Hospital Sales Prospecting Tips

​One of the biggest challenges your MedTech sales team will face is selling to hospitals, and the right approach to hospital sales prospecting is critical to success. Selling technology and services to hospitals take industry knowledge, technical expertise, and a clear value proposition. Knowing how to make the best use of time, especially early in the sales cycle, is an equally important, if not essential skill. The worst-case scenario is investing hours into preparation and sales meetings with a prospect only to discover there is no potential for a sale. 

What’s Your Sales Sweet Spot?

​Before you deploy your sales team this week, make sure you have a handle on your ideal customer profile. To identify the attributes that describe this ideal, key questions to consider are:
​

• Which of your hospital clients find the most value in your systems or products?
• Which features of your technology or services resonate the most with these clients?
• Do these clients require any special or additional services and support outside your core offering?
• What is the margin or profitability level of these clients? 

 
Once you have developed a clear picture of the type of hospital that represents an ideal customer for your company to do business with, qualifying — and disqualifying — leads will become easier. Although whittling down a long list of leads to only a few prospects can be daunting, even discouraging, remember that bad news early is good news in sales. You want to devote your time and energy to prospects with the greatest chance of converting and onboarding clients that will have positive financial impact on your business (and theirs).

Qualifying Hospital Sales Prospects

​Depending on the type of systems or products you sell, your method of grading prospects will be unique. However, you can begin building a grading system for sales prospecting with these common metrics: 

• Size: Drill down into your current customer base to find the best way to determine the ideal size of a prospect. Your sales team may want to look at one or more metrics in this category, such as bed count, discharges, number of facilities, or number of employees. 
• Competitive ranking: Evaluate the prospect’s market position. Are they leading in their market, an underdog, or somewhere in between?  
• Service line dynamics: Understand how the hospital gets patient referrals — and whether the hospital is maintaining its patient flow or experiencing patient leakage. 
• Physician relationships: Investigate the hospital’s staff turnover rate — will the relationships you develop pay off in the long-term? Also, consider whether physicians at the facility will champion your product during the sales process. Are these physicians employed or affiliated? Are these physicians loyal to the facility or do they work across multiple locations?
• Financial impact: Your ability to demonstrate the potential for ROI will play a significant part in the sales process. Can your product improve hospital performance in areas such as length of stay or re-admissions? Could your product save time and improve efficiency so more patients could receive treatment? Will you be able to show value to the prospect in dollars and cents?

Contact Hospital Administrators by Email

Sales Prospecting Tools

​Data is undeniably valuable when qualifying a hospital as a viable prospect, but collecting data manually is extremely time-consuming and probably inaccurate. Googling a hospital will barely deliver the right contact information, and it certainly won’t lead you to uncovering the deep insights you need to determine if a prospect is worth pursuing given the value proposition of your offering. Sales prospecting tools can more easily and cost-effectively provide you with the information you need. Using a strategic targeting platform has two main benefits.

First, you can find prospects based on your ideal customer profile, collect the information you need, and prioritize outreach. A MedTech sales & marketing platform can provide up-to-date information across a wide variety of siloed hospital, regulatory, and reporting databases, both public and proprietary. Using accurate information from a sales prospecting tool ensures you are finding the best opportunities for your business and not overlooking those that could slip through the cracks because your internal sales database isn’t updated.   

Second, this type of sales prospecting tool helps you match your messaging and align your value proposition for each and every prospect. You can use healthcare data and analytics across your entire sales cycle — from convincing your target to take an initial call to ensuring your discovery call or calls are confirming what you learned rather than starting from scratch. Bringing personalized, hyper-local insights on your prospect and their market will completely change the dynamics of your conversations. You will likely be educating your prospects on insights they have been wishing to know but didn’t have the resources or data to figure out for themselves.

Hospital Sales Prospecting: Next Steps

​Sales reps who have spoken with a new hospital sales prospect need to decide whether to pursue or not to pursue the account. Even if the prospect checks all the other boxes as an ideal customer, if need, interest, and budget aren’t there, the smart move is to disqualify the prospect and reconnect at a future time. MedTech sales teams dealing with complex organizations and long sales cycles don’t have the luxury of continuing to focus on a prospect until they get a solid “no.” They need to reserve their time for bona fide, future customers. By gathering the right information during the hospital sales prospecting process, and by leveraging those insights strategically during your interactions, your team can focus on the best opportunities with the highest probability of contributing to your top line growth.

Get Free Healthcare Data

About the Author

Carevoyance contributor Bernadette Wilson of B Wilson Marketing Communications is an experienced journalist, writer, editor, and B2B marketer, specializing in content for technology companies.