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hello this is dr eric bricker and thank you for watching a healthcare z today we're going to be discussing selling in healthcare now the irony is not lost on me that as a physician it is odd that i'm talking about selling but i will tell you as the chief medical officer of columbus professional health services and as one of its co-founders one of my primary jobs at compass was like as the sales guy and so at compass we had over 2000 employer clients with many major national accounts like t-mobile and southwest airlines the majority of our groups like we're between like 200 and 2000 employees so kind of like mid-market fully insured and self-funded employers was kind of like our bread and butter and i would sit down with the broker benefit consultant with hr and the head of benefits from the cfo and the ceo and i literally had thousands of meetings over the 10 plus years that compass was in existence and guess what when i started out as a salesperson i was horrible like it was awful if you actually saw yourself but over time i learned and i learned it i learned and i learned and i learned a few things so i wanted to share those with you today specifically as they pertain to health care okay first off there's this thing called a sales funnel of course all of you probably know that right it can be divided up into many ways but i will just divide it up into prospecting pitching and closing and there's some very specific ways to think about each one of these three segments okay first up in regards to prospecting i follow a guy named aaron ross and he wrote a book called predictable revenue and he wrote another book called from impossible to inevitable and he is fantastic he basically created the entire um lead generation and sales process for salesforce.com i mean this guy is genius now he says in prospecting which is getting leads that there's three ways to do it there's nets seeds and spears okay so nets just like it sounds is when you're gathering large numbers of leads it's typically through inbound marketing so it's typically through you're putting out blog posts you're putting out videos you're putting out advertisements you're doing conferences etc and people come to you expressing interest maybe even they come to the website and say hey i'm interested in xyz okay so nets is one of the three ways to get leads now the conversion rate of nets is typically very low so the number of nets that go from prospecting down to pitching just know that's going to be the lowest of these different categories okay now seeds are relationships that you or people on your sales team have planted in the past think of them as your linkedin contacts that you actually have a relationship with and i will say that fostering those seeds and just constantly meeting people so i would go to conferences not to try to like pitch compass at all i would go to conferences just to like meet people and play you know planting seeds i'm like hey who are you what do you do because people at conferences always want to talk about what they're doing they really don't want to listen to what you're doing and so i would just give them an opportunity to tell me about what it is that they're doing and i would like sincerely have interested in it and it would come to like all sorts of like various things down the road so the important thing about seeds is that seeds while they tend to have higher conversion rates they tend to take a long time as you can imagine a long time to grow and actually turn into something that goes on to pitching okay and lastly we have spears that's what you're like directly hunting for a specific lead i've you know you as a salesperson have identified xyz person at abc company and you're going to contact them now i will tell you in form of spears one of the most important things to do is to actually call them to use this thing called the telephone now it will tell you in this day and age almost nobody answers the phone so just know that the vast majority of time this will be an exercise in leaving voicemails but that's okay because what you're going to do is you're going to email them as well and you're going to do an email and a phone call on the same day and that phone call is going to reference your email now i won't get into the details about how you write the email blah blah blah but the fact that so few people call these days the fact that you actually call and do leave a voice will will make you unique now the key here with spears is that their initial like reply rate is just super low so this is just an exercise in failure right and so this is where listen if you can connect with three out of ten people then you're gonna make it to the hall of fame right so just know that you're gonna get the door slam in your face a gazillion times and that's okay that's part of the deal okay so then we move on to the next part of the funnel where your leads have moved their way into actually wanting to have a conversation of hey i want to learn about whatever service or product it is that you have okay now there are different buyers now this is the miller hyman approach to sales and i think it is very apropos to um to the complex business to business sale that is oftentimes found in healthcare and here you have the three different buyers you have the economic buyer you've got the user buyer and you've got the technical buyer the economic buyer is typically in the c-suite so the ceo or the cfo and they're the ones who are literally going to be writing the check and they're looking at what is the dollar value of what you're providing vis-a-vis the cost these are the other budgetary priorities that i have okay so it's important when you're talking to these people that you talk in terms of numbers and value and budget okay next up is the uh is the user buyer now the user buyer is actually getting like the use or the value out of the product or service so if you're selling an insurance carrier service or a point solution or you know what have you the user here is actually not the end employee because the person who's buying your service is actually not the user buyer who's the user buyer is it's hr and the people who work in benefits at that company depending upon the size of the company it could be one on the same okay so that's the user buyer and so it's very important for them to talk about outcomes what will be the benefits that come from this particular health care solution whether it be better health fewer days of absenteeism decreased musculoskeletal claims uh improvement in hemoglobin inland ceiling levels of your of the employees so there's a zillion but that's what they're gonna be interested in and lastly you have the technical buyer and the technical buyer is the one who's literally going to be interacting with you whether it be on a daily or a weekly basis they're the ones who are going to have to do like implementation of the program they're the ones who have to go and do like on ongoing like servicing of the program so oftentimes employers will outsource a lot of this technical buyer service and that's where the broker benefit consultant uh comes in so oftentimes the broker benefit consultant or like maybe a medium or a lower level benefits manager will actually be the technical buyer they want to know the nitty gritty of listen how easy or difficult is this to actually do or use so it's very important to think about this framework and here's where it gets really interesting you can be in one meeting where you will have all three of these different buyers in the same meeting so you literally need to tailor your pitch in the same meeting in different ways depending upon who you're talking to at various points in the meeting and guess what that is called hard that is a very difficult thing to do like i would come out of these meetings and i would be dripping with sweat like i feel like i would have lost like five pounds like my stomach would be churning i mean it is hard okay then lastly we come to closing and this is a model from a book called hope is not a strategy about complex business to business sales it's a rather old book yeah this thing this thing is awesome you got to read this thing it's very thin paperback i love this book okay and basically here you have what is important to a buyer over time so t is time and we have a little graph here so what's most important at the beginning is fit is the service that you're offering does it fit their particular problem what they need and you got to get that i don't even say out of the way first you have to sort of win that fit battle first and the next comes up is risk okay what could go wrong and they're going to punch a million holes through what could possibly go wrong okay where do you host your data do you use amazon web services do you use a data center what kind you know do you have a uh you know disaster plan you know what are you gonna do you know all these different things that could possibly happen you have to go through those risk issues okay and then lastly you get the results then finally you get to price okay what are you compared to the competition what do you compare to other similar things that i buy in this particular area what do i what is the price vis-a-vis our budgeting season okay maybe this makes sense but we just don't spend stuff on this stuff right now because we budget in july and we don't start spending on it until january so really we can't spend any money on you until six months from now so just know that as you're talking about fit if they start asking you risk questions that's actually a positive buy sign and if you're talking about fit and risk and they actually start asking you price questions that's actually a positive buy sign those are good things those are showing you that you're progressing along this timeline now everyone who's watching this video wants to make change for good and we all need to sell we need to sell good ideas we need to sell new ways of doing things sometimes we need to actually sell products or services or even old companies so we all need to sell in some way shape or form and here are several frameworks that i have found helpful in doing so and thank you for watching a healthcare z