What's the Big Idea?

Medical professionals in the aesthetics industry work hard to create and perfect a treatment toolkit. But with medical sales reps constantly presenting exciting new devices, it's important that aesthetics professionals choose the best device for their own practice, rather than simply chasing the latest, greatest technology.

The medical aesthetic industry is poised for growth, as the economy gradually recovers from its recent slump. To better take advantage of the surge in interest, aesthetics professionals must be properly equipped, both in tools and skills. This means not only providing services using the best available technology but consistently remaining educated in order to provide the best services.

Understanding the Technology

Before you can sell a procedure to a patient, you must first fully understand the procedure yourself. This includes thoroughly grasping every aspect of any new device you're using. This understanding should be thorough enough to allow you to personalize the features and benefits to each patient.

During the sales process, the physician should ask key questions, tailored to the patients' needs. How will including this new device in your toolkit add value to your business? Prior to purchasing the device, the physician should do serious research to compare the cost of the new device to the revenue it will likely bring in.

Leadership Plays a Critical Role

All leaders challenge the process. Whatever your challenge in further growing your medical practice or business, you must be willing to step out into the unknown and search for opportunities to grow and improve. More importantly, you do not need to do this on your own. Product and service innovations tend to come from listening to the unmet needs of your patients and addressing those needs through inspired ideas, processes, services, and systems. Those should be adopted in collaboration with your industry representatives and professional organizations, from the people doing work in creating new medical devices/technologies. Leaders tend to be early adopters of new technologies. As such, innovation and change all involve experimentation, risk, and failure. One approach to creating change is through incremental steps and small wins. This builds your confidence to take on bigger challenges and assess future technologies that will continue to build your practice over time.

Are You an Early Adopter?

While there is value in providing the latest procedures using the best technology available today, service should always come first. Deploying technology too quickly can backfire on a practice, especially if the physician hasn't taken time to fully learn the device before putting it into use.

Unfortunately, it takes time for a physician to have real-world experience with a particular device. The best benefits from a new procedure or device can only be fully articulated once a physician can describe personal experience with past patients. With new products and procedures constantly being introduced to physicians, aesthetics professionals are continually striving to strike the balance between learning new technologies and demonstrating their years of experience to patients.

Prior to introducing new procedures or tools, an aesthetics practice should have a strategy in place. New services should be introduced into existing services in a way that ensures the smoothest transition possible. Preplanning can help prevent any snafus as practices introduce new procedures.

Consider the Patient

At the forefront of every medical aesthetics practice is the patient. If a patient senses a physician is in any way uncomfortable with a new procedure or technology, that patient will also be uncomfortable. Having before and after photos of previously-performed procedures can help ease a patient's concerns, but communication is the most important tool in the patient consultation process.

A patient's concerns may not be related to the physician's comfort level at all. At times, comments made by friends or media stories could create unfounded fear in a patient. The rare instance of a death or complication during a cosmetic procedure could have a patient assuming this is more the norm than a rare possibility.

Each aesthetic procedure comes with risks and recovery times. By being as straightforward about these complications as possible, a physician can help create trust in the physician-patient relationship to help ease any discomfort.

Today's patients are interested in both prevention and improvement, leading to an increased interest in aesthetic home care products and services. Devices can be purchased that the patient can use at home without physician assistance. It's important to fully explain these devices to ensure the patient is comfortable with the product before taking it home.

While patients are concerned about costs, market research data has shown consumers/patients are willing to pay for procedures and products that increase their self-confidence. Understanding this, physicians are able to move forward in recommending the best procedures for each consumer/patient, whether that procedure is completed using the latest technology or products and practices that have been used for years.

Michele Bennett is Founder and CEO of Bennett Global Consulting Group (www. bennettglobalconsulting.com). She has experience in medical management, sales, strategic marketing, and communications. Previously, she was Global Executive Director of Strategic Communications for Bausch+Lomb's Surgical unit and Senior Director of Global Scientific Communications and Global Strategic Marketing Director of Allergan.