At Volkart May, we believe a sales rep’s time is better spent closing a sale than finding one. In other words, the more your high-powered (and highly paid) sales team can focus their efforts on building relationships, demonstrating products, negotiating contracts and of course, closing deals, the more efficient your sales process will be.
However, even the best medtech and healthcare sales reps find themselves plagued by time-consuming but necessary business development activities.
Symptoms of an unproductive sales team
Is your internal sales team spending too much time:
- Looking up contact information for potential prospects?
- Researching company demographics and background information on healthcare organizations to have informed sales calls?
- Following up with inbound leads from your website, tradeshows or other campaigns?
- Returning endless emails and voicemails to schedule appointments with qualified prospects?
- Figuring out when competitor contracts expire or budget cycles begin, to target healthcare buyers at the right time?
What if there was a way to tackle these top-of-the-funnel business development activities without taking up your healthcare sales reps’ valuable time?
Use outbound calling to gather insights on healthcare buyers
That’s where outbound calling campaigns come in. At Volkart May, we connect with healthcare buyers around the country every day, from pharmacy directors to lab technicians to transplant surgeons (and nearly every role in between).
We save our medtech clients time and effort by connecting with your target audience at hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies and other healthcare facilities.
Working together, we collaborate on the approach and information needed, then hit the phones as an extension of your team. It’s great way to improve sales team productivity and increase your results.
Four things you can learn from a healthcare sales call
Here are four important things we can help you learn from a single healthcare sales call. These insights then fuel a smarter, more efficient sales and marketing process.
1. Healthcare decision-maker names, roles and contact information
Forget 411 dials and endless scrolling on LinkedIn. Instead, arm your healthcare and medtech sales reps with the most current, accurate data on your prospective healthcare buyers.
Updating records in your sales and marketing database (or helping you build an amazing prospect list from scratch) are cornerstone activities of every outbound calling campaign. They’re essential for smooth-flowing business development activities, too, because no list is perfect. In fact, as much as 20 percent of all B2B data changes every year, making this a smart investment to support sales teams of all sizes.
2. Demographics about your target healthcare buyers
What information drives your healthcare sales cycle? Every company has specific qualifying questions that help identify the best potential customers. For some it’s number of hospital beds; for others it’s types of tests used in the lab; for others, it’s how Medicare reimbursements are submitted. The variations can be endless.
What’s rarely easy is gathering this critical demographic data. It’s expensive to purchase from a list broker or other source, and often not publicly available at all. That’s where an outbound calling campaign can add significant value, by asking simple questions and gathering the demographic and qualifying data you need to segment your market accurately. This custom intelligence helps your internal sales reps focus on the best prospects.
3. Current solutions and buying cycles
If you sell a complicated or expensive medtech solution, or a product that requires regulatory or budget approval, then you know how important timing is to a successful sales cycle. An outbound calling campaign to hospitals, clinics and other medical facilities can capture the information you need on current products and healthcare buying cycles. Sales reps and marketing teams can then target your messages based on the competitive system in place, and nurture relationships appropriately based on when budgets and contract expiration dates occur.
4. Pressing issues and trends that lead to healthcare sales
Creating a sense of urgency helps move a healthcare sale forward. Showing you understand the common challenges that your healthcare buyers face establishes trust and empathy. A healthcare sales call can identify these pressing issues and market trends—including verbatim voice of customer comments—so your sales team can conduct substantive conversations. Gathering market insights in the customer’s own words also yields value for marketing, product and others in the organization.
Ready to improve your medtech and healthcare lead generation? Check out our capabilities, then contact us to discuss your project.
