks day, 1999, and Facebook wasn’t until February 2004, so it was good vision, we’ve done good. But, I want to, you were talking about Facebook, my homies, they’re all driving right now. So, what I do is I retweet my guests, so your Twitter is @growhackersent and you had, I just retweeted to my twenty five thousand homies on Twitter your last tweet which was, “Get clients now, Facebook Friday's, how local business can use Facebook to expand their reach and make more sales,” and it’s to your iTunes podcast, how local brands are using Facebook to expand. So, you can subscribe to his podcast on iTunes and if you’re not on Twitter, he’s uploading these podcasts on Dentaltown too.
But you know what? I am a fan, I’m not a fan of Facebook, I’m a fan of, if I grow the audience, like Dentaltown and I make a post, anybody can get it. That’s why I like Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin. And I know Facebook owns Instagram, but the only reason Instagram still, like I have fifteen thousand followers on Instagram, if I make a post, they all get it. But, they’re only doing that because they’re trying to kill SnapChat, this is a vicious lion taking down an antelope, and the minute that little-
Ken: You’re going to pay. There you go.
Howard: I’ve tried pay to play before with women, and it just didn’t work out right, the police were involved. So, Facebook, I mean Mark Cuban is the one that first gave me the heads up on this, years ago he says, Mark Cuban says, “I spent a million dollars on Facebook advertising, building this tribe of a million people,” and then what does he do? It’s a bait and switch. Oh, now, if you want to post something, but it’s worse now because I have three hundred thousand Facebook followers, I wish they’d just knock the bullshit out and say, “Give me this amount and your three hundred thousand tribe will get it,” but it’s not even that game. It’s like, well do you want to boost it? No, I don’t want to boost it; I have three hundred thousand people following me and here is a podcast I did, I want them all to see. They’re following me, I can understand -
Ken: You can do that.
Howard: You can do that, how do you do that?
Ken: Absolutely, you just go on and say that, “I want everyone in my audience to see this,” and you say how many times you want this to run, how many days, and they’ll tell you how much that’s going to cost you. You can send that to every single person who has liked, you talk about people who have liked your page, people who are fans following you, absolutely you can do that, sure you can do that, absolutely.
Howard: I did not know that. Ryan, we’ll look into that. What I love about it, you know, the secret to lower price is lower cost, the secret to more profit is lower cost. I mean, the way that iPhone has been able to maintain not only that fee, but to only have a 36% overhead is amazing. I mean, when you hear these idiots saying, “Apple makes their phone in China,” dude, the cost of manufacturing the phone is 2%, 36% is everything, most of those people work in America, making the phone is nothing. But they're able to maintain those margins, so I always like Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin for those reasons.
By the way, on your deal, on this deal, where did you get the name Funnel Tribes? I understand the funnel, that’s what I was talking about. I’ve been telling dentists for years that, probably for every hundred people that land on your website, only three call. For the three that call, your untrained receptionist who puts everybody on hold and they go to voicemail only gets one of the three to come in. And the three people who come in with a cavity, you can only convince one to do it. I just say, “Just fix anything on that funnel! I mean anything on that funnel.” You can sit there, if three came in, if you doubled your close rate, because one will always buy because you're the doctor, one will never buy because they’re the ones smoking while they’re in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube in their nose. The next up the ladder is the receptionist. If three people call, put more sales people up there. Then, as far as the funnel, what you're talking about is the facebook ad, you’re pulling more people than the top of the funnel, but where does the name Funnel Tribes come from? Because people are so tribal.
Ken: Right, and so the idea of tribes comes with membership, because I believe that membership really is the holy grail of marketing. Membership is a forever client, customer or patient, membership is, you’ve got your, in this case, your patient is the central focus, everything else, your entire business is built around satisfying and serving that patient, so given there are a lot of challenges with creating membership with dentistry or chiropractic or any other type of professional service like that because of HIPPA, but yet there are ways to create membership so you keep people in your practice longer. The cost of new patient acquisition is the death now of a lot of practices.
If doctors would focus more on maintaining and focusing on the relationship with their existing patients, so they can move them, again I talk about moving them up the funnel so that you can get them into those higher, more lucrative, profitable services, there’s a process for that, but just continually going after new, new, new, new at all cost is crazy. So the whole idea of Funnel Tribes was using marketing automation, very sophisticated marketing automation, I’ll say that. So I talked to a lot of people and they talk about funnels and this and that, they’ have no idea really what they’re talking about, this is really, really sophisticated what I’m talking about. You understand me, but I think most of our listeners probably don’t.
The Tribe part of it is; hey listen, the best way to create a business, whether you’re in practice or whether you own a business, whatever, as your coach or your consultant, is to create a tribe to have a membership platform. My friend, Robbie Kellman Baxter book, The Membership Economy is phenomenal. I loved her, actually I suggested to her that I wanted to mention to you that you might want to have her on the show. Her book is a number one bestseller.
Howard: Fix us up. I’ll do it, just call me and Ryan and we’ll do it.
Ken: Love it. She’ll be one of your best interviews.
Howard: What’s her name?
Ken: Robbie Kellman Baxter. She wrote The Membership Economy but she’s just one of the people that I know that do this, but it’s a great read. It’s one of those books that if you buy the book, it’s not a one time read; it’s a manual you can go back to over and over and over again. The whole idea of Funnel Tribes is, using marketing automation, sophisticated funnels, it’s a membership platform that I have where I work with clients to help them grow their tribes and we use automation to do that and also, one of the key cornerstones that I teach is sales control, which is persuasive communication. You know Bob Chiodini, Bob said, Dr. Chiodini said on multiple occasions, especially in his latest book, Persuasion, that most of these triggers are unconcious to people. And so, for probably a year I wouldn’t release Sales Control because I was just torn between, “Hey listen, if I release this, people could literally use this to manipulate people. But then again, I’m an avid outdoorsman, I’m a big bow hunter, but I also like to bird hunt a lot, and I own weapons, I own guns, and I don’t go out and shoot people with them, so that was really, for me, the thing.
I’m working with professional people here, I don’t accept most of the clients that apply, and dentists are doing tremendous work. It’s a tremendous service that you can do for someone, it’s just not the smile, the health benefits of dentistry, the long-term benefits of good oral hygiene I think are grossly understated and grossly under-utilized in communicating to patients and just the general public. Not on the doctor-patient level, but just in public, but having said that, the whole idea of being able to communicate with your prospective patients or your existing patients in a way that is very, very helpful to them, but at the same time it’s never pushy, it’s never overbearing, it’s never sales-y, it’s a way to really help them, and it’s subconscious, so it’s not pushy at all and quite frankly, it’s not hard to learn, but literally they’re called genetic buy-in triggers, there are triggers you could literally flip the switch in your patients to get them to say yes. Now, you can’t be incongruent, so you couldn’t be a total cheeseball on one end and use these things in their work, no, there’s a lot to it.
You have to be likeable, just things that Bob teaches before, but there’s so many more that have been discovered. I work with, I’ve worked with Bob, I work with Dr. Kevin Hogan, I’ve worked with Paul Connor from Emotive Analytics, he’s here locally. This guy does research for huge Fortune 500 companies on emotional triggers to get people to buy, so he helps them through research craft better advertising. These things are being used in advertising, constantly we’re being bombarded with things. You mentioned having your conversations recorded through these devices, well why do you think some of these ads pop up when you're online? Not just from the stuff while you’re online, but it could be from the things that your device inside that you talk to records and it automatically integrates that n. Data is being collected on us at every step in our lives now.
Howard: Dude, I’ve seen this in my own life, like I’m visiting my kid, right? They’re watching this show, I forgot what the show was, it was some T.V. show, and then I go home, and I go out back on my patio and open up my YouTube browser, and guess what the first video is? That movie, and I wasn’t talking to them about it, my phone was in my pocket.
Ken: But it was never off.
Howard: You could have sent me a text, and it’s like, my entire life, YouTube never served up that video, and I must have talked to my kids thirty minutes during this movie, and now that’s the next thing prompted on my phone. And I also, another dentist, you think this is true or false, because you never know if they’re kidding you or pulling your leg, you said he left his phone home, and switched the channel to UniVision, the Spanish channel, and left it on Spanish channel all day long, the phone was just on, no apps were open, and when we came home, his ads being served up were in Spanish.
Ken: Yeah, whether he talks or not, your iPhone, actually any smart phone is going to communicate with devices, any device in the room, so if it’s a smart device, and most of the new T.V.’s that come out now are smart devices, data is being collected. It’s very overwhelming, and if you really stop and think about it, it’s kind of scary. But, in the interim, if we don’t want to think about the scary aspect of that, we can think about the fact that we can utilize these tools to really help serve our communities.
Howard: And thanks for the referral, any of these hot guys that you think would help my homies, refer them to me and Ryan. I opened up that Amazon, The Membership Economy, find your superusers. Master the forever transaction, build recurring revenue, and that Membership Economy, and she’s also calling the the recurring revenue, look at what’s happening on wall street. I mean, the street right now is valuing Netflix and Disney at the same value, and Disney has got parks and movies and all these assets, and now Disney is starting to realize that they’re in that old deal where they try to get a new product and sell it. Launch a movie, and the first day it has a hundred million dollar opening day or whatever, whereas Netflix just keeps, wants to be dinging everybody for twelve dollars a month. And they’re building that recurring revenue, and that recurring revenue, it’s like, I don’t care if you're a little old grandpa and you're eighty, if you just keep taking one step at a time, and just keep getting those, people looking at that recurring revenue.
Ken: Look at gym memberships. Gym memberships; recurring revenue.
Howard: Some called it “subscription model,” some called it “recurring revenue,” but yeah, the recurring revenue, and you're starting to see it in dentistry, where a lot of dentists are really turning their office around by going against insurance and saying, “We’re going to have our own insurance plan. Give us your credit card, we’re going to ding you.” But, they’re doing it all wrong, how they’re doing it is they’re just a slower sale where you pay this much for the year for an individual, or this much a year for you and a spouse, or this much a year for you and two kids, and then we’ll do all this stuff.
And I said, but then at the end of the year, you’re back to zero again, and you’ve got to start all the sales again. Get the business, when you ding their credit card, my friends that own a gymnasium say that the data on national gyms like lifetime and all that stuff is that when they get you, they ding your credit card, and almost all stop coming within eight months, but it takes almost thirty-six months-
Ken: To cancel.
Howard: Because you’re driving to work thinking, “I need to cancel that gym membership,” but you're a human, you’re busy, you’re forgetful, you’re driving, but by the time you actually get around to cancelling your gym membership, you haven't walked in there from month eight to month thirty-six, so the Netflix, like I don't’ even know if I’m subscribed to Spotify, I thought I was, and I asked my accountant one time, “Do you see a five dollar Spotify?” Because I don’t use that anymore. So, who even knows? Spotify may ding me five dollars a month until I drop dead. I just want to know one thing, we’re out of time, we’re three minutes over, can I ask you just a couple more overtime questions that we didn’t get to?
Ken: Sure.
Howard: You talked about Facebook, but the data I’m reading is that the two biggest searches in the world are Google and YouTube, both owned by the same deal. Would you put all your eggs in Facebook or do you also like Google and YouTube?
Ken: No, no. I would never put all my eggs in one basket. I think I mentioned that a little bit earlier, so you mentioned Instagram and Twitter and so on and so forth, it depends on who your ideal new patient prospect is, where are they going to be found the most? But, as far as buying attention, I would start with Facebook, I would adwords is very competitive, it’s very expensive.
Howard: Now adwords is a YouTube thing. Is it a YouTube or Google?
Ken: Google adwords.
Howard: So that’s Google adwords, do Google adwords work on YouTube also?
Ken: Yes, well it’s different, so I would not throw out YouTube as well. As many ways you can touch people, as many ways as you can be found, I would do that. But, I wouldn’t jump all in, I would start with one and then slowly add pieces.
Howard: You start with Facebook, what would be your second one, would it be Instagram or Google?
Ken: Instagram, really the average age of an Instagram user really doesn’t lend itself in my opinion to sixty thousand dollar, I don’t even know if that price is right, but what’s a full amount, a really good one, a hundred grand? I don’t know.
Howard: Twenty five thousand an arch.
Ken: Okay, so fifty.
Howard: Fifty grand if their whole mouth stretched.
Ken: I don't’ think that you’re going to find a whole lot of fifty grand full mouth patients on Instagram. Are they there? Sure, but not in the higher levels that you’re going to find them on Facebook or Linkedin, I mean, that’s professional people, you’re going to find it’s more expensive to run ads on Linkedin, but I would certainly target Linkedin if that’s the kind of people you’re looking at, so you really have to look at the cyclegraphic and the demographic attributes of the particular person that you want to target.
First of all, the big mistake that people are making is that they don’t have an ideal new patient avatar or a customer avatar or a client avatar. You need to know so many different intimate things about these people, so that you can plug this data in. Otherwise you’re wasting money and your ad spend, you’re wasting your ad spend. If you could really narrow it down by looking at all the commonalities, take the top 10% or top 5% of your patients, look at their commonalities, not the differences, and then plug that data into Facebook, LinkedIn, Google adwords, YouTube. Like, you’re on YouTube, you create videos, so people watch these things.
People like to consume information differently. Some people are visual, some people are auditory, some people are kinesthetic, they like to read, video is awesome but not everybody can sit and watch videos, so that’s why podcasts really rank, I think, the best as far as disseminating information because people can listen in their car, they can listen at the gym, they can listen while they’re on their riding lawn mower, they can listen while their wife is watching the Flea Market Flip. My wife watches that, and the beautiful and talented Lisa watches that and I can’t stand that show, I think it’s a big waste of time, so while she’s watching that I’ve got my headphones on.
Howard: Well, we are out of time because their brand is an hour, but do you know, if we’re talking about marketing and advertising, we should mention the greatest dentist marketer of all time, and you said you liked bow hunting?
Ken: Yes.
Howard: Yeah, and it was Walter Palmer, all you’ve got to do is go shoot Cecil the Lion, and you will get more hits on your website. In fact, his servers were crashed, so I think you should come to Phoenix and lend me your bow and we’ll go down to the Phoenix Zoo and I’ll shoot like a rhino, and I’ll make the evening news.
Ken: And you’ll be in jail.
Howard: I’ll have all these new patients.
Ken: And PETA will come knocking at your door.
Howard: So, should we shoot a rhino or a penguin?
Ken: You know, I just would rather shoot a really large elk or a really large white tail.
Howard: All right. On that note, seriously man, it was an honor for you to come on the show today, I know my dentists, I know them like the back of my hand, they want to learn about dentistry and bone grafting and implants, and this is not the hat they want to wear, but it’s the hat they have to wear, or they’ve got to get a spouse to wear, or an office, somebody has got to keep the house in order, and I keep telling you dentists, “If you get poised for growth, and you’re profitable, you can buy all the toys you want. You can spend the rest of your life going to laser courses and implant courses, and you can go to Dominican Republic, but as soon as your business house is not in order, you’re not going to have any fun anyways.” So, do the business first, get rich, get your house in order, then play tooth.
Ken: Awesome words.
Howard: And I get it. Okay, thank you very much, I hope you have a rockin’ hot day
Ken: Thanks Doc.
Dr. Newhouse’s work, it completely blows everything else that we’ve ever done with Google out of the water.
I have been looking for a way to grow my presence online and have spend thousands of dollars with folks who give all sorts of promises, and it’s really been hard to see. And what I’ve viewed from Newhouse’s work was something that certainly is faster than anything I’ve seen before.
And you can grasp the seriousness of the topic at the same time, so I think that that makes it very powerful and impactful. He says he’s going to do something, and he does it, he does it in the timeframe that he says he’s going to do it in. It’s exciting, which is kid of nerdy, but it’s very exciting. When you talk about the results that you're going to get, and you can believe his word because he follows it up with actions.
Our office, our main thing is being cutting-edge, and I thought that marketing through the internet and being at the top of any kind of search engine was definitely a benefit. It is now, and it will continue to be even more and more beneficial to businesses. Dr. Newhouse is direct, he’s to the point. He tells you what’s on his mind, and he backs his words up. From what I know now, from working with him, I think he’s passionate about his work and he backs it up 100%.
My name is Joyce, I have a national advertising business that specializes in driver recruitment advertising, the transportation industry. Our clients typically are trip driving or transportation, truck driver companies, nationwide carriers. I was introduced to you through LinkedIn, and they have a business profile where you could do a contest, to select people from LinkedIn that you could choose from to see, they would do a referral pilot program. It's Been amazing to work with you, because you have delivered results and value and really keep your promises and have put my business on a fast-track to reach the goals that we want to reach. I have worked with other people in the past, and they have not delivered the results or not delivered to this level, and not to expedite it in speed and quality that you have delivered. Within two months’ timeframe, we have acquired new business, new clients, that you have assisted with and helped with the ad copy and copywriting and positioning and the website, developing of a website. I would definitely recommend Ken Newhouse for business development for someone who is serious about growing their business and that their heart is in it, and passion, and they can have, can make the time, and make it a priority and that’s what they really want to focus on; growing their business. I think that your results are based on the numbers and it will at least double the sales, quadruple the sales, in a very short time-frame.
It’s been amazing working with you, Joyce has become very independent with things, she’s taken the bull by the horns. What you give her is what we need to do, so we’ve been doing that.
We’ve actually attained a new client in the process of that, and we get new clients, and most definitely you are quite the asset to have for our business.
I feel like I’ve finally found what I was looking for, but I never really knew what I was looking for, because I never knew enough about the subject matter. So, I was always grasping things previously, but I felt I was finding the complete package. The one thing I really liked was it was just like talking to a friend, he was very easy to talk to you one-on-one, and very easy to ask questions and get direct answers. YOu are very direct. Not wasting any time, giving good examples to help understand the subject matter.
I also got online and checked some of the other doctor’s websites and saw how they were performing, and thought that it looked like it would be worthwhile, but I was ecstatic, it was great. As far as the Internet marketing aspect to it and just having a good, solid presence on the Internet, I was blown away.
I really liked it, it opened my eyes to what I’m missing out on. How people are looking out and what’s available to them at their fingertips, so that’s what I wanted to be a part of, to have that exposure out there and that’s what you guys were showing me, and things that I connect on right now you’ve given me a kind of a cookbook, “Here’s where we’re going, let’s get this started,” and you guys have been good with me on that, and that’s what you need to get started; you need A, B, C, let’s do it like this and get going.
What I liked best is you offer something that no one else has out there, which is a pretty comprehensive approach about marketing, understanding systems.
You have a great energy. It’s really innovative, cutting edge information, the technology, and that’s just, no one’s ever heard of it before, we know we’re on the ground floor of that, and we’re excited about it.
I would, it’s a different world, you have to have different tools, it’s with the Internet, you have to have different strategies. You cant’ get stuck in how we’ve done things, so it’s a fast-changing world. Actually, just very needed, it’s all over news now, how Yelp and Google, how they, I forgot what the term was, but you really feel like they’re holding you hostage with those reviews. And it’s been all over the news and the newspapers, and you can’t do anything about it, and that, but there’s a way to fight back and not let them take advantage, not let them just rule how your office is being presented. I like that a lot. But then, coupled with, I’ve had a consultant, sometimes two or three at a time, that’s how much I believe I don’t know, I dont’ have the answers and looking to experts to bring in how to do things better, but what I liked, one of the things you were saying was pretty direct, so I liked that we were getting straight answers, no BS.
I don’t know how many people you’ve had consultant-wise work with you before, but I can assure you that Ken is not going to be like those people, Ken, when he sets out to implement something, it’s implemented, so give Ken a chance to show you and prove to you that he is different than many other companies that are out there.
If somebody asked me should they use Dr. Newhouse’s team, absolutely, because you’re going to get the important information that you need, very, very quickly. And not have to wade through a bunch of stuff to get to the meat of the subject. I deal with a lot of people who are professionals, a lot of consultants. The thing I like about Dr. Newhouse is that he cuts to the chase; he doesn't waste my time.
It’s worth your time. Ken does exactly what he said; he will give you more than you bargained for. As I said, it’s a worthwhile investment of time and money.
On a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, I would probably go with nine.
As a general dentist of twenty-five years, I’ve been approached by many consultants throughout the years that said that they could do wonderful and amazing things for my practice. Ken will help you bring all of the pieces together. Give Ken a chance, you won’t be disappointed.
Other people have come in that said they were going to do things, and it didn’t take place, Ken comes in here and says, “This is what’s going to take place,” and it’s happening. You need to hire him because he’s going to do everything he says he’s going to do. We didn’t believe him in the beginning, but he did, and now all of the employees have turned around. Yes, definitely hire him.
I think you should hire Newhouse because he is thorough, he investigates the whole problem, not just bits and pieces of it, and puts it all together.
Get our name out there so they get the opportunity to let me help them. On the Internet, on the different marketing techniques, I’ve never experienced anything like this.
Yes, we’ve had other three companies in the past, since I’ve been here, who said they could fix things. It was never taken care of. The last three or four months I’ve been working with Dr. Newhouse and his team, there’s been a lot of positive, there’s been a big difference, positive things. We’re getting a lot busier.
Within the last three months, we’ve actually doubled. New patients only, we’re probably averaging ten, twelve, and now we’re, I would say we’re close to twenty-five to twenty-eight.