Last month we finally settled down (almost) in our new home. We just moved back to Bangalore.

My wife is a Pedodontist – meaning she specializes in kids dentistry and was looking out for jobs in paediatric dentistry.

I would have done disservice to her as a husband who’s operated in Ops for over eight years working in close quarters with go-to-market teams – and did not do something to ease her job hunting. And a good husband I am (except for the part where I have delayed our honeymoon for seven months coz covid🤷‍♂️😁).

I put an exhaustive prospecting plan in an excel and she put it to test in the first week of Jan. The results have us excited!

This is what I did.

Requirement gathering:

1. Does she want to work as an independent consultant or a full-time Dentist?
2. How much she knows about Bangalore’s Dental market?
3. What should be her pay expectations?
4. How far can she travel from home?
5. What are two non- negotiables in any job she takes?

After I had a detailed idea of her requirements and figured what she knows and doesn’t, is where the next part of the plan falls in place.

Googling

I googled and put together a list of all clinics within 8km radius. Why 8km? While ideally 7kms made sense given the time it took her to travel and back from our home, we stretched it to 8kms coz there were a couple of good clinics we wanted to accommodate in our plan. It is like $500 gives you a king size bed and $470 gives you a queen-size. You stretch coz of the returns exceed the lil more effort.

What is the clinic’s public rating?

I then started putting the top rated ones. Whoever has used Amazon or Flipkart knows rating means nothing without the # of people who rated the product. So I used rating and # of people who rated the clinic to arrive at a weightage. Below is a good example of why only looking at rating is a bad idea.

Which clinic is putting out paid ads?

I then identified the clinics that put out a google paid ad for pedodontists (keywords: kids dentist, pedodontist, etc.) Put a weightage in my above formula to account for these. This gave me two things: if they have weathered the covid storm, they now mean business and intend to cover the market as vaccination drive starts and people start heading back to the city. My wife will have a higher chance of securing an interview with them. And our post-conversation results prove this was a right assumption!

Which clinics have pedodontist mentioned on their website?

When you do a google search for a phrase, Google identifies in the search results if your specific keyword of interest shows up on any websites. I listed all clinics that had keywords and phrases of our interest like “children tooth decay”, “kids specialist”, “children’s RCT” among others mentioned on their website and accounted in my formula.

Some more checks

Ideally I would have done two more checks in a non-covid world that Google can’t tell me today.

• Talk to local pharmacies. I would have done walks to local pharmacies and get intelligence from medical shops to understand who do they get most kids prescriptions from. Why? Clinics tend to exaggerate their patient footfalls. If you had a neat marketer on premise, you could make your clinic sound the most loved of them all within just weeks of setting it up. This intel validates some of our data. Leave my wife’s visiting card at every pharmacy.

• Google play schools near me. The second important check I would have done is to go to play schools close to us to check if they had a resident doctor. Propose a free dental checkup. Leave my wife’s visiting cards at every play school.

You don’t convince a kid on why she needs a root-canal treatment; you convince her parents!

Play schools are the clubhouse of your ideal customer profile: kids’ parents!

Now onto the outcome of this exercize….drum rolls……!!

• We listed 83 clinics near us that fell into our criteria
• Top 13 clinics had a score of 100+ in our analysis and were must go meet and seek an interview
• Of the 13, only 3 had rating of 125+ in our analysis and we parked these for Day 3

You might be wondering why did we park three clinics with highest rating in our analysis for day three. Here’s why.

We did not want to squander the chance with top 3. Interview the first two days with the top 10 clinics and get intel in every other clinic on:

• Patient footfalls
• Number of dental chairs
• Rate cards (what do you charge for each procedure?)
• What do they each pay a consultant and resident doc?
• How price and quality sensitive is the Bangalore’s dental market?
• If you are a consultant, do you bring your own material (that goes into dental procedure) or they provide? Some of these materials are expensive.

Use all that information and build an arsenal of intel before stepping into top 3. At the same time, you don’t walk in for a “transactional” interview but for a “qualitative” conversation.

Transactional Conversation sounds like this:

Interviewer: What are your pay expectations?

Interviewee: I would like to be paid INR 50,000 per month.

A qualitative conversation would look this for the very same Q:

Interviewer: What are your pay expectations?

Interviewee: Depends on if you want me work full-time or as a Consultant. The general market trend on pay in Bangalore is right now for full-time Pedodontist’s is INR 40,000 for a fresher while I come in with a year’s experience. The Consultation charges would be INR 350 per visit and revenue sharing at 50-50 split for every procedure. If materials would be mine, the revenue sharing will be 70-30. What are your thoughts?

To collect information and structure it into a format to really figure intel, we decided a set of siz Qs my wife designed that she would ask every clinic she visits to form a pattern from her data. Like the below ones:

• Paedo-cases per month? Gives you a fair idea on footfall in clinics on your speciality by area.
• Revenue Sharing per case? Gives you idea on pay
• No of chairs? Gives you idea on the clinic’s infra

The outcome?

• My wife has pretty neat idea on the consultancy market in Bangalore when it comes to paediatric dentistry
• She created her rate card for different cases with confidence to say why she would charge what she would
• Got offered from 3 of the top 5 on our list. Yet to hear back from 1. 1 No req.

The top-most clinic on our list had ratings almost 3x of anyone else on the list of 83. So I knew the founder knew something others clearly did not.

I asked my wife to share our entire plan of why we think he was the best on our list. He was incredibly amazed at how we put in the ratings and weightage. But he said he couldn’t offer a job for now coz he himself is a pedodontist. But! But!! But!!!

This is what he did:

• Gave my wife a tour of the entire clinic
• Told her no dentist has ever walked in for an interview with this level of research & analysis. Of course I got some credit too 😉
• Gave my wife feedback on which one’s to shortlist and which one’s not and what rate cards to work and what courses to do. One course my wife told him she wants to do, is on his wish-list too
• Told her she will be his go-to should he need a pedodontist

And he did something that gave my wife a chance at something new. You will see! Keep reading for another 100 seconds!

The market is brutal right now given the pandemic means most people are not in Bangalore right now. Those that are, are least keen to bring kids to clinics. But at the same time it is an opportunity to gather intel (doctors have time on them to tell a fellow junior on Qs asked and more). Network around. One doc turned out to be the doc who treated her when she was a kid!! Can you believe that!!

Smart work is a distilled outcome of hard work backed by data.

Wife is now part of quite a few Dentists’ WhatsApp groups and a made some “friends” on Facebook this past three weeks.

One things that is apparent from this exercize is the only way to increase your chances is to run into as many things as many times with continuous data feedback loops.

Remember the interview my wife had with the founder from the best clinic on our list? Well before my wife came out of that clinic, that founder gave my wife a referral to another founder who is on the India board of a medical device maker and runs a neat clinic of his own.

Today was my wife’s first day at work there 🙂