Health care products and services are high-consideration purchases in the business-to-business space. Health care services for the consumer are typically not high consideration (if you’ve broken your arm, you’ll be looking for the nearest urgent care clinic right away!) The business to business (b2b) space, however, is different.
Health care products and services organizations typically are marketing high-consideration products that are expensive, and often come with a large change-management tag as well.
Let’s explore how you can empower a small sales team with the right program behind them and the right tools in their hand to close more deals.
1) Give them a steady stream of leads
Every sales team needs a steady stream of qualified leads. Qualified leads are built by Attracting customers to the organization through quality content found through search in their research process. Those leads are Converted to prospects by offering top-notch, in depth content offers (how-to, case studies, and whitepapers, webinars and videos are some examples.) And they’re Nurtured with ongoing relevent content offers, automatically through the use of sophisticated marketing workflows that are deployed from a marketing automation software suite without the salesperson ever having to lift a finger. Salespeople can then be secure in the knowledge that by the time the prospect has requested the demo, or they’ve been notified of client activity on the web site, that the client is ready to move to the next stage. It moves a cold prospect to an interested, engaged, warm one. And sales teams love to call warm leads.
2) Support them with quality, targeted content that resonates with their buyers
The sales team is both a wealth of knowledge about what clients need and want – they talk to them every day! They hear their challenges, their objections, their questions. And that is amazing fodder for content development by the supporting marketing team. Marketing teams that support the sales team can develop articles, case studies, videos and on-demand webinars that answer the questions, outline the implementation process, cover product details in depth and answer the tough questions like “how long will this take to implement” and “what does it really cost?”
The marketing team should work closely to provide the sales team with weekly communcation as to what new articles have been developed (with links!) what new content offers are available on the site and how to use them. An e-mail to a salesperson with this information will go a long way to getting the sales team to actually do the things the marketing team wants to do.
A regularly scheduled meeting of the sales and marketing teams should highlight the successes, the plans and the changes made to the lead generation and nurturing program – we recommend weekly, with supporting email followup to sales teams.
As the prospect moves to the Closing stage, the prospect should be converted to a Client status and moved into the post-sale workflows to ensure that their transition to happy customer is complete.
3) Develop a post-sale program to guide integration that helps the client use the product and service to it’s fullest capabilities
Once the sale is done, most sales teams hand off the work to a technical sales engineer who is responsible for making sure it works for the client. This supportive program should have these basic components:
- Customer evaluation of the process
- Identification of customer needs or requirements not already answered
- A product-build schedule to implement new, desired features
- Customer training
- An in-person visit to evaluate the implementation process to ensure that it’s going as it is intended
- A post-implementation followup at an interval to ensure that the client is happy (preferably not performed by the sales team, but by the more independent product marketing team)
- Regular new product updates, and rollout program to ensure customers know what new features are and how they can use them
Want to learn more about how to make your web site work for you? Download our free Inbound Marketing Guide!
