Streamline your sales workflow for healthcare

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hello and welcome to the ose north america production printing webcast this is part of our presco business development program designed to help ose customers succeed with digital printing this is a list and only webcast however we encourage you to submit your questions anytime during the webcast you may do so by typing a question in the ask a question box on your webcast screen today we'll be discussing how to sell to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries matt reese as infotrins and jim daly of fennel media are here to share insights and practical knowledge that you can use to capture this business opportunity welcome matt well welcome everyone and welcome to this month's my preschool webinar again i'm matt reese senior consultant at info trends and with me today is jim daly president of funnel media i'm going to start today's webinar by quickly defining the health care market and the pharmaceutical market and then discuss the relationship both of these markets have with each other and then share some marketing needs that each industry has individually and then jim is really going to get to the heart of this webinar and share with you how to sell into these markets and when we think about the pharmaceutical market we immediately think of the large giants in the industry companies like pfizer merck glaxosmithkline they've really become household brand names pharma companies are in the business of developing producing and marketing drugs licensed for the use as medicine in the pharmaceutical industry as many of you know is enormous when compared to the relatively low number of establishments interestingly when looking at company size by employee the industry is very well balanced and so the message here is that while we would all like accounts with major brands you may not have to target those larger brands in order to get your foot in the door the healthcare market is familiar to all of us it's an industry comprised of dentists pharmacists physicians home health care hospitals and nurses all in the business of providing goods and services to treat patients and while the health care industry is over a trillion dollars larger than the pharmaceutical industry it's comprised of significantly more establishments and it's dominated by what i call small and medium businesses these are establishments with 20 or fewer employees when we look at how these two interact on one side you have the health care market whose goal is to treat patients with curative preventative rehabilitative and palliative care and while the healthcare market is constantly undergoing changes with regards to role function revenue sources close to 70 percent of the healthcare industry is again comprised of these smb organizations and operate very much within these smb dynamics these establishments to a large degree are managed much like mom-and-pop businesses if they're going to to expand and grow their practice they need to find attract and retain profitable patients on the other side you have the pharma industry who researches creates tests and develops drugs and products for the healthcare market the pharmaceutical industry is tasked with educating the healthcare market about new and existing products that can be prescribed pharma industries grow their market share by getting healthcare to use their products and from a marketing standpoint pharma companies operate with large marketing budgets we've all seen the commercials on tv and ads and magazines us marketing spend is estimated being close to 30 billion dollars although i've seen estimates where that number is almost double and roughly twenty five percent of that marketing spend goes directly to physician sales calls pharma companies employ reps whose job is to make physicians and doctors aware of new drugs existing drugs and changes in their portfolio of products given the competitive nature of the highly regulated regulated pharma industry digital print is ideally situated to meet the needs of farmer reps and when we look at health care opportunities what's interesting to know is that 70 percent of health care establishments are in ambulatory health care services health care practitioners in this subsec sector overwhelmingly provide paid outpatient services where the equipment and infrastructure aren't the primary focus of generating revenue this segment includes physicians dentists chiropractors especially therapists and more and from a marketing standpoint ambulatory health care services are focused around the patient life cycle which involves patient acquisition so identifying the audience and creating targeted messaging patient services which focus on maintaining a positive patient physician relationship and patient retention which is really where the personalized communications can come into a big role with uh reminders updates triggers that allow you to send out messages that keep you in contact or keep doctors in contact with their patients and so with a little bit of background out of the way it's now my pleasure to turn things over to jim so he can share with you his experience and knowledge on how to sell into these markets jim well thanks matt and kim uh osei and infotrends for sponsoring this webinar and thank you so much each one of you for attending for committing time from your day to discuss some new ideas i'm here today to bring a bit of a different perspective regarding how to be successful selling print services to the health care and pharma industries especially as it relates to research data that info trends is introduced to provide insight into this marketplace just so you know a little bit about me as i advance this slide there we go uh the death of the typography industry in the 90s taught me to stop selling technology as technology and start selling value after selling my typography studio before the industry evaporated i created digital express a short run color digital printing company delivering some respectable numbers 1.6 million in revenue eight employees 24 net profit that's 384 000 profit each year ultimately the company was acquired by synveo while at sunvayo i became responsible for reviving underperforming operations in several locations why am i crazy in unconventional sales ideas mostly in the commercial print sector at pbm a cgx company i drove the transition from a convenience pod operation to enterprise level vdp cross media and print management solutions for clients from colgate to apple to glaxosmithkline and many others which has now led me to develop funnel media to help clients grow sales by undercut uncovering value that customers see and are willing to pay for but enough about me let's get started first off health care providers really do need print to help them run their business whether it's prescription pads direct mail campaigns calendars newsletters or brochures they need print but when it comes to print they don't care and generally don't have a provider preference because it's an occasional commodity purchase to them they might as well be playing excuse me buying floor mops so even though it's a significant market in every part of the country the data says that you'd better be the low price provider to compete well let everybody else evaluate the market that way i think we'll take a different point of view for just a moment taking a cue from henry ford the inventor of the model t and so much more if i'd listened to customers i'd have given them a faster horse so why not bring something new to the table change the game deliver value they can see value they'll pay for why not recognize the size of the market as the very large opportunity that it is and build solutions to make money serving that market vistaprint nearly owns 11 million small business print needs in the us today because of thinking like this and they are highly profitable and growing why not adjust our approach to provide value that customers see and are willing to pay for instead of selling unique print jobs to folks who don't understand print excuse me and while we're at it despite seemingly lower prices let's make sure we make exceptional margins on all that we sell the first thing we need to do is to stop thinking like commercial printers selling a job at a time with every job unique each one its own unique event in the plant well how by creating products like kits portals and customer process improvement so here's what that means on this chart will help a little bit as a printer along the top access there my customers tell me what they want me to print from their designs custom all the way that means a lot of unique interaction high touch which takes a lot of time high cost for which we must adjust excuse me for which we must charge a high price where is the value in healthcare providers terms they don't know designers photographers copywriters so that brochure is simply too expensive on too many levels therefore no sale yet they really do want a brochure and they need it if you move to a provider status look what happens that's the next column now you're providing the same rack brochure but it's selected from among several customizable designs that can potentially be sold in one meeting that you're already set up to produce profitably that you can offer an attractive price because you've eliminated many of the manufacturing and sales costs you've also added value because in an environment that is very sensitive to regulatory compliance such as hipaa that's the health insurance portability and accountability act you've already created a pre-approved compliant product you can add further value by kidding related products together helping them make better and more efficient purchasing decisions but if you want to change the game that's the last column it's time to improve their process and make your products an integral part of how they do business every day the first step is often to create a health care health care specific storefront that features products for that market only again to lower your cost increase sales and increase customer value ultimately you'd like to make your process their process so that buying your product is necessary for them to deliver their product so i've provided some examples in this next chart a product as simple as a physician's prescription pad is surrounded with lots of regulatory issues regarding its format and protection against copper copying and forgery so there is actually significant risk in buying them by creating prescription pads as a product you will have researched and accommodated these issues once yet you provide them as a valuable necessary feature over and over again by the way i've produced customized prescription pads for the pharmaceutical companies charging them as much as four dollars and fifty cents for a simple twenty five sheet four by six pad since you productize these in these prescription pads you can realize the production savings of gaining these orders on say a weekly basis to increase your margins since a it's a product instead of a custom order turning now to the next line there newsletters and treatment booklets there are several companies that provide contact uh content that you can customize to create newsletters and treatment booklets again i had many regular print runs for pharma companies that they distributed via their sales force and my portal as medically relevant incentives to physicians this is in industry legalese that means that pharmaceutical companies can pay for them without violating the law a little later i'll introduce a way to create cross media programs for post treatment guides that can become part of the health care practices business process but now let's take a look at some essential components of a storefront first this is a healthcare provider specific storefront but it's shared by all of your care clients with most portals you can limit what products are displayed for a particular account based on their individual login and password since you've productized your offerings you can now use one of the most powerful tools available to increase sales a pricing grid you can grid prices and quantities to encourage larger orders have different specs providing good better best options and you can group products into logical kits to increase total orders while providing valuable logical choices that helps folks make better decisions pretty cool you can also use this portal for event reminders to include promotional items they might need or simply to encourage larger waters with price breaks having prominent orders having a prominent water display panel will assist folks by reminding them of what and how many they ordered last time even if the office manager is on vacation lastly you can use the portal to promote new products or seasonal products that are now available in short let the portal do the selling for you so what about creating products that become part of the way the health care provider does business let's look at an office visit to set a broken leg after the pla excuse me excuse me after the plaster has dried the billing clerk goes to your xm pi micro site to create a custom care guide that they print out on their desktop printer but not just any guide this guide is specific to the patient the doctor and the procedure it includes a calendar of required visits where to buy and how to use crutches a care guide regarding how to say bathe with a cast an emergency guide that includes qr codes and printed urls that direct the patient to say a webmd information page or maybe a practice specific information page or emergency contact information for the practice that might change based on the time of day it was scanned since all of the patient data is captured within the custom qr codes an email or text message can be sent to the practice and physician regarding which patient made the inquiry and when and a log can be maintained by xmpi for all of this activity this product saves the practice substantial time explaining from not having to explain broken leg care it dramatically reduces office interruptions from worried patients makes certain patients get the complete and authorized information they should reduced exposure to lawsuits patients get the warm fuzzies and an impression that they're getting the care they need from a practice that's up with the time that's real value you get to sell this service over and over again but most importantly you're going to sell it on a subscription basis so that you have monthly continuing revenue regardless of how often they're using this system that subscription basis thing is very important so bridging this a little bit let's talk about getting through to pharma itself the guys with the big bucks selling to pharmaceutical companies means that managing big data is is paramount i've helped build programs that replace physicians drug samples with traceable voucher cards designed so that the pharma company can maintain control over who receives the samples and how many this also eliminates drug storage issues for the physician especially for controlled substances i've done roll out programs where we prepared announcement postcards for six hundred and eighty seven thousand five hundred and eighty three physicians i'm not kidding that we sent out to each of eleven thousand six hundred and three sales reps to instruct the pharmacies that serve those physicians to drop the pre-stamped card in the mail when they receive their supply of the new drugs and i've designed vdp campaigns that generated unique sell sheets to health care facilities based on which insurance plans they accepted comparing drug prices under each plan with their competitors while including the relevant legal disclaimers required by each state or governing locality bottom line to sell to big pharma you need to understand the data but there is one more segment that we haven't talked about so far veterinarians selling to vets there are substantially fewer compliance issues there are substantial budgets available from the pharma companies almost as good as the the people uh pharma often via their companion animals divisions or farm animals divisions and frankly i've found them to be more practical about their business operations than most health care providers jim i've i've just got a couple quick questions coming in so you know i mean this idea of productizing is really a natural extension of the value-added services that that many service providers can offer by leveraging digital technology you know one of the questions is uh you know in looking to pursue this new line of productization what quality should i look for in a sales rep if i'm going to pursue this type of business that's probably one of the the great things about it is you can start out with people that are brand new if you need to and just teach them about what your product set is so that they can sell to that product set yep the second thing is it also allows your regular sales staff to develop a process of starting accounts that they know are going to become continuing revenue for them for years to come meaning they'll put more effort into the initial sale and then let the portal take care of the sales after that and maybe showing up every say three or four months to see how things are going yep so that way they can they can take advantage of all the lower lower price orders and still make it a viable income out out of that segment gotcha gotcha and and in in your experience i mean where do you see sales reps that that are able to grasp these concepts and really run with them particularly in the printing industry which as you and i both know is is kind of a complex thing to try and teach somebody do you see them as younger kids maybe coming out of college with a print background or people coming from with a sales background in say i.t or you know if i was going to look for new sales reps to bring on to my team to help support some of these new initiatives where should i go to try and find them uh frankly as long as your product set is well defined and you've defined that value in other words you can train folks into the sales process uh i would start with the youngest folks possible yep just because it's a great training ground and for the existing sales staff that might not gravitate to it immediately start calling it a residual income uh and pretty soon they find out well wait a minute i make one good sales call and for the next six months i've got money coming in while i sleep yeah and and in talking about the residual sale uh how what's what's a lead time in your experience from from both getting your foot in the door with a healthcare provider with the type of systems you've outlined very clearly and and brilliantly for the audience and then what's a typical sales cycle like to try and get your your foot in the door with a pharma company with a pharma company or with a health care company well i i would love to know both okay with the healthcare company you really should be able to walk out the door with an order in hand gotcha in other words your your sales call should be sufficiently compelling that you've set them up you showed them the the website and you might have taken the first order uh manually but uh generally you don't want to leave the office if you can without having made a sale gotcha it's not the thing is that you need to spend the amount of time that it's going to take to make that happen yeah as far as getting into the pharma companies there's a couple of routes one of them is with these brochures the treatment brochures there are a number of companies out there that that's their business their publishers of treatment brochures and you can tag on with them going to a particular pharma company because they they've you know uh don't offer the entire equation but might have some access into the pharma company itself uh the other way is to basically go to the pharma company and say we've got this relationship uh we have these uh three treatment publishers that we deal with gotcha uh we know it's part of your value prop uh let's go after it gotcha gotcha so so on one hand it's it's work on really understanding the market that you want to go after identifying products that you can cost efficiently manufacture that that market really needs and developing a clean storefront portal that facilitates ease of use and ordering and then and then bringing that solution to market and then with the farmer it's looking if you can't go directly to the print buyers it's looking to partner with other organizations that may be serving the pharma and bringing kind of a unified partnership that way correct and i would say frankly that the most common request is for a certified prescription pet that pharma company can put whatever type of information they want on it very big never-ending all the time gotcha so those are definitely products that that they go for and again the idea is this portal becomes a service portal to the pharma end of to the healthcare providers uh especially when you start adding in all of the other things whether it's you know little uh brochure racks or who knows pens or whatever it might be very handy for them yep and and jim we just got another question in from the audience and the question is um who are you selling to in pharma and or health care is it traditionally print buyers marketing executives or someone else and i'm sure that the answer is probably a little different for both both industries well the beauty of it is is you can actually go to procurement on this sale in other words this is a pretty easy sale once you have something that's pre-packaged that's a solution that they're looking for normally also in big pharma the folks on the procurement side are are generally very knowledgeable and interface pretty well with the marketing departments obviously if you can get through to the marketing departments a big a big deal but most of what you're going to be doing as they will call it a minor player uh the access to marketing is going to be very limited so i i guess what i'm getting at is this is one of those rare instances where you can do pretty well starting out in procurement yep yep yep and you know i i think about some of the the doctors that i've seen and they're you know the the offices that i've been in are typically very small um do you think you know even on even on the the smb ambulatory healthcare services are the doctors themselves making those purchases or is that traditionally maybe handled by uh somebody in a in a more administrative role more often than not it's going to be the office manager okay or the person doing the scheduling okay unless that's the doctor too but i don't think i've ever seen that one unless it comes the irish doctor gotcha well great well well i thanks for answering the questions jim i appreciate it i'll let you continue all right so so really to wrap things up you know the biggest issue is if you want to start selling print jobs it's just too expensive and large potential markets are unavailable because they don't want to learn your process to make money in the health care provider and pharmaceuticals market again we go back to this product productized to mitigate pricing sales and service costs gain preference and margin by adding value and reducing risk that's a very big one make sure you've got a pre kind of a pre-approved product and you can work with with folks in pharma on that create repeatable businesses business processes that you sell over and over again you saw that with the subscription idea and pay attention i mean hyper attention to ease of access provide subscription pricing and value purchase print plans to drive continuing revenue very very helpful it's a little bit of a different mode but it's great so to close my segment i'd really like to say that it's been a pleasure to provide you with what i believe is a practical approach to growing sales in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals market if you have any questions that we cannot address in our time remaining please feel free to contact me directly thanks once again to kim and matt and osei and infotrends for making this webinar possible you