Let’s face it. Getting busy professionals at clinics, hospitals and other medical facilities to take an interest in your product or service can be challenging. But, connecting with those potential buyers is critical to achieving the lead generation and sales goals at your medtech or healthcare company.
When you combine both warm and cold calling campaigns, you can multiply your impact in the marketplace.
Consistent outreach to potential healthcare buyers—at all stages in the sales process—ensures you always have a steady flow of qualified healthcare leads and opportunities.
Cold calling establishes the sales relationship; warm calling deepens it
Most medtech companies understand the term “cold calling.” Just like the name implies, it’s an unsolicited outreach to a “cold” prospect—a healthcare company or individual where you haven’t yet established a business relationship.
Warm calling is just as important. Where cold calling establishes the sales relationship, warm calling deepens and activates it.
Here are more differences between warm and cold calling in healthcare inside sales:
- Cold calling is the first step in the business development process. It’s useful to engage new lists, refresh your sales database, create awareness of your medtech brand and begin generating qualified leads.
- Warm calling expands on a relationship that’s already in place. This strategic outbound calling helps you nurture cooler leads and opportunities, build trust and credibility, and move healthcare buyers forward in the sales cycle. It’s even valuable with current customers.
Warm and cold sales calls to healthcare organizations both serve the same purpose. They identify the most qualified, “sales ready” opportunities so your internal sales team can spend their valuable time closing deals.
When you use both types of inside sales calls in tandem, you increase your chances of converting more healthcare prospects to closed sales.
Don’t let busy reps neglect inside sales calls
Cold calling can get a bad rap, and not every sales rep enjoys or excels at it. Business development reps (BDRs) tend to like making warm calls more, but, with everything else on their “to do” lists, they often neglect these important calls.
Keeping warm and cold calling going consistently is why many medtech and B2B companies choose to outsource to professional contact centers like Volkart May. Using trained external resources adds capacity and provides flexibility; you can scale up or down in call volumes without the time and expense of hiring and managing a business development team internally.
A lead generation call center like Volkart May that’s fluent in healthcare is the ideal resource for medtech companies and others who need to reach buyers at hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies and other medical facilities. Dedicated industry experience helps us hit the ground running and maximize the impact of each warm and cold sales call.
Use warm calling with these healthcare prospects
Who should you target with warm healthcare sales call? There are numerous possibilities.
These healthcare audiences can benefit from a warm inside sale call:
- Past or “lapsed” customers
- Current customers ready for renewal
- Website leads and inquiries
- Event, tradeshow and conference contacts
- Leads with a longer sales cycle
- Influencers and referral sources
Start by identifying segments in your market or your sales database where you have established a sales relationship. This can be through an inbound inquiry, such as a contact form on your website or a visit to your booth at a tradeshow.
There’s also tremendous opportunity for warm calls to current and past leads, prospects and even customers where you haven’t had time to connect in several weeks or months. A call can jumpstart opportunities that may be languishing and create new qualified leads by reminding healthcare decision-makers of your value proposition.
Sales influencers and referral sources are another option for warm calling. These individuals won’t buy from you directly, but they can be valuable resources for gathering market intelligence and spreading the word about your services in their networks. Warm calling gives you a chance to deepen your relationship, share new news or services, and show appreciation for their efforts.
Benefits of warm calling to hospitals, clinics and healthcare buyers
Digital tools like email, SEO, and websites often get the headlines (and the budget) in healthcare marketing. But, a human conversation can achieve so much more than one-sided online communication.
Because they’re live conversations, outbound sales calls are great for gathering information. Warm calls get healthcare buyers talking! They’re great to uncover the challenges and pain points that your product can solve, the contract expiration dates for competitor solutions, the budgeting process in use—and numerous other details.
At the same time, talking with a knowledgeable and helpful representative of your medtech company creates a positive touchpoint for your brand. It builds rapport and credibility. It strengthens the sales relationship.
Download our medtech lead generation guide
Outbound calling is a smart way to generate more healthcare leads, keep your customer satisfaction levels high and ultimately, close more sales of your medtech product or service.
Download our medtech calling guide for proven techniques, case studies and tips. Then, contact us to discuss how outsourced business development for warm and cold calling can improve your healthcare lead generation results.
