#212 Dentist: Systemization Comes Before Incentivization

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Discover how to scale your hygiene department without increasing your marketing budget. In this episode, Gary Bird & Colin Ambler reveal proven strategies to boost hygiene production, improve patient retention, and motivate your team through smart incentives and gamification. Learn the exact systems top-performing dental practices use to turn hygiene into a growth engine and drive consistent revenue.

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Website: https://teamcaredental.com/

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Dental Marketing Theory gives dentists real strategies to grow smarter and scale faster. Hosted by Gary Bird, founder of SMC — recently recognized as the best dental marketing company — the show features candid conversations with top dental leaders about marketing, operations, and what’s actually working in today’s practices. If you want predictable, profitable growth, this is your podcast.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So I think in order to incentivize, you kind of have to systematize first. We have to be able to track these things and measure them and attribute direct individual like effort. One of the first things that we do in this whole thing is that we systematize the whole thing. We make it so that you can easily track results. And then once you have the results, you can tie up an incentive to them. And that's like a super motivator for people. And we make it full automated. People get daily payouts all the time. It's super awesome, super fun for staff members. So the way we do the incentive is often $10 per patient. That's what the staff member might get. And people get 30, 40, 50 patients a month for this list individually. So they can get another five, three, three hundred, five hundred dollars a month.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Welcome back to another episode of Dental Marketing Theory. I'm your host, Gary Bird. I'm the owner of SMC National, where we help offices just like yours level the playing field against the big guys out there so you can grow the way that you want. And in 2025, you need to learn how to gamify the system. You know, your team is out there working every single day, and sometimes they're not doing the things that you want. If you want them to change their behavior, you need to motivate them to do so. Today I have Colin, who's the CEO and co-founder of Team Care Dental, and he's going to dive into how he's made his team do the daily behaviors that he wants by gamifying the system. This is a such a cool idea. And it's new to dental, but it's not new to business. This is something that I'm going to ask you to change the way that you're thinking as you listen to this podcast because it's going to bring a ton of impact if you listen to this and you follow through on it. So stay tuned. All right. We are live for another episode, and we're going to be talking about something that a lot of dentists will love. How to drive more hygiene, how to get more production out of your hygiene without spending more on marketing. That's like the holy grail. And Colin, you guys have put together a playbook on this. And the reason that you guys did that was because you have a product that helps dentists manage their incentives for their teams, right? And I I've seen this personally, and I've also seen this in the dental offices where you have people who are, you have all these different bonus systems going, all these different incentives going. And it's almost like a poly market inside of your inside of your practice, but it begets it gets really difficult to manage. So I want to dive into this playbook that you guys put together, which if people want it, the links right down below. It's free. And the three steps to growing your hygiene department without paying more money to your marketing. So if people want that, the link's right down below. But Colin, what did I get right about your company and what it what did I miss? And before we jump into those, that playbook.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Yay. Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me. I love your podcast. Super stoked to be here. I'm a practice owner. My wife and I, we have a facility. It's 14 operatories. We do almost 1300 hygiene visits in a month. Our marketing is not that proportionally big. And so this is something we know very well, and we've distributed it all over. Um, I think a lot of dentists probably kind of start out, you know, one of the buzzwords out there is like systemizing. And so I think in order to incentivize, you kind of have to systematize first. You know, we have to be able to track these things and measure them and attribute direct individual like effort. And so one of the first things that we do in this whole thing is that we systematize the whole thing. We make it so that you can easily track results. And then once you have the results, you can tie up an incentive to them. And that's like a super motivator for people. And we make it full automated. People get daily payouts all the time. It's super awesome, super fun for staff members.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Oh, so it's daily. So you can make it a daily incentives, a daily gamification.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah, whatever you earn goes into your account, and then on a daily basis, it just sweeps right into your bank account. And so as you earn different rewards on the platform, you just notice payouts coming into your account every day.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Which is really important because a lot of times, especially as entrepreneurs, we we really value long-term large payouts, right? So, like for me, I'm like, man, by 2027, my goal is to have this, this, this, and this. But what I've learned over the years is most people don't think that way. Most people think like this month or even this pay period. And so that's really cool that you guys have figured that out to pay out on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, super cool. I think, you know, there's people, I think a lot of what we've done has been kind of collected experience from hanging around the industry and in our own practice for so long. There was one guy I was talking to on our podcast who was like, and this was years ago too. He's like, my favorite way to incentivize people is to stand at the back door with a fist full of cash and just hand it to them on the way out because they wanted to receive that daily gratification. And he felt like it made them come back hungry harder next day because they wanted to get that money again. And I was like, you know what? I don't know if we can make these doctors stand at the back door with a handful of cash. But the technology, we can definitely do this. And so we chased after that, and it's like it's it's fully in motion, it's been up and running for six, nine months now, and it's super cool. It's just like people love it, and it just totally automates the entire process for the managers.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Is there a contract involved? No, month to month, month to month. Cool, cool, cool. Okay, so let's jump into this playbook that you guys put together. So basically, what you've solved, you could you could have given us a lot of different playbooks, but this one's pretty cool. So it's uh the hygiene growth playbook, three tactics to drive hygiene without uh spending more on marketing. And you get basically give us three steps. So the number one step is pre-appointment. So practices with a 97% pre-appointment rate consistently outperform other hygiene revenue. Why? It's because you're basically just getting these people to come back and that means more treatment. And so, what what kind of bonus system are you putting in place for something like that?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Yeah, so first we have a mechanism that every single patient coming through the office, you know, has this opportunity to confirm that they got pre-appointed. And so any staff member can go in, click two buttons, and what it does is verify that the patient has a future appointment. We find in real time, we say, okay, does this patient have a future hygiene appointment? Yes. And then we assign credit to that person who clicks the button. So whoever's logged in can get credit for doing this. And we usually reward, I mean, it's up to practice, but about $100 if your personal pre-appointment rate is above 95%.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Okay, so is and is that being paid out daily or how how does that how does that work?

SPEAKER_01 6:21

That one's a monthly one. We we collect it over time and it's a monthly one.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

So it's very small thing and it's just like a learned behavior. Hey, we got to get these people. And that's something you're not gonna lose your shorts on that by your team over. You know, there's some bonuses out there that you can your team can gamify too too well, and it ends up hurting you as a practice owner. This is not one of them. So if you're if you're setting this up correctly, you're more paying them to learn a behavior and then you just keep paying them out on that every single month. And then, but you're making more money as they do that. Any other tips on that before we move to step number two?

SPEAKER_01 6:57

No, I think I mean all of these hygiene-related ones are such a win. I think it's like, you know, this pre-appointment one, I think is the core of patient retention. You know, and in if you have a really poor pre-appointment rate, you're gonna end up having to market more and spend more in dollars, and you're gonna have to reactivate more patients that never got back on the schedule. And so this is like one of these foundational things that if you get your pre-appointment in check, it's gonna far outseed, uh, you know, exceed the the payout for it. It's like these, instead of six months coming back and trying to like replace lost patients, you're just starting with a full schedule and you grow from day one. It's like it's a beautiful thing. So, you know, we don't see this as a loss ever. It's like all these hygiene things are always a payout for the doc.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

That's sweet. Okay, so this part number two or step number two is reactivate. So obviously, everybody has a bunch of hygiene appointment, hygiene patients, or even unscheduled treatment that is just sitting on the sideline that nobody's doing anything with. And you know, it's funny because I know you run a SaaS company, I run a marketing company. So we have what's called an SDR, a sales development rep. And uh, what they do, all they do is that we have all these contacts that have reached out to us for one reason or another. Maybe they got a free resource, maybe they talked to us two years ago about marketing and they didn't sign up with us, whatever. And the SDR is just constantly reaching out to those people and checking in with them, like, hey, how are you doing? Is there anything that you need help with? Are you still looking? Did you figure out your marketing situation? And they leave notes on that. And that's their full-time job. Like that's their only job. And you they can't be distracted. If we give them other jobs, they won't do that job. And it's a, you know, it's just one of those jobs you just grind at and you just do it over and over and over again. However, in the dental offices, they don't have SDRs, they have hygienists, they have dental assistants, they have front desk people, they have that, you know, all the administrative team members. And what's interesting is like the doctors are always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, when you get free time, call all these people. And guess what happens? No one ever calls them. And so I love that you guys put together a bonus structure for this one because this one is like, I feel like no one would do this first. No one's gonna be like, I'm gonna start my day just calling people. Everybody's gonna be like, if there's time left over, I'll do that. But if you have a bonus system, they'll find time to do it.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And and this was another system, you know, it's like your SDRs, you know, they're probably working with some like CRM tool that helps them keep track of this stuff. Like demo software is never have that. It's like when we we've been doing this for years now, and this is probably our number one bestseller across all of our products, um, just because it's like it's it works so well and it's so trustworthy. But you used to have to like pull an Excel sheet from the PMS and like put it into, you know, columns and write notes and things like that. And just imagine like the pace that we've created with this. It's like anyone with any spare 10 minutes can log into the system and record 10 phone calls, leave voicemails, try to get people scheduled, and it keeps track of all the efforts. And the biggest thing with this incentive is that we only pay out the incentive once the patient has been seen in the office, like butts in seats. We don't reward attempts, we don't report masks just kind of like checking the box across all these. We're so tied into the the PMS systems that we can actually detect once the patient comes in, we can search back for who made reactivation attempts, and then we give credit, we give bonus only when that happens. And that really takes the risk out for the docs. That's what people love the most.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah, I love that. And so they're logging into your platform and getting these, just making these phone calls. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah, that's right. They like we we like to call it a living list. It's always responding to your dentrix, your open dental. If patients are breaking appointments, they're instantly on the list. If they call back and scheduled their appointment, they're removed from the list. Like we're only gonna call people that fit the criteria of like this person needs a phone call. And that list, we've we've really perfected that. It's so trustworthy. People just feel like if I have five minutes, I can go there and I'm not gonna overlap on someone else's efforts. And, you know, I know this person's due and I know they're unscheduled. I could just call them and offer an appointment, and it works great.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

And then so for me as the team member, now I'm getting paid every time one of those patients come back. So if I want to sit there and just crank on this, I can make some good money pretty quickly by getting these patients to come in. And then the doctor's happy because it's like, oh, all these patients that didn't do this treatment before, haven't been back in a while, they're all starting to come in now.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, I mean, we track all that from dial to dollars. We track who was involved in getting the patient back in the door, and then we count production dollars for the doc. You know, we want docs to know that it's worth their while. So the way we we do the incentive is often 10 bucks per patient. That's what the staff member might get. And people get 30, 40, 50 patients a month for this list individually. So they can get another five, three, three hundred, five hundred dollars a month. And typically what we see with this is that when that patient comes back in, they do their cleaning appointment and then they often need, you know, other treatment. And for about a hundred patients, we see about fifty thousand dollars. We see about in the in the world of observing this, we've done this across hundreds and hundreds of practices, it's somewhere between five and six hundred dollars a patient. And so when we position that to a doc, and and some offices are more, um, but that's what we've seen on average. When you say, okay, doc, would you would you pay $10 in order to get $600 back into your office? And it's like unanimously, of course. Yeah, easy.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

There's nothing in marketing that's going to perform that well because, and the reason is, and this is a rule in the business world, is it's easier to get more from somebody who already knows you than to get something new from somebody who doesn't know you. And so, like all these marketing patients, they don't know you. They don't know you yet. You have to build up time, you have to build up your reputation with them, trust, all those kind of things. And it takes time to do that. But if you already have people in your office that already know you, trust you, and for whatever reason, they just haven't come back in. If you can get somebody on top of that, that's huge and definitely makes a huge difference. Um, okay, so let's talk about step number three. So I love this. What you manage gets measured. So setting hygiene goals and coaching towards towards them. So setting up different goals. And then you had a couple goals here. So number one, reactivation conversion rate, 10 to 15%, and then reappointment rate. And then, so how do you do is this like an additional bonus that you would set up, or is this just like a scoreboard that you have that everybody's working towards?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

No, this is an additional setup. I think that you know, we we look at maybe two things. It's like the pre-appointment that you mentioned as the first part of the playbook is like a long-term strategy. That's making sure six months from now we're gonna have more patients than we did six months today. The reactivation bonus is a way to take daily action that's gonna help us tomorrow, the next day, like this month. You know, you can reactivate those patients and put them into the schedule ASAP. And the final is the monthly goal. And so we have a whole goal setting criteria, but we might say, you know, we want to make sure hygiene visits this month is 500 patients. And so if we exceed that goal, if and when we exceed that goal, everyone's gonna get an additional payout or an additional payout per patient that we've exceeded it by. And so I think there's like a different kind of motivation that happens there. It's like the reactivation is one thing, but then when people have this as like a little bit more kind of middle-term goal, they start to be opportunistic in the day. They're answering the phones, they're offering appointments that can fill the schedule today. Like they want to make sure that they're on pace and that we're gonna be able to hit the goal. And so, you know, we set the goal and we give them a really good visibility of every day, every hour, how close are they to being above or below pace? And when people see that, they can kind of adapt their behaviors. They're like, we're a little bit low. Let me find some family members, let me go reactivate.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So, what you're doing is you're getting them to think like an owner, because this is what owners do. But the problem is owners do it with lagging measures. Meaning we look at, as business owners, we look at the bank account and go, it's low, got payroll in two weeks, but that money coming in is a lagging measure. So then we go back up top of funnel and we go up to all the leading measures, things that are happening before the money gets there, and we start tinkering, right? And we're like, gotta fix this, gotta fix that. But if you can get your team to be thinking on these leading measures, like your hygiene reappoint rate or getting people to come back in that haven't been in in a while, that all impacts your bank account. So now you have them thinking like a business owner. That's really smart.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Yeah, that thank you. I mean, and and it wasn't, you know, me, but I definitely codified the process. You know, if you can accept that hygiene, just like you said, if you can accept that hygiene is the lending leading indicator, then almost let's gamify that. Let's put that under the microscope and let's let people really go after that because the rest is going to take care of itself. We're gonna diagnose, we're gonna do treatment, focus on hygiene. And then these little subsystems about pre-appointment, reactivation. And, you know, I think one of the beautiful things that this like staff-led kind of culture does is number one, it gets people excited about like reaching goals and just creates an energy in the office. And number two, everything we've done is is kind of intentionally always done on a leaderboard. And people have like this this exciting competitiveness about being in first place or checking the leaderboard to see if I've moved from third to second. It's like a little bit of this hunt. And so I think there's a really good balance between having these individual incentives and also these team-based incentives that are like hitting the hygiene goal. And people get to kind of like opt in and opt out and choose how much effort, how much they want to maximize their downtime with this. I think it's like a really fair system. The hard workers get rewarded more than the people that didn't work hard. And if people want to make more money, doctors have an easy way to give them opportunities.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

So you don't have to give as many raises, right? Like it's like, hey, you want to make more money? Yeah, it's performance-based. So you can you can all go make more money right now, and anybody can do that. I love that. Okay, so now getting to I want to cover and think through this like from another angle. Like, what other systems, if I use your software, let's say I own a dental practice, just give me some easy steps to be able to help my hygiene department. Again, if you want that, those three steps they're right down below with some scripting and different things, the bonuses and things that you can set up. Now, with that said, though, what are some of the other things that you would help me set up through gamification if I was to use your software that you already have kind of already cooked up?

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Oh, so this would be just to make sure I give a good answer. This would be outside of the scope of hygiene. What do we do? And in other words, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

So just any anything that you're gonna help me move the needle that it might be different that uh is helpful, is helpful.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Yeah, we we like to put those in three categories. One is hygiene. We talked about that. The other is bottom line related stuff like closing treatment plans. And the third is about reputation, Google reviews, social media posts, things like that. And so I love that. By the by the reaction of the, I'll go into the reputation based one. Um, we have two areas there. So one, we pull in every single Google review, and I think this is really cool. After we pull the patient, we match it up to that patient profile in your software, and we figure out who was involved in that patient's experience, which doctor, which hygienist, which front desk. We can pull all of these things out. And so we automatically give credit and payout in one motion to those staff members. And so a Google review hits, Google, patient gets it, and um almost immediately there's an email that gets sent out to the entire office that says, Mrs. Smith left a five-star review. Here's what she said. And the people that were involved in it were Colin, Gary, and Teresa.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

So your hygienist, your front desk person, your hygienist, and your dentist, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

And everyone got recognized in front of their peers. Like I think that's a huge, really powerful thing. People love to kind of have credit where credit's due.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

So they all get an email that, hey, you guys did awesome. Because it does take a team effort, right? You can have two, it's like I always think of like restaurants. You can go to a restaurant and have they seat you immediately. The food is like amazing, and everything's just like done properly, but then the service is bad. Or vice versa. Like you can have seated, timely, the best service in the whole word world, but the food is not that great, right? Like you got it for for me to love the experience, it all has to be good. Like all of the whole thing, right? And so that is something that I that I think about a lot with dental offices, is like a Google, a good Google review isn't just one person, it's a multiple people. So now I'm being recognized, and me and the team, everybody who touched them. And then do you give them like a small bonus each for touching that patient?

SPEAKER_01 20:08

On top of that, yeah. And I think that, you know, as a practice owner, like I would kind of get like frustrated by the fact that I would see these Google reviews. Like I was the, you know, my the profile owner for Google My Business, but like all of our people in the office were given the experience. And like, if I didn't send it to them, they didn't know about it.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

And half the time you don't even know who touched them as the the business owner. You don't even know who to send it to. You're just like, hey, good job, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Well, yeah, I would send it to the whole team. But then yeah, I would like to recognize, like distinguish who actually interacted with this patient. And and that's another leaderboard for us. You know, you start to count these things up and say, oh my gosh, like Teresa has nine five-star reviews this month. Like, that's amazing, you know, and and it's just another kind of criteria. I think managing staff is is hard. And if you don't have objective measures, like it's even harder. And and the PMS just don't kind of do that thing, they got too much other stuff going on. So yeah, we we really live in this world of like having these things systematized and having them be very quantifiable, um, and and leaderboards are part of it. And then optionally, you can kind of supercharge anything you want with an incentive. Like when people start getting paid for it, like then the systems really start to move freely.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

It moves uh without you pushing it, right? That's the it's uh the gas is in the tank, so to speak. So that's that's huge. Now, last last thing, if someone says, and this is like a big a big deal for a lot of people, I already have like a thing that my team calls from, a list that they call from. It's in another software. I already have the Google review thing set up and all those kind of things. Do you can you still use your platform for like all the bonuses and stuff? Or how does that work?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, so I think there's some other tools out there. I think PMS do stuff. We do write back into the system for like open dental people. Love Comlogs, Dentrix, people love office journal notes. We do make entries in there. I don't know if whatever people are using, I think they tend to drop it because they are not getting full adoption out of it and they don't know how effective it is. You know, if if you have some list, maybe it's giving you the patients' names, but it's probably not individually keeping track of who called which patients and putting them on an automated follow automated follow-up schedule. And number two, it's probably not bonusing those individuals for the results once the results happen. I think that makes us really unique in that reactivation game. And so I find that most people are, you know, they just they're they're okay to switch. I mean, we work directly with the practice management systems. I don't know what else people are using for staff-led reactivation efforts like this, otherwise, but I think we're like really one of the best in class at this. And I don't mean to be cocky. I just I think we do it really well. I think people are really happy with it. It gets so much use.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

Awesome. And then if someone wants to reach out to you and learn more about what you guys are doing, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

TeamCareDental.com. We we go there. You can either book a free trial and start immediately, or you can schedule a demo and you can see it first.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. This was a great show, and I learned a lot. And again, if you guys want that resource, it's right down below. Also, Colin's information is down below. Go check them out. This is different. This is a different way of thinking. This is how the rest of the world operates, but it's coming to Dental. So you might as well get it on board and at least consider it. Thanks so much, Colin.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Thanks, guys. Awesome time. Thanks for having me.