Generating medical leads isn’t just about product promotion in order to attract interest. It should also be about discovering a potential customer’s needs and what they’d normally expect out of an EMR system. What’s challenging is that you have to do this without arousing suspicion or resistance. This event will most likely happen when you’re capable of tailoring an EMR system for medical institutions of all sizes ranging from small private practices to entire hospitals. It’s just a matter of organizing your prospects according to their concerns and what specific solutions you can prescribe to them.
These concerns can be divided into two concepts: affordability and application.
- Affordability – You should never ignore a prospect’s budget when you’re qualifying business leads. Some private doctors are often skeptical of EMR because of the costs it would take to implement it and maintain it in order for it to stay useful. Hospitals on the other hand, tend to manage them a little easier. In either case though, you need to offer a solution that makes a right fit with their budget (and again, not just in terms of implementation costs). For private practice, you might want to offer cheaper software and advise your prospect on easy but acceptable practices to keep those costs down. Hospitals on the other hand should know every single detail of such costs. Your sales should be ready to explain the reasons behind the price tag and stay open to negotiation.
- Application – Another issue with EMR is meaningful use. The issue seems prevalent in both hospitals and private practices with both under pressure by governments to achieve it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that such pressure can’t teach to your potential emr leads. All of them need to know just how an EMR system can help run the place more smoothly and your sales team should be informed of such expectations. And seeing as how you’re likely to prescribe a different solution to each one, then it’s only fitting that you educate each one differently from the other. Try to demonstrate your software solution in relation to your prospect’s respective field. Don’t hesitate to go beyond the specifications either. If you’re confident that you have a better idea, then discuss with it them.
Helping your sales team prepare for your software appointments is part of what lead generation is about. Sure some sales representatives would insist that they’d rather wing it but they shouldn’t pursue without even at least a basic understanding of what a prospect needs. The following lists just some of the mistakes that could result from a lack of preparedness:
- Offering an expensive solution – They could end up preparing a proposal that could be way beyond a prospect’s budget. On the other hand, they would’ve readied a different presentation had they known that the prospect was a private practice.
- Offering an inefficient solution – Insufficient knowledge of a prospect’s field will result in a solution that doesn’t easily adapt to their demands. Features remain unused. Costs rise up from improper usage. The loss of meaningful use incentives could have a devastating effect on their finances.
These are just some of the consequences of not organizing leads according to different kinds of EMR concerns. It leaves sales (and even sales leads) in the dark about what kind of solution to propose and could result in rough sailing throughout the end of the sales process (and beyond).