The Secret To Effortlessly Building and Maintaining Relationships with Healthcare Providers

Your healthcare support business should echo this same desire, the desire to build trusting and committed relationships. After all, meaningful relationships are the backbone of most successful business arrangements.

Positive, trusting, collaborative, and supportive relationships allow you to get repeat business and referrals, build mutual understanding of each other’s needs, and create an overall environment that’s set out to benefit everyone involved. Plus, it simply makes the work you do every day feel more impactful. 

Keep reading to learn more about simple ways you can build and maintain relationships with healthcare professionals and entities!

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First Impressions are Everything 

This is a pretty universal truth: first impressions are everything. As you’d expect, this is just as true in the healthcare space as it is anywhere else. 

This means that before you even talk with your prospective clients, your brand should be representing your business well. You want your healthcare prospects to have a really good idea of who you are before you discuss anything with them. 

There are a variety of ways to help make prospects’ first impressions of your healthcare support business more positive. Let’s start with your website. 

Your website should be easy to find on the internet and easy to understand. Essentially, you want your site to rank well in search engines so that prospects can locate you easily. Once they’re on your site, you want them to stay there. To help make this happen, lay out your services and specialties in easy-to-read, visually engaging layouts. Give your prospects just enough information to know they’re in the right place, and then show them where they can go to learn more, whether that’s a landing page or a contact form. 

To help prospects locate your website in the first place, you need to generate traffic through things like paid media ads or social media engagement. Luckily, these act as great platforms for making positive first impressions as well. 

All your traffic-generating efforts—from paid search ads to organic social media posts—should communicate a cohesive brand message and personality. You want to stay consistent so that your prospects recognize you and associate you with positive emotions. 

Additionally, you should put out helpful educational content that provides value for your audiences. After all, your prospects need to know that you can actually help them. Highlight your case studies, white papers, testimonials, and other things that show your authority and expertise.  

Make sure you’re following other best practices that aren’t marketing-related as well. Prioritize client experience, treat people well, and do all the other things that separate good businesses from selfish ones. Be the best business you can be. 

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Highlight Your Competitive Differentiators 

You may not picture this as a relationship-building piece of advice, but it’s especially important for healthcare business networking. Obviously, you want prospects to think of you as a helpful and friendly authority, but you also need to stand out against your competitors. 

Look inward and find the ways that you can uniquely solve clients’ problems for them.  

For example, if you were able to reduce a client’s billing costs by 20 percent, that’s a tangible stat to highlight for your potential customers. Of course, you can’t guarantee the same results for everyone, but it’s great to talk about what you’ve achieved for others.

Find stories and stats like these and scatter them across your marketing tactics in the forms of blogs, newsletters, social posts, and website content. Your competitive differentiators should be tied into your communication often so that prospects can understand them after their first impression. 

Be sure to talk about these differentiators in sales calls, meetings, and other interactions appropriately. They’re important for your prospects and current clients to remember, so you can’t let them fall to the wayside. 

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Want to learn more tips and tricks on how to competitively stand out from other consultants? Check out what our experts have to say about the importance of content marketing! 

Open Communication 

Once your prospects are in your sales funnel—or if they’re already a client—you need to maintain open communication with them. 

Open communication involves making an effort to clearly understand what your clients' needs are and demonstrating how your services will help them. In other words, you need to reassure your clients that you hear their problems and have the capacity to solve them. This can be conveyed through active listening, recap emails, and other communication best practices.

Additionally, making sure that your client clearly understands every step of the engagement process with your business will help to prevent headaches down the road. Make sure you layout expectations as soon as you can, to avoid any surprises that might turn them away. 

From the very basics of a project (like budgeting) to the fine details (like the strategy), every party should know exactly what is going to take place throughout the process and when. If there are any hiccups or potential problems you foresee, make sure to communicate them with your client. 

The more transparent you can be with your clients and prospects, the more they’ll trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they will be to do business with you or refer you to their network.

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Advocate for Your Client’s Success 

Your clients and prospects need to know that you’re on their side. They’re trusting you with their money, time, and resources—you need to show them that you can handle it all. Even if you’re not a fiduciary for them, you need to show that everything you do will be in their best interest. 

You can advocate for your client’s success in a few different ways. Before you even meet them, you can provide them with educational content and helpful messaging across your marketing tactics, as mentioned before. This will help them to understand that your mission involves their success, not just a sale for you. 

Once your clients are in your sales funnel or working with you actively, you can continue to show your trustworthiness by being transparent with them, educating them, and keeping them updated.

Show them where their money is going. Tell them how you’re building value for them. Show them data that demonstrates how you’re steering them in the right direction. Do everything you can to alleviate any doubts they have about your ability to win for them. 

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Use Technology to Establish Direct Connections with Healthcare Providers

One of the hardest parts of establishing and maintaining relationships with healthcare providers is simply getting connected with them. That’s where Perla can help. 

Founded to correct the inefficiencies of traditional healthcare sales and marketing, Perla is a private networking platform that enables you to market DIRECTLY to healthcare entities and professionals. 

Powered by intelligent matching, Perla allows you to reduce the length and cost of your marketing efforts by ensuring you’ll only receive leads from healthcare entities and professionals that are searching for your exact offerings. 

Add Perla into your sales and marketing process to make the most out of your marketing investment while speeding up your relationship-building timelines. 

Request a demo to learn more about Perla and see how it works!