Empower your Healthcare Business with a Tailored Cycle Sale Solution

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okay we are live thank you everybody for joining me today for this medical sales live stream today i wanted to cover a very important topic that is crucial for to have any amount of success in medical sales and that's shortening your sales cycle so i realized early on when i got into medical sales it was way behind the curve because there were a lot of people who had a lot more experience than me they could talk better they had better relationships so i knew that the only way i was going to be able to compete was by keeping myself as sharp as possible and running as efficient as sales business as possible and it ended up working out for me pretty well i worked for when i first got into this industry i worked for a small company and it took me about 18 months to become the number one rep with the company but that was starting with zero relationships but how i did it wasn't because i mean you can see as i'm doing this webinar i'm not like uh you know some eloquent magical speaker i was just really good at staying on top of things and i ran a super efficient sales business and it ended up yielding fruit for me so i wanted to go over some of the top ways that i found that you could shorten your sales cycle which is going to yield more sales for you quicker sales and at the end of the year you're going to end up making a lot more money so i have seven points and wanted to cover if my laptop will cooperate here we go okay so first and foremost i know i've harped on this before in some of my other webinars and in my sales videos but the number one thing that you can do to shorten your sales cycle is to stay organized and the number one way you can say or you can stay organized is by using a crm if you're not using a crm you're you're missing out i can't remember this statistic i think it's about 41 i think it was 41 there was a big study that was done on sales people that use crm burst don't use crm those who use the crm have 41 higher sales than those who don't so it goes to that saying gives you a good snapshot of where all your leads are at uh what your objectives are what you need to be who you need to be taken care of and when and it just it for me it's a good visual representation so i know um i can see a good snapshot of who all my clients are are who my prospects are my warm leads my cold leads and it just helps me run a lot more efficiently but crm is obviously very important for you to use if you're not using one use one automate repetitive tasks i going back to the story that i shared in the beginning about the first sales job that i had in the medical industry one of the things that gave me confidence was a few months into the business i went out with one of the reps who is a pretty successful rep he was considered their top rep however and he had great relationships and he was very good with doctors no doubt about it but the one thing i noticed about him was when riding around with him he did a lot of things that were inefficient so we would go into the uh we would go into a sales call and after the sales call he would sit in his car for a while and think about it hmm well i'll let me pull up my salesforce app on my phone and let me uh log in the sales call and and uh and let me go over to the print shop and i need to pick up some flyers for the next guy all stuff that you shouldn't be doing nine to five this is during nine to five is is your time to shine this is your time to make sales a lot of these things could have been been done after hours it was really really inefficient and so a lot of these repetitive tasks like sending out emails all those things can be automated again going back to that first point about using a crm try to automate as much as possible of your repetitive tasks and focus on sales that's what you're paid to do or to hit this point but focus on sales during business hours so the one thing that uh when i finally overtook this rep i set my mind i go okay this guy has better relationships than me this guy he um he knows the industry better than i do but what can i do i can be a lot more efficient than him when i finally overtook him the um manager for our company looked at our crm at the end of the year and found that i had made over twice as many sales calls as the next guy and that's how i had to overtake them was just by being efficient and between those hours of nine to five i was in the field i was just making sales calls everything else i did at home okay the next point to shorten your sales cycle is to identify pain points i've covered this in a couple of my videos before but i can't stress this enough there's no motivation for anybody to buy what you have unless you uncover a pain point and you agitate that pain point so you have to think well what might a practice a physician a clinic administrator who whomever you're pitching what are some of their pain points you know a lot of times it's going to be something like wow maybe they're missing out on revenue maybe it's hitting those performance-based metrics maybe it's that they don't have enough people in they can't keep nurses or medical assistants on staff because they're such a shortage right now maybe they don't have access to the diagnostic tests for their patients with the right insurance i mean it could be anything but you really need to uncover those pain points and then you have to connect those pain points to the value of your solution when you do those two things that's when you have success okay the third way that you can shorten your sales cycle is by having a plan now i know this sounds trite this sounds obvious but i'm surprised how few people are really good at planning when i say plan there's a few things that go into planning number one make sure that you're dealing with the right person i know i counsel with a lot of sales reps and sometimes we they're they're deep into a sale they've been working on a client for a while and then they get me on the phone with them and i realize this is not a decision maker this isn't a person that really has a lot of influence and they're wasting their time so first and foremost you want to make sure you're dealing with the right person and then for each of your sales calls you want a pre-call plan again as i stated i worked for big pharma and in big pharma they train you how to pre-call plan that's one of the first things you learn and they drill it into you for months of training pre-call plan means you have a strategy before you walk in the door you're not walking in the door and just figuring it out when you go in there i'm going in there with a specific purpose doctor raised this objection last time well i got the study that backs up and i'm going to bring that in this time or i'm going to advance the sale to this to this point this time and then use incremental closes to advance the sale medical sales most of the stuff that we sell is not a one call close so a successful sales call does not necessarily mean walking out of there with that signed contract uh a successful sales call might be huh you know i'd really like you to talk to one of my other physicians uh physician partners about that can you come during off hours or something boom that's a successful sales call right there maybe it's setting up a demo maybe it's getting them to do a trial um maybe it's even just overcoming an objection or something and bringing in that next thing that they need to see so you can overcome that objection but you should have a plan to pre you should have a pre-call plan but you should also have that plan to advance the sale so so that's what i mean by planning okay number four is have a very clear crisp value proposition i see this a lot in the with some of the vendors quite frankly that we deal with sometimes they look at their marketing and i'll look at it and i it's not real clear to me what they do or what they're asking the physician to do so you really have to refine your messaging and make sure that it's on point that it's clear and unambiguous so you need to make sure that when you're talking to your to your prospects you're using statements that resonate they resonate that that creates the need something that differentiates so why do they need to use you or your company and it substantiates this proves that you can do it okay next thing is anticipating objections the last thing you want to do especially in medical sales you're remember medical sales is not easy you're dealing with professional buyers they have 10 15 20 i mean they have countless people walking into their practice or calling emailing hitting them up constantly trying to sell them things so they know to ask the right questions and um in you do not want to be caught flat-footed you're going to look like an idiot and credibility is everything in medical sales the way i look at objections objections are helpful i love when i get an objection most of the time when you get and i realize this when i buy stuff sometimes i want to be sold but i have that objection i'll bring that objection up because i want them to satisfy that objection because i want the excuse to sign that contract and because it might be something i really want to do but i do have this lingering thought you know someone told me this one thing was you know what i've heard that before um this is why this is uh you know that objection is not legitimate here's something that proves it so i've i've experienced this from the other side as i'm sure all of you have but objections are helpful because that can help you get to the root of what their concern might be because a lot of times what happens is they won't actually give you an objection so what you have to do is anticipate what the potential objections might be you have to validate it you don't want to fence with them yes i understand i've heard that objection before you want to validate that that is a legitimate objection however you know and then you have your your proof of you know how you can overcome that objection but you have to rehearse these things ahead of time so if they have a if they have objections the problem is a lot of times they won't say it they'll say things like okay well it's not a good time right now or we're happy with our current solution right now that means they have an objection they're just not telling you what that objection is real simple question you can ask in the beginning is do you see any reason why this solution wouldn't work for your practice that gets it out there in the open some people are afraid of objections don't be afraid of objections once you overcome the objections then when you do things like demos or or whatever your your next plan of attack is it's going to be that much more effective because now you've overcome that objection that's not clouding their mind as they're watching your demonstration they're gonna be watching with a much more open mind at that point okay number six use social proof this is important in any sale but i'm telling you in my experience medical sales social proof is is more important in medical sales than in any other sale that you're gonna make so i read this statistic that nine out of ten buying decisions are made with peer recommendations and i think about that all the time a lot of the stuff i have is because a buddy told me about this or that or you know someone recommended this restaurant or someone said oh i got this killer electric bike you should you know whatever it is a lot of times you're doing it because your peers are doing it you're not a doctor so this was actually said to me when i just got out of training in my first medical sales job i was working with a i was put out in the field with a guy who was a veteran rap really great guy but he knew pharmaceutical sales backwards and forwards and at one point i said something in a lunch to a doctor and i don't remember what i said but the it was something to the effect of well actually doctor what you should do is dot dot dot and he just stared daggers at me from across the table we walked out of there he said mike you are not a doctor he's not gonna listen to you about that stuff what you have to do is you have to relate it to their peers you know doctor i've heard that same objection from some of your peers but here's what they found dot dot dot so they will listen to what their peers are doing they're not necessarily going to listen to what you think they should do um so but if you don't have a if you obviously if you have somebody who they could just dial up and you give them hey i call dr so-and-so uh he's been working with us forever he'll tell you what great service we give or how effective our product has been or how the patient's benefited that's great if you have that and that's a slam dunk if you can get it if you don't have that which most of the time you're not going to be able to have somebody to rely on like that then use case studies to back to back up what you're saying or you could at least give examples of some peers so you know there was a doctor who is just who had a very similar situation uh like you this doctor told me he had patients who were facing this challenge and they had tried these different treatments and it wasn't working but what they found is when they tried this treatment that you know fill in the blanks so again related to one of their peers don't relate it to something that you you know picked up in sales training or something you're you're not going to be taken seriously okay the last point i will make about how to shorten that sales cycle is to make it easy the one thing that i've uh that i found in medical sales is you're dealing with people that are very very busy and sometimes they blow you off other times i think they legitimately do want your product or your service but if you don't strike while the iron's hot all of a sudden you get you're below a stack of papers and they're just so busy that before you know it you're calling your sales manager saying oh yeah dr so-and-so he loves us said i could pick up that contract in two days said come back friday so we're good to go before you know it you're three months down the road and whatever happened to dr so-and-so wow i keep going back there every week they said though if you don't strike while the iron's hot a lot of times you're gonna miss out on that sale so you gotta have everything cued up and ready to go one thing i do is if if you need a doctor to sign a contract they need to sign a lease they need to sign an agreement uh credit application whatever it is if your objective going into that sales call is to get them to sign it i would have that thing already filled out you already know what their address is you might already know their mpi number you might a bunch of the stuff that goes in those contracts you already know doc only needs a signature right here and we're ready to go even better is if you can load that into a or something like that where daca got an electronic signature press a button and you're good to go anything you can do to shorten that sales cycle to get them to do the thing right there so that they don't say okay well let me look it over tonight when i get a little more time i'll fill that out no no doc don't worry about it i know you're busy enjoy your free time i got it all ready to go for you let's go and ask if when in doubt ask for a small entry-level commitment so maybe don't shoot for the moon if you feel like that's going to be a stretch doc why don't we try this be why don't we crawl before we walk what do you think about trying this on one of your really tough to treat patients for you know for wound care you know maybe a wound that hasn't uh you have a patient whose wound has persisted longer than six months and and nothing else has worked what have you got to lose that might be a good time to try our new wound care product um can we get a commitment to do two or three patients just so you could experience it firsthand we'll try on the hard ones something like that get a small entry-level commitment even if it's uh just to advance it to that next step but get some kind of commitment and then finally when in doubt do the assume close i do this all the time it might seem um i don't know it's difficult to do if you haven't done it before i guess um but once you start doing it it's pretty easy a lot of times people want to be led down this road they want they want you to take control and they want you to tell you what they need to do next so if i uh send some hesitancy or there's uh yeah you know what come back in a week and i'll have that ready for you tell you what i'm gonna do doc i can see that you're busy i'm gonna make your life a lot easier i got this contract filled out here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna do and i just walk them through what we're gonna do and we're gonna get started we'll have a few patients and when i come back here next week we'll already have three patients lined up so you can implement this new service with them and we can take it for a test drive what do you think do the assume close have this i already started filling out the paperwork so we're ready to go you'd be surprised how often that works and people just sign so with that i hope you guys found some use out of this it you know i i've done some crunch some of the numbers on this i don't have it handy but even just trimming down a week or two off of your sales cycle if you extrapolate that out over the year i mean you could add 10 20 30 to your pay at the end of the year because you're that much more efficient at cranking things through and uh it's just going to lead to more sales and that's pretty much all i have so i hope you guys found some value in this and thank you again for getting on okay everyone thank you you