Sales Prospecting Perspectives

How To Overcome Common Obstacles When Teleprospecting Into Hospitals

  

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With the hospital industry being a sub sector of one of the largest industries in the U.S. (the Healthcare industry), it’s no surprise that your inside teleprospecting team is calling, or will be calling, into hospitals at some point to uncover potential opportunities. Speaking from experience, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome when calling into hospitals. The biggest challenge for me was always figuring out which hospitals were part of which larger Corporate Health Systems. With this in mind, I reached out to our Inside Sales Reps about their experiences when calling into the industry. I received an overwhelming amount of responses and it became pretty clear very quickly as to how popular targeting this industry is, which gave me more of a reason to blog today about how to overcome common obstacles when calling into healthcare.

Here are some interesting responses I received from my team to the following questions: “What is your biggest obstacle when teleprospecting into hospitals? How do you overcome the challenge?”

1. Determining Email Patterns. Maureen shared that it is very difficult to play detective and figure out a lot of the email patterns within hospitals. Many of these organizations use very unique email patterns that use middle name initials which makes it very difficult to target these prospects by email. Her way around it? She utilizes Jigsaw to find these unique email addresses. If Jigsaw doesn’t have it, she tries to speak with administrative assistants to get the information from them. If the assistant won’t budge on giving up the email address AND won’t send Maureen to the prospect’s voicemail, she calls the prospect before and after hours to hopefully bypass the gatekeeper.
    
2. Mapping out Corporate Health Systems. John, who calls into cancer rehab contacts at hospitals, explained that one of his biggest challenges when calling hospitals is mapping out Corporate Health Systems.  He expressed that he will get far into a conversation with a contact that discusses an open project with him for 10 minutes, but tells him that they can’t make any local decisions, and that he needs to call Corporate to talk to the decision maker.  The solution to this obstacle for John is to take time from his day to map out these health systems and organize how the system is structured and which sister hospitals fall within the overall system. It takes additional time, but it is necessary when calling into the industry.
    
3. Convincing Decision Makers at the Corporate Health System Level to Evaluate your Product/Service. Once you have uncovered who at Corporate you need to speak with, now it is time to convince them to evaluate your product/service.  Liz, who calls into the Healthcare Industry, explained that once she does get to the decision makers, they require a lot of information regarding success stories with similar Health Systems like theirs.  It is important for them to know what other products and services other Health Systems are implementing so they can be as efficient and effective as possible compared to the rest of the industry.  Sharing customer success stories in general helps to build a lot of credibility as well, and the more often you can showcase your expertise in the industry, the better.
    
4. Calling into HR. Jonathan brought up a very interesting point. In the past he has called into hospitals, targeting the HR department specifically. What he has learned from his experiences is that HR departments can be very difficult to navigate through at hospitals. To overcome this challenge, he started to call the IT department because he felt their group was a bit smaller and easier to reach live on the phone. He found that even though he ultimately wanted to speak with HR contacts too, targeting IT was also a great avenue to go down. The reason being is that the IT department is the group that handles issues when problems come up with current technology, so this department likely hears the pains that HR has to deal with as a result of their current technology not working.

These are just a few of the many common obstacles when calling into healthcare. What are ways you overcome challenges when calling into the healthcare industry?