Marketing and sales leaders often ask us, “What makes a good sales prospecting call in healthcare?” Knowing how to engage and convert potential buyers and decision-makers at labs, pharmacies, hospitals and clinics is an essential skill for the medtech business development team.
It starts by hiring the right business development reps, then providing robust training.
Beyond that, it’s all about how you support your lead generation callers. Sales enablement tools are essential to success in generating leads with hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies and others in the medical field.
Sales enablement equips your sales team for success
What is sales enablement? Simply put, it’s the ongoing process of providing resources to make it easier for your inside sales or business development team to do their jobs.
Providing the right mix of sales prospecting tools and lead generation aids empowers your healthcare sales team and equips them to conduct more productive conversations about your medtech product or service.
Typical sales enablement resources fall into three categories:
- Knowledge, such as product briefs, competitive intelligence, audience personas and even lunch-and-learns with SMEs at your organization.
- Content, such as thought leadership articles, videos, whitepapers, eBooks and infographics that help educate and inspire potential healthcare prospects.
- Tools, such as business development call guides, ROI calculators and email templates that streamline the sales process and reduce unnecessary effort.
If you’re like most medtech and healthcare companies, you’re already providing some of these support elements to your business development team. Each of your business development reps are also likely creating their own sales enablement tools.
Defining a sales enablement strategy helps move your organization from ad hoc to strategic so you’re maximizing the impact of these important sales prospecting assets. Start by asking the sales team what they need, and for examples of tools already in use. Then, match your sales enablement resources to your buyer’s journey. You should have sales enablement tools for each stage in the process.
Five healthcare sales enablement tools to support your business development team
When we launch a healthcare lead generation campaign at Volkart May, we work together with our medtech and healthcare clients to make sure we have several critical sales enablement tools in place.
These are the “must have” list we’ve developed, based on our 30+ years of outbound calling experience to healthcare and B2B organizations.
1. BDR call guide
The first priority for a successful outbound calling campaign is the Business Development Representative’s Call Guide. This essential sales enablement tool eliminates the need for a call script (which only results in awkward, robotic interactions).
Instead, an effective business development call guide emphasizes the reason for the call, then provides an outline of key points for outbound callers to cover during each conversation. It includes discovery and qualifying questions to ask, the company value proposition and tips for handling common objections. A business development call guide enables the sales team to stay on track during a lead generation or sales prospecting engagement, while still building rapport through an authentic conversation in their own voice.
2. Ideal customer profile
Customer profiles, also called personas, identify the different types of individuals involved in buying, recommending and using your product or service. This valuable sales enablement resource falls into the “knowledge” category. It educates your outbound calling team on exactly who you need to reach to generate a lead and make a sale.
Effective customer profiles for healthcare are brief and actionable—typically just a single page for each role. They should include details on each individual’s role in the buying process, examples of their job titles, as well as challenges or problems that your solution can address. They’re often called personas because they help outbound callers clearly picture the “person” and relate to your potential buyers.
3. Lead scoring system
Our third must-have sales enablement tool for healthcare is a lead scoring system. Think of lead scoring as a scorecard to qualify each prospect interaction. With lead scoring in place, you’ll save time by keeping your healthcare sales team focused on the leads and opportunities most likely to convert to closed sales. It also reduces friction and finger-pointing between marketing and sales, or between inside and outside sales, because everyone uses the same definitions to qualify leads. There’s no more “gut feeling” or wishful thinking in the pipeline.
Common components in a lead scoring system include business type or industry, purchase timing, budget, current product or solution, and demographic information about the company type, size and industry.
4. Email templates
Email templates are another essential sales enablement tool designed to save the business development team time and effort during the sales prospecting process.
How often do you need to send a follow-up communication after engaging a healthcare prospect? Instead of asking each sales rep to create their own (and use their own judgment on the best messages and approach), create a library of frequently used emails and load them into your marketing automation or CRM system. Each business development rep can point-and-click to follow up quickly.
5. Prospecting list
What powers a productive outbound calling campaign? A current and accurate prospect list of potential healthcare buyers. Keeping your database up-to-date should be a high priority for sales enablement. The less time your callers spend searching for company names, phone numbers and contact information, the more time they’ll devote to lead generation conversations with potential healthcare buyers.
If you have an existing list, make sure there’s a plan in place to update the data at least annually. If you’re entering a new geography or industry, work with a reputable list broker to source a prospect list that you can build on.
Improve your healthcare results with sales enablement tools
With the right medtech sales enablement tools in place, your healthcare business development team can generate more qualified leads and nurture cooler opportunities so they come to fruition more quickly.
Get more healthcare and medtech business development tips. Download our guide to medtech lead generation, then contact us to schedule a conversation about your specific lead generation needs.
