A colleague of mine, Tyler Anderson, recently posted a blog titled, Four Keys to Targeting Financial Institutions with Teleprospecting. The post highlights a few tactics to help successfully target the financial industry. While reading it, I realized that many of these tactics were also applicable to the healthcare industry and for targeting hospitals in particular. I was inspired to use his post as a springboard and share some tactics that should also be considered when teleprospecting to hospitals.
1. Identify all decision-makers and influencers and tailor messaging accordingly
- Hospitals have a number of key players involved with technology decision-making from the C-suite to VP/Director Level Management of individual departments (i.e. finance, radiology, pharmacy, etc) to IT. It is important to understand who these contacts are, and that they often have different needs and priorities.
- For any given solution, for example; A CFO may be concerned with ROI, cost savings and efficiency, while an IT decision-maker may be more concerned with ease of integration or the support required, and at the same time a department head may be concerned with usability and functionality
- Typically, VP/Director level management and Department heads are a good place to start when trying to gain an understanding of the current situation/environment within a particular area of the hospital as they are very familiar with the day to day challenges and current initiatives
2.Build a profile of the IT environment
- Hospitals use a number of vendors to facilitate essential functions (i.e. EMR, RIS/PACS, RCM, etc). Since integration requirements can be a key factor in the decision making process, it is often necessary to understand the current vendors in place. Building a profile of the IT environment via teleprospecting allows proactive positioning on how your solution will integrate with existing infrastructure.
- Core solutions are not changed frequently; therefore, determining when evaluations will occur is highly beneficial for ongoing nurturing strategies.
- Be prepared with competitive messaging. The industry is full of mergers and acquisitions, and solutions frequently hit End of Life requiring a migration. Also, positioning against a specific installed solution can be effective, particularly when there are known