Stop Wasting Leads Series: Scaling the Funnel – How to Build a Multi-Location Scheduling System That Converts.

Written by Ryan Torresan, Chief Marketing Officer, Peak Dental Services.

In my last article, Stop Wasting Leads Series: Retention, Not Just Acquisition, Drives Dental Growth, we explored why marketing ROI doesn’t stop at scheduling. The real growth comes when patients show up, accept treatment, and return for ongoing care.

But what happens when your dental group starts to scale?

When you go from five offices to 30—or 30 to 60+—or expand from one region to multiple regions or a new state, the challenges don’t just add up; they multiply.

Here’s what usually happens:

Leads start falling through the cracks
Your tech stack becomes inefficient and slow—kind of like waiting for AOL dial-up to connect back in the day. Except instead of that screeching modem sound, you hear the sound of marketing dollars burning
Scheduling becomes inconsistent and frustrating for patients
Marketing gets blamed for “bad leads” or broken tracking… when in reality, it’s a messy mix of tracking gaps and operational breakdowns.

At a single office, a missed call is a small problem.

At 50 offices, it’s a seven-figure revenue loss.

Scaling isn’t just about running more ads or hiring more providers. It’s about building a repeatable system that converts marketing dollars into scheduled and shown patients, consistently across every location.

Here’s how to do it—and why the right scheduling strategy is key component to marketing and growth success.

Here’s how to do it—and why the right scheduling strategy is your secret weapon for growth.

The Scheduling Chaos of Scaling

When you’re running just a few offices, local teams can usually handle scheduling calls, responding to online form fills, and following up with patients.

But as you grow, cracks start to show:

Missed calls skyrocket during peak hours or after hours. (I regularly see missed call rates of 20% or more—that’s one out of every five calls going unanswered.)
Online form fills and live chats go unanswered for hours—or even days
Each office develops its own scripts and workflows, making reporting nearly impossible
Front desk teams are overwhelmed, juggling phones, patients in the lobby, and daily office responsibilities
Scheduling blocks constantly change, making it difficult to book patients in a timely way
Recruiting, training, and retaining skilled front desk team members becomes overwhelming
Marketing dollars are wasted because leads never even make it onto the schedule

The result? Marketing ROI plummets while management is left scrambling to figure out why new patient growth has stalled.

Centralized Scheduling: A Scalable Solution

To scale effectively, you need a centralized, professional scheduling solution that ensures every patient interaction is handled quickly and consistently while still allowing offices to slot in patients on the schedule.

This doesn’t mean taking control away from local teams—it means supporting them with the right infrastructure.

One approach is to partner with a specialized third-party call center like Reach (getreach.co).

Reach acts as an extension of your team, handling:

Inbound calls across all offices
Outbound recall and reactivation outreach
Online form fills and live chat responses
After-hours answering to capture leads 24/7

Customize the workflows and lead flow specific to your dental group.

For example:

Setup an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to automate phone system that interacts with callers and routes calls to the appropriate person
All new patient calls route directly to the call center
Existing patient calls stay local—unless the office doesn’t answer within five rings, at which point the call automatically overflows to the call center
Scheduling templates are built for each office’s preferences, insurance participation, and high-value appointment blocks

This blended approach allows:

Offices maintain control of their day-to-day operations
Call centers to handle high-priority marketing leads and clear blocks on the schedule to book appointments
Marketing to introduce AI scheduling tools for missed calls and direct online bookings

The result? Fuller schedules, fewer missed opportunities, and a smoother patient experience.

Why a Great Call Center Partner Matters

A strong partner like Reach brings best practices gained from working with many dental groups. They’ll help you with:

Designing your IVR (phone menu) to reduce patient frustration
Building smart scheduling templates to fill high-value appointment slots first
Creating scripts and workflows that consistently increase conversion rates
Handling the heavy lifting of hiring, training, and managing reps, so you don’t have to build dozens of front desk teams as you grow

Data Visibility and Tracking at Scale

Centralizing scheduling solves the execution problem. But how do you measure performance across 10, 50, or 100 locations?

That’s where tracking and analytics comes in.

Step 1: Fix Your Marketing Tracking

Most dental groups invest heavily in Google Paid Search, but very few have their analytics set up correctly to track calls and form fills by source.

Start here:

Set up a Google Ads MCC account so you have one master login and true ownership over all campaigns
Ensure every call and form fill is tagged by marketing source (PPC, Google My Business, SEO, direct mail, etc.)
Partner with a digital vendor who will test and verify tracking, not just run ads

Step 2: Add AI Tracking Software for Funnel Insights

Once your Google Ads plumbing is in place, you need to understand what happens after the phone rings.

This is where Peerlogic (peerlogic.com) comes in. It acts as an AI-powered analytics layer for your scheduling funnel.

Think of Peerlogic as your Higgins, TC and Rick to Magnum P.I.
Keeping everything organized, delivering the intel you need, and occasionally saving you from blowing up the whole operation.

Peerlogic provides:

Tracking of which marketing channel generated each call
Identification of whether the call was a true scheduling opportunity or just a billing question
Separation of new patient opportunities vs. existing patients
Real-time reporting on whether those opportunities were actually booked
Insights into why patients didn’t schedule—priceless for coaching teams and adjusting marketing
The ability to listen to calls for quality assurance

With tracking software, you can finally answer critical questions like:

Are certain offices—or even your call center—dropping the ball?
Which marketing campaigns are generating real new patients, not just phone calls?
Where should you increase or decrease spend?

Plus, with Peerlogic for missed calls it’s AI solution can communicate with the caller and book appointments direct into your practice management software (PMS). It is an added bonus that drives positive ROI and gets appointments on the schedule.

Step 3: Close the Loop

Combine solutions like Reach and Peerlogic to create a closed-loop system:

Marketing drives the lead → Call Center schedules the appointment → AI tracking software tracks and reports → Marketing optimizes spend and strategy

This transforms scheduling from a local office problem into a scalable, predictable growth engine.

Scaling Best Practices

Whether you build your own centralized team or partner with 3^rd party solutions, follow these best practices for multi-location success:

1. Standardize Your Scheduling Playbook

- Define clear rules for booking, block scheduling, watermarks, etc
- Align scripts and messaging across all offices to create a consistent patient experience

2. Measure What Really Matters

Track metrics that connect marketing to growth

% of leads that are true scheduling opportunities
Ratio of new vs. existing patient calls
Cost per lead and cost per scheduled appointment
Show rates of scheduled patients

These metrics move beyond vanity stats to true business impact

3. Cover Every Channel

Patients expect instant responses

Ensure calls, form fills, live chats, and after-hours inquiries are answered within minutes, not hours
If you wait, they won’t—they’ll book with your competitor

4. Balance Marketing With Capacity

Marketing is wasted if your offices are booked out months in advance.

<15 days availability: Ramp up marketing spend
16 to 30 days availability: Continue marketing spend
31–60 days: Slow marketing slightly
61+ days: Focus on cost-effective tactics like SEO and Google My Business while pausing heavy spend

The Future of Scaled Growth

Scaling isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter.

As dental groups grow, marketing and operations (MOPS) must align more closely than ever.

By pairing a centralized scheduling partner with data-driven insights, you create a scaleable system that:

Converts leads into patients
Creates predicatable growth
Maximizes marketing ROI
Provides clean, credible data to confidently report back to management/board

Marketing brings the leads.

Call center ensures they get scheduled.

Tracking software proves it’s working.

That’s how you build a multi-location dental marketing to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

Stay tuned for my next article.

If you have questions or need help diagnosing your funnel, email me at ryantorresan@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn

Ryan Torresan is considered one of the leading marketing minds in dental and healthcare on what’s next in marketing, relevance, marketing that actually impacts DSOs and can be measured. With more than 10 years of DSO experience, Ryan is a marketing executive who steered a very successful career to reach the executive level at three of the largest dental support organizations (DSOs) in the US.

During his tenures, he earned promotions and awards after tremendous success in the digital marketing and social media space. He is also known to have transformed event, CRM and content marketing into lead generation. He has repositioned brands, navigated crisis public relations and driven incremental sales through office designs. He played a crucial role on executive teams that sold DSOs to private equity firms.