A little note on CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
I first saw that come to the fore when people still used BlackBerrys (age-appropriate; you might never remember them if you're young enough).
Straumann brought it into the sales team way back in the noughties. Some of the sales team revolted and resigned and went somewhere else that didn't have CRM, but it does make complete sense only if you do it properly and, nicely and kindly.
At its worst, CRM pressures a sales team to generate more sales, regardless of the ethics or impact on the customer. If you use it properly, it's an extraordinary service tool; it means you never let someone down (a patient in our case).
Let me explain…
If someone contacts you who may be interested in having treatment at your practice or services that you offer, note their name down in some way or another and continue to contact them to discuss the possibility of treatment with someone who's kind and caring and understands until they tell you not to.
So, people come to us for a consultation, we provide them with a plan, and they say they'd like to think about it. They go onto our CRM system, and they ask us to call them in a month, so we do. They say they're not quite ready; we ask, shall we call you in another month, three months, or six months? They say 3 months; we call them again in 3 months, and they say, 'Can you call me in 6?' We call them in 6; they say, "I'm ready", at least some of the time. If they say, you don't need to call me anymore; I'm having it somewhere else, or I've decided not to have it, we don't call them again.
What we say to patients is we will never let you down on service, but we will never oversell, and so, therefore, we don't oversell, but we just call people when we say we will to remind them and touch base.
In a previous blog I wrote on my own personal blog here about Mark Pollock, I talked about booking Mark as a speaker to open a new Clinic building. Mark's expensive, and I've not started building it yet, but I contacted him a while ago because he is extraordinary. Every so often, he contacts me and says, "How are things going with the building, Colin? Do I need to put a date in the diary?" That's CRM. He says to me, Please don't let me hassle you; I won't keep contacting you if you don't want me to. I say, Mark, keep contacting me, we're closer here than we were last time, we're nearly there.
That's what CRM is.
Can you do it properly, or can you do it badly, or do you not even do it at all?
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