How to Build a Marketing Funnel That Actually Brings in New Patients

Narrator: This is The Thriving Dentist Show with Gary Takacs, where we help you develop your ideal dental practice—one that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Gary Takacs: Welcome to another episode of The Thriving Dentist Show. I’m Gary Takacs, your podcast co-host. The title of today’s episode is How to Build a Marketing Funnel That Actually Brings in New Patients. Now, we have covered marketing in different aspects in the past in the Thriving Dentist Show, but we have never talked about a marketing funnel. I think you’re gonna appreciate this information, and I think you’re gonna be able to apply it in your office to create more new patients in your practice. I think you’re gonna enjoy this one.

Hey, before I get to this episode, two quick announcements to make. First announcement is that coming up not too long after this one publishes is our 2025 RID Annual Summit. RID stands for Reducing Insurance Dependency. That’s happening on October 24th.

It’s a virtual summit. You can attend from the comfort of your home or office. It is five hours of CE, so we’re gonna start at noon Eastern Time and we’ll finish at 5:30. We’re required to take a couple breaks, so there’s gonna be a couple of very short breaks in there, but there’ll be five hours of CE. It is everything. We have panels. We’re gonna do some keynote lectures. I’m gonna do a short presentation at the beginning. N’s gonna do one. We have multiple panels of experts, and everyone that’s involved with the Reducing Insurance Dependency Summit has information that’s gonna help you successfully resign from PPO plans. This is our fifth annual summit. First one was in 2021. Every year, our attendance has increased, and we’re counting on that again this year.

Here’s the great news—no tuition. You’re attending as a guest of ours as a courtesy of your listenership. Go to RID Academy. Again, RID stands for Reducing Insurance Dependency—RI Academy—and you will see registration. Registration popup will be there. Be sure to grab your seat. You do have to register, so make sure you register, although there is no tuition. So come join us for the 2025 Reducing Insurance Dependency Annual Summit. It will be well worth your time. I’m gonna politely suggest it may be the most important business CE that you take this year. Lots of useful information to help you successfully resign.

The second announcement I have is we have a returning guest, a great friend of the Thriving Dentist Show, Dr. Pavel Krastev, and he is going to talk today about why glide path technique matters more in Endo than you think. So Dr. Krastev is gonna talk about glide path technique. For those of you that are interested in Endo, I think you are gonna find this fascinating. Thank you, Pavel. We really appreciate your contribution. With no further ado, here he is on Why Glide Path Technique Matters More in Endo Than You Think.

Dr. Pavel Krastev: Hello, friends and colleagues. This is Pavel Krastev, DDS, from New York. And today I would like to discuss an area of endodontics that I am very passionate about. And I’d like to kind of explain what I think you should do. You do run procedures. So today I’m touching on glide path management.

Once you gain access into a tooth and you locate your orifices of the various canals, you may choose to pre-flare the orifice slightly. And eventually, I recommend using a size 10 hand file. I don’t promote any products here, but I personally like to use the Flexo files. The Flexo files are designed from a triangular blank, and I use the balanced force technique, which is essentially watch winding as I go down the canal. The particular Flexo files that I’m recommending to you actually cut when you turn the instrument counterclockwise.

Dr. Pavel Krastev: Okay? So the motion is this: you are going a few degrees this way, a few degrees that way, and a few degrees this way, a few degrees that way. Slowly, without forcing the instrument, you will feel the file—the Flexo files in particular—will cut. You may feel a little pop when it cuts the dentin. But the bottom line is this: once you locate your orifices, it is critical and extremely important—if you don’t want to break files or want to minimize how many files you break—to establish a proper glide path.

So, once again, you’re locating your orifices in a particular tooth. You may choose to pre-flare the orifice slightly before you introduce a vent file. After that step is done, I always like to use a viscous chelator. I place it in the orifice with the viscous chelator. I have my apex locator attached to the 10 file, and I slowly start watch winding, watch winding, watch winding until I reach the apex. If I don’t reach the apex in the first round, I’ll remove the instrument, and I will irrigate—possibly use some ultrasonic vibration or activation, if you want to call it—in order to loosen up all the debris. Then I’ll continue with the same process: more viscous chelator and 10 file until I get to the apex.

Dr. Pavel Krastev: Once I get to the apex and record my working depth from a standardized reference point that’s reproducible, I will then hold the file and gradually, in very small increments, just move it up and down and extremely slightly through the apex. You are monitoring this on your Root ZX machine, or whatever apex locator you’re using. So I have it clipped to the file the whole time I’m doing this.

You want to get that 10 file to be sloppy loose. Now, sloppy loose doesn’t mean it goes in a little bit—it means you should go in and out, in small increments, further out of the tooth, backing, further out of the tooth, backing, until that file will go in and out to the apex in a tiny, itsy-bitsy—maybe half a millimeter—through the apex. So you don’t start zipping the canal. If you start moving it up and down once it’s at the apex or past it, then you’re going to start moving the foramen. And don’t forget, you want to keep your foramen as tiny as nature made it, okay? You don’t want to blow it out. You don’t want to walk the foramen to a different position. And therefore, once you’re at that point, you’re going in very small increments.

So once you get your 10 file to be sloppy—sloppy loose as a goose—okay, then you proceed to what I like to use: an orifice opener. In my office, I use the ProGlider.

Dr. Pavel Krastev: And please, when you go to the ProGlider—or whatever orifice opener you use—you want to follow it in slowly. Never push it. If it doesn’t want to go and it binds, remove it, irrigate, activate, and then go again with your 10 file until everything is clear, the path is established again, and then proceed with the orifice opener—a good choice.

So the key thing is—and I ask how I know this—I’ve broken several instruments. I think we all do who do endodontics. But I notice the ProGlider will break if you keep it in place rotating, okay? And it’ll usually break at the apex. So constantly move it in and out, but do not force. You are following the handpiece. It’s sitting in your hand. You’re not forcing anything. It’s simply flowing into the tooth. If it stops to flow, back out and continue the process again, again, until it reaches down the apex to the proper depth without any resistance.

So, moral of the story: proper glide path is key in order to factor less instruments and get a beautiful end result.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your time, and looking forward to the next episode.

Gary Takacs: Well, welcome back to the Thriving Dentist Coaching and Action Segment. As I mentioned in the intro, our topic is how to build a marketing funnel that actually brings in new patients. I shared earlier that we’ve never covered the idea of marketing funnels in the Thriving Dentist Show, and it’s something that would be of great use to you. So we thought this episode would be very valuable.

You know, I wanna frame it a little bit in the beginning. Naren’s gonna lead this episode based on his expertise in marketing. But, you know, new patient flow is more important than ever. If you’re practicing comprehensive dentistry—which I imagine most of our listeners are—you depend on new patient flow to continue to grow your practice. Because if you’re practicing comprehensive dentistry, at some point, you get your patients restored.

Now, they may need future treatment depending on, you know, what’s going on in their mouth, but hopefully, you’re getting ’em nice and healthy, and you’re maintaining that for ’em. So as a result of that, if you wanna keep growing, we need more and more new patients.

And reality is, I think, as a profession, we should be doing public service announcements to get the public to understand how important oral health is and how important it is to find a dentist who they know, like, and trust. You know, there’s some data that says that despite the fact that we’re more interested in health than ever, there’s still a huge segment of the population that doesn’t have a dentist. And I’d like to go on a campaign to change that.

And certainly, at the practice level, I’d like to help you achieve whatever your goal is for new patients every month. So Naren, I’m excited about this topic, and I’m excited about your wisdom related to funnels. That may be a term that’s new to some of our listeners, so maybe we wanna start by defining a funnel. So why don’t we start there? Naren, what is a marketing funnel? What really is it?

Naren Arulrajah: Thank you, Gary. Yeah, it’s an excellent topic, you know, and really, I think where you’re starting is a good place to start. By the way, all of you know me—I’m the co-co-host of the Thriving Dentist Show and the founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing. So I’ve been helping practices solve this funnel problem for 18 years now.

So let’s dive in, Gary. The funnel is really a four-step process, and it’s really, really important you listen intently to what the funnel is, because understanding the funnel and optimizing each step of the funnel means you’re gonna be successful. You don’t understand the funnel, and you don’t optimize each step of the funnel, you’re gonna struggle.

Many of you have been used to getting patients from PPO plans. And really, when you’re getting patients from PPO plans, think about the fact that they’re coming to you because, in their mind, it’s free. "I get this benefit from my employer, I don’t pay for it, therefore it’s free, and I’ll just go anywhere," right? There’s no convincing, nothing needs to be done—no marketing, nothing needs to be done to get that patient in and take care of them, because in their mind, it’s free. So I’ll go anywhere.

Gary Takacs: Kinda like the 99-cent hamburger.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly, exactly.

Gary Takacs: In the pantheon of fast food restaurants, you know, it’s the 99-cent hamburger.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly. You couldn’t have said it better, Gary. But on the other hand, when you’re trying to attract the right patients who have choices, who are gonna work with their wallet, you have to really understand the funnel.

So, step one of the funnel is awareness, right? People need to know that when they have a need, you are one of the people they should consider. That’s called awareness.

Step two is they have to get interested, right? They’re aware of you, but that’s not remotely enough before they become your patient. The very first thing is they have to get curious, they have to get interested, they have to want to learn more. That’s step two.

Naren Arulrajah: And the third step is they have to trust you, right? In today’s world, people don’t want to take a risk, right? 

Why? Because information is at their fingertips. There are tools like Google reviews and all kinds of other tools which can tell them, within seconds, if someone is a safe bet—whether it’s a dentist, or an expert, let’s say, in implants. Again, you could be providing high-value services—services in implants or any other kind of business, right? Whether it’s a high-end restaurant or whether it’s any other local service.

So the third step is trust. They have to trust you.

Naren Arulrajah: And finally—that’s still not enough—they’re making that phone call, and we have to get that patient to book an appointment. Remember, the difference between the patient who’s coming for free dentistry—i.e., PPO patient—versus the patient who’s driven by this marketing funnel is this: first, they have to become aware of you, then they have to get interested in you, then they have to trust you.

Naren Arulrajah: And finally, they call the phone. So the first three steps are happening online—could be on their mobile device, could be on their desktop, or a combination of the two. And then, without the first three steps happening, the phone is not ringing. But once the phone rings, you’re still not done. You still have to master the art of persuasion, the art of building rapport, the art of asking for an appointment, and then get them booked.

So if you skip—or if you’re not doing really well in—any one of these steps, you could fumble, you could go backwards. So it’s really, really, really important for you to understand these steps and master them.

The flip side of this is, once you understand this simple four-step process, you can easily zoom into the things that are important. For example, on trust, let’s say you’re only getting two reviews a month—here, go fix it. No rocket science. Gary and I have been preaching this for the last 10 years: every practice who’s listening to Thriving Dentist should at least aim for 10 or more Google reviews.

So once you know where you stand in each one of those steps, you know what actions to take. And that’s kind of where I wanna focus our conversation today, Gary.

Gary Takacs: Lemme go back to the second point in that funnel there—interest. Yes, interest sometimes can be created by need. You know, so for example, someone that has a toothache is now interested in getting that taken care of because they have pain. So it could be as fundamental as that. Emergency dentistry can create interest.

But I’d also argue that, because of the information superhighway that we all have access to, interest can also involve some things that represent our high-value services. For example, cosmetic dentistry. Maybe there’s a patient that is interested in improving their smile—they have interest in that. And it may be, in the short term, something they’re looking for right away, or maybe something like, "someday I wanna improve my smile."

But you wanna make sure that, as part of that funnel, you are creating interest in the areas of the practice—clinically—that you’d like to grow.

And all of our listeners have heard me talk about high-value services. I think the key to having a thriving practice today is to have a mix of everyday general dentistry combined with whatever your menu of high-value services is—whatever trips your trigger, whatever you really enjoy doing. It could be dental implants, it could be Invisalign, adult orthodontics, cosmetic dentistry, could be complex restorative, could be sedation, could be diagnosing and treating sleep apnea—whatever your interest is.

Now, you can kind of pound a stake in the sand. You can plant a flag. And when people are looking for this in your area, you can be found and essentially be credentialed based on the fact that Google is now presenting you as a resource.

Naren Arulrajah: Absolutely, Gary. I just want to expand on what you just said. One of the people I’ve studied a lot—in addition to Dr. Robert Cialdini—is a professor from Stanford by the name of BJ Fogg. He was the person teaching how to change behavior at Stanford when the two kids, 18- or 19-year-old kids, were at Stanford and starting Instagram. I’m sure you all know Instagram—I’m sure we all know how addictive Instagram is. It’s probably worth—you know, Facebook is worth $2 trillion or a trillion and a half—probably Instagram is half of that value because it’s so addictive.

So he came up with a formula. By the way, one of the books he’s known for is called Tiny Habits. And I guess he made tons of money—maybe he was one of the early investors in Instagram. But anyway, he created this thing called Tiny Habits, wrote a book called Tiny Habits, and he helped people who are struggling with not having the right behaviors—and/or having the wrong behaviors—change behaviors.

Naren Arulrajah: Now, he came up with a simple formula that I use a lot, and we use a lot when we market for our clients. It’s called: B = MAP.
Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt.

So—motivation. Gary gave you a good example. Emergency—you don’t need to motivate them. They’re motivated. You just need to make it easy for them to show up. Like, I mean, if you tell them, “Hey, can I see you a week from now?” they’re not gonna wait. They are really motivated. They need to see you today because they’re in pain.

So—motivation. And the way he describes it is, you know, the building is burning and your son is in that building. Nobody needs to tell you to go there and get your son. You’re gonna just run through the fire and get him, right?

Gary Takacs: Whatever it takes.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah—whatever it takes. But motivation is the weakest of everything, because we all know about how we all make New Year’s resolutions. So you’re motivated—you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that—then three weeks later, it’s all gone.

So motivation is the weakest link when it comes to human behavior. So you’re right—emergency—you don’t have to motivate, just make it easy for them. You know, when the person answers the phone, get them in right away. That’s all you have to do. Really easy.

But what if the motivation is not that high? What if it’s a “nice to have,” like that beautiful smile? Or, you know, “Hey, I know that my gums are bleeding, but it’s not a big deal. I can live with it.” What if it’s one of those things where it’s not a must have, where there’s significant pain or motivation? That’s where—like Gary was talking about—we need to do a much, much better job in creating interest.

Gary Takacs: Or desire. Desire, Naren, is very motivating. If someone wants something—

Naren Arulrajah: Yes.

Gary Takacs: Desire can be very, very motivating. And that’s one of the reasons—let’s stay on this cosmetic dentistry thing—that’s why, if you really want your marketing to succeed and your funnel to be populated with the patients you want, we need great after photos, exactly, on your website—of patients you’ve helped to have the smile of their dreams. Of course, we need patients’ permission to be able to use their photos, but we need to credential yourself, you know, that you are the person to…

But desire can be very, very motivating.

Naren Arulrajah: And I think it can be—

Gary Takacs: —fleeting, it can change—

Naren Arulrajah: Yes.

Gary Takacs: But let me pivot to the second point of all this. Okay, so let’s say our listeners are saying, “Okay, I’m getting it. I’m getting this idea of a funnel. I like your suggestion of it’s four steps—awareness, interest, trust, and then booked.”

But now—how do we actually get someone to take action?

Yeah, so talk about the difference between a homepage—which everyone has—and a real landing page.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, that’s an excellent point, Gary. So let’s understand the flow of this patient, right? We all think people are just looking for a dentist and then they decide what service they want. That’s not how they work. They have a problem, and they’re looking for a solution to that problem.

So they go to Google. Let’s say one example is pain. Another example could be, “Hey, I’m afraid of going to the dentist, and I heard about this thing called sedation dentistry—got a lot of work to be done.” So I start looking for sedation dentistry. Third example is cosmetic—like you said, “Oh, I have crooked teeth, and I heard about Invisalign, or I heard about braces.” And I start looking for somebody who can do braces.

So what am I doing? I’ll take the braces example. I type in “braces” or “Invisalign” or any one of those keywords. I find a webpage. And that page is your Invisalign page. If you’re doing your job right in the first step, which is awareness, you are going to show up when I type in the word “braces”—meaning your Invisalign page is gonna show up when I type in the word “braces [my city name].”

Gary Takacs: It’s important to distinguish—they’re not landing on your homepage.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: They’re landing on the—because the reason we don’t want ’em necessarily landing on your homepage is they have to do work to get to the point where they get their itch scratched.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: And you don’t have time to do that. If they’re on your homepage—

Naren Arulrajah: A hundred percent. And the A is ability, and what it means is: don’t make it hard for them. If you think about Instagram and their genius, you just have to move your fingers up and down, up and down. That’s all you have to do—literally, like no thinking required. No buttons to press. Just move.

Gary Takacs: Caveman-level!

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, exactly. So Gary’s absolutely right. We have to make it easy for them. So they go to the landing page—in this case, the Invisalign page. And yes, we don’t want them going to your homepage, because now they have to figure out where the Invisalign page is. That’s more work. And by then I’m getting distracted by something else—some other shiny object I see—and yeah, I’m getting lost, right?

Gary Takacs: That’s a mistake most dentists make with their Google paid ads. With a Google paid ad, you only have 15 seconds—and that’s hard data. When someone finds you through a paid ad, they’re spending 15 seconds on your website. If you make ’em work, they’re never gonna get off your homepage. They’re never gonna book.

But instead, if it goes straight to your landing page on cosmetic dentistry, your landing page on Invisalign, then the likelihood that they could book goes up dramatically—because of the way this works and the amount of time they spend there.

Naren Arulrajah: Right. So I’m on that Invisalign page, and going back to B = MAP, the P is Prompt.

Prompt meaning: how do you kind of make them want to take action?

One of those things is social proof. Gary alluded to it. So if I am coming to you because I want to have that awesome smile that my colleagues have, and I have these crooked teeth and whatnot—show me pictures of people like me.

If I’m in my 20s, I want to see other people in their 20s. Even skin color, right? So the more you can show me pictures or examples of people like me—again, not words, just… you know, pictures are worth a thousand words—someone like me having the smile that I want, now I’m like, “Oh yeah, he can help me.” Why? Because he has helped someone else. That’s called a prompt. So you are prompting them.

That’s a simple example of a prompt. Again, you have to place it in the right spot. You have to have the right pictures.

Like, if I have more time—let’s say it’s a more complex case, like implants or full-arch dental implants—maybe a video where you have three people talking about how maybe this is an All-on-4 implant case, right? So you’re targeting an older demographic, and they’re looking for both the smile and the look, but also the functionality. So someone explaining all of that in a two-minute video.

So really, you have to think about, when it comes to action:
How do I convince them? How do I prompt them to take action?

Step one—awareness, right? If they don’t go to the right landing page, that’s where SEO comes in. If you are really good at SEO, you’re gonna rank on page one. You’re gonna show up for 50 keywords related to Invisalign, 50 or 20 keywords related to whatever. You’re gonna show up at the very top of Google search results, and now you get them to the right landing page, and then you help them take action by prompting them with cases, with videos, and so forth.

Gary Takacs: Now, this next point is kind of where the rubber meets the road. And this is the stuff that most practices ignore. I’m talking about call tracking and follow-up.

Share some simple tools to track what’s working—so any of our listeners can figure out what’s working and, consequently, what isn’t working. What are some of those tools you’d recommend?

Naren Arulrajah: Absolutely, Gary. So just to give you some baseline, you can get people through ads—Gary alluded to it. They will only give you 15 seconds. And ads typically are five times or more expensive than SEO.

The other way to get people is through SEO. The trick there is—only 5% of you will get all the free traffic. Meaning, you will rank and you will create that awareness when people are looking for those things by showing up on page one, right? So you wanna be in that 5%.

And how do you know you’re in the 5%? A hundred or more keywords and phrases—you’re ranking on page one of Google, meaning in the top 10 results. Now, I go there, and you do a good job in prompting me, and I’m ready to take action.

Now—don’t forget trust before you worry about call tracking.

Nobody in 2025 is gonna come to you just because you do great SEO or just because you have a great landing page. They will also check out your Google reviews, whether they like it or not. They’ll type your business name into Google and type in the word “reviews”—or even without the word “reviews,” Google will immediately show your Google My Business page. And they will see how many reviews you have—4.5 stars, 249 reviews.

And Google obviously will also show more if you have recent reviews. So if you’re getting 10 or more reviews a month—great job. You’re also gonna show up on Google Reviews more and more and more. So trust is important.

Now, let’s say they’re aware of you, they have interest in you, you’ve prompted them, they’re ready to take action. They’ve checked you out by spending 30 seconds and looking at your reviews. Now the phone is ringing.

One of the problems I find is—each one of these places could be a leak. For example, you might not be in the top 5%—so you need to track how many keywords you’re ranking for. You might not be getting people to the landing page—you need to track the traffic coming to your website.

Or, these two things are working extremely well, but maybe you’re not getting enough phone calls. So you need to track the number of calls coming in.

So we put a tracking number on all the marketing we do, so our clients know precisely what happened—how many calls they got, how long those people spoke. Everything is recorded so we can go back and do research and studies and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

So call tracking and follow-up is really, really, really, really important.

And, of course, one of the reasons we do call tracking is to figure out—is your marketing funnel working?

For example, you’re ranking for 400 keywords, but you’re not getting the right number of new patient calls—then we have a problem. We need to go fix it.

But let’s assume you are getting the phone calls, but you are like the average dental practice in the U.S.—you’re only booking 1 out of 3 new patient calls. Now everything else is working, but—if you’re spending $300 in marketing, two out of those three patients are not booking. That means $200 of the $300 is getting wasted. You’re only making money from the $100 that results in one patient booking.

So you also want to understand: What’s my conversion rate? Am I booking those patient calls?

Once you tighten all these pieces up, you have a solid marketing program.

Gary Takacs: I’ll add one more area that you might be missing, and that is missed calls during business hours. If you don’t have a way to track that, I can confidently tell you—you are missing more calls than you’re aware of.

And you might be thinking in your head—just like I did at one point—“Oh no, we don’t miss any calls during business hours.” Right?

And in reality, that wasn’t the case. So we’ve got to make sure—if the marketing’s job is to get your phone to ring, and if we’re not answering it… today, given people’s attention span, they’ll simply go to the next office in their Google search. And that’s a fail.

Well, the last part of the funnel—

Naren Arulrajah: Can I just add one point on this, Gary? Absolutely right.

Remember we talked about ability—to make it easy for them.

Old days—25 years ago—I’m okay leaving a voicemail and waiting two days for somebody to call me back. Today? I don’t even wanna wait for an Uber for more than five minutes. You think I’m gonna leave a voicemail?

I’m just saying—we have been trained in this digital, mobile phone, information-at-our-fingertips era. I need everything right now. Right now.

So—you miss that call, you lose that patient forever. They’re not calling you back. They’re not leaving a voicemail. And even if you call back—they don’t even remember you, because they’ve already called the second person on the Google result and booked.

Gary Takacs: They’re not looking for a dentist anymore—they’ve found another one.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: Really, the fourth part of the funnel involves your team. And I’m gonna cover this part. Yes—the team is a really important part of the funnel. The way your front desk team members handle the phone calls can make or break everything. And if you are not tracking your conversion percentage, you have no idea what’s happening.

Let me benchmark this for you. The goal is not to convert 100% of new patient calls to appointments. Naren, why do you think the goal is not 100%?

Naren Arulrajah: It’s kind of—I mean, I love the analogy you taught me, Gary, which is baseball, right? Even in baseball, only one out of three convert. I mean, I’m not saying you should convert one out of—

Gary Takacs: Well, if one out of three converts, you’ve got a Hall of Famer.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah—Hall of Famer if someone’s batting .333. But that’s for big, big, high-value cases. I get it—not everyone is gonna accept a $20,000 case. So great, one out of three is exceptional performance—keep doing it.

But I think with phone calls, we should at least aim for 70%. And I think the reason people are not converting—you and I have listened to hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of calls over the last several years, Gary—and I’m sure you can share with me your opinion.

You do coaching, by the way, which is one of the things you offer as part of your coaching service. And nobody—step one—they don’t even know what their conversion rate is.

And I know every dentist—before we start doing call tracking—you ask them, “Hey, how are you guys handling the phones?”

“Oh, we’re doing an excellent job.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I talked to Jamie who answers the phone. She said we’re doing an excellent job.”

It’s kind of like asking your son how he did on math when he’s never looked at—

Gary Takacs: —without the test scores.

Naren Arulrajah: Without the test scores. Exactly.

Gary Takacs: Well, here, let me go back to the benchmarking.

• 70% or above is an A
• 60% to 70% is a B
• 50% to 60% is a C

This is just kind of a broad scale. Anything less than 50 is failing.

And I’ll give you an example of what call training can do. In our Thriving Dentist coaching base, we had a client just starting with us whose call conversion was 25%.

We did call training with the team, and in a fairly short period of time, we got them from 25% to 75%.

So 25% is where on the grade scale, Naren?

Naren Arulrajah: Uh, it’s failing.

Gary Takacs: Failing—less than 50. So really failing.

He was getting 50 calls a month. So at 25%, that’s 12 new patients a month. By just improving the way they handled calls, it went to 75%. Same 50 calls a month, now he’s getting 38 new patients a month.

And it was all from just working with the team—helping them understand how to, strategically and step by step, convert that call to an appointment.

Well, Naren, great information on funnels. You talked about four different things here. I’ll recap real quick:

• First of all, the journey includes four steps: awareness, interest, trust, and then finally, we book them.
• We talked about step two: the difference between a homepage and a landing page.
• Step three: call tracking and follow-up, so we know what’s actually happening with the calls that come in.
• And then finally: make sure we’re involving the team, because they’ll be the final piece that puts this all together and results in an appointment in your schedule.

Let’s hit pause here and go to the Thriving Dentist Q&A Segment.

Gary Takacs: Welcome back to the Thriving Dentist Q&A segment. And we’re gonna stay with our format for this one. I’ll be the one answering questions. So Naren, I’ve got—well, I’ve got four or five. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll cover at least four. I may get to a fifth question. You ready?

Naren Arulrajah: Absolutely, Gary.

Gary Takacs: Alright, first one—great, great question.

I’m getting clicks from ads, but barely any calls. What’s going wrong?

Naren Arulrajah: This is an excellent question, Gary. I’ll give you the top reasons as to what can go wrong.

Number one is—we talked about the whole funnel, right? There is a method to the madness if you want the madness to produce results, which is bringing new patients.

So let’s say you’re running ads on social media. They’re watching whatever they’re into—Instagram, TikTok—those platforms show you the things you like. One person may see entrepreneurial videos, another celebrity videos. We’re absorbed in our content. Then an ad pops up for a dentist or implants, and I click on it. These platforms make it easy to press one button, and they send you all their info.

Now, this person doesn’t even remember submitting the form. So that’s a huge example of not following the funnel. We didn’t create interest, we didn’t make them want to take action, we didn’t build trust—and obviously, we’re not going to get the appointment booked. It’s all fake.

You have to ask—is your marketing following the funnel?

I’m not a huge fan of social media ads—they’re typically the worst and most expensive of all digital marketing options.

Now, the next one is Google Ads. Let’s assume this person was talking about Google Ads. Gary alluded to this earlier—and I also mentioned it. Many Google Ads don’t even go to the landing page. They go to the homepage, which is a big problem.

Even if they get to the landing page, it’s not compelling—it doesn’t make me want to take action. There are no relevant before-and-afters, no strong messaging. It’s not mobile-optimized. So many little things can make it hard for someone to fall in love with you and take action.

And remember, when someone clicks on an ad, they don’t trust you. They’re thinking, “What’s the catch?” Why is this guy spending money on ads? That’s what’s in the back of their mind.

So, I would recommend replacing ads with SEO—if you’re going to be around for a while. If you’re retiring in six months, SEO might not be worth it. But if you’re planning to be here 2, 3, 5 years—or longer—and you want to stop depending on PPO patients who only want insurance-covered dentistry, focus on SEO.

Honestly, this is a complex question. I’d say—book a marketing strategy meeting. We answer all your questions, look at what you’re doing, and even analyze your top four competitors. We’ll benchmark you—are you better or worse than them in each part of the funnel?

Are you getting an A? B? C? If it’s a C or B, we’ll show you how to get to an A. And in our experience, every client we take on—we know we can get them to an A in all parts of SEO and the funnel within 12 months.

So book that meeting at ekwa.com/msm if you’re ready to stop relying on PPOs and take control.

Gary Takacs: I’d strongly recommend that. I often refer our coaching clients who want to improve their marketing to Ekwa—especially if they’re resigning from PPO plans. You’ve got to replace Delta as a source of new patients.

So, would you rather get patients from Delta—where you take a 45% haircut—or from Google, where patients are genuinely interested in what you offer?

I’ll take Google every day of the week.

Do yourself a favor—set up that marketing strategy meeting.

Gary Takacs: Alright, second question. Back to landing pages;

What should I put on a landing page to make patients actually book a new patient appointment?

Naren Arulrajah: Excellent question. I touched on it earlier in Coaching and Action.

Why do people choose to do business with someone? Two reasons:

One—we talked about prompt. We use psychological principles to influence people to say yes. One of the biggest is social proof—showing other people who’ve created the outcome the patient wants.

So if you want to do a good job—say you’re on your veneer page, full mouth reconstruction page, or all-on-4 page—those are big cases: $10K, $20K, $30K.

The bigger the dollar amount, the more convincing you need. And you’re doing it all online—without even speaking to them.

So create case studies. Show the before close-up, the after close-up, and the after full face—because that’s what they’re really buying: the transformation.

Then write a short story—why did they come to you? What were they looking for? What was the treatment plan in plain English? How did they feel after?

Post the photos and the story on your landing page. Start small—one or two cases a month—and keep building. Because once it’s on your site and you’re ranking on SEO, it keeps working for you—over and over.

That same case could convince 100 different people.

Also, remember—we take action when we like someone. Dale Carnegie said it: we do business with people we like.

So—videos are powerful. Especially in 2025.

In the past, they’d come meet you to see if they liked you. Now, they can watch a 45-second video.

So, record something simple. “Hi, I’m Dr. Smith. I’ve been helping patients with implants for 17 years. Please take a few minutes to look at my work. Me and my team love creating beautiful smiles. Call my office. I’d love to help you.”

Gary Takacs: Let me add a really simple idea. We all know the power of reviews.

Let’s say you’re traveling and looking for a restaurant. You find one that looks good—what’s the first thing you do? Read the reviews.

You have no idea who wrote them. Could’ve been the owner’s mother. But if they’re glowing, you book the table.

So—put specific testimonials on your landing page.

Say it’s a cosmetic dentistry page. You’ve done a smile design case—10-unit upper anterior porcelain veneer case—and the patient says, “Doctor, I love it. I wish I did this years ago.”

Ask them to write that down for you.

Now imagine you have 3–4 of these across your landing page header. Not random reviews—specific to the treatment they’re interested in.

It’s super powerful.

Another idea—people trust credentials.

So, if you have physicians who are patients—ask them to write a short testimonial. It doesn’t have to talk about treatment. “Love going here. Great people. Wouldn’t go anywhere else.” And sign it with their name, MD.

What does the public see? If three or four physicians go to your office—that says a lot. If doctors trust you, others will too.

Naren Arulrajah: It gives them confidence, it builds trust.

Gary Takacs: Exactly. They figure—“If doctors go there, it must be good.”

Naren Arulrajah: Yes. And we have a tool called Doctor’s Choice Award—doctors write reviews for each other. We created it eight years ago. It’s one of the highest levels of social proof.

Whether it’s reviews from people who look like me—same age, same background—or from authority figures like MDs, those are powerful.

Ever buy a health book? What do you see on the back? Doctor reviews. You don’t even know who they are—but it makes you think, “This must be a good book.”

Gary Takacs: Let me offer a workaround. Maybe you don’t have physician patients—but you have dentist friends in other states or cities.

Call one of your dental school buddies. Ask them to write something you can put on your website.

“I went to school with Dr. Smith—he’s amazing. Highly recommend.”

That carries weight. Even if it’s not a local dentist, it shows professional endorsement. Same idea.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: Naren, thank you for all that amazing insight on landing pages.

Gary Takacs: Let’s move to question number three.

Do I really need to track calls and clicks? Isn’t that overkill?

Naren Arulrajah: No, Gary, it’s not overkill. I’ve had the privilege of working with you on the coaching program for at least six or seven years now. We have a lot of mutual clients — I help on the marketing side, and you help on how to run the practice better.

One universal truth I’ve seen in successful practices: they know 3 or 4 or 10 things that are important to them — and they do them well, every month. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

From a marketing perspective, calls are important. They tell you how many new patients are calling through your marketing. If you don’t know how many are calling, how can you tell if your marketing is working?

Also, you need to know if those calls are being answered. And beyond that — how many of those calls are booking? If you’re getting 10 new patient calls and only booking 3 — there’s a problem.

Gary Takacs: Back to my earlier example — a practice with 25% conversion. Same team, same phones. With some quick training — and credit to the team, they were very coachable — we took that from 25% to 75%.

That’s the difference between 12 new patients a month and 38 new patients a month, all from organic SEO.

The doctor had asked me, “Gary, I’m only getting 25 new patients. Should I invest in Google Ads?” And I said, “Let’s make sure we’re solving the right problem.”

Are you getting enough calls? If not, it’s a marketing problem. That’s on the marketing company.

If you’re working with Ekwa, and you’re not getting the calls — that’s on you and your team, right Naren?

Naren Arulrajah: 100%. Absolutely.

Gary Takacs: But if you’re getting calls and not converting — that’s a training issue. In this case, it was a new Ekwa client. SEO was just beginning. But even then, they were getting 50 calls a month and only converting 25%.

With some training — we got them to 75%. No need for paid ads. Saved them thousands.

So yes — track calls. And be scientific about it. Dentists are scientific in the clinical part of the practice — why not treat the business side the same way?

Would you say, “I think my fillings are holding up fine,” without any data? No — you’d want evidence. You’d change the material if it failed.

Same logic applies here.

And no — the goal isn’t 100% conversion. That’s not realistic. But 70% is very realistic. You can even get higher with effort. But it won’t happen by accident.

And some team habits are hard to break. They’ve been doing something the same way for years. That’s why ongoing training matters.

So yes — you do need to track calls, clicks, and conversions. It’s not overkill. It’s just part of the science of the business side of dentistry. 

Gary Takacs: Alright — let’s move on to question number four:

How can I get my front desk team more comfortable talking to new patient callers?

Naren Arulrajah: Great question, Gary. Before I answer, just one last point on the previous topic — in addition to tracking calls and conversions, you should also be tracking keyword rankings. Are you ranking for 100+ keywords?

If you don’t know — book a marketing strategy meeting. And if you want help improving how your team handles calls, book a coaching strategy meeting with Gary.

So, back to your question: how do you help your front desk get more comfortable on calls?

Here’s what I’ve seen firsthand. My team listens to every call and gives clients their conversion rate. Gary’s team selects six calls — some that are good, and some that need improvement.

Gary, can you define what you mean by ‘good’?

Gary Takacs: Good just means one thing — the patient made the appointment.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly. It’s black and white. They booked, or they didn’t.

Gary Takacs: A call that needs work is one where the patient didn’t book.

When I do call training, I’ll listen to 40 real calls from your practice. Then I’ll pick six — four good, two that need work.

We review them together. It’s a friendly, positive session. We laugh, we learn. The team laughs at themselves — it’s all constructive.

My goal is to get your team comfortable and in control of the call.

Here’s what I teach: there are two outcomes we want from every call:

1. An appointment
2. A connection

Most front desk teams just process the call. They answer questions, they’re reactive.

That’s a mistake. We want your team to lead the call — to take control.

How do we know who’s in control? The one asking the questions.

So here are the four essentials of a strong call:

1. Give your name when you answer. Now the caller knows they’re talking to a human, not “just some person at the office.”
2. Get their name early. If they don’t offer it right away, as soon as they pause, say something like, “Oh, by the way, my name is Linda. Who am I speaking with?” Then respond, “Mary, great to meet you by phone. I look forward to meeting you in person.”
3. Ask how they chose your office.
   “Maria, how did you choose our office?”
   They might say, “My coworker recommended you.”
   You respond, “Oh, who’s your coworker?” Then, “We love her. We’re going to take great care of you — just like we do with her.”
   Or if they say, “I found you on Google,” say, “That’s how many people find us these days — you made a great choice calling us.”
4. Find a way to connect. This part is unscripted — but so important.

If they’re asking about cosmetic dentistry, say:
“Our doctor loves doing all kinds of dentistry — but especially loves helping patients create the smile of their dreams. You’ve called the right office.”

That’s a connection.

Or if they just moved to the area, say:
“Where did you move from? Let me be the first to welcome you to Pensacola. We love it here, and I hope you’ll come to love it too.”

Naren Arulrajah: That’s powerful. Because once you connect, they’re more likely to show up, accept treatment, and become lifelong patients.

Gary Takacs: Exactly. And all of that starts with how your team handles the call.

Gary Takacs: So look at the difference there, Naren. We’re connecting with the call. And if we connect with the caller, a number of things happen — they’re more likely to keep the appointment, more likely to have a positive perception of you before they even come in, more likely to choose you as their office for life, and more likely to accept treatment recommendations once they’re in your office.

So there’s some simple things you can do to help your team become more comfortable — teach them how to connect with any caller.

Well, Naren, we’ve covered a lot of information in this Thriving Dentist Show — how to build a marketing funnel that actually brings in new patients. Lots of takeaways for our listeners.

As we wrap up today, I want to take a minute and say thank you. Thanks to all of our listeners — we appreciate each and every one of you.

If I bring it back full circle, be sure to join us on October 24th for the Reducing Insurance Dependence Annual Summit. Go to rid.academy to grab your free ticket. You’ll get five hours of CE. We look forward to seeing you there.

Last reminder — if you haven’t already booked a Marketing Strategy Meeting with Ekwa, I’d encourage you to do that.

Naren, give your URL if you would.

Naren Arulrajah: Thank you, Gary. It’s ekwa.com/msm for a Marketing Strategy Meeting.

Gary Takacs: And if you’d like some coaching — on going out of network, developing your practice to full potential, or helping you achieve effective work-life balance — those are all areas we do a lot of work with our clients.

Schedule a Coaching Strategy Meeting at thrivingdentist.com/csm. That would actually be a Zoom meeting with me. I’d love the chance to meet you, learn more about your practice, and share how we might be able to help.

On that note, thanks for the privilege of your time, Naren — and I look forward to connecting with you on the next Thriving Dentist Show.