Getting them in the Door

Matthew,

I wanted to discuss practice building, and I decided to review what you had written in your book.  The chapter, Getting them in the door actually is quite thorough with everything you discuss regarding marketing, networking, online promotion, and working with other health care practitioners.  My question is about presentations and lectures to groups in the community.  Do you have any strategies that you have found successful when promoting your practice to such groups.  I am very interested in creating an outline for presentations that would be effective, educational and productive.  Currently as I am teaching in addition to practicing I have an available network and opportunities to speak and present but I am interested in finding other venues or groups to present to and to educate regarding the healthful benefits.  I always have a raffle for a free treatment and that gets interest as well as often new patients.

Thanks!

Zu San Li

Glad to hear you found the material in my book on getting them in your door to be useful. As for public talks, it took me many years but I feel I finally came-up with a very good approach when giving public talks and that is to stress that acupuncture works by stimulating the body’s own natural resources. That is the same explanation I give my patients during the initial consultation. In addition to my book, I also rote of this in one of my Acupuncture Today’s articles including some thoughts on how to apply that in public talks. The link to that article follows this post. I really can’t over emphasize just how useful it is to stress with the public that acupuncture stimulates the body’s own resources. Doing so allows one to then explain so many aspects of how acupuncture works .  In the AT article I give this advice for public talks:

“ A great way to start a talk about acupuncture is to ask the audience this:

“If I could wave a magic wand and help you to get more good out of your own healing resources, would you be interested in that?” Most people will indicate that they would. You then tell them:

“Sorry, I don’t have a magic wand, but I can help to boost your own healing resources with acupuncture.”

This takes about 30 seconds and sets up how you will then go about answering all the questions that follow.”

In that article I use the “turning brown grass to green”  explanation for acupuncture that I have been using for years. I recently added a different variation to that way of putting things in that I sometimes now tell people that the boost acupuncture gives our resources is like the “surge” of troops we had in Iraq. A good series of treatments will give a “surge” to the body’s resources and then we must wait to see how much good that will do. Wether it is turning brown grass to green or the surge explanation,  this way of framing it cuts right through all the misunderstanding and mystery and allows your patients and the public during your talks to understand how this treatment works.

I hope that helps and feel free to contact me for more information or to lets us in the Forums know how your talks go. 

Matthew Bauer