The ads weren’t the problem. Nobody owned what happened next.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency that sets up CRM and lead management for private and mixed dental practices across the UK and Ireland. We build automated follow-up by email, SMS and WhatsApp, write call scripts, train reception teams, set up appointment reminders and report on enquiry-to-consultation and consultation-to-treatment conversion. Systems connect with practice software such as Dentally and Boxly where supported.
An enquiry is just someone putting their hand up. Between that moment and a patient sitting in the chair there’s a phone call, a conversation about price, a booking, and usually a fair bit of thinking time. Any one of those is a point where they can drift away.
A proper CRM gives that whole stretch some structure. Every enquiry is logged, followed up and tracked through to treatment, so you can see where patients come from, where they stall and what your marketing is really bringing in. With private treatments that people take weeks or months to decide on, that structure often decides whether the diary fills.
Everyone wants to talk about the ads. Almost nobody wants to talk about Tuesday afternoon.
An enquiry lands at 2.14pm. Your nurse is chairside and reception is on the phone to a supplier. Somebody screenshots it into the WhatsApp group with a thumbs up, and there it sits.
By the time anyone rings back on Thursday morning, that patient has phoned three practices and booked with whoever picked up first. You never find out. It just shows up as a quiet month.
We’ve audited practices spending £4,000 a month on advertising with nobody responsible for what happens after the form. The campaigns were fine. They were just being poured into a bucket with a hole in it.
Fix the bucket and your existing spend starts working. Sometimes you don’t need more leads at all.
It’s worth saying plainly, because this is the part principals worry about. Nobody at your practice is failing. Your reception team is answering phones, taking payments, rebooking patients, chasing lab work and calming down the man in the waiting room, all at once.
Asking them to also run a structured follow-up process from memory, between patients, isn’t a fair ask.
The system does the remembering, and the reminders go out on their own. The script means nobody has to improvise on the price question. What’s left for your team is the part they’re already good at: being human with a nervous person.
Most teams like it within a fortnight. The ones who resist usually turn out to be the ones who were carrying the whole thing in their heads.
Enquiries rarely vanish in one go. They slip away at a handful of predictable points.
Response time is the biggest single factor in whether an enquiry converts. Not the same day. The first hour.
“How much are implants?” answered with a number and nothing else ends the call. Answered properly, it books a consultation.
Someone books three weeks out, hears nothing and quietly decides not to bother. No reminder and no nurture means a no-show.
They came in, liked you, said they’d think about it, and nobody followed up. Most practices have dozens of these a year.
Circumstances change, but almost nobody goes back and asks again.
We set up the systems, scripts and training that turn enquiries into attended consultations.
An automatic text and email goes out within 60 seconds of an enquiry. It reads like a person wrote it, not a marketing blast, and it buys you the time to ring properly.
Open rates that make email look broken. We send treatment information, finance options and a video from the clinician, and give people a real reason to reply.
What to say when someone asks the price, how to handle “I’ll have a think” and how to book the consultation rather than promise to call back. They’re written for dental, not adapted from a double-glazing template.
Two live sessions with your actual team. Most of them have never been trained on this and are doing brilliantly without it.
Text and email in the run-up to an appointment. It’s the cheapest fix for no-shows there is, and roughly half of practices still don’t have it.
Eighteen months of low-key contact for people who weren’t ready. It’s occasional and useful rather than spam, and it books treatments a year later.
We track enquiry to consultation booked, booked to attended, and attended to treatment started. Once you can see which number is bleeding, fixing it is straightforward.
We’ll mystery-shop your enquiry process, time your responses and map where patients drop out between the form and the chair. Then we’ll show you what we’d fix. It’s free.
The most common causes are slow response times, inconsistent handling of price questions on the phone, and no structured follow-up after the first enquiry. Speed matters most, with conversion rates falling sharply after the first hour. Many practices also have no reminders between booking and appointment, which adds to no-shows.
A dental CRM is a system for managing patient enquiries from first contact through to treatment. It’s separate from the practice management software you use for clinical records and the diary. It tracks where each enquiry came from, records follow-up, automates email, SMS and WhatsApp messages, and reports on conversion from enquiry to consultation to treatment.
Within the first hour where possible, because conversion rates drop significantly after that. An automated text or email within minutes secures the enquiry before a personal call is made. Practices without an automated first response depend on staff being free, which varies with clinical workload.
Automated reminders by text and email in the days before an appointment are the most effective single measure. Confirming the appointment verbally at booking, explaining what the consultation involves and taking a deposit for higher-value consultations all help further. Practices commonly see no-shows fall substantially once reminders are automated.
