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Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of, To The Point. I am Dr. Nell with the American Acupuncture Council. I want to thank AAC so much for having me here today to talk about something that was actually really critical for me. And the success of my practice. I’m currently getting notifications that AAC is live.
So if you all have not signed up for those notifications, please do we have too many great speakers to miss out. So at the end, we’ll go over what’s happening next week. But for today, Let’s jump right into the slides so we can get into your 32nd elevator pitch. So here’s a little bit of what we’re going to go over today.
There’s a lot of important aspects to this, but it’s really important for me. For the topic of this conversation to give you something really tangible that you can walk away with and scale for you, your practice using any given situation, we’re going to go over what some of those situations might be.
But we’re going to talk about how you’re currently introducing yourself. What does that current pitch look like? Is it even really a pitch? Do you stumble over that a little bit. We’re going to solve that problem today. Why we need this introduction how critical it is for our businesses, for our lives and what’s your, why?
Why do you need a good introduction? What are you looking to. Accomplish in your business and life. And how do we build that confidence when it comes to our communication. And then we’re going to get into crafting your new introduction, your 32nd elevator pitch, and then next steps. How do you use this throughout your life?
Let’s move on through. How are you currently introducing yourself? If we can talk about that for a second, this is the number one thing that practitioners and students tell me that they often struggle with because we are usually called licensed acupuncturist, but we do so much more than acupuncture.
Do you say that you’re an herbalist? Do you find yourself saying acupuncture best and people just assume certain things about you or about your. Do you say integrative medicine provider in order to try to be a little more inclusive with all of the things that you do, are you saying you’re a TCM practitioner?
The issue with all of these is, and we don’t want to forget this one. When we list all the modalities, because we don’t want to limit ourselves to acupuncture. So we say, but I also do cupping and moxa and Quasha and herbal medicine and nutrition. And you’ve totally lost the person in front of you because what do all of these things have in common?
These terms are really meaningful for us as practitioners who understand our medicine, who understand the value that we bring to the table. However, They don’t provide a lot of value for that person sitting across from us or standing next to us in line at the Starbucks or the person that we overhear on the street who has an injury that we could really help.
And they’ve never tried acupuncture before. So how are we going to go about articulating that value to someone who has no idea what we do? And more importantly, what are we actually missing out on by not honing in this clear communication? So if I say, oh, I’m an acupuncturist. And someone has these preconceived ideas about what that means, or very commonly they’re afraid of needles.
They might not even want to hear the rest of the conversation that we could engage in, where they could be held. Herbal medicine, cupping, nutrition, et cetera. So we don’t want to miss out on these key areas and having proper communication allows us to really hone in here. So provider collaboration, and I’m not just talking about providers who are well aware of what we think.
Providers in our industry or people we’ve already been engaged in a referral type of relationship with, but what about providers who need to understand our value, who would be great sources of referrals? However, we’re not in a place where we can communicate that effectively. And then they don’t know how to properly refer to us.
Referrals are consistently noted as the primary source of new patients. And when I coach practitioners, this is what they say to me all the time. My practice is so referral based. If we can hone in on our communication and have that perfect pitch, this will really help us get more referrals, a general public education.
So these are people who have maybe little to no knowledge about what we do. Maybe you have a speaking event where you’re actually going to be a public speaker you’ve been asked to speak or you’re at a health fair. Pre-qualified people who are already interested in their health. So they need you you can get really targeted with this general public education as well.
So again, this template we’re going to go over. You can tweak for any given situation. All of these areas are going to benefit from you being able to craft that perfect pitch, talking about patient retention. So let’s say you’re like, ah, doctor now, I don’t want to be a public speaker, so I don’t need to do general public education.
What about people who come into your practice that you’re trying to articulate? Why they need to come three times a week for three weeks, or you’re trying to explain to them how critical their treatment plan is to their success and the goals that they want to reach that effective communication with your patients is what’s going to help them continue to come back into your practice to build that trust, to manage expectations.
And all of that is important, even in that one-on-one relationship and then networking, of course, and this is something that we’ll go into more in a later episode of to the point. Sometimes you just meet people and you’re not really sure how they’re going to fit in with you, your practice, your network.
You want to be connected to this person. You want to stay in touch, that you want to be able to articulate value. How are you doing that in 30 seconds or less? Because the attention span is going down. Our timeframe that we have to make a meaningful impression is going down. And so I want you all to get really clear on that today.
And that’s what I’m here to give you. So we can’t talk about effective communication. We can’t talk about your perfect pitch if we don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, because what I might say and the value that I believe I can articulate to an audience could be very different than the value.
You want to relate to somebody the type of patient that I want to attract? My goals for my business for life to be very different than yours. For me, my why is bringing acupuncture into the standard of care. I am passionate about that. I think it’s really important. I think the more people who have exposure to this medicine, the better, but there aren’t a lot of people who can effectively communicate what we do to an audience who has no idea what we do.
It took us years in school to understand certain concepts and verbiage and jargon that the general public doesn’t know. So we always want to have our why in mind, because that’s going to help us craft our messaging. When I’m thinking about acupuncture into the standard of care, this helps guide my business decisions.
It helps guide my messaging. So I’m always focused on meeting people where they are, because. Goal is to bring more people who are not knowledgeable about this medicine into the fold. So you can have your overarching why, and then your smaller business-wise I’m not saying that, when you’re deciding where you’re going to go for lunch in the middle of your day of practice, that you have to be thinking about your overarching, why, but you might be thinking, oh, if I want to get acupuncture into the.
Care. I want my communication with the public to be extremely professional. I want them to see that my practices very clean that they can trust me thus, they can trust other practitioners in this medicine. And so our goals and our plans get derived from that overarching idea. So I love this quote by Stephen Covey to begin with the end in mind, because you are going to reverse engineer that.
And the last thing we want to talk about before getting into that actual template is confidence because this is the pushback that I get a lot of times from practitioners, we get educated very well. When it comes to clinical skills I. Doubt people’s clinical skills. When I went to school in California, it was a rigorous education.
And so I felt very competent when it came to needling thing. When it came to herbal medicine. However, I didn’t have a ton of business training. There are very minimal hours in the curriculum allowed for that. And so my confidence when it came to business was not there. So I’ve been where a lot of you are at this point.
And so we’re going to. Some of that today. Like I said, I like very tangible takeaways. So we do have this responsibility of being able to educate and communicate about how we provide value, because how do you get patients into your practice if you can’t do that? How do you help grow the medicine, the professional without being able to do that?
So we do need to be very focused on building our confidence so we can have these conversations. You hear a lot? Oh, confidence comes from operating outside of your comfort zone. True. But again, let me make this really tangible for you, keeping the commitments we make to ourselves. So if you tell yourself I am going to do these five things today and you check off that to do list, you do all five things at the end of the day, you have reinforced to yourself that you can trust yourself.
If you have a list of 15 things. That’s a lot more things than five, but you’ll only do 12 of them. Even though 12 is an accomplishment. You might be telling yourself, oh, I didn’t get to 15. That’s what I said I was going to do. I can’t trust myself. So when I coach students and practitioners on building confidence, I encourage you to come up with ways that you can check that box that you can trust yourself.
It might be a simple. I said, I’m going to work out this morning and then I did. And so today is a success I can trust myself, but that confidence in life translates into confidence in business and absolutely your confidence in communication. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that you’re going to be a hundred percent every day.
If you wake up and think I need to be at a hundred percent to go and treat patients or to practice, nobody’s perfect. So I actually love this 51% rule that my business coach told me to just believe it a little more than you don’t. And sometimes the act of going through the process, practicing things, you will get closer to that a hundred percent.
So when it comes to your confidence and you’re saying, okay, I’m going to, do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to put myself out there. I’m going to do this elevator pitch. I believe a little bit more than not believing that it’s going to work and you will eventually start to scale that confidence. So remember this, how you’re currently introducing yourself.
Let’s see if we can get a little bit more clear and concise with this. So this is the template that I will tell you for me. Changed my entire practice, this very simple elevator pitch. So your introduction, we often think it’s about us because it’s called our intro. Game changer is this is a three-part thing and only one part gets to be about you, which is.
Mind boggling for some people, it was mind boggling for me because the way I used to introduce myself as a young woman who wanted to prove that I, had experience and I was competent in my field. So I liked to list all of the certifications I was doing, where I went to school, my doctorate, all of these types of things.
That articulates no value to the person that you’re meeting, who knows nothing about this medicine. Now, if two out of the three parts are about the person sitting in front of you. That’s going to do a little bit of a better job articulating that value. So this first part of the introduction who you are, this is where we get to satisfy the burning desire to talk about ourselves.
And this could be that you are a licensed acupuncturist. If you feel very attached to that, you want to make sure acupuncture is in that title. This could be the integrative medicine provider. This could be for me, founder of peak health or director of development for American acupuncture council. This is where you get to say, this is who I am.
However. The other two parts get to be about the person you’re talking to. And this is the reason that this is a template. I’m going to show you some examples of this, of how people in every industry use this type of communication, this type of pitch and how I’ve used it. When you look at how you want to use it, you do not have to have the exact same introduction for any given situation.
How you introduce yourself is going to be different. If you are at a mommy and me group, and you’re talking about how you help postpartum moms and babies, that’s going to be a little bit different than if I’m speaking to a surgeon about how I am going to help benefit their practice and their. So when you’re looking at the who I help, that gets to be customized.
And what is the outcome of working with you? So I want to give some examples so we can go through each of these parts and it makes a little bit more sense. And I like to start with other industries because you will see everyone does. Yeah, you’ve heard it before many different industries, your 32nd elevator pitch.
This is how it breaks down. So these are two women who I was in a mastermind with, and this is toy. So toy penny, a holistic health strategist. She helps celebrity and CEO moms put their oxygen masks on and learn how to take care of themselves so they can be their most productive and their best selves for everyone around them.
Now, if I am. A man, maybe this wouldn’t resonate with me. If I am an athlete, maybe this wouldn’t resonate with me, but you bet if I am a celebrity or a CEO, mom, and I hear this, my ears immediately park up and I say, she’s talking to me. She still gets to say who she is. She’s toy penny. She’s a holistic health strategist, but I’m going to bet that the holistic health strategist means a lot more to her than it does to me as the person who she’s talking to.
She can have her own attachment to that, her own verbiage around that, just like we can to owner of your practice, licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, but the important piece. And you can see, even from the length of this, is that. The value proposition is longer. It’s more about the people that she’s helping.
So yeah, if I’m a CEO, mom, I’m listening. I want to be my most productive self. Maybe I should talk to her angelic. Cause I love cause hers is even shorter. And to the point, highly specific, a lot of times people think with these intros, with these pitches that they can’t be specific. You absolutely. Can you want to target the people that you’re trying to reach?
The person that’s in front of you articulate value for them individually? So angelic helps small businesses land corporate clients so they can increase their revenue and expand their influence. That’s pretty specific, if I’m a small business who wants to land corporate clients, I am ready to ask more questions of Angelique and that’s the.
Of this pitch of this 32nd elevator speech of this one, one sentence, two sentence, three sentence introduction. It’s to get people to ask more. It is not to articulate everything that we do. Every single modality into 30 seconds. It’s to provide enough value to the person sitting in front of you where they say I feel like they’re talking to me.
So two quick examples. And these are both me. And that’s why I wanted to show you guys. You can be the same individual with multiple intros, with multiple pitches. It does not have to be, oh, this is the only thing I can say. I gave you two examples at the beginning. I could either be Dr. Nell, the founder of peak health or the director of development for American acupuncture council.
And I love both of those roles. Both of those roles are such a part of who I am. Yes. What would follow that and who I’m talking to is going to be a little bit different. So if I’m speaking with a surgeon, I’m going to look at what value can I provide for the surgeon and in their practice. I will tell you with referrals, we all want to think that it’s enough to just say I’m able to get your patients better results.
It’s not. What else does that surge need? So that surgeon wants to know that their patient is taken care of because they don’t want to be dealing with the recovery aspect. They want to do a great job with the surgery and then have someone else holding them. Just hand. So that’s what you want to be able to articulate there.
Like how do you really provide that value? What is the outcome of working with you? And then that’s going to look different than if I’m doing a health talk specific to men’s health. I still get to be. I can be the founder of peak health still, but I’m going to talk about these needs, these middle-aged men who are experiencing these symptoms, weight, gain, muscle soreness, poor sleep.
I’m going to talk about how I address the root cause of that. So they can feel like themselves again, a really great tip with this is listen to what your patients say when you are going to. Provide value to people outside of your practice. You want to listen to the people that you’ve already helped.
What did they say when they came in and what are they saying now that they worked with you? When I work with middle-aged men, the number one thing that they say to me when they come in is I just don’t feel like myself anymore. And they list all of these symptoms. And so you want to work those things into your introduction, your pitch, because then you know what value you’re actually providing.
So this is your turn. You’re going to go through this process. You’re going to start with your why. So why are you doing what you’re doing? What do you love about it? And then who do you want to reach? Because this, who do you want to reach part is so critical with the who you want to read.
That’s how you’re going to decide, how do I present the value? What who are the people that I help and what is the outcome of working with me? So once you define who you want to read, This is the honest part. Are you confident? You can add value to this person or group of people. And if you’re not go back to those confidence exercises, I briefed with you guys.
But you’re going to go through that. I’m confident in you all I’m confident in this medicine. I know you can do it. People do not suffer from a lack of clinical skills. We’re just working on how to articulate that value to someone who knows nothing. What we do. And when you go through that process, then you’re going to craft your value proposition and that’s your one sentence in trial.
So again, what does that pitch look like? It’s going to be your, who you are, who you help, and what is the outcome of working with.
I’ve had so much fun being with you all today. I really appreciate you taking the time to tune in. I hope that this is a game changer for you just as it was a game changer. And thank you so much to the American Acupuncture Council for having me on the show to be able to provide this value and be sure to tune in next week, we are going to have Matt Callison and Brian Lau on Wednesday.
And you do not want to miss them..