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hello this is dr eric bricker from a healthcare z and this is the how to sell in healthcare podcast today we're going to be talking about mid sales funnel activities to move your prospects along now what do i mean by that so in the previous uh uh podcast we've talked about prospecting and initial five-minute phone calls and then we've talked about 30-minute whether it be in-person presentations or phone calls or webinars to do a more you know quote-unquote form presentation okay so we're done with that and in this episode then it's like okay well what's next so typically the call to action after that 30 minute and if you know let's say it's an hour what have you is depending upon the client the prospect there are various things that you're going to want to have in your toolbox as sort of a next step to educate them in the uh buying process about your product or service and that could be one an opportunity assessment and so this is where you would want to have some degree of sort of custom data about the prospect that you can then apply your uh analytics to now what do i mean by that obviously since we're dealing with healthcare oftentimes it's in the form of claims and you would look at their historical claims and then you would apply your solution algorithm analytics etc to those claims and say okay well if you had our service for this six-month 12-month two-year period of time historically on your claims this is how much of those claims we feel like we could uh impact and how much we could then save you now this is uh oftentimes very helpful for both the broker consultant and for the employer because what you're doing is there are going to be advocates for your product or service within the client within the client uh buying team or committee and you're going to need to it's almost like being an attorney you need to build a case along with that client advocate in order to prove your case to the rest of the people at the on the buying committee to essentially commit budget to your solution and there and therefore uh make the sale and that assessment is is additional ammo or is part of then building that case for that uh client advocate now here's the challenge is that often times you have this sort of quote unquote wish list of client data and it's hard to get so so the carriers almost never want to give up any type of data and you might have certain uh data fields that you want and they might not want to give you those data fields and there's a there's a couple of ways to get around that because the key to the assessment is speed because if your assessment takes two weeks four weeks six weeks eight weeks to happen well then whatever momentum you have created from the initial five minute phone call and 30 minute phone call is gonna die quickly if you could not deliver that assessment ideally within a week and i'd maybe give you two but ideally you'd want to be able to deliver that assessment within a week now how do you make it happen fast you would want to build off of any existing reporting that they already have for several reasons one you don't want to have to create any more work for them to do because if providing you with data for an assessment creates more work for them to do well they just might be so busy that they never get around to it and then two if they have to create some type of like special report coming from their tpa or their carrier their pbm or whomever well then they have to deal with the uh administrative account management people on the carrier pbm side and then they're busy and they got stuff to do yada yada and then you might have to have a um an authorization in terms of a couple forms of authorizations you might have to sign a data data privacy agreement with whoever is providing data whether it's the employer or the carrier um and you also might have to sign a business associate agreement to the extent that there's any you know phi and you're an extension of the plan uh in order to be able to you know do the assessment as well so then you're like okay well then we got to run this through legal there's there's there's technical issues in terms of the data but then there's also you know legal issues in terms of what contractually needs to be signed before it's handed over you don't want to deal with that so to the extent that you can work off either existing de-identified data reports that we had they have or even if they have like summary reporting of course all employers already have gobs and gobs of summary reporting and oftentimes the employers don't really know how to best use that summary of reporting there's actually a lot of very helpful information off of that summary reporting that you can use so what are some examples of that like you just need things like number of people on the plan you just need things like maybe uh weekly monthly or quarterly claims paid you might have some you know high level diagnosis or cpt breakdown uh you might even have some facility breakdowns like x amounts spent at xyz facility in the first quarter x you know x amount spent at one two three facility during the corner so there's some might be some facility specific uh cost uh information in there as well so what does that mean that means that ideally when you're providing your assessment it's best not to create your assessment beforehand i mean obviously you can create the you know full enchilada like ideal assessment beforehand however what you really want to do is you want to have various versions of that assessment that can be created that are quote unquote dumbed-down versions of that assessment based upon the type of data that's available from the client and that is that was a super helpful way of addressing the need to build a case by the client and the broker consultant as well and by the way doing that assessment it's not going to be like you know hey assessment and then close i mean sometimes that happens but very rarely the assessment is just another step in the buying process of building your case to make the sale okay so don't don't try to hang your hat 100 on just this assessment it is it is just part of the overall case that you are building now so fine uh you need to so that's one in regards to the data two you need to make your assessment aesthetically pleasing you gotta make it look good to the eye you have to make it look real professional now you can deliver it obviously many assessments can be delivered just soft copy in a pdf but you want to have it you know have the company's name on the front you're going to want to have a nice cover you know page you want to you're ideally going to want to have it in color and there's going to be charts and graphs and graphics and images to break up the text so you're not just sending them like charts or graphs plus big blocks of paragraphs of prose so my point is is that you want to make it aesthetically pleasing and and and visually easy to digest quickly because a lot of the people whether it be the controller or the cfo or the purchasing department i mean they're going to look over this thing incredibly fast and so it might even make sense to have like an executive summary at the beginning of the assessment and then obviously have more detail uh uh behind that but just know that you're not gonna you know you're gonna create this wonderful assessment and you think that the reader is gonna take the time to read it they might not take the time to read they're so busy that they you know to the extent that they can like you know check the box on the assessment piece and you're gonna have different people reading it at different levels of uh detail so again that executive summary section is super super helpful for it okay so a completely separate uh educational next step mid funnel that the uh that the employer could do oh oh and by the way the last thing i'll say too is that oftentimes the broker or the consultant can provide the reporting and if they can do that that's super helpful because to the extent that the that the employer can offload that you know just hey get out get these reports over to um xyz uh you know vendor that just makes it a lot easier for the employer if they can offload it to the broker or the consultant to be able to do that so that's another reason why you want to have a positive working relationship with the broker consultant even if you went direct to the large employer to prospect you're still going to want to do that for uh you're still going to form that positive relationship with the brokerage consultant because they need to help get you the assessment data in order for you to do the assessment okay we also did a we also kind of stratified our assessments by the size of the group so we had so of course if it's a fully insured group you're never going to get detailed claims data if it's a self-funded group that is like you know maybe a thousand or two thousand employees or 500 employees maybe we'll get some degree of claims data for if you have a ten thousand twenty thousand fifty thousand hundred thousand uh person group they might already have whether it's called a a data lake or or a database already that they have and it might be very sophisticated so you're going to want to have varying levels of sophistication that are also available based upon the size company as well because those really big companies are also going to be able to um sort of uh force the carrier to give them more detailed data than just a 500 or a thousand person uh self-funded group now the um the the next sort of area obviously to go to is references and it's interesting i would say that that going to a reference for a small or a mid-market group after just the 30-minute call was actually fairly common for us because they the uh the group and the broker consultant they don't necessarily need to have a ton more data or information from you what they're essentially doing so there's there's the sort of timing uh uh uh temporarily you know chronologically during the cell cycle where at the beginning fit is the most important thing and that's where you're doing your five minute your 30 minute conversations to see if the solution actually applies to them and then the next phase during the buying process a very much a mid-funnel part of the process is is assessing risk and so assessing risk for a small and mid-size employer is oftentimes done through uh reference calls okay so this is where being able to maintain those positive relationships even as a sales person being able to dig your well before you're thirsty and maintain those relationships with your customers that you've already sold such that you can go back to them and ask them to be references is super important and it's important to have your references uh obviously the name you know name of the person the name of the company their contact information but it's also important to have sort of a database of references within your customer base by industry and also by geographic location and by size of company those are probably the three areas so we talked to a company and they'd be like hey you know we're in trucking it'd be great to talk to another trucking business and that other trucking business might not be in the same metro area or even state but they just want to talk to another trucking business or they might be you know they might be uh um a rural employer or they might be in a particular uh town let's say cleveland or st louis or seattle and like i really like to talk to another because a lot of hr people know each other in the in the hr community and they want to talk to somebody who's in their same geographic location uh and then sometimes it's just helpful to have another company that's their size so they could be a trucking company that has 15 000 people and you might have a 500 person trucking company but they're just like you know look yeah it's kind of helpful but i really it'd really be helpful to have another like 15 000 person company that i could talk to even if even if it's in a different industry so being able to have a searchable database whether you use salesforce.com or excel or something else some other crm in order to keep track of your your customer base right because you're going to use a crm not only for your your prospects and your leads but you're also going to use a crm for your existing clients your account management team as well um to be able to provide those references and when we would talk with references we would um you know of course ask them if they could be a reference in advance and we would set the expectation of you know one that we wouldn't wear them out and that two that we would notify them when we had shared their name uh as a reference so that they wouldn't get a call or an email just out of the blue and they had no idea where it was coming from so that we could contact them and give them the heads up to say hey look we've uh we've given you as a reference and we would say the name of the person such that if they were getting a call from mary or bob that they would you know one they would take the call or you know if they had an assistant their assistant would make sure that the call got through to them uh etc so you want to be able to manage the expectations of the person who's providing the reference uh as well and of course you would do you know nice things for them as well whether it be thank you cards or gift baskets or things like that to show our appreciation for them to be a continued reference for us now some folks wanted one some folks wanted two some folks wanted three um we would always start out try to be at the low end so that we wouldn't have to burn out a ton of our references with like giving everybody three uh and oftentimes actually it was the broker consultant who would do the reference check and not the employers themselves um interestingly a lot of times folks would ask for references and they would never end up contacting them and we would still close the sale i almost wonder if they just wanted us to you know they just felt confident enough or they just wanted to prove that we had clients that were referenceable or maybe they just never got around to it because they were busy and you know that being the case just know that there's going to be some folks that are going to ask for reference and they're never going to contact them and you'll still be able to close the sale okay now so that's number two so number one is the assessment number two is the um uh is the reference number three is a site visit so it's great to have them especially if you're there in the same city as your headquarters or if you have multiple offices as one of the other offices as well is to do a site visit so that they can actually see the the work location and if you know obviously these are all um you know obviously if you're doing a onsite nearsight clinic if you want to have them come to see another on-site nearsight clinic you run well then that makes total sense and you have the ability to showcase that otherwise you're typically going to be in an office an office setting and we did a lot of preparatory work around a highly orchestrated office visit in terms of being able to showcase various aspects of our company because an office visit is not a tour of the office it's really an opportunity to really get to know the uh the company better and operations better and i t better and finance better and it was especially for larger employer clients i would say we started doing site visits for typically companies with more than a thousand employees that was sort of the threshold typically we would not have any companies with less than a thousand employees want to do site visits we certainly had many employees with more than many companies with more than a thousand employees that did not want to do a site visit but it tended to be the larger companies that wanted to do the site visits and typically it would be a combination of the broker consultant and the employer and not only was it a great opportunity to sell to the employer but it was a great opportunity to showcase your company for the broker consultant such that they have other groups that they work with and for them to have actually been able to see uh the location and the operations was great now few things around that one is that we it's obviously important to be honest about what it is that your office is like you don't want to in your employees i mean you don't want to hire employees or have a temporary office and yada yada yada so it needs to be sincere and in this age of um pandemic if it makes sense to do like a virtual tour where you walk around with a laptop or just doing face time or what have you then that that might make more sense and we really found that the uh the decision in terms of office space was a obviously it had a lot to do with operations and had a lot to do with finance in terms of being able to afford the space but we also took into account what the office site visits would be like when choosing our office space so that we you know it it was it was the type of building that would instill confidences you know so that same sort of mentality then why banks are um in whether it be you know significant you know brick buildings uh et cetera et cetera so just know that you're going to want to have that site visit it's almost a subconscious thing that you know people are very visual um we would um we would do all sorts of sort of special you know nice things for them in association with their site visits so that's another good thing to do especially for the uh the the much larger uh prospects so the um the other mid-funnel things that i can do would be okay uh example reporting that is another piece of collateral that is very helpful to have is to show them what a utilization or a savings report would look like oftentimes those are done monthly or quarterly so example reporting is very helpful [Music] oftentimes groups will require an eligibility file or maybe even a claims feed in order for you to provide your service the sales team is going to want to have the file specs for the eligibility file and the any data files and again the best thing to do is to be like you know hey look you know we're flexible about how we take you know the division of your technology department's called etl extraction extraction transfer load in terms of the frequency of the downloads and how they take them and et cetera et cetera but it's important for the sales staff to be trained and have an understanding of that because believe it or not there are people within hr because hr has to deal with feeds all the time out to various vendors and they're going to have people that you know sort of specialize in hris and their hris system so you can actually get some pretty details questions about the file transfer process etc etc during the sales process and that's good right it's a positive buy sign if they're actually thinking about the sometimes cantankerous process for transferring eligibility files or data files that's a good thing that's positive pipeline right so you need to have you can't just say oh well it's our technology people no no no because you don't want to have to get the technology person on the phone or in the meeting with the prospect every time they got questions about the eligibility file i mean you want to be the conciliary you want to be the you want to sell them through that process uh as another opportunity for you to build your relationship with them so you're going to want to have the the you know very nice looking data spec documents uh for the um the eligibility file and any data feeds along with you know lots of language in there about how you can be flexible in terms of the types of fields you uh get and the the route and the frequency uh with which you get them so yeah also employee communication piece example employee communication peer pieces are also a great mid-funnel uh piece to send on to them whether it be home mailers or example emails or example text or example table tents or example wallet cards uh etc um if you if your solution has an app that is used by the employees then doing doing an app demo during that you might only do like screenshots of the app during the initial 30 minute to one hour presentation but you actually want to do a more detailed uh deep dive live demo of the app with them um uh or if you have like an online portal that would as well that could be another one so my and and you do not do not dump all of this on them at once so here we've named a whole bunch of things that you can use mid funnel and what you're going to do is you're going to say many people in your situation like to see one or a handful of items to further educate themselves about our solution some people like to see an opportunity assessment based upon your data and if they say oh yeah that's great we would love to do that okay don't give them all the other options just be like okay great let's do that and you focus on kind of dripping out one thing at a time don't be like well we're gonna do the assessment and we're gonna give you all the communication materials and we're gonna give you the specs for the file feeds and we're going to do the example report no no no you do not do all of it at once you want to drip it out because what's going to happen is that mid funnel this is when sales stall you think oh 30 minute presentation they're going to want to totally keep moving forward with this and i i'm i don't understand calling them and i'm emailing them and they're not responding to my phone calls or my emails like what's going on like are they not interested anymore and the answer is is that they may still be highly interested they're just busy right i mean the typical hr person benefits person even the typical broker i mean they are fighting fires on a daily basis so you just have to understand that that you are not necessarily their priority especially if they're thinking about something that's going to be implemented you know nine ten months in the future which most of these things are the you know the very early stages are going to be you know nine to 12 months before they would ever you know go live with it with it so they're not necessarily going to have the hot seat underneath them to move forward so you're going to use these various pieces as excuses to get them back on the phone or have another meeting with them or have another webinar with them so that every time you're checking in shouldn't say checking in every time you're following up with them you are dripping additional pieces of information with an opportunity again they're really they're super busy get on hey can we you know here's an example report hey let's get on a 10 minute phone call we'd love to be able to kind of walk you through this real quick um you know here's our specs you know here's a we would give example opportunity assessments so say like okay you know let me give you an example opportunity assessment it's got an executive summary for that you know it's blinded it doesn't have the name of the company on it so that they can see if they do do an opportunity assessment they can see what the deliverable will look like okay so that that is super important to keep things moving along and you know you had to do 12 contacts seven emails five phone calls in the beginning just to get the process started you're gonna need to do the continued follow-up mid funnel to keep the sale moving and you're going to need a reminder system in a crm again we use salesforce.com doesn't matter which crm you're using but sales people are notorious for forgetting to follow up and dropping the ball and is it possible to have a absolutely fantastic reaction to an initial 30-minute call by both the broker and the group and if you as a salesperson fail to follow up will the sale not go anywhere the answer is absolutely like if you think you're going to do that 30-minute presentation and they're going to follow up with you that's crazy okay even if they were like jumping out of their chair excited you still have to follow up with them because they are used to everybody pinging them like if you were in their world you never ping anybody because everybody is constantly trying to get in contact with you so like you kind of use that passive approach when you're constantly being dealt with that way historically so they're not going to sort of change their mo just for you so you just you got to put yourself in their shoes and live in their world now what you're gonna do next so that's mid-funnel okay fine the the definition of in my opinion the definition of no longer being mid-funnel is when they either either give you we would call it a verbal yes or they would ask to see an example of your contract or you start i wouldn't even say start talking about pricing because sometimes they like to talk about pricing earlier on but i say if they want to see the actual um example of your contract or if they just give you the verbal yes and here's the reason you we would we would mark that as verbal yes and as soon as we got the verbal yes we would begin the implementation process where we would sort of co then co-manage the prospect with our implementation and account management team because can deals fall apart between the verbal yes and having the contract signed of course of course there's a tremendous possibility for the deal to fall apart in fact even after the contract is closed and signed and you started supporting the client the deal can still fall apart so you know you have to keep selling through this entire process and you cannot again in my opinion you cannot wait until the contract is signed before you start implementation so what does that mean you're going to start some implementations and you're going to end up not closing the sound the contract's not going to go through because oftentimes you'll either have purchasing department or legal there are other uh bureaucratic processes within the and the and the larger the customer is the more bureaucratic these processes are and if you wait until the contract is signed into implementation you you know we would have groups that would literally sign the contract the day before they were supposed to go live i mean and these were for very you know multi-thousand tens of thousands employee companies so we did tons of implementation work before the contract was signed but we did have the quote-unquote verbal yes so it's very important to have marked in your crm when do you have a verbal yes versus when do you have a signed contract and obviously you're going to have the anticipated start date in there as well and that anticipated start date might move too obviously a lot of groups like their start date to be on the first of the year when their new plan year is but if they started off cycle then instead of starting in april they might end up starting with may for nothing that has to do with you it might be something on their own end that they're you know they're put they're doing an hris implementation and they're having a whole bunch of hiccups with it and they have to do all hands on deck for another month before they can implement you know your solution so in the next episode we will discuss the selling through the implementation and contracting process but that will be the end of our discussion today for uh the mid funnel process for selling in healthcare and again this is dr eric bricker with a healthcare z thank you so much for giving me your time and attention and i wish you all the best