It is not the “length” that matters

One of my coaching clients hired me to help him with his dinner with the doctor program.

For those of you who you do not know what a dinner with the doctor program is, it is basically a talk where you invite your patients and they invite their friends and family members for a dinner where you pick up the tab and you do a 25-35 minute talk about chiropractic and close for an appointment.

You can also advertise this talk using Facebook ads and other strategies to drive even more people to it.

My client is an amazing doctor with great chiropractic philosophy, technique and purpose to serve his community, but the conversions of the dinner were really bad (around 40%).

He was not losing money, but the conversions were not where they are supposed to be, over 80% consistently.

His first assignment for our coaching call was to record his bi-monthly dinner with the doctor presentation and send it to me so I could critique and improve it. When I received the video and opened to start reviewing it I almost fell out of my chair.

The video was 1:32:00 minutes (one hour and 32 minutes).

What?!… a dinner with the doctor!? One hour and 32 minutes?? It was 3 times longer that is it supposed to be!!!

So I started watching the video, and to my surprise, the doctor had included a 35-minute section on nutrition in his talk.

Now, I coach a lot of doctors that do wellness talks that include chiropractic, nutrition, detox, exercise, meditation, etc, but that was NOT the case.

The talk was not promoted as a wellness seminar, it was not promoted as a 90 minute talk, and the offer had nothing to do with nutrition or wellness (it was an offer for X-rays, check for subluxation type of offer).

When I asked the doctor why he included a 35-minute chunk on nutrition on a traditional chiropractic talk his answer was: “because I felt like I had to add value”.

That is one of the common myths that I see with chiropractors that want to use speaking to get new patients.

They believe that in order to be effective at closing people at the end of the talk they need to add a lot of content.

That is not true.

Please remember these 3 principles:

More information does not necessarily mean more conversions

It is not about the amount of information provided, is about what and how the information is presented

It is not about the length of the talk, it is about the persuasiveness of the talk.

During my next coaching, I shared with him several ideas to improve his talk, but two ideas that solve this “speaking too much problem” were:

a) cut the entire nutrition chunk (the entire 35 minutes) and

b) add a pre-frame in the beginning of the talk saying that “there are several elements that impact someone’s health like nutrition, exercise, etc and this evening you will discover the one that controls your health…”

On his first talk after my coaching call the doctor closed 83%! Not bad for just one coaching call 🙂

Understand that it is not the “length” of the talk or how much information you share with the group that will determine conversions, it is what and how the information is presented.

“What and how” to present information is what our 3 day public speaking intensive is all about. If you want to finally, dare I say, “enjoy” speaking, then signup here:

www.chirospeaking.com/iff

See You Tomorrow,

Roberto Monaco
The Chiro Speaking Company