Medical conferences often bring together a variety of stakeholders with the unique opportunity to share insights and discuss what’s happening in the industry. As a sales or marketing professional, you’ve probably attended events over the years, but maybe you’ve felt you didn’t get out of them what you thought you would. 
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Networking is likely one of the best ways for you to develop relationships, and as you know these relationships are critical to gaining new customers. Of course, your product or service and how it fits their needs is important, but you’re in a competitive market. Networking is key to standing out from the rest. You may still feel a little stumped, or even awkward, when it comes to networking at medical conferences. We’ve got some easy and proven networking tips that you’ll want to put into action at your next event.

According to the AMA’s Physician Practice Benchmark Surveys, over 47 percent of physicians were recorded as practicing medicine in a private medical group in 2016. While physicians have been increasingly abandoning private practice in favor of employment by hospitals and health systems, doctors in private practice still make up a significant portion of the medical population and can provide sales reps with a sizable amount of business.

Typically, hospital deals require long sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders and many touchpoints over months (or even years). The rewards can be huge — long-term purchasing agreements, commitments to purchase expensive capital equipment, strategic buying contracts — but these sales take a lot of time and resource. Selling into medical groups or private practices can often be more straightforward and less complex, leading to quicker buying cycles.

Long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) work hard to differentiate themselves through the level of quality care they provide. Not sure what differentiates a LTCH from the more common general acute care hospital? While LTCHs are certified as general hospitals, these facilities focus on treating patients with more complicated conditions, requiring longer times to recovery.

Patients treated in LTCH typically no longer require the extensive diagnostic and intensive care delivered at general acute hospitals but require more care than can be delivered in a skilled nursing facility, assisted living facility or the home. Given the complexity and cost of treating these types of patients, administrators who run LTCHs are motivated to understand, measure and continuously improve the quality of care delivered to their patients.

Your MedTech system may deliver promising solutions that significantly impact a LTCH’s ability to maintain and improve the quality of patient care at their facility. Aligning that value proposition to each prospect’s unique situation should be part of your message during the sales process. 

Including information about your technology in your email marketing to physicians can help build awareness and get the message across that they are market leaders in progressive, innovative, and quality patient care. However, before they can use your MedTech system to enhance care and convince physicians that they are the right choice for their long-term care facility, you have to convince both your administrative and clinical buyers that your MedTech system will deliver value to their organization. Here are four ways to communicate your value-add through your marketing and sales processes.

Selling to hospitals is complex. With multiple decision makers and stakeholders, it can be difficult to know which titles to target, as well as how to target effectively. Once you define who you want to go after, you have to understand that buyer intimately, including what they are responsible for and what matters to them.

When looking at the highest level of hospital leadership, some argue that “selling higher” is the best approach. However, according to a study published by Forester, executives consider less than 20 percent of their meetings with salespeople to be valuable.

So, how do you get to be part of that 20 percent? You have to know that persona completely with a 360-degree viewpoint. In breaking down the who’s who of leadership, you need to know what they do and what matters to them, so you remain relevant.

​The circumstances leading to people’s visits to hospitals and doctors’ offices are as unique as the people themselves. If you were to try to imagine all of the possible situations that could result in a visit — both commonplace and unusual — you might doubt that healthcare settings could rely on pre-created codes for diagnoses that weren’t so general as to be useless. 

Before you get too far in that line of thought, I suggest you scroll through the list of ICD-10-CM codes.   

​In this era of value-based care, hospitals and the health systems to which they belong are intensely focused on metrics that directly impact their scores and related financial incentives and penalties affecting their reimbursement.

For marketers and salespeople who target hospitals and health systems as clients for their products and support services, performance metrics are equally important. Sales and marketing teams also benefit when they can look at these metrics across facilities and geographies to slice and dice the data to better understand their prospects and opportunities.

So which metrics are most important for MedTech marketers and sales teams, and how can those metrics be used to align the value of your company’s MedTech products to the needs of those hospitals and health systems?

Congratulations for landing the meeting with the hospital c-suite, physician leadership or perhaps an influential purchasing agent. The bad news? The hard work of selling your medical product or service has just begun!

​Not to worry, we've put together a guide of how to up your game during the sales pitch using data to help you tell your story.

Planning great content for each sales meeting with hospital execs and physician leaders is equally, if not more, important than the actual meeting. Without a focused agenda, the right content, and a maniacal focus on progressing the relationship to the next step, you'll be wasting everyone's time. 

We have all been there ... you finally landed a meeting with a hospital executive after months of trying. Success!!!

But then reality sets in and you are literally pulling our hair out trying to come up with engaging content, while staying on point with focused messaging relevant to your product and service.