Steps involved in the selling process for healthcare

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good afternoon thank you for joining us for today's webinar value selling and the healthcare buying process i am paul carpanella from leverage points marketing department and like to welcome you to another one of our monthly webinars on value based strategy sponsored by leveragepoint leveragepoint provides the only software platform for customer value collaboration we offer a sas based cloud platform that links all cross-functional team members involved in building and executing a value-based strategy this changes the way that companies create communicate and capture value you can find out more about us by visiting leveragepoint.com a few housekeeping items before we begin all participants are on mute for this call if you have any questions you can enter them in the on in the questions panel located on the right hand side of the screen we'll answer as many questions as possible during the question and answer portion of the program and also you have an opportunity to win a copy of chris's popular new book health care value selling winning strategies to sell and defend value in the new market you can enter for your chance to win one of five free e-copies by filling out the survey which will appear as you leave the webinar now my pleasure to introduce leverage point ceo and moderator peyton marshall payton thank you paul we're delighted to have with us again noted pricing practitioner strategist and award-winning author chris provines chris is a healthcare and medical technology expert with over 20 years of industry experience he's held executive roles at johnson and johnson and at siemens healthcare currently chris runs his own consultancy value vantage partners where he shares his expertise and trains global clients in the areas of strategic pricing value selling and sales negotiation chris is an author of multiple books on strategic pricing in the healthcare industry including his most recent one healthcare value selling one of the best books i've read in a long time we're privileged to have chris as a member of the leverage point advisory board he's also a popular adjunct professor at rutgers university a lot of us today are eager to hear what chris has to say about value selling in the health care buying process welcome chris thank you thanks uh paul as well and the entire leverage points team uh it's it's a pleasure to be with you all today wherever you're calling from and uh good morning good afternoon good evening we are veterans day today so for those of you who are veterans or veterans in your family thank you very much for your service okay so we're ready to get started okay so we're going to talk about today uh topic that's near and dear to me it's really um healthcare value selling you know the world has changed dramatically in healthcare and regardless of you selling devices or diagnostics or pharmaceuticals or services it's pretty clear that the the old world of selling has changed dramatically um so we're going to try to do today is really dive in a few areas that i think are pretty important for both sales and marketing teams as well as pricing teams understand that's first understanding the customer's buying process so how does your customer buy that may sound pretty silly but i i'm always pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised at the level of understanding in this whole area across many industries particularly in healthcare we're going to talk about strategic sourcing strategies so as the professional buyer plays a much more important role in the buying process in healthcare how do you as a sales and marketing and pricing team think about that and deal with it and then we'll jump into how do you use your value during that filling process and lastly we'll talk about uh you know it's not good enough just to be able to sell your value you have to in this new market be able to defend your value so what are some tactics or techniques you can use to defend your value okay so let's move on to the next slide so we're in this shift that's happening and i talked about we're moving from this old world of relationship and clinical future buyers to this new world of a what i call value and data driven buyer and importantly a professional buyer so more and more professional buyers are playing a much more uh bigger role in the buying process and they're called all different things across the world depending on what market you're operating in they could be called purchasing procurement supplied chain strategic sourcing materials management they can be called pharmacists and part of europe for example whatever their name is it's pretty clear that they're playing a much more important role so part of what we'll talk about today is how do you deal with this this new buyer this professional value driven buying process how do you make sure that you you you're able to actually leverage this and get past these buyers or get around or work with them depending on the circumstance to really grow your business before we jump into some of the tactics and some of the stuff happening let's just step back and say why is all this happening i think there's there's a bunch of forces i usually go through 10 but in the interest of time i'm going to talk about just six of those ten so these are six big forces driving change in how your customers are running their business if you're selling to a hospital or a physician office or surgery center outpatient clinic of some kind and these forces in turn are putting pressure on you and suppliers so the first two are accountable care and value-based purchasing obviously with the affordable care act aca there's been tremendous change in the united states there's also a change outside the united states where more and more customers are really focused on getting value in their purchasing uh also particularly in the united states providers physicians and hospitals are becoming much more accountable for the care they provide and we all know there's lots of penalties and other mechanisms in there the payers are now trying to cost quality and outcomes performance transparency is a big trend that's driving a change whether that's price transparency whether it's value transparency or whether it's outcomes transparency it's going to have a big process of a big impact on the buying process next of course the maturing hospital supply chain or health care supply chain if you look at academic surveys of industries where they rank various industries in their purchasing or supply chain capabilities often the industry that fall towards the bottom or offices at the bottom is healthcare and within their hospitals have been not the best in terms of their capabilities in supply chain of purchasing and that is rapidly changing and they're getting much better that in turn is putting pressure on suppliers and their sales teams uh importantly sorry about that we were drawing direction let's move that up next importantly is reimbursement cuts of course this is having a big impact on your customers and the financial pressures they feel and as someone who's worked in purchasing when whenever you face financial pressures the first place you look is your supply dates to see if you can get more value and then lastly hospital consolidation so depending on who you talk to i've talked to hospitals ceos cfos and ceos uh some are for prognosticators and we'll say that if you look at the hospital industry maybe 50 or 100 very large systems that run most of healthcare in the united states so we're seeing tremendous change whether you agree with that statistic or not would be hard to argue that we're not seeing lots of consolidation and for shelling your value and for pricing that's becoming a big dr driver and lover of how you should be thinking about the market okay so there's lots of pieces to the puzzle of going through value selling and making sure that the customer really understands your value and that you're in at the right part of the buying process uh there's also a lot of pieces of the puzzle in terms of making sure that you're defending your value appropriately but we're going to talk about just a few today and the first one is really doing a deep dive on the buying process so how does an organization buy how professional buyers buy how do they think about you as a supplier we're going to talk about understanding the professional buyers so what are the goals interests fears and desires how do you understand what they're looking for make sure you can best leverage your value next we're going to talk about leveraging hospital buying behavior and this is just the basic premise that every hospital buys a little differently but you can usually categorize them into different segments if you are clever about thinking about how they're buying then that gives you some opportunities to use your value as well and then lastly really use your value to educate the customer and i always tell people this is really about helping your customer make an informed buying decision um there are statistics out there that even the best run purchasing or procurement organizations only do value analysis one-third of the time for important purchasing so if you're waiting for your customer to do the value analysis and do it correctly for your products or solutions uh you're gonna be in a lot of trouble so you have to determine what is your value and use that to educate the customer so overall i think it's really a new level of sophistication and selling and defending value is required in this new market okay so i'm paging through some of these up front slides a little quickly um that's in the hopes that at the end we'll have a rich discussion around some of the questions often the real value comes out of the questions you all ask so please think about questions but this is a slide slide channel that i like to use to really get people grounded in how does the hospital buy and again this isn't chris making this up um i actually teaching global procurement and strategic sourcing this semester at the university if you pull out the university textbooks there's laid out something very much like this of how professional buying organizations buy in fact you could go out to a number of your large idn customers in the united states and on their website they'll have a process just like this so i'm going to walk through this and i'm going to touch on some really important points about this buying process particularly as it relates to your selling to your pricing to negotiating your value okay so it's a really simple process here it starts with step one which is uh recognition by the customer that a supplier can help with a problem or opportunity that's step one step two is they'll analyze the opportunity in the supply market step three is they'll determine the strategic sourcing strategy so i just mean how they're going to buy whatever they're good at services and we'll go through that much more detail step four is invite suppliers and evaluate the solution step five is select the supplier negotiate terms and then step six is basically implement the agreement or the contracts and manage supplier relationships okay it's a very simple six stage process again i could give you links to a couple of very large ibm's in the u.s and they may have a five-step process some might have a seven-step process but essentially they're doing this and from this process there's some important insights so what is the customer trying to get done in the beginning of this process they're really looking for qualified opportunities so what's a real opportunity for them to do usually one of three things reduce costs improve quality or improve outcomes enjoying those those steps are looking to develop a qualified opportunity they're developing clear requirements and they're putting together what they'll call the decision criteria so at the end of the day how are they going to make a buying decision second output of this process is usually a sourcing strategy and a negotiation strategy right so they do all of this in advance and then as you get towards the end of the process uh they are implementing the relationship putting together supplier scorecards and implementing the contracts so there's an important insight from this and this comes from the challenger sale book if anyone's read that book i'm sure many of you have and the insight is that sixty percent of the customers buying decision is shaped by the time they formally reach out and engage suppliers so for those of us that have worked in procurement or teach in the area this is not a big insight it's not a big aha because if you look through steps one through four this is exactly what purchasing people are taught to do right do all of their homework up front make sure that they have very clear criteria for how they're going to buy things but there's important insights from here from a selling perspective so let's say an rfp shows up in your mailbox tomorrow morning at eight you've not heard at all from the customer about whatever they're buying you have to ask yourself is it real if they've gone through this entire effort and they're not reaching out to you is that really a real opportunity um likewise if you're the incumbent vendor in the situation and it shows up you have to ask from an incumbent vendor's perspective are they really going to switch from me or is this just a game they're playing with me but there's also other insights by thinking about this process if you go back to step one recognize problem or opportunity that can come from a variety of sources that can come from you obviously helping uncover insights from your customer helping them understand and recognize an opportunity that you can help them with it could also come from your competitors right your competitors could be then they're selling so they could be creating the opportunity for the customer oftentimes this will come opportunity recognition will come from benchmarking uh so the customers may be at a conference with other purchasing people and they hear about great pricing other hospitals are getting for the same things they're buying it can come from their gpo they could come from consultants purchasing consultants so it could come from a lot of places the point is if you're not in there early enough in the buying process that opportunity is going to be shaped by someone else uh and sometimes and oftentimes that will be really hard to go up against that so you have to be really engaged early on in the buying process uh there's a couple other important points with this chart step three and we'll go through this in a little more detail the customer is really developing a strategic sourcing strategy so that just means how are they going to actually buy that good or service so smart buyers don't just really nearly do this they have a strategy and they'll develop a strategy based on what you're selling in the supply market characteristics and so part of what you have to look for in selling your value and marketing the value is is there a mismatch between their sourcing strategy and what they're buying and we'll talk a little bit more about that i think another insight from this chart is if you go all the way to step number six the buyers are supposed to be doing something called srm or supplier relationship management so just like sales organizations have crm or customer relationship management uh buying organizations have srm so they're supposed to be working with a supplier really partnering developing a relationship with those suppliers that they deem to be strategic so this is a perfect opportunity for you if you're the incumbent vendor you should be having that conversation you should be bringing that up in business reviews you should be talking about that you know simple question to ask more sophisticated buyers is what type of supplier score cards do you use and if you're working with them do you actually have a score scorecard you you actually review them or in business with you so in step number six if you're not communicating your value not reminding them of the value you're bringing uh then you miss a big big opportunity because they will conveniently forget during the next rp round or next bidding process okay so some important insights on this process you should be selling value early on in the process so as they're shaping their buying criteria you should be helping influence that and shake that if you're outside the united states in a tender market obviously you have to do that in a legal way but there are certainly ways to shape that buying criteria so that when the bid comes out the evaluation criteria comes out it's actually uh very much in your favor so you kind of uh tilt the playing field to favor yourself if you will okay so one of the things you also have to do in this network new world is professional buyers play a more influential role is really understand what they're all about uh so they have many goals i've listed a few the top ones here first goal primarily is to reduce costs so if you have a chance and you have a good relationship with the director of supply chain or materials management if the accounts you call on you know one thing you might want to do is just ask them what their goals are for the year for this upcoming year what are the goals what are they trying to get done usually it's reduced costs most organizations will have at least a five percent savings target uh more and more hospitals are getting shabbier about connecting suppliers and the supply chain to patient outcomes so patient outcomes related goals might be in there managing risk is often a big goal or uh objective for supply chain and purchasing folks so if your products for solutions have a better risk profile than your competition it's certainly something that you want to be able to sell early on and help shape the buying process managing internal stakeholders and then obviously their personal work and credibility so if you're a high performing supply chain or procurement person many of them have aspirations to do something else eventually so they're really trying to build their own credibility and work and so as a supplier you have to think about is this an opportunity to collaborate with them or not but usually in any selling situation when you're dealing with professional buyers there's always a group of them and there's even even for the best professional buyers they will at times want to play games because they recognize that playing games works so here's a quote from ahead of purchasing i usually pick out which supplier wanted advanced it's usually the high value high price supplier i then add many bids into the bid process inevitably one of the suppliers is low and i use this as leverage with my preferred supplier so this is a standard negotiation sourcing tactic in fact um i did a presentation to a group of professional buyers there's about 120 or 150 of them but i asked that by raise of hand how many of you actually issue an rfp when you have zero intention of ever switching from your incumbent supplier and you can probably guess how many hands were up but everyone in the audience had their hands up i went up to a young lady in front and said what do you guys do this she's making all the suppliers jump through and she said it's real simple answer it works so it's a very simple tactic that works for them so as a as a sales organization and a seller you not only have to be able to sell your value but you importantly have to be able to defend your value and defend it against games that come at you so in that context i wanted to just show you some research that i think is pretty interesting so this is a standard negotiation model it's been around for almost 40 years so on the vertical axis is cooperativeness so it's your concern for the others and on the horizontal is your assertiveness or concern for self so how much are you concerned about yourself and then the verticals how much you concern how much you're concerned about others and this has been used by researchers over time to study negotiations and selling situations so uh real quickly if you're down low on both you'd be avoiding if you didn't have high concern for yourself but had very high concern for others you'd be accommodative uh in the middle you'd be sharing if you have high concerns yourself but not high concern for others you'd be competitive it would be more when lose and then the ideal world is up to the upper right hand corner where you're both concerned for self and concern for others okay so this is a standard five negotiation styles that have been studied over time there was a study done not recent not that much long ago uh where they asked professional buyers what's your preferred negotiation style using this model and 70 saying that this is their preferred model what's interesting is um they will work they will move down to the lower right hand quadrant to competitive with lubes if a couple of things transpire if they think they're being treated unfairly by the supplier if they're distrustful of the supplier if they view the supply item as not being terribly important to their business um those are the general things that will push them down there also what the research showed and i can validate from my own personal experiences if they see weakness from the supplier and a supplier really doesn't understand their value it's much easier to go be competitive than it is to be collaborative collaborative usually takes a little more effort to come to agreement on things so the point is from selling your value if you're not really clear on your value and you don't have a real backbone in your selling process you could end up in a situation where the the buyer wants to be collaborative with their preferred style but they push you down into the edited position and they get windows okay so part of uh understanding buyers and how to sell and how to negotiate with them is really put yourself in their shoes and understand from their perspective how they view what you sell so i like to use this model again this is in chris making this up this is called a supplier segmentation or some people call it a portfolio model it's just a way of taking all the things that a hospital buys and putting it into a quadrant so you can have a strategy for how you source these things okay so real quickly on the vertical axis is the customer characteristic so this is basically how much money they spend it's not the price of the item but if you go to their budget it's how much budget money exists so either low to high and on the horizontal is the supply market characteristics so uh this comes down to how influential and how much of a preference item is it does it have very high physician preferences an example you'd be in which the right how many sources of supply exists what's the switching cost is it high or low and then how critical is the item to care so if you take any hospital and you look at what it is they have to buy to keep their operations running i mean it's tens and tens of thousands of supply items right and so they couldn't possibly develop a strategy for all of those so one of the things they've historically done is outsourced purchasing or parts of purchasing with their gpos the other thing is they'll take and bucket their supplies into categories and they'll know callers category management they'll put it on a map like this and this helps them really think about strategy so if i'm uh if i'm a buyer and i'm buying something where i spend a lot of money but i think there's a lot of a lot of suppliers really low preference from a clinician standpoint low switching costs that would be something they would call commodities if you're in the upper right-hand quadrant this is where they spend lots of money but there's lots of stickiness in the marketplace uh there's a lot of physician or clinician preference there's fewer sources of supply there's a high switching cost and which relatively critical care that's something they would say is strategic if they ideally if they're well-run would want to have a strategic relationship with their vendor next down low is where they don't spend a lot of money but it's real sticky that's what they would call key and then down in the lower left-hand quadrant these are things that are they don't spend a lot of money on but they're easy to switch right so uh i do know uh some very large hospital systems and they take all of these tens of thousands of items that they purchased and they put them into categories and one in particular has 300 categories and they would put us categories on a map like this and from that they would develop their sourcing strategies so how are they going to attack that body item so they will obviously attack things differently if they think it's a commodity as opposed to strategic you can also think about your product life cycle through the lens of this chart so as an example when a product becomes new to market if it's highly innovative it usually starts out in key you have few competitors there's high preference key by the way is an area where uh traditionally supply chain has not paid a lot of attention to because it's not a lot of money there from savings perspective but it's really hard to switch as you grow your business and follow the product life cycle you get strategic as you eventually grow and grow and grow the market matures and competition enters you get to commodity and then hopefully not to decline but this is a way to think about uh your solutions through the lens of the buyer okay so the other thing that's important to do also is think about how your customers buy uh everybody buys differently driven by the maturity of the purchasing organization by their buying rules by the financial pressure i like to think about it these four buyer types so they could keep things relatively simple so you have a value seeker this is usually a sophisticated buyer who's interested in value is willing to make trade-offs you have a traditional buyer this is an account where physician preference still drives or the physicians primarily are calling the shot you have the innovator and they're just that they're they're an account where they're actually competing based on innovation so they're looking for innovation from suppliers innovation is really important to them they could be a center of excellence as an example and then lastly you have the price buyer and price buyers just that by by definition they're a buyer who only for whatever reason only cares about price okay so ideally you want to approach these accounts differently right if you have some kind of segmentation you want to be thinking about i'm not going to offer the price buyer the exact same offering as my traditional physician buyer or my innovator price buyer only cares about price i need to somehow unbundle my offer and my products and services and get in there with as low price as possible that makes sense okay so we've talked a lot about professional buyers how they buy how they think how an organization buys once they become much more mature we're going to talk a bit about value and using your value and close this out so you first need to understand your value what is your value i like these two quotes one from albert einstein so everything that can be counted does not necessarily count everything that counts cannot be counted and then lord tell them when you cannot express what you're thinking about in numbers your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind so two interesting perspectives of value question you have to ask yourself is who do you agree with obviously very both of them geniuses personally i agree with both so i think you first have to take a holistic view of your value that really comes in three parts it's looking at your clinical value we really do have differences your economic value so trying to put that in monetary terms for the customer and then never forget emotional value so risk trust relationship brand service all of that stuff uh obviously counts and you need to focus on where you have differential value even if you can't quantify this stuff initially you should be thinking about where am i different how am i different even if i don't have studies yet prove it or even if i can't quantify what it's worth it's always something you want to use to remind the buyers but ideally you do need to quantify where you can so you have to go through the economic value and think about how am i taking costs out how am i improving the revenue profile or reducing the universal penalties etc for the customer how am i improving risk what does that risk translate into financial terms and then am i helping them reduce their working capital so ideally it's really going through and capturing what are you doing for their business because as i mentioned at the beginning of this talk if you look at some of the studies even the best most well-run organizations uh only do total cost of ownership one-third of the time for important purchases so if you're relying on your customer to quantify the value for your you're not going to do it they're going to do it and possibly get it wrong and it's hard to convince them otherwise or they may do it not actually tell you and use it against you in the negotiation process okay so we've gone through this uh fairly quickly some of these slides i just wanted to wrap up with really three points um it should be clear as your customers become smarter buyers and they become much more formal on how they buy goods and services and the buying decision migrates from purely clinician only to a committee based and much more value-based buying that you really need to proactively engage in the buying process much much earlier than we have it's what's really teaching the customer about your value understanding our fee processes and bid processes and when they're surprises or not next you really have to shape customer value perceptions if you leave it up to the customer to quantify the value for you you could be in a lot of trouble and i know obviously in the device and healthcare with your legal regulatory department it's not always easy a lot of products you probably haven't invested in the evidence in the past so it becomes difficult but if you don't start now you'll never be able to do it so you need to be able to really uh clearly communicate your value and i think there's two important points here too is really understand switching costs and understand it from your position so if you're the incumbent supplier how do you raise switching costs if you're on the outside and you're trying to get inside of the account how do you lower switching costs and switching costs to just cost the customer incurs to move from one vendor to another and then lastly obviously it's not enough to just be able to just sell your value in the world of professional buying and it's going to increase more and more in health care as they become more sophisticated buyers as an industry you're going to have to be able to understand and work with these folks and really recognize their gains but also recognize at the end of the day they've got a job to do they're good people by and large um they're not out there to make your suppliers go bankrupt but they are looking for good value so you've got to figure out ways to work with them but also for those that bluff be able to understand how to recognize those gloves and deal with those okay so with that we're going to move back to peyton and move on to some questions that's great chris thank you very much some terrific insights there we have a few questions that came in during the webinar and by the way there's still time to enter your question on the panel on your screen while you're entering just a few words about leverage point a single platform for customer value collaboration through the product life cycle many leverage point customers start with our value based platform on the product development side beginning with product design and moving through their stage gate process to product launch going to market our customers develop customized marketing and sales content that enables sales to communicate value at critical points in the sales process a platform facilitates collaboration among cross-functional teams as they plan product launches and as they execute using technology and a common framework to embed best practices and the best information leads to better outcomes in multiple dimensions from better product decisions to better sales execution which leads to the whole point of a value-based strategy higher margins and better performance executing on value is on value selling is all about teamwork good value propositions aim for the right people to deliver the right messages to the right audience at the right time our cloud platform is readily usable by sales a dynamic value proposition is both more flexible and more effective than a static powerpoint deck sales teams deploy simple tailored value propositions with strong value headlines easily changed by sales for customer specifics with consistent graphics and messages and with ready access to information and the ability to drill down into quantified value as appropriate sales teams build customer trust as they validate an offering's value through consistent sales conversations with accessible collateral supported by leveragecoin thanks so i see we have some great questions so chris what advice do you give to companies just getting started in value selling on where to start what products types of customers sales generalist sales versus subject matter experts medical science liaisons yes that's a big question with lots of parts i think but you know obviously for for most of the companies on the phone here today you probably have a legal and a regulatory department and they control a lot of what you say and a lot of that is gendered based on what evidence exists for whatever point you're trying to make right um so oftentimes this works best if you're just starting with the newest best thing that you're launching so usually a new product launch where you've had the chance to invest in at least some evidence in some proof points to explain why you're different is usually the easiest place to start particularly if it's an important product obviously if it's an important product and it's going through your pipeline and you've you've at least been able to invest in some evidence along the way this is really i think the easier place to start to go back and take products have been on the market for a while and try to generate evidence or find differences is hard with that said sometimes the value to look at value holistically sometimes the value is not always in the product itself but it's in all of the wrap around services and programs that a company provides and oftentimes those are easier to quantify from a evidence standpoint so often look at particularly the products been on the market for a long long time is more at the mature stage of the product lifestyle but look at what are where the wraparound program services things like delivery all of that stuff does have value and you can quantify it thanks so next question what about times when the customer pushes you from strategic to commodity for example they communicate that there's no real difference at least in their opinion between vendor a and vendor b yeah i know that's a that's a great question and and if you go to purchasing school 101 one of the first things particularly if you're dealing with a purchasing person they're going to tell you and you everyone on the phone who's sold uh will have heard this in their lifetime is that's a commodity they're all the same so oftentimes they will say that even if they don't believe it it's basically to devalue your offering and put you uh on the defensive so you really have to look at it holistically from the perspective of how does the account think about it overall not just how does the purchasing or supply chain think about what you're selling and i will tell you even if it is even if your product has reached the mature stage of the product life cycle and let's say there's little difference between the physical product itself and maybe it does sit in the commodity bucket oftentimes the real value then becomes the services you're providing so inventory management your delivery education training all of those things the value often switch from the product to all the wraparound services and oftentimes that's where you do have differences great so so if the professional buyer is not the decider who is yeah it depends on what you're selling but um you know the research i've done shows about 90 percent of hospitals have at least one value analysis committee we know that p and t committees have existed for since the 1900s in hospitals so oftentimes these days it's the value analysis committee which is either chaired by a physician or some other clinician or you know oftentimes the director of materials so it's often more of a committee is the decider but obviously a committee is made up of individuals they have to figure out who has the most influence as individuals but again part of this will the the level of influence will depend on what you're selling and if you go back to the four by four with the quadrants where does it fall in there so if it falls if it truly is something that's more commodity in nature that they spend lots of money on and there's really easy to switch lots of competitors then you know the economic buyers probably do have more say so in that but i'll tell you a funny story i was talking to a director of materials and he was telling me about they had a value analysis committee meeting on surgical team and someone said why are we even wasting our time talking about this let's just switch and get the lowest one and that's what they did and he said you wouldn't believe the headaches that caused you know the tape whatever the alternative tape was it was sticking when it wasn't supposed to be sticking and not sticking when it was supposed to so it was creating all kinds of infection barrier issues and patient discomfort so you think of something as simple as surgical tape which at least you know i haven't worked in the tape area but at least in my mind i'm thinking maybe that's a commodity but even he was saying you wouldn't believe the headache that put us through so uh understanding what are the real differences where are your performance differences are really important great thanks um so there's a question that even i can answer which is will these slides be shared yes everyone will get a copy of the presentation slides as well as the link to the recording so uh chris you've said a lot about hospitals in the provider community uh what role do you see for value in in the payer community yeah obviously the payers are more and more looking for value if you go to medicare as an example as our biggest payer in the united states all of the programs they're implementing are all about value it's about cost quality outcomes right um also with the voluntary aco programs and bundle payments it's really about coordinating here and trying to take costs out these some of these things have existed on the private payer side before even medicare jumped on the bandwagon they've been around for a while but private payers are getting into this um so i think generally if if you are prepared if you have good solutions i think the movement of both providers and payers much further down the path of thinking about value and purchasing decisions personally i think is a really good thing here's a here's another question related to segments are there different approaches to smaller size providers compared to the larger provider systems that that's kind of a broad question when i think about segmentation um it's less about size but more about behavior and i think there's i didn't want to over complicate the slides but i think there's really two dimensions to it one is behavior so how do they buy as an organization what's important to them are they interested in value and partnerships for the suppliers do they look at suppliers as the enemy or actually as a capability that's an important point so look at how they buy as an organization the other thing to look at is how do they make money and we all know in healthcare i mean no margin no mission even if you're not for profit you need to have a margin to stay in business and you have to think about how they make money and if i'm a hospital that i'm a rural standalone i'm not part of an aco i may make money very differently than if i'm part of an accountable care organization or i i have my own insurance products as a hospital so part of this is thinking about how do they buy but also how they make money i can tell you that broadly speaking at least the research i've seen a lot of feedback out there is there's a lot of people that believe little hospitals are not going to survive by and large that they're going to be either gobbled up or closed or in very rare instances will they be out there on their own surviving a good point good point so some sales people are reluctant to sell based on value because of their concern that customers have better data than they do any thoughts on how to give them courage and get them started yeah at the end of the day i think you have to be seen as particularly if you're dealing with more professional buyers you have to be seen as someone who's part of the solution um and and i've talked to lots of hospital cc people this is what they're looking for this is what professional buyers generally looking for is how are you part of the solution so if you're just talking to me about features and benefits you are not part of the solution you know the professional buyers you know if you're blah blah blah on features that goes right over their head you're seen as someone who's pushing a product whereas if you can actually translate in economic terms what you think your solution is worth at least now you're having discussion about their business and financially what you think you can do to help them in their business now they may not agree with your numbers but uh just getting them to talk about them is is actually a big win because you're debating a number as opposed to whether there's any value whatsoever interesting here's a related question how do you suggest handling buyers who don't communicate much and don't want to be educated yeah so we we didn't have time in the session maybe there will be a follow-up session is really talk about the maturity of buying organizations and how that plays into their behavior but you you do have some who are you suppliers as the devil as just a cost and they'll play all kinds of games and including either shutting you off or not wanting to hear from you and you know that's that's really those are the old fires those buyers by and large will disappear over time and either they're gobbled up or fired or laid off honestly i think that's what's going to happen um i i had a guy at a conference i presented that to professional buyers and he came up to me and he said he introduces himself as the sales prevention department to every sales person and i just thought you know what a dumb perspective right you you should be looking at your suppliers as capabilities not as costs and think about how can you use them to grow your business and improve your business so part of this is you have to figure out if that person going to be around and part of is are you selling to the right person and can you go find someone else in that organization that gets it uh absolutely so um i think we have time maybe for one more question there's still still something stacked up here but you talked about offering value-added services to take some of the heat off your products price can you elaborate on some of the services that are highly valued in the clinical space yeah so when i was talking about value-added services more talking about what's traditionally happened for many device companies is over time to compete companies have have not only innovated on a product front but also added in bundled in free services whether that be training which they have you have to train your your clinicians on your products obviously but training delivery special support overnight shipping you can go on and on about the various things that companies have done as companies are facing cost pressures what they have to do is now start to think about unbundling much like they've done in the airline industry you don't want to be hated like airlines but part of this is understanding all of those services do it do do they or do they not create value for a customer where they cost you to provide and if they do create value for your customer do you have to give them to everyone or should you be using them more as a negotiation trade so part of becoming more sophisticated over time i think is unbundling really understanding which services create value who to offer those to and if you're going to use those how to use those in a negotiation more effectively great point so speaking of airlines i i think we're uh coming in for a landing so i'm afraid that's all the time we'd have for questions today i i see there are a few left and and really please feel free to reach out to to chris or us directly with with additional questions so thank you so much for that chris paul great thank you peyton and thank you chris those are some uh wonderful insights uh and some really good questions by the audience so thank you as well uh and thank you peyton for moderating a few programming notes before we move on our next webinar is coming up a week from tomorrow wednesday november 19th at 1 p.m eastern join us for dr george cressman's insights in the transforming commodity products into value offerings and then december we'll be uh presenting our product roadmap there's been a lot of exciting enhancements to the tool this year and a lot more exciting enhancements to come so join us on december 16th to learn about these enhancements and how leverage point is enabling b2b enterprises that execute a collaborative value-based strategy details and registration emails for both webinars will be coming out shortly again thank you once again everyone for attending and chris for your wonderful insights as peyton did mention all attendees will receive a copy of the slides and recording within the next one to two days and don't forget about your opportunity to win a copy of chris's popular new book you can do that by completing the survey which will appear as soon as you leave the webinar thank you again and have a wonderful rest of the afternoon bye