Uncovering the Psychology of Physician Lead Generation
As a B2B sales rep targeting professionals in the healthcare industry, it wouldn’t help your cause much if you learned to become a heart surgeon. Sure, you’d have a greater empathy with the doctors you were targeting with B2B sales of your products and services, but you wouldn’t be closing deals based on the fact you had developed your surgical skills. On the other hand, if you trained to become a psychologist, you’d have a much easier time selling, because you’d understand the psychology needed to be effective in medical lead generation.
DISSECTING THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND SELLING TO DOCTORS
Doctors in Canada don’t have too difficult a time growing their practices. There are far more patients than there are doctors, so word gets out quickly when a doctor is accepting new patients. Unlike a B2B sales rep targeting the healthcare industry, doctors don’t have to extend too much effort generating “leads” to “sell” his or her medical services. That’s why medical lead generation companies like MD Select are more important to sales reps than doctors. Such online database services provide sales reps with a wealth of information on over 91,000 doctors, surgeons, specialists and other medical professionals working in Canada. Healthcare lead generation companies are just one step in the process of marketing to doctors. Once you have generated a strong lead list full of high quality sales leads, you have to figure out the best approach to marketing to doctors. That’s where the psychology comes in.
Doctors in Canada are not prone to listing a menu of services they provide and attaching a discount price to them in order to attract customers (i.e. patients) to grow their practice. Doctors don’t operate on a competitive price business model. If they did, they could advertise their services and ask potential customers to provide their contact info to receive something of value in exchange from the doctor – things like information on the services available, special discounts and other info related to the practice. In this fashion doctors could grow a “lead” list, then use it as a strategy to market to their potential customers. In the same fashions, sales reps targeting doctors have to develop strategies that inspire doctors to “opt in,” in essence granting permission to sales reps to send marketing messages to the doctor. That means they have to offer doctors something of value in return, like exceptional content on a website or in a newsletter or blog. Developing strong content marketing strategies gives B2B sales reps a greater chance of connecting with doctors, because the information being sent is aligned with the doctor’s needs.
MEDICAL LEAD GENERATION IS EASIER WITH MD SELECT
Overcoming a doctor’s reluctance to opt-in to receiving your marketing materials is a key goal of success for B2B sales reps selling to the medical industry. Healthcare lead generation companies like MD Select offer an enormous service to connect reps with doctors across the country. With all the relevant profile information available from medical lead generation companies like MD Select, B2B sales reps and marketing teams can craft highly-focused strategies designed to appeal to doctors who may traditionally be leery of becoming targets for marketers. Doctors tend to do a lot of their own initial research prior to connecting with marketers, so it’s important to learn as much as possible to be able to appeal to doctors and overcome any mental barriers they may have.
