“I can’t raise prices – I’ll lose customers!”
Sound like someone you know? Or this one:
“I’m not worried about losing customers over price – my prices are just fine where they are.”
These viewpoints may appear completely opposite on the surface, one as pessimistic as Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh and the other confident to a fault, but they share something in common:
They’re both wrong.
If your goal is to optimize your business practices so that you can maximize your profits, undercharging and overcharging are equally disastrous. Armed with the right data, you can raise your prices in many instances and you should lower them in others.
If only there were a way to get up-to-the-minute, zip code-level percentile ranks for different procedures’ prices, you’d be in the next tax bracket in no time, right?
Well, we’re here to tell you that there is a way: Sikka’s Fee Survey. If you’re one of those already in the know about our Fee Survey and getting updated pricing data at the recommended twice-yearly cadence, stop reading and head out in your Tesla to your vacation house right now.
But if you’re still working toward those earthly rewards – which are on top of the deep satisfaction that comes from improving patients’ quality of life, of course – allow me to paint a picture of your bright, optimized future, using current pricing data freshly-harvested from Sikka’s opt-in database of the full third of U.S. dental practices that use our services.
COVID-19 has impacted life – and business – in ways too numerous to go into here, but suffice it to say that dental procedure fees are no exception. To put some numbers to this, we compared average prices across the entire United States for the 600+ procedure codes we track on February 15th of this year (which feels like a lifetime ago, quite frankly) and August 15th, which represents current fees, for all intents and purposes. The image at the top of this post shows a few examples of noteworthy divergences.
Many of the most popular procedures’ average fees increased over the past 6 months, and, as our graphic attests, all-porcelain crowns and endosteal implants were no exception. Upticks weren’t universally the case, however, by any means. In fact, while two-surface metallic inlays had an even steeper dropoff in average fee commanded, more specialized ¾ cast porcelain/ceramic crowns exhibited the exact opposite movement from their all-porcelain brethren.
Each procedure is subject to its own market forces, however – up to and including random fluctuation, it should be stated, which presents as many opportunities and threats vis-à-vis your competitive landscape as any other reason for change, be it general inflation (or, heaven forbid, deflation), underlying commodity prices, changes in popularity, new alternatives and many more.
Again, we have them all dead-to-rights with zip code level data for 95% of the country.
So, what are you waiting for? Give your practice a shot in the arm with increased revenues of up to $60,000 – at a cost of only $495. That’s a potential net gain of $59,505, accomplished by way of a seamless signup procedure that takes all of one minute.
Once you select the three zip codes that will give you the market picture you want to see, an email with comprehensive fee survey data for each of them will be on its way to your inbox.
If, conversely, you don’t avail yourself of the power of Sikka’s Fee Survey, you can bet that your competition will. And in that situation, by you potentially overcharging relative to your local market for some procedures (and therefore driving customers away) and undercharging for others (thus putting undue pressure on your bottom line, which can lead to all sorts of negative knock-on effects), you’re giving your competition a potentially insurmountable advantage.
So don’t overcharge. Don’t undercharge. Supercharge! Sign up at sikkasoft.com/FeeSurveyforDentistry today and see where it takes your practice.
