Lead generation, especially for a B2B healthcare tech companies, is a balancing act of art and science. It takes skill to engage a busy healthcare professional in a sales conversation, but there’s also a scientific approach to elements like the number of call attempts and the best times of day. These factors significantly influence the success of lead generation efforts with medical facilities, pharmacies, laboratories, and clinics.
With outsourced inside sales teams like Volkart May, we tap into both opportunities for lead generation campaigns and healthcare industry experience. We employ trained business development professionals who speak healthcare fluently. Simultaneously, we deploy state-of-the-art technology and performance levers to support our valued callers in achieving campaign goals.
Use metrics to improve lead generation performance, spend wisely
Both healthcare marketing teams and sales leaders benefit from putting strong lead generation metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in place. Executive stakeholders also find value in decisions made with data rather than gut instinct.
- Marketing can understand which messages and offers work best, and in which market segments.
- Sales can learn from high-performing inside sales reps and quickly coach less experienced outbound callers to refine performance.
Lead generation metrics and reporting provide objective data for decision-making. This reduces the friction that can occur between departments. It also ensures budget dollars get used wisely.
Tracking healthcare lead generation doesn’t have to be complicated
Often, medtech companies—particularly startups—worry that tracking lead generation performance will require expensive software and or complicated systems. While CRM and marketing automation software can support your healthcare lead generation efforts, they’re not required in order to put lead generation reporting in place.
In fact, you can compile some of the most essential healthcare lead generation measurements in a spreadsheet or sales database. As your outbound calling program grows, you can automate your lead generation reporting with a more comprehensive digital marketing tool.
Look beyond the number of healthcare leads generated
Lead generation metrics should exist at several levels so you can build benchmarks suitable to your organization.
As you set up reporting, it’s smart to track by:
- Sales rep
- Product or service
- Market segment
You’ll want to measure healthcare lead generation performance for individual business development representatives, so you can recognize high performers and duplicate their best practices across your team. You’ll also want to roll up results for your funnel campaign as a whole, across the entire sales force.
Finally, with the right lead generation data, you can examine results for different market segments and products or services, such as lead generation calls to long-term care facilities versus clinics versus hospitals.
Boost results with 5 proven healthcare calling metrics
Whether you handle outbound lead generation calling and sales prospecting with an internal sales team, or if you outsource business development responsibilities to a professional healthcare call center, these five metrics will provide a great snapshot of your short- and long-term campaign performance.
1. List usability
The quality and quantity of decision-maker names in your prospect list forms the foundation of a solid calling campaign. This healthcare lead generation metric tracks the viability of your purchased prospect list or internal sales database. It looks at the number of disconnected phone numbers, incomplete records, companies no longer in business and similar red flags in your data.
A low list usability score means the inside sales team wastes valuable time dialing into the wrong accounts. A high list usability score indicates more productive records. High list usability correlates with stronger lead generation numbers and overall campaign performance.
2. Reach rate
Once you eliminate the unusable accounts in your medtech prospect list, it’s time to look at your reach rate. Just like it sounds, this healthcare lead generation metric refers to the number of potential customers your outbound calling actually engages in live telephone conversations.
Your reach rate will vary substantially based on the type of decision-maker you’re trying to reach and the number of call attempts that business development representatives make. For example, a lead generation effort with four call attempts to a mid-level nurse manager at a community clinic will likely have a much higher reach rate than two call attempts to a VP of healthcare administration at a metropolitan hospital.
Tracking this important healthcare lead generation metric quickly lets you gauge the amount of effort and expense required to meet your business goals.
3. Lead rate
Often, medtech and B2B businesses focus exclusively on the quantity of leads generated in a certain period of time, without putting that number in context. While the number of leads is important, it doesn’t reveal as much as the overall lead conversion rate.
The lead rate measures how many actual conversations—where a caller speaks to a decision-maker—convert to the next stage in your sales process.
With this lead generation in healthcare metric, it’s helpful to have a clear definition of what constitutes sales qualified leads. Using a lead scoring system means everyone relies on an objective set of criteria, so there no questions or finger-pointing occur about the leads your healthcare campaign generates.
4. Cost per lead
Once you’ve calculated your lead rate, move on to cost per lead. This healthcare lead generation metric will help you assess your effectiveness and manage your budget. Beware that the numbers with an internal business development team may surprise you, especially if you look at the organizational investment for salaries, benefits and the equipment required to support an in-house sales team.
If you’re outsourcing your healthcare lead generation calling, your cost per lead will vary based on the size of your campaign, type of calls (such as information gathering versus appointment-setting) and number of call attempts.
5. Campaign ROI
The final must-have healthcare lead generation metric is overall campaign ROI. At Volkart May, our medtech and B2B outbound call center metrics campaigns routinely return 10:1 or greater ROI for clients—even on their very first demand generation marketing project with us. Our proven process, experienced callers and advanced technology all help us work efficiently and effectively.
Run the numbers with Volkart May. How does your internal team’s performance stack up to industry benchmarks? Contact us to see how outsourcing some or all of your healthcare lead generation efforts can impact bottom-line results.
