By a quality problem, I mean a good problem to have.  Frank Caruso (located in Avon, Ohio) wrote to me:

My schedule has been full now this entire year. I used to start a week with a 10 patient waiting list for both new and return patients, now I have gotten that list down to maybe 1 patient.  I still have not found another acupuncturist just yet. I haven’t really been pursuing it.

This is after adding a third treatment room. He previously tried getting in touch with Acupuncture Today (twice), but they never got back to him!

By the way, Frank doesn’t just have good marketing - he also believes strongly in the law of attraction.

I’ve talked to other acupuncturists who added an associate acupuncturist to their staff.  In every case, they wished hired someone sooner.   If you’re thinking about hiring someone, you could be giving someone worthy a job, make more money, and help even more patients.

So I have a question - where should someone advertise to hire a new practitioner?  I know of PCOM’s job postings, and Acupuncture Today’s e-classifieds and regular classifieds, but where else?

If you hired/are hiring acupuncturists, where would you look?  What was your experience?

If you’re looking for an acupuncture job, where do you look?

Thanks!

Send Out Cards is a great way to stay in touch with acupuncture patients. It helps with relationship marketing and serves as a reminder that you’re there for them. However, Send Out Cards has a requirement that videos not be available to the general public.  That’s why I have to password protect the video.

The password for the previous video is the last name of the developer of the “Balance” method of point selection.  If you don’t know the name, you can contact me through the form below.

A couple months ago, I had lunch with Frank G., a local acupuncturist.  After lunch we visited his clinic, where he walked me through his intake procedures. (I don’t want to give away his secrets if a patient googles him, so I’m withholding his last name.)

Frank has a fantastic intake procedure that builds his credibility.  He uses charts to locate pain and discuss how acupuncture can treat it.  He also shows patients how pain in one area is connected to other parts of the body.

While I was there, he had a call from a prospective patient. I caught him telling the patient something like, “Why don’t you come in, and we’ll discuss your problem.  Then I’ll let you know if I can help you.”

These two sentences alone did a lot:

• He convinced them to come in without hard selling.
• His attitude implied he wouldn’t do any hard selling.
• He established a basis of trust - he’ll tell them the truth, even if it’s that acupuncture isn’t for them.
• He avoided the “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome.  (Chiropractors in particular tend to try fixing everything, even if chiropractic isn’t the right approach.
• He established himself as an authority in their minds.  The authority principle is one of the six Cialdini principles - mental shortcuts to persuasion.  (I discuss the Cialdini principles in an appendix of Never Market Again.

This is just a small part of his intake procedure.  Believe it or not, your intake procedures ARE part of marketing acupuncture.  As I mentioned in Never Market Again, intake should be like a slippery slope.  Once someone starts on the path to becoming your patient, it should be easy and effortless to end up in your clinic for treatment.

Note that although Frank wasn’t definitive whether acupuncture would help, he was definitive that he would be able to find out.  That’s the authority principle in action.

How do you use your intake procedures as part of your marketing?  (If you don’t, you might want to start.)

I’ve been violating my own rules lately and neglecting my marketing!  It started out because I was too busy to write… then because I wasn’t motivated (what does one more week matter?)… then to see what would happen.

It reminds me of a story about William Wrigley, of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum fame.  He told a reporter, “Advertising is pretty much like running a train. You’ve got to keep on shovelling coal into the engine. Once you stop stoking, the fire goes out. The train will run on its own momentum for a while, but it will gradually slow down and come to a dead stop.”

I’m seeing that now - my book sales have slowed to under half of the usual. It’s been interesting seeing my train slow down.

I should know better, because I’ve seen this happen to a lot of acupuncturists. They’ll get busy, and have so many patients, they’ll neglect the basics of keeping in touch, or start asking for referrals less often, or “forget” to do other things - no matter how easy they are. Then when there’s not enough acupuncture patients, they have to scramble and start marketing more.

A lot of practitioners complain of fluctuating numbers of acupuncture patients, but this boom/bust cycle caused by their own marketing action/inaction can make the variations even worse. Do this, and your patient visits will go up and down like a rollercoaster.

The best way around this is to make it pretty much a no brainer.

Are you making this mistake? Or have you done it in the past? What can you do to prevent it?

Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Awareness Day is October 24th. See: http://www.aomday.org/. It’s a great day to have an open house. Open houses are great for reactivating old patients, and having existing patients bring people in to meet you.

If you have ideas, comments, suggestions, experiences to share, please fill in the comment form below.

Thanks!

Kevin Doherty and Dominic Sembello are now running a coaching website. If you sign up, you’ll have access to many resources (both written and audio) for learning to build your practice. Since they charge a lot of money for coaching, the $19.95 a month they’re charging seems dirt cheap.

They’re going to be raising the price to $29.95 soon (and may have done so already), but this is still very cheap for what I think they’re providing. I haven’t seen this myself, but we all know Kevin knows his stuff. He’s proven it with his book, Build Your Dream Practice.

Dominic wrote a book on Automatic Practice Success. It has good information, but is quite advanced. It would be difficult for most practitioners to implement, especially since it talks more about the “what-to-do” than the “how-to” do it. I’ve talked to Dominic about this, and he admits you would probably need coaching to be able to pull it off. If the “Prosperous Practitioner” program has the “how-tos”, for Automatic Practice Success, I strongly recommend getting both.

Especially since I’m a big believer in automated systems. Good systems allow you to focus on treating patients instead of running a business.

Just one new patient would pay for Automatic Practice Success, Build Your Dream Practice and a few months of the coaching program. So take a look.

Every once in awhile, someone asks me about how to ask for a referral in a certain situation. Or how to educate patients. Or how to word something they’re thinking about putting in a letter. This happens even with acupuncturists who own a copy of Never Market Again. They see the opportunity to make a connection, but aren’t quite sure how to take advantage of it.

A useful way to think about marketing acupuncture is to think of it as making people aware they have a choice.

If they know someone that you might help, they can [Read more →]

A lot of people are afraid of being pushy or otherwise offending people when trying to get new patients. In fact, I’d say that more than half of acupuncturists worry about this, based on responses to the online Quiz I created. Fact is, it’s possible to assert yourself without being pushy. If you can actually help people, you’re doing he world a disservice by NOT asserting yourself.

Problem is, a lot of us have been on the receiving end of a pushy salesman’s script. I’ll never forget buying my current car - I wasn’t ready to sign the contract that day, so the saleman brought in his manager. The manager tried his best to get me to buy immediately. He pounded me, rapid-fire, with question after question designed to get me to buy the car immediately. I wouldn’t, and I found his approach funny because I knew what he was doing.

(My attitude: “I’m not ready, you can’t make me, and I think it’s funny you would even try.” But I can see how people would get mad.)

I was actually inspired to get into helping acupuncturists with their marketing after seeing the materials of a prominent acupuncture/chiropractic marketing system. They recommend using the SAME tactics as a car salesman. A bunch of questions and a script to counter every objection. Most practitioners I know who were in that program quit. As one said, “It’s not coming from the heart.”

This is the kind of thing that turns us off to ANY kind of self-promotion. We don’t want to be anything like the sleazeballs. But that just makes us hide what we have to offer.

C.J. Hayden wrote a good article about this, and gave me permission to share it with you.

In the 15-plus years that I’ve been teaching entrepreneurs about sales and marketing, the most significant barrier to success named by my clients and students is that they simply don’t like to market and sell.

The roots of this dislike are varied. Sometimes what gets in the way is fear of rejection, or self-doubt of one’s abilities. Other times it’s lack of knowledge or inexperience; most of us don’t like to do things when we feel we can’t do them well. But a theme that rears its ugly head over and over again is this: a belief that sales and marketing is dishonest, manipulative, and sleazy.

You might expect me to argue that these negative portrayals of marketing are not true. But in reality, they often are. Most of us experience on a daily basis, inauthentic marketing, manipulative selling, and attempts at persuasion that rub us the wrong way. When we note our distaste for these tactics, consciously or unconsciously, we allow them to color our attitude about marketing in general, and our own marketing in particular.

Of course we don’t want others to think of us as untruthful, manipulative, or pushy. So once we characterize sales and marketing as deserving of those adjectives, a natural outgrowth is that we begin to avoid doing it.

I’m not suggesting that you, the person reading this article, are a sleazy marketer. In fact, I suspect it’s much more likely that you aren’t. But it just may be that you need to convince yourself of that truth in order to raise your comfort level about sales and marketing. To that end, I offer the following guidelines.

You are NOT a sleazy marketer, if:

~ You only promise what you know you can deliver. You don’t make unrealistic promises and overblown claims, because you know they backfire in the long run. Even when exaggerations like these convince customers to buy, when their purchase doesn’t live up to the hype, they feel misled and dissatisfied. Unhappy customers don’t make repeat purchases or refer others.

~ You always represent your abilities and experience accurately. You’re not afraid to let customers know how good you are at what you do, but you don’t feel the need to fabricate a background that doesn’t exist. Instead, you play up your strengths, tell stories about past successes, and rely on positive references.

~ You explain why you are good rather than why the competition is bad. You know that running down the competition only makes you look jealous or defensive. Your competitors are also your colleagues, and can often become some of your best referral sources. You don’t hesitate to stress your unique competitive advantages and emphasize the benefits of your products and services, but you do so without disparaging others.

~ You never trick people into taking or returning your calls. You wouldn’t think of asking someone’s receptionist to put through your call by giving misleading information. Nor do you leave voice mail messages implying that your call is for a purpose other than the real one. The most productive sales conversations are always with people who are open to having them.

~ You ask for permission to follow up or to add prospects to your list. When you ask a prospect “may I call you again next quarter?” you are both agreeing that a follow-up conversation is worth having. You’ll feel more confident making future contacts when you know they are welcome. You also know that subscribing people to your email list without permission only annoys them, so you always ask first.

~ You stop selling when it’s clear the customer doesn’t need what you’re offering. In a sales conversation, of course you respond to objections with counterpoints, but you do so respectfully, and never push customers past their own comfort zone. When prospects make it clear that they don’t have a current need for your products and services and don’t wish to continue hearing about them, you thank them for their time and move on.

Post this list by your computer and your telephone. Read it over before writing marketing copy or making sales calls. Do whatever it takes to reassure yourself that your own sales and marketing is honest, ethical, and authentic. Once you are confident that any hint of the sleaze factor has been eliminated from your marketing, it’s my bet that you will want to engage in sales and marketing more enthusiastically, with more pride, and more often.

A lot of people worry about the cost of marketing their acupuncture clinic. It’s the single most common question I get: “What’s the most cost-effective way of marketing?”

Fact is, marketing is free when it’s done right. It pays for itself - otherwise why in the world would you do it? Your website should be free. Your brochures should pay for themselves. Your yellow page ad (if you have one) shouldn’t cost you anything.

There’s just two problems. They’re only potential problems if you handle them right. [Read more →]

I haven’t yet run an acupuncture clinic myself. Still, I get asked a lot about how to set up the business procedures/processes for running a clinic.

The best book I’ve seen on running a business is The E-Myth Revisited. Bad title, great book. It’s actually easy to read, makes a lot of sense, and will get you thinking about how to make things easier on yourself.It’s almost certainly in your local library.

In it, Michael Gerber talks about how many people who start a business end up creating a job for themselves that’s much worse than the job they left. It’s no wonder that [Read more →]

For those of you who don’t know Dr. Tan, he’s got an amazing system of acupuncture called the Balance method. It pretty much uses only distal points (points on the limbs or head, not the body) so that no disrobing is needed. From what I can tell, practitioners use a needle on every meridian. The effect is to balance all meridians at once.

Also, the points are achi - meaning if it’s a good point to needle, it will feel sore to the patient. It makes for super-fast and accurate point location.

My best buddy (who got me started in marketing acupuncture) uses Dr. Tan’s methods exclusively. For awhile I thought he was lazy or negligent, [Read more →]

On April 24th, I decided to improve my own marketing. Here’s what I did:

[Read more →]

Someone emailed me:

“People who are in the holistic health business should be as aggressive as pharmaceutical companies when it comes to marketing their services.”

They aren’t kidding. The most profitable businesses in the world (as determined by profit margin) are drug companies. What’s worse is they’re devastatingly effective at what they do. The PLoS Medical Journal is one of the only medical journals that doesn’t accept ad money from drug companies. Most continuing education for doctors is sponsored by the drug companies!!!

This means they don’t learn about new therapies. Or nutrition, exercise and better living helps patients. Especially not about acupuncture and OM. They just learn about drugs, drugs and more drugs.

Want to know how the drug companies market? [Read more →]

You’ve heard of acufinder, and they cost something like $179 a year or $219 for two years (if I remember correctly. They may be well worth it, because each new patient is worth at least $150 (probably closer to twice that). So just one new patient pays for the ad. Every patient after that is a bonus.

TCM Directory isn’t as well known as acufinder, but it actually has more features. Elie, the site’s creator, tells me that some people even use it as their website. It’s that powerful. Until September 15th, you can get a listing for $11 - 85% off the regular price. [Read more →]