Sales Strategy for Today’s Changing Market

When I see blogs like this one from Fierce Healthcare, Equipment-related failures cause frequent operating room errors, it continues to challenge us with the importance of a manufacturer, distributor, or service provider’s responsibility and opportunity to serve the healthcare industry. There’s a lot of pressure on healthcare service providers, from so many directions. From quality of care, cost containment, infection control, patient outcomes, and yes, equipment failure. Your customers and potential customers (also known as your target personas) need your help!

The days of operating as a business in lockdown, protecting your secrets, is over. Brand transparency is no longer optional. It’s vital to your organization's future growth.

Are you building products to make money? Or are you making money to build better products?

Your long term goals, hopefully, are to make money to build better products. How do you know what’s needed? Listen to your customers. In the Fierce article, they basically provide you a road map of your persona’s pain points. How can you build better products? In the Fierce article's instance, reduce equipment-related failures.

• How are you serving your customer? In this study, “For roughly one-third of cases, a device or machine wasn't working properly.” What an opportunity to serve your customers and be a dependable resource!

• Are you listening to the needs of your customers? Be a resource in problem solving and managing challenges, requires understanding what keeps them up at night.

• Do you know where your customers go for information? 61% of global Internet users research products online. (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012)

• When the persona you are targeting seeks information, do they find you or your competitor? If you’re not talking about the challenges, solutions, and issues facing your target personas, I promise you, your competitor is.

• Are you an educational resource? Here’s your golden opportunity. Who knows the industry better than you? Who knows the problems your product or service are designed to solve, better? Make sure your sharing that information.

• If you’re not sure where to start, here’s some beginners recommendations for learning how to engage on social media, and begin sharing.

• “Buyers perform 80% of their research online, before ever engaging directly with a sales person.” Are you managing a sustainable business?

• If you stopped paying for any advertising tomorrow, would you own any of your leads? The value of an inbound marketing strategy/marketing automation is, it brings everything you’re doing to build credibility and a customer base, full circle.

The market will continue to change. Your personas will continue to research for answers to their challenges, the same way they do for their personal life. Make sure you're a part of that research, and you have a purpose-- to provide better products and solutions.