Author: Harshit Jain
Published July 23, 2023
”Sales strategies of the healthcare industry follow a dynamic approach. However, the healthcare sales process remains more or less the same.
Businesses in the healthcare industry generally have a well-defined sales process. Statistics also show companies with a set sales process achieve 18% more growth on average compared to those who don’t.
Today, we will explore the healthcare sales process so that you can implement the steps in your business.
- Identifying and Prioritizing
Before you can sell, you need to identify your target customer profile and potential buyers. Who is going to buy from you? Will it be doctors or patients? Or, are you selling to hospitals and clinics?
Healthcare businesses spend considerable time developing buyer personas. It helps them understand the customer and their potential pain points. Profiling is really necessary, as you might end up trying to sell to the wrong people.
A look at your past clients can give you an idea about the type of customers you need to sell. You can also check out the customer profiles of your competitors to develop insight.
- Tracking Decision-Makers
Finding the decision-maker is easy when you are selling to a doctor or small clinic. But hospitals and large medical institutions have multiple decision-makers involved in the process.
According to Harvard Business Review, B2B sales at least has 6 stakeholders. The number of decision-makers is generally more in case of healthcare sales.
Medical businesses often visit a prospective organization several times to land up appointments with actual decision-makers. For this reason, you should know the decision-making hierarchy of the organization you are targeting.
Only then can you convince the right people and make a sale.
- Discovery
Healthcare businesses start the process of discovery once they get a meeting with the decision-maker. During the meeting, the sales rep will try to assess the specific and unique pain points of the prospect and problems he is facing.
Identifying the pain points helps the rep make out if his product or service is suitable for the client. He can also use his reasoning and logical capabilities to align the benefits of his product with the needs of the client.
The deal can push through once the product or solution matches customer needs.
- Raising Awareness
Customers today have all the information on their fingertips. However, they are not so sure when it comes to buying complex products like medical equipment. Here, the rep needs to create client awareness and push for his solution using a specific rationale.
A healthcare sales rep may use various resources from healthcare marketing strategies like infographics, videos, and data to sell prescriptively.
- Nurturing
Healthcare sales generally take a lot of meetings. Customers need time to make their decisions and may need extra convincing from the sales rep. Healthcare businesses should put an effort to establish credibility with the prospective client on every opportunity. They should work to gain the personal trust of the client through constant nurturing.
Not all healthcare businesses will have the exact same sales process we discussed. The best sales process is what works for you and your customers and brings more business. However, the steps we discussed still form the foundation of a healthcare sales process and can help you define your own sales process for growth and more revenues. Also, choose a reliable HIPAA compliant healthcare CRM like LeadSquared to make the most of your sales process”(Jain, 2023).
This article highlights the commonalities between sales and design. The process described sounded very similar to the beginning stages of design research. The overall stages all happen in design but I think are just utilized in different ways. The emphasis on the consumer/user is something important that stood out to me because this is a large part of designing for people. Even steps of personas are taken in sales to understand where the user is coming from; this happens in design as well. Both disciplines need to grasp their user point of view to effective represent them.
The final step is nurturing and establishing a relationship of trust. When in the tricky industry of healthcare, many subjects are sensitive and serious matters. Establishing trust can be a game changer for sales teams. Establishing trust for designers in healthcare is also just as important. We need our audience to trust that the products we are producing are creditable and safe. They will be more inclined to use them if we have a relationship of trust. But how do we build it? I would be interested in looking in to how the sales industry develop these channels of trust. Something that’s could possibly save or end someone’s life, how is that marketed? How do they develop trust and sell medications that have serious side effects? These answers could be insightful to factors that play into my designs for the capstone medical device. At the end of the day, the medical products being designed need to be marketed and sold.
Reference
Jain, H. (2023, July 28). Healthcare sales process for high-return success. LeadSquared. https://www.leadsquared.com/industries/healthcare/healthcare-sales-process/
