Dental practices, like any business, need to generate revenue in order to cover their expenses and make a profit. These expenses can include the cost of equipment and supplies, rent or mortgage payments for the office space, salaries for employees, and marketing and advertising costs. Additionally, dental practices may also have to pay for continuing education courses, licences and insurance.

By generating more revenue, a dental practice can increase its profits, which can be used to expand the business, improve services, invest in new technology, and even offer bonuses or raises to employees. Additionally, generating more revenue can also provide the practice with financial stability to weather economic downturns or unexpected expenses.

 

1.) Generate More Sales by Selling Dental Products

Generate sales more by selling dental products within your practice. You can sell to your regular patients that come into the practice for their dental appointments. As dental practices are able to access discounted dental products from dental reps and their companies, you can display a variety of dental products such as electric toothbrushes, medicated toothpaste, mouthwashes, interdental brushes, braces cleaning and wax kits in the dental reception or the waiting room. 

Get the dental staff team to help promote and sell these products to increase sales on a monthly basis. This will generate a steady income on a monthly basis for you and your dental practice. As many of these products will heavily relate to the treatments the patients will be receiving at your clinic, this will help sell the dental products easier and bring in more revenue.

Recommended Reads: 7 Ways to Upsell as a Dentist

2.) Promoting a Dental Plan to your Patients

Promoting a Dental Plan to your patients will benefit the patient as well as generate a regular income for the dental practice. There are a variety of dental plans available that can offer great benefits to your patients at your dental practice. 

Simply Health: Denplan is a dental health care plan; From just £11 a month, the plan covers routine care, treatments and emergencies:

  • See an NHS or private dentist of your choice 
  • Claim back the costs for your regular dental check-ups 
  • Get money back for dental treatment, accidents and emergencies

 A monthly care plan will accommodate a variety of patients with a wide range of dental issues.

The dentist will be able to assess their oral health plan; this will help the patient to be better protected from upcoming costs of dental treatment that they may incur in the future. A regular hygiene visit that is incorporated into the plan will help the patient to reduce the number of visits to the dentist, meaning more time is spent on selling treatment and preserving the patient’s overall oral health.

Alternatively, you could even look into creating your own in-house dental plan that will generate additional income without any extra costs. Please keep in mind you will have to ensure it complies with all laws and regulations to not only protect your patients but also your clinic. 

Having a reliable and beneficial dental plan is an excellent way to generate revenue for your dental practice, as this will become a regular source of income for your dental practice.

Dentist Promoting Additional Services to Patient

3.) Investing in New Skills & Technologies

Investing in new skills and technologies by the Principal Dentist, with the latest advancements in dental technology available on the market, will mean you can reduce time spent on dental treatments. This will free up more surgery time for the dentists, allowing their time to be spent with more clients, which means more revenue in return. New tools and technological advancement will help to increase the revenue for the practice and reduce the time it takes for the dentist to carry out dental treatments in the surgery. 

New technologies doesn’t always have to refer to the equipment a team uses; it can also refer to the education and latest discoveries in the field. New dental skills and customer training courses will enable the team to increase the overall income for the practice. The dental staff must have a good understanding of their patient’s needs and wants to be able to outline the benefits for the patients. Having a better understanding of their patient needs and their role as a whole will not only make surgeries and appointments more efficient, it will also help retain patients due to excellent services.

4.) Implement a Dedicated Treatment Coordinator to your team

Implement or assign a dedicated Treatment Coordinator on an employed or self-employed basis to your team. Employing a dedicated staff member to explain treatment options and answer questions regarding advanced treatments will save time and money. The treatment coordinator would be able to dedicate the time to explain the treatment to their patients in an informal setting. The patients will feel more relaxed and your team will have the time to sell and explain in detail the treatments available at the practice.  As well as alleviate all the patient’s concerns before going ahead with any major treatment plan.

This will allow you to help reduce the time spent by the dentist explaining the different treatment options available. This will help to manage and prioritise the surgery time more efficiently, where the dentist can carry out essential and advanced dental treatments, without overrunning their clinic. 

The dentist will save surgery time, as this will eliminate spending a long time discussing treatments during surgery hours, which will mean you can see more patients throughout your busy day or week. This will provide the patient with a dedicated service to discuss the pros and cons of their treatment in a relaxed setting.

Treatment Coordinator explaining treatment with patient

5.) Develop Your Team: Employ a Dental Therapist

Employing or hiring a self-employed therapist would be a cost-effective way to reduce the workload for the other dentists in the practice. As they can work on a fixed hourly or daily rate, they would be able to take care of routine treatments and carry out general dentistry. This will free up more time for your dentists to carry out more advanced treatment plans that will help generate more income for the dentists and the practice they are working at.

You can offer advantageous incentives or commissions to your Treatment Coordinator or the Dental Therapist, to sell and promote high-value treatments to increase income for themselves and the dental practice.  

6.) Good Patient Care Practices

One of the most important goals for all dental practices is to ensure you provide and maintain good patient care practices within the practice.  This is essential for the growth of any business, as retaining the existing patient list will help your practice’s reputation grow in the area. Excellent customer service is vital in any business, so make sure you get this right.   

It’s worth getting your loyal dental patients to add a complimentary Google review, as these are essential to help the overall growth of your dental practice and help to get more patient referrals. Not only do amazing customer reviews show that you are an excellent clinic, but it will also help you rank better when potential patients search for a dental clinic in your geographical area.

This will hopefully mean that you will attract more patient enquiries and referrals as your reputation grows. 

7.) Invest in Marketing

Investing in marketing will be the best way to increase revenue for the dental practice and will help to promote your dental practice business to customers in your local area. A good website that considers the user experience and journey will help generate more leads and revenue. This is a good way to inform the public about what your practice is offering, such as restorative and cosmetic dentistry. This platform will help to advertise and promote offers to generate ongoing income in the foreseeable future.

Marketing can take many forms that will help you not only reach people in your local area but can also help convert people into patients. Whether you start making regular social media posts, create leaflets, pay for Google or Meta ads or use a referral scheme, any marketing efforts can help you increase your conversions, bringing in more revenue to your dental clinic.

In Conclusion…

As discussed in this article, there are a number of cost-effective ways and changes you can make to help generate more income for you and your practice. Depending on your budget, you can invest in a number of ways to help to increase the overall success of your business and increase revenue at the same time from making small marketing efforts, to upselling services and dental products to clients.

Recommended Reads:

If you want to learn more about how to grow your dental practice through your existing patient list, get in touch for a free consultation. Alternatively, view this case study of the results we achieved with Indigo Dental and how we helped the grow their turnover by 35%.