Shortening the B2B Healthcare Sales Cycle

Shortening the B2B Healthcare Sales Cycle

A key part of shortening the B2B healthcare sales cycle is making the marketing funnel more efficient, learn more about what our experts have to say:

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Your sales cycle is a huge determinant of your organization’s success. This is especially true for healthcare support businesses. Unfortunately, many companies in this space have only experienced long sales cycles that often resulted in dead-end leads and frustration. 

“Traditional” methods of B2B healthcare sales and marketing—like word-of-mouth advertising, networking meet ‘n’ greets, publication ads, and other outdated tactics—are a large part of what slows down many healthcare sales cycles. 

They often act as “one-size-fits-most” solutions and don’t take into account the specialization and unique services that healthcare entities and professionals require. 

So, it must be noted that a key part of shortening the B2B healthcare sales cycle is making the marketing funnel more efficient. 

What are the actions your organization can take to optimize its marketing funnel and shorten the overall sales cycle? Let’s discuss further.

Sales Cycle Basics

Now, what precisely is a sales cycle? Let’s get on the same page. 

Your B2B healthcare sales cycle is the unique path your prospects follow to become clients. It includes all your client-facing interactions, from first impressions to closing a deal.  

Key aspects of improving the sales cycle and marketing funnel include understanding your audience’s psychology, defining cohesive messaging, and maintaining consistent contact.

Understand Your Audience

Getting to know your target prospects is absolutely vital to shortening the sales cycle. Your organization’s understanding of your audience is what makes or breaks your sales efforts as a whole. Think about it this way: you could have the most elite salesforce and largest marketing budget, but if you’re not aiming it in the right direction it will be utterly useless. 

This is why you must define your target audience before you engage with any sales or marketing tactics. As you know, healthcare is an industry that divides into many niche categories, each containing its own areas of specialization. 

There are some factors you should take into consideration when narrowing down your niche healthcare audience. 

  • What type of healthcare practices will you be targeting? 
  • What size practices will you be targeting?
  • Who within the organizations you’re targeting will you be speaking to?
  • How do your target prospects make decisions? What are their problems? How can you uniquely solve them?

When you start to ask yourself these questions, you’ll start to have a clearer picture of who you’re speaking to, where you can find them, what they want, how they’ll respond, and why you can say you’re the most qualified professional to help them. 

For example, a solo healthcare attorney may have better success targeting a private practice vs a large bureaucratic hospital system. The latter audience would be better served by a group of consultants with expertise in a variety of legal fields or who can carry out a higher volume of work.

If your organization can aim your sales and marketing in the right direction, at the right people, then your sales cycle will cut out a massive portion of wasted time and effort. 

Define Your Messaging

Now that your sales and marketing efforts are aimed in the right direction, you need to determine exactly what it is that you’ll be saying, how you’ll be saying it, and where your prospects should go next to proceed down the path towards becoming a client. 

The foundation of your messaging will likely be determined by the target audience itself. For example, if you’re speaking only to private OB-GYN practices, your messaging would be entirely different than if you were targeting a nephrology group practice. 

The messaging you employ should have a clear value proposition. 

A value proposition states exactly what you have to offer to your prospects. It’s the overarching mission that drives what you do. It’s often your specialty and the very reason you’re in business. Once again, niche healthcare audiences need niche support solutions, so always make it clear who your services are for and who they aren’t for. 

You should determine your competitive differentiators, as well. 

Look inward and find out what makes you stand out in the marketplace. Is it your long time serving a niche audience? Is it your ability to facilitate healthcare business relationships? Is it your technology, educational background, financial track record? The list goes on. 

Use your competitive differentiators to support your value proposition and prove its validity. For example, “our accounting firm has been serving oncology group practices for over 25 years; we understand the intricacies of your operation and know how to best manage your bookkeeping.”

Additionally, you need to choose the right platforms to put your messaging on. 

As mentioned earlier, “traditional” platforms for healthcare sales and marketing like meet ‘n’ greets and trade publications may be popular, but this doesn’t mean they’re the best option. They may provide a broad reach, but that doesn’t mean the right people are seeing it.

For B2B healthcare sales and marketing efforts, digital platforms typically provide the best ROI, especially when they are optimized for niche healthcare audiences.

Just like finding your target audience, determining your messaging will cut out wasted time that ultimately slows down your sales cycle. Get the right ideas in front of the right people and you’ll only be working with qualified leads instead of sorting through dead-ends.

Maintain the Engagement Using Automation

You must stay in front of your audience consistently in order to move them through your sales cycle faster. It’s paramount that you keep your messaging top-of-mind for your prospects so that they know exactly when to find you and what to expect from you. 

One of the most effective and time-efficient ways to do this is utilizing sales and marketing automation. Don’t worry, this isn’t taking the “human element” out of the equation, it’s just utilizing technology to send out routine follow-up messages or lead generation emails that you’d otherwise be spending time on. 

According to the Salesforce State of Marketing report (2017), 67% of the marketing and sales leaders use automation software. It also states that over the next 24 months, an additional 21% are planning to start using an automation platform. 

Automation can help to drastically reduce the length of your sales cycle while improving its efficacy. Your organization will spend less time carrying out repetitive, administrative tasks, and will have more bandwidth to engage with warm leads that have entered the sales funnel. 

Shorten Your Healthcare Sales Cycles with Perla

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 in the segment your organization specializes in. 

Powered by intelligent matching, Perla allows you to reduce the length of your sales cycle 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 investment while speeding up your sales timelines. 

Visit our website to learn more about Perla, see how it works, and request a demo. 

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