Medtech sales can be challenging to prospect, move through a proven funnel and close. Sales and marketing leaders often face steep revenue goals (and less robust budgets) and must discern how to best use the skill sets of the in-house salesforce.
At the same time, most sales teams feel uncomfortably stretched when asked to prospect and close. These are two different skill sets, and a typical sales professional excels at developing customer relationships and closing sales over cold calling and filling the prospect pipeline.
Many organizations choose to outsource their sales prospecting to companies that specialize in the tools of the prospecting trade.
Volkart May is your partner in prospecting for reliable leads your team can close. We speak “healthcare” fluently, connecting daily with professionals at hospitals, clinics, labs and other medical facilities across the country.
Contact us today to create a customized outbound call strategy for your medtech product or service. We apply a human touch that safeguards your brand and generates medical leads that convert.
Prospect vs. lead: What you need to know
According to Hubspot, a prospect rests at the top of your sales funnel. Potential customers may know about your product or website, but have not yet engaged with your company in a meaningful way.
Prospects are the people or companies that visit your site but don’t convert to subscribers or request immediate follow up. Prospects may also engage with you casually, like at a conference or trade show. They may give you their contact information, but they may or may not be decision-makers.
A prospect becomes a lead when they subscribe to your newsletter, express a need you can address, request more product or service information or set a demo or introductory appointment with you.
The challenges of conventional prospecting tools
Many sales teams get stuck in a “we must do all the things” mentality. Asking your salespeople to develop digital marketing, staff trade show booths, attend networking events and research and purchase email lists can decrease productivity over time.
Most sales employees gravitate toward one section of the sales funnel: making cold calls or closing the sale. Asking your team to excel at every detail of the conversion process can be a less-than-stellar use of your team’s talent.
Further challenges involved with conventional sales prospecting tools include:
- Purchased lists that provide only company contact information
- Email lists that reveal nothing about the prospect’s decision-making process
- Event prospects that lack complete information, such as decision-maker names or roles
- Digital marketing that leaves out the relationship-building component of the sale
Sales prospecting done right
Outsourced outbound calling remains one of the most effective sales prospecting tools for the medtech and medical device industries. A specialized, experienced contact center can support your salesforce with market intelligence and qualified leads.
A dedicated prospecting team can mine your target market for decision-maker names and roles, as well as uncovering the specific challenges in each company that your product or service addresses.
An experienced call center team will apply conversational techniques and persistence to discover new prospects and update your database with current information.
You can use outbound calling for several prospecting objectives:
- Appointment setting: Filling your calendar with online or in-person product demos, service consultations or informational meetings so you can educate your audience and engage with qualified leads.
- Lead qualification: Wading through info requests from trade shows, conventions, inbound marketing and online channels to contact decision-makers and prioritize follow-up.
- Identifying insights: Profiling individual companies based on current services, pain points and buying cycles, testing value propositions on your prospective clients or discovering how prospects view your medtech company and your competitors.
- Growing relationships: Announcing your new products, walking prospects through a registration process or nurturing existing prospects through regular follow-up conversations.
A medtech outsourced sales prospecting success story
Here is a prime example of how call-based sales prospecting worked for one medtech company:
A manufacturer of biomedical tests needed to identify qualified opportunities at hospitals. They needed to reach the individuals responsible for medical testing equipment.
We started by cold calling the main phone numbers for the various healthcare facilities, working our way through phone trees, departments and gatekeepers. It’s work where persistence pays off.
Volkart May’s sales prospecting calls:
- Identified names and titles of appropriate decision-makers
- Conducted introductory conversations with 40 percent of these individuals
- Left informative voicemails for those who were unavailable
- Produced a robust, opt-in email list of qualified prospects
The medtech manufacturer next sent follow-up emails with a special year-end promotional offer. The sales prospecting campaign provided valuable market intelligence to guide the sales team, who focused their expertise on closing new sales.
How outsourced sales prospecting helped a healthcare manufacturer
Call-based sales prospecting is effective because it can accomplish multiple things at once.
For example, with the maker of an intravascular solution, Volkart May callers simultaneously gathered market intelligence, built a complete and accurate sales database and generated new leads for the in-house team.
Working with this medtech manufacturing organization, we honed healthcare-specific qualifying questions, such as:
- What equipment do you currently use?
- When was it purchased?
- What are some of the challenges you face with your current system?
The results speak for themselves. Calling into hospitals and medical facilities generated an average of two “hot” leads each week, along with a dozen or more interested prospects at earlier stages in the sales cycle.
This allowed the inside sales team to spend more time with qualified opportunities, where one in four of the cold calling leads resulted in a new equipment trial within 90 days.
For the marketing team, the campaign provided valuable insights on when and how prospects purchase and use their medical equipment.
Volkart May: Your partner in effective outsourced sales prospecting tools for medtech companies
At Volkart May, we customize our approach to our sales prospecting tools based on your unique medtech company’s challenges. We’ll assist you in discovering new markets and reaching decision-makers. Together, we’ll help you close more sales with healthcare professionals, through the power of conversation.
Contact us today to create your sales prospecting campaign.