Ninety days.
Depending on your point of view, it can seem like an eternity—or be gone in a flash. At Volkart May, we look at 90 days as a smart window of time for medtech marketers to test a new outbound calling campaign.
Three months’ of professional calling lets you connect with healthcare decision-makers in your target audience to generate leads, gather market insights and validate the ROI that’s possible when using outsourced inside sales resources. It’s ample time to produce compelling results and build a foundation for future success.
We actually guarantee a minimum of 10 qualified leads within the first 60 days of our campaigns.
7 ways to use outbound calling to improve your medtech sales
As you put your annual medtech marketing plan into action, consider the value of an outbound calling campaign. How can human-to-human outreach efforts like these complement your digital campaigns, support your outside sales reps and improve your medtech sales?
1. Update your prospect list
Medtech data can decay quickly as busy healthcare professionals change jobs or contact information; using outdated information wastes the marketing budget and your sales team’s time. Fortunately, it’s fast and easy to obtain current information over the phone. Outbound calling is also a great vehicle for collecting new opt-in email addresses to amplify your digital programs.
2. Nurture website or social media inquiries
When a healthcare prospect fills out a lead capture form on your website, how quickly does your sales team follow up with a live call? Do you even have enough information to score and hand-off these cooler inquiries? An outbound call team is the perfect resource to rank, sort and nurture qualified leads, freeing your medtech sales force for closing sales. A fast response greatly increases your likelihood of a sale.
3. Support distributors and resellers
If your medtech company sells your products through a network of distributors or value-added resellers, an outbound call campaign is ideal for providing qualified leads to these critical channels. A call center like Volkart May can make lead generation calls on behalf of your brand or the brands of individual distributors, then seamlessly funnel warm prospects into your CRM system or other sales database
4. Build out a new territory or market segment
When you bring on new sales reps or expand to new geographies or industries, it takes time to fill your sales pipeline. Using an outsourced team of healthcare callers can significantly accelerate your efforts. A single call can generate awareness, qualify potential buyers and generate medtech sales leads.
5. Gather competitive intelligence
Market insights fuel effective sales and marketing efforts. You can conduct an inside sales campaign specifically designed to identify insights about your healthcare market segment, or you can roll these learning conversations into your regular sequence of sales prospecting calls. Unlike online surveys, market research through a call center produces verbatim voice-of-customer responses, including valuable digital recordings so you can listen to prospects and customers in their own words.
6. Upsell customers
We’ve all heard the old saying that it costs more to win a new customer than keep an existing one. Yet sales plans and commission structures usually incent the medtech sales team to focus on new business, leaving other revenue opportunities unfulfilled. An outbound call campaign can quickly identify the strongest sales potential—as well as important customer satisfaction levels—within your installed base. Your medtech sales team can then follow up the most promising deals.
7. Test a new message or product concept
The medtech market landscape changes frequently as new startups and innovations come to market. There’s an almost constant need for medtech companies to refine your messages and test new approaches. An outbound calling “sales lab” is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to do this. You can rapidly gather actionable feedback and reducing the risk associated with new product introductions or market expansions.
Combine multiple objectives in a single call
Keep in mind, outbound calling is extremely flexible and customizable. In many cases, a single call can meet multiple objectives from this list. For example, a recent medtech campaign to generate new healthcare leads also produced valuable data to update the marketing and sales database, collected opt-in email addresses, identified decision-maker names and titles and gathered competitive intelligence.
Ready for even more ideas? Check out this article, or contact us to discuss how outbound calling can support your medtech sales goals.
