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Data scientist and direct mail expert Parthiv Shah talks about a postcard strategy that appointment-based businesses can use to sell more of their leads.

Dentists who need help from Parthiv can go here: https://www.sellmoreimplants.com

Non-dentists can get his free marketing giveaway here: https://www.freegrowthsystem.com

Click above to listen to the 30 min audio.

Read Full Transript

Sean Corbett (00:18):
Hey, everybody. It’s Sean Corbett again, Websites.ca marketing. Very interesting episode for you this month. What I have is, I have on the president of eLaunchers.com. This is Parthiv Shah.

Sean Corbett (00:30):
He runs one of the premier digital marketing agencies in North America. He’s worked with the godfather of marketing, Dan Kennedy, and he’s a recognized expert in marketing funnels, physical mailings, and interestingly enough, recently he was invited to join the executive board of The International Academy of Ceramic Implantology.

Sean Corbett (00:49):
We have a really interesting case study today. He’s going to walk us through his case study of how he helps dentists massively grow their implant business, which should give you tons of marketing ideas for your own business even if you’re not a dentist. Parthiv, welcome.

Parthiv Shah (01:04):
Thank you very much.

Sean Corbett (01:06):
Yeah. Thanks for being here. Could you tell the audience a little bit about your background and experience with marketing?

Parthiv Shah (01:13):
Sure. I’m a data scientist and I come from the world of direct mail marketing. I have mailed more than a billion pieces of direct mail and I have worked for more than 10,000 projects. I have ran the same exact spreadsheet, same exact number 10,000 times or more.

Parthiv Shah (01:42):
My love for dentistry started when I was hired by a super dentist in Kennedy’s circle, and then he became a coach, so his coaching members started hiring me. In my lifetime, I have worked for 679 clients. Couple of hundred dentists, and it works very well out for me.

Parthiv Shah (02:10):
There are only two types of people on earth, Sean, dentists and non-dentists. Would you agree with that or not?

Sean Corbett (02:18):
It sounds like it checks out, logically.

Parthiv Shah (02:24):
You are either a dentist or you are a non-dentist. What we are going to talk about for dentists, can work for you if you’re a doctor of other body parts. Ophthalmology, hair, cardiology, pain clinic, cosmetic surgery, a chiropractor, physical therapist. Anything that does not require insurance or government to pay for it.

Sean Corbett (02:53):
Got it. Okay.

Parthiv Shah (02:54):
The system can also work for lawyers, financial advisors, coaches, consultants, anyone who makes money by appointment. The system is unlikely to work if you have a small ticket, or if you’re a retail, or a restaurant, or if you are an incident lawyer, like bankruptcy or personal injury.

Parthiv Shah (03:25):
The system that I want to talk about is a long-term nurture of staying in touch and indoctrinating. Those who say no today will buy tomorrow. If you are a kind of lawyer, I call unhappy lawyers. If you are an estate planning attorney, if you are a intellectual property attorney, if you’re an immigration attorney, the system is likely to work.

Parthiv Shah (04:04):
Put yourselves in the shoes of the dentist. How much time do we have, Sean, on this episode?

Sean Corbett (04:10):
Parthiv, we can talk as long as you like to talk. Typically, it goes about 30 minutes, but no problem going over if we really want to get into it.

Sean Corbett (04:19):
Actually, that brings to mind, really the first question which is that, if one was to approach advertising for dentists, I think one of the hurdles, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, would be, there’s a timing issue.

Sean Corbett (04:32):
If someone thinks they don’t need dental assistance, dental services, then it makes it a little bit more difficult for the marketer because now you have to put them on the list, and like you said, keep them engaged until the timing is right. Would you say that’s an accurate pain point to solve for you?

Parthiv Shah (04:48):
Yeah. That is true for any business. When you spend money on marketing, you’re going to drum up energy at the top of your funnel, but only a subset of that energy is going to come down to the bottom of the funnel, where you can pitch and close, and they can say yes and no.

Parthiv Shah (05:09):
Vast majority of them, more than 90% of them will get stuck at the top and in the middle of the funnel. You spend money on marketing, it generate leads. You don’t even get to pitch and close them.

Sean Corbett (05:28):
Yeah.

Parthiv Shah (05:32):
You want to push them along, and nurture them and educate them on the subject of, you have a problem and therefore your life sucks. Fortunately, I’m here and I have solved this problem before. If you believe this to be true, the following to be true, I think you will find, what I do to solve the problem really interesting.

Parthiv Shah (06:03):
I have written a piece of property that you might find interesting. I have a free report, or I have a checklist of, some kind of a lead magnet that I would like to share with you. That will help you decide what you should do, now that we have determined that you have this problem.

Sean Corbett (06:26):
I’m really glad you mentioned the lead magnet, because that brings me to my first major question. You have a very robust giveaway offer, and I think it would be helpful to talk to the audience a little bit about how you approached, putting together that offer from market research, from your past experience, that kind of thing, because you’ve assembled, not just a simple checklist giveaway, you have a very irresistible offer giveaway with lots and lots of facets to it.

Parthiv Shah (06:52):
Sure. Sean, you can see me on the video, but people can’t. I’m going to describe what you see.

Sean Corbett (07:03):
Sure.

Parthiv Shah (07:04):
I have two Two-Comma Club awards from ClickFunnels, and the second one came post COVID. I had to rebuild my revenues that I lost in COVID, because all the dentists and non-dentists were shutting down, they turned their marketing off. I lost a sizable percent of my revenue in two and half days in March of 2020.

Parthiv Shah (07:36):
I got 14 people, Sean. I gathered the crew and say, “Okay, nobody’s getting laid off. Nobody’s getting fired, and nobody’s getting their hours cut. Nobody’s getting their hourly rate cut. No vendor’s getting paid late. I’m going to have to look in the business, for us to survive and thrive.”

Parthiv Shah (08:00):
I went to Kennedy and Russell Martino and said, “Okay, guys. This is what happened. Make it rain,” and then we crafted an offer. That offer, Kennedy, I stopped losing money in August. I did 1.1 million in 2019. I did 710k in 2020. Significant drop, but I still didn’t lose money. In 2021, I did $1.2 million. That’s what the second offer, the second trophy is for.

Parthiv Shah (08:43):
My offer, my current, very well converting offer to non-dentist, same to the dentists is, take the system, take Parthiv out, put yourself in. Five funnels, one campaign, you can have it for free.

Parthiv Shah (09:04):
All you have to do is go to www.freegrowthsystem.com. You would be invited to take my funnels. They’re free. All you do is pay for software. You do have to pay for ClickFunnel … and you do have to pay for keep because that’s where the campaign is.

Sean Corbett (09:29):
Yeah.

Parthiv Shah (09:30):
I would give them to you at no charge. I don’t need to get paid. I only get paid if you want me to build you bespoke funnels, or customize my funnels with your story in it. This is the offer for non-dentists.

Parthiv Shah (09:52):
Dentists are attracted to it too, but what are you going to do with five funnels and a campaign, even within the sell path? For dentists, I have an even more irresistible offer.

Parthiv Shah (10:10):
You see, if you’re a dentist and if I want to grow my business by growing your practice, I have to grow your business. Now let’s talk about implants. An implant case would talk about $6,000 on an average. Some would charge less money, but then you have to pay for crown, if you have multiple implants. That’s $10,000, if you’re going to take all the teeth out and a put a full arch. That’s 12, 14, $15,000 in the U.S.

Parthiv Shah (10:46):
On average, an implant patient is worth about $6,000. You need 167 of those to make a million dollars in growth. Now, you know, if you’re a dentist and you’re not making minimum wage and not driving Corolla and living a doctor’s life, you need to be making about $300,000 per year, per day you work in practice.

Parthiv Shah (11:20):
If you’re working, say three and a half days, you need about a million dollars in top line production because that would yield about 300,000 in gross profit. If you’re willing to do that-

Sean Corbett (11:32):
Okay.

Parthiv Shah (11:33):
… you need to get more doctors, right?

Sean Corbett (11:37):
Yeah.

Parthiv Shah (11:38):
Now, patients say no all the time. They say no by filling out a lead form, but not booking an appointment. Booking an appointment and not showing up. Not showing up, and listening to you and then say, “I’ll call you back to schedule treatment,” or just say, “No, I’m not interested.”

Parthiv Shah (12:03):
When a patient says no, they’re not saying no to you. They’re not saying no to implant. They are saying no tonight.

Sean Corbett (12:17):
Yes.

Parthiv Shah (12:19):
If I can educate them, send them a book that you wrote, send your Shock and Awe package, a consumer guide to choosing implants. Show them a photo book. Send them home visit page out of my photo book that looks exactly like their case might, and tell them to come back, where we will answer your questions. In reality, they’re coming back to me for answering my question.

Parthiv Shah (13:00):
Are we going to have you do the implant or not? If you’re not going to do implant, I have two other options of, you could do a partial, you could do a crown and a bridge, or you could do an implant, to bring them back for a clinically sound, but fiscally attractive alternative, because doing nothing is usually the worst option, and most people go with doing nothing.

Sean Corbett (13:47):
Yeah. Of course.

Parthiv Shah (13:49):
They’re not going to go to another dentist and book an appointment. They’re going to live in the same tooth.

Sean Corbett (13:57):
Yeah. That’s exactly right, especially with dental work. It’s not always that there’s a competitor. Sometimes the competitor is their procrastination and willingness to live with the pain.

Parthiv Shah (14:07):
Exactly.

Sean Corbett (14:08):
Yeah. When you’re talking about … Just to give the audience a nice 30,000-foot view here, we’re talking about engaging these prospects who, maybe are not quite ready to buy now. You’re putting them on, what you said was a keep email list, and it also sounds like you’re giving them physical mail-outs.

Sean Corbett (14:28):
Wanted to just talk about, foundationally, about a couple of these concepts. One, we could, maybe talk about the online to offline and offline to online concept that some people might not be familiar with.

Sean Corbett (14:39):
I also wanted to ask you before we get into that. For this particular dental offer, what platforms, what arenas are you using to initially find those leads? Like you said, when maybe they say, “No, not right now,” or when they say, “Maybe,” how are you finding those people, initially?

Parthiv Shah (15:00):
My idea, a dentist makes between one and $4 million and looking to grow. If you’re making between one and four million, you already have patients. What I do is I look into Dental Intel. That’s a software that I use to find current patients, and see who is a candidate for implants, sedation, cosmetics, ortho, or Invisalign, where we presented the case and they say, “No.”

Parthiv Shah (15:40):
If I can find a few hundred of those … Look, if you have a million dollars in practice, you probably have 1,200 active patients and three to 4,000 inactive patients. That’s just not-

Sean Corbett (15:52):
Yeah. That checks out. Yeah. That makes sense.

Parthiv Shah (15:55):
If you have a two to $4-million practice or if you have two, three locations, the problem amplifies. I just look for several hundred current and past patients who I want to pitch significant dentistry.

Parthiv Shah (16:16):
Then we send them postcards. Three postcards, three days apart. It costs 60 cents to send a postcard.

Sean Corbett (16:27):
Beautiful. From those three postcards, then that’s where you get the maybes, the yeses, the no responses. Then that triggers the rest of your campaign.

Parthiv Shah (16:37):
I have 12 postcards that I leave. Appointment not booked cards. Let’s say you are using an agency to do Facebook advertising or Google Pay Per Click advertising. I don’t do that. I’m a direct mail guy.

Parthiv Shah (16:55):
I’ll tell you my direct mail strategy in a minute, but let’s say you give someone two and a half thousand dollars plus $1,000 in ad spend, and they’re going to generate 200 Facebook leads, for example. Cool, but we only have 14 appointments. After 14 appointments, only three people want.

Parthiv Shah (17:23):
Let’s get the physical addresses. I knew if I can buy the data, if I have the email and mobile number, I can match them to their physical address.

Sean Corbett (17:38):
You’re going to a list broker to do that, or do you have your own internal system for that?

Parthiv Shah (17:42):
I go to IDI. I am a list broker, so I have 100 different vendors that I use. In U.S., the data is very easy to get. Canada, it is little more complicated, but most American strategies will work in Canada.

Parthiv Shah (18:06):
I have appointment log booked postcards. There are three postcards. The people who book an appointment, those who don’t book an appointment. I have three postcards for appointment no-show, because a typical dentist would have between 30 and 40% appointment no-show.

Parthiv Shah (18:26):
People have fear and anxiety, and they book an appointment because they know they need it, and they don’t show because they would not rather not see you.

Sean Corbett (18:44):
Yes.

Parthiv Shah (18:46):
I have appointment no-show postcards. What do most doctors do? They make you sign a damn paper that says, if you don’t show up, they are going to bill you $65.

Sean Corbett (18:59):
Yeah.

Parthiv Shah (19:04):
There is this confrontational, semi-aggressive relationship between the doctor and the patient, where the doctor’s staff have an attitude of, “Oh, you are in here. Why didn’t you show up? More work for me.” There is an acute shortage of people. Be grateful to those who showed up, and give your insurance paper and make right that I’ll talk to you in 10 minutes. They make you sign a paper, a little thing where you put your name as to what time is your appointment, what time you showed up. The front office experience is not very patient-friendly.

Parthiv Shah (19:56):
There are reasons why people would book an appointment and not show. If you send your cousin to secret shop you, and if you can have that user experience taped and then watch it, you will know why you have appointment no-show. I’m not going to fix your staff, but I have three postcards that can go to people who book an appointment and not show, saying, “Hey, you booked an appointment. Something must have come up. Why don’t you come in?” Right?

Parthiv Shah (20:33):
The next sequence of postcard is appointment no-sell. You come, we sit. I tell you it’s $6,000 and you say no. Well, I want you to come back for a follow-up appointment, where another doctor in my clinic can give you a second opinion.

Sean Corbett (20:58):
Is that also the appointment where you send them home with some of the educational materials?

Parthiv Shah (21:04):
Yeah. I’ll come to that in a minute. Right now, I’m just talking about my 12 postcards.

Sean Corbett (21:09):
Sure.

Parthiv Shah (21:11):
At the appointment … Pre-appointment, we send them a Shock and Awe package. That appointment, I have a case presentation, a video that I walk in that, you walk out with. If you say yes, we FedEx you a new patient welcome experience box.

Parthiv Shah (21:31):
At the end of treatment, we will send you the end of treatment celebration box. If you give us a referral, we send you a, thank you for giving us a referral, box. There is the user experience, as in print, and everything is automated.

Parthiv Shah (21:51):
I digressed. I was talking about my 12-postcard marketing campaign. Appointment no-sell card is designed to have you come back for a second appointment.

Sean Corbett (22:02):
Yeah.

Parthiv Shah (22:04):
Not everybody will come in for a second appointment, but nearly everyone who come in for a second appointment will buy. Here is the genius. We call it neighborhood marketing cards.

Parthiv Shah (22:21):
If I a patient buys, you want to send a postcard to the neighbor here, neighbor here, neighbor in front, neighbor in back because the neighbors who live next door to your patient are same, similar age, demographic, psychographic, income, and are likely to have same home activity.

Sean Corbett (22:56):
Okay.

Parthiv Shah (22:57):
One thing I do is, you know in Facebook advertising, you do lookalike audience?

Sean Corbett (23:00):
Yes.

Parthiv Shah (23:02):
In direct mail, what I do is I take your 1,200 active patients. Per million dollars there are 1,200 active patients. I would find five to 10,000 neighbors of those active patients and send out three to six postcards in mail to those 10,000 people.

Parthiv Shah (23:26):
Here’s my gift to your audience, Sean. I took my entire lifetime of work on implant. It has 36 unique marketing ideas like this postcard. My Shock and Awe package, my gift presentation packet, my other marketing.

Parthiv Shah (23:49):
Any dentist who wants my implant marketing system that has these 36 marketing ideas, they can go to sellmoreimplants.com. If you are a non-dentist, you can take my five funnels and one campaign, and I’ll just give it to you, no charge.

Parthiv Shah (24:10):
Maybe 20 minutes, you … If you have ClickFunnel, I just copy it in your account. If you don’t, just start an account. Then if you can do it yourself, or you could hire anybody you want to hire, to get all the work done.

Parthiv Shah (24:29):
If it gets done, my staff can fix that haircut for short money, or you would hire my team to do everything, and I would get a client and a friend. If you accept my gift, I get a friend. I make a lot of friends, and a few of them become clients. That’s how I grow.

Parthiv Shah (24:51):
To close the loop that we’ve started at the beginning of the podcast, Sean, which is, “How do I come up with an offer?” Look what I just … I can share with you, my intellectual property. I am cheerfully giving it away, to build a relationship, establish trust, and hopefully a subset of those would possibly hire.

Sean Corbett (25:21):
Yeah. I mean, it makes complete sense. I would recommend that the listeners actually go to both landing pages and do both downloads because even if you’re not a dentist … The non-dentist one, again, we’ll put this in the show notes, freegrowthsystem.com.

Sean Corbett (25:36):
For the dentists, sellmoreimplants.com, but I would personally recommend that even if you’re not a dentist, you go to sellmoreimplants.com, download it, look at what Parthiv is doing because you’re going to get ideas for your own business one way or the other if you pay attention.

Sean Corbett (25:53):
Also, before I give it over to you for the final thoughts, Parthiv, I wanted to make sure I highlight something so that no one skips over it.

Sean Corbett (26:01):
You had a very interesting, very profitable, but more importantly, very efficient answer when I asked, “Are you getting the leads?” The answer for people who missed it, was that in most cases, if you’re a semi-successful to successful business, you already have a list of customers, ex-customers, and maybe customers. There’s no excuse to not start marketing to them immediately.

Sean Corbett (26:25):
You don’t have to whine about building an email list or anything like that, right, because what you just said, Parthiv is, they’re sitting on a goldmine, from these different angles, obviously.

Parthiv Shah (26:36):
Yeah.

Sean Corbett (26:36):
Parthiv, last thought goes to you. What would you like to say about this whole topic we’ve been talking about today?

Parthiv Shah (26:44):
Guys, we have two enemies that are coming at us, and one of them can be lethal. Unfortunately, both are coming to us, inflation and recession. If you don’t grow your business by 30%, your 2021 paycheck or 2019 paycheck will not sustain your 2025 lifestyle.

Parthiv Shah (27:27):
Growth is not optional. Business growth is mission critical to survival. You can exit and go get a job, but if you want to be a business owner and a successful business owner in 2025, you better have 30% annual growth for the next three years at the top, without compromising the profitability at the bottom.

Parthiv Shah (28:11):
Grow because your government want more taxes from you, your staff wants more money from you, your vendors want more money from you. If you’re listening to Sean’s podcast, you are America’s rainmaker. You are Canada’s rainmaker. You are the breadwinner for the nation.

Parthiv Shah (28:43):
Make more money than what you are used to making, because your staff, your vendors, your wife, your husband, your kids, your city, your county and your country depends on you to make more money.

Sean Corbett (29:05):
Very well-said. Folks, marketing growth is not an option anymore. The best time to start on a campaign, like Parthiv is talking about would have been yesterday. You better get rolling.

Sean Corbett (29:17):
Parthiv, I really appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us today.

Parthiv Shah (29:20):
Bye. Thank you very much.

 

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