Understanding the Sales Cycle at the Hospital
There’s a lot for B2B sales professionals to consider these days when it comes to putting signatures on contracts, especially for those targeting the medial and healthcare industry.. The sales cycle alone has multiple stages, from prospecting for leads, contacting customers, qualifying the lead, presenting proposals and projects, dealing with customer objections and finally closing the sale. Two other considerations are knowing what the sales cycle is when targeting hospitals and subscribing to a credible physician database.
Knowing Hospital Sales Cycle Can Help You Close More Sales
If you have a subscription to MD Select in order to utilize the physician database Canada, then you already have the best tool for lead generation targeting hospitals. If you’re new to hospital sales, however, you need to recognize that selling anything to the medical and health industry includes a long sales cycle. People overseeing large hospital budgets can’t simply make snap decisions on purchasing – whether that’s buying a year’s supply of PPE for emergency workers or buying a multi-million dollar CAT scan machine. There are many, many stakeholders involved in the purchasing process, so the line you’re in as a B2B sales rep is longer than the line-up at the emergency ward after a May 2-4 Saturday night in Winnipeg.
The goal is to try to connect with a decision-maker who can green light purchases, or connect you with the person who can. Start by looking at the Ontario directory of physicians, for example, if you want to sell to hospitals in Ontario. There are 91,000 profiles of doctors and nurse practitioners on that MD Select list, along with contact information of hospitals and medical facilities. Narrow your targets down to weed out those individuals who most likely have nothing to do with the purchasing process in the hospital or facility you’re targeting. One key piece of information you will need to know is the fiscal year end for each hospital or, even better, to find out when they’re completing the budget cycle for the upcoming fiscal year. Hospitals have lots to spend but they spend on a tight budget; you can’t expect a hospital to simply allocate a significant amount of money to your products or services if it’s not already captured in a budget line during the current fiscal year. The timing of your pitch will certainly affect the length of the sales cycle.
Subscribe To MD Select to Access the Physician Database
The hospital procurement process varies from organization to organization, as internal acquisition teams go through the steps involved in evaluation, needs assessment, procurement, commissioning and eventually monitoring. If you want to be a preferred B2B sales rep considered for more of the local hospital contracts, you have to take the steps to be an informed and resourceful vendor. You have to do your research and know the hospital areas where purchases may be focused. Like all sales initiatives, you need to be able to provide a solution to a need within the healthcare organization. Research begins when you subscribe to MD Select to gain access to the physician directory Canada information. It’s the best place to prospect for leads and discover relevant information.
