It’s not too early to set your 2022 sales quota

Just like that, we are well into the start of 2021. But it’s not too early to set expectations for your 2022 sales goals.

As an experienced sales professional, you know the healthcare market is constantly shifting. Providers are rolling out new COVID-19 vaccines while continuing to care for existing patients. A new President in the White House will likely bring changes to healthcare regulations. Staying flexible in your approach and your goals will be the key to success in 2022 and beyond.

Whether you’re new to the healthcare market or continuing to grow, we’re here to help. We’ve compiled insights on the intelligence you can use to tailor your sales strategy and stay ahead of market shifts.

How one major medical device company set 2021 sales quotas

Recently, a large medical device company in the Northeast leveraged medical claims data to set its sales quotas and measure success from the year before.

The company’s primary focus is on a device that treats pulmonary embolism. To pinpoint the best opportunities, the company searched a medical claims database for all hospital inpatient diagnoses of pulmonary emboli. To map sales territories, the company segmented results by city and state. They even filtered by diagnosing physician to find potential influencers and points of contact.

Physician diagnosis analytics search

Fig 1. Image is an illustration featuring a search for pulmonary embolism diagnoses by physician. The illustration is based on a search performed using the Definitive Healthcare Medical Claims database. 

Once the company had those results, they could analyze diagnosis trends from 2019 to 2020. Regions with an increase in pulmonary embolism diagnoses are ideal targets for new business. Reps assigned to those areas could be given higher quotas to align with the available opportunities.

Regions with a decrease in pulmonary embolism diagnoses may not be the most ideal targets. However, even if diagnoses are trending down, the region could be a good prospect if the overall diagnosis volume is still high. One sales strategy could be to assign lower quotas to reps in these areas, or to base quotas on percentage of market rather than a large dollar amount.

Key data for adjusting your sales quota

If you realize halfway through the year that one team is drastically outperforming another team selling the same device, it likely has to do with claims volumes.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) release claims data roughly once per quarter. You can use this publicly available data to determine whether pulmonary embolism diagnoses have increased or decreased in your target regions. The right data partner can make this easier by compiling claims data from multiple years for simplified visualization and interpretation.

From there, you can modify sales territories or individual quotas. Understanding the shifting market allows you to readjust and improve performance in time to hit your year-end targets.

Assessing sales success with medical claims

Conveniently, you can use the same medical claims data that you used to set your initial goals to quantify your success!

When assessing the impact of your treatment on your clients, a key healthcare metric you can refer to is readmission rate. Say you sold your device into to the HCA health system in 2019. You can analyze this network’s pulmonary embolism readmission rates between 2019 and 2020. If readmission rates dropped, that could indicate your treatment was successful—and you likely have a loyal customer who knows the value of your device.

Similarly, complication and mortality rates can demonstrate the success of your treatment. Lower rates of surgical complications or pulmonary embolism-related mortality indicate that your clients are implementing your device successfully. These clients serve as a source of future referrals as well as key use cases you can use in your sales messaging.

Learn more

Are you looking for more information on maximizing sales efficiency and increasing revenue? Read our blog, 5 Ways to Improve Sales with All-Payer Claims. This article outlines how you can use medical claims to find your target market, customize your value proposition, and leverage patient journeys to identify entry points.