It’s pretty tempting to procrastinate until January to set New Year's resolutions. But if one of your new year’s resolutions is to increase your sales, you’re not going to want to wait until January to get started. Getting ahead of your sales plans can put your team ahead of the competition and in a position to start the year strong.
Not sure where to begin? We’ve got you covered with five steps for building an effective sales strategy:
- Review past performance
- Map sales territories
- Target the decision-makers
- Create a clear and targeted value proposition
- Plan for change
Read on for tips on each step and to learn how data and analytics can make your sales strategy successful.
1. Look at your current year’s performance
Even with new beginnings, we shouldn’t ignore what’s past. Your current year’s sales metrics can provide a lot of insight into your planning. Look for the numbers that stand out. Which reps closed the most sales? Which type of outreach won the most business? How long were sales cycles on average?
Look even further than your team’s performance and examine the demographics of your wins. If you’re selling into the provider market, take a look at what kinds of providers were most interested in your product. Were there any correlations between contacts’ ages, response rates, or preferred methods of communication? Were there any interesting trends among patient populations of the facilities where you closed deals?
The right healthcare commercial intelligence makes the answers to all these questions quite simple. With data that’s easy to access and analyze, you can transform your past performance metrics into a winning strategy. Definitive Healthcare offers a variety of commercial intelligence solutions to support the unique needs of every industry within the healthcare space.
2. Map your sales territory
Good things happen for those who are in the right place at the right time. We’ve already established that now is the right time to strategize, so let’s make sure you’re in the right place. Sales territory mapping can expand your customer base and provide your team a sense of unity and direction, driving increased sales for your organization.
Analyzing geographic areas for providers and patient populations who will most benefit from your product will help you determine which territories deserve the most focus. Whether you want to conduct your analysis at the city level or within Core Base Statistical Areas (CBSAs), our platform can deliver insights into important metrics like population trends, regional bed counts, facility types, and other factors that will determine where your best targets are.
3. Target the right people
Now that you’ve determined your sales territories, finding the right decision-makers there is key. Knowing which executives to target directly can maximize potential response rates and drive high-value conversations.
Facility org charts will give you a clear understanding of leadership structure and relationships between departments. You’ll want to identify the provider leaders, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and decision-makers with whom your value proposition will resonate most, and those who can actually sign off on the sale. Healthcare reference and affiliation data can do just that. By providing firmographic data on healthcare delivery facilities, as well as information on contacts and locations for providers, you can use reference data to identify and target your perfect prospects.
Definitive Healthcare can give you more than just the name of potential targets. Our platform provides an even closer look into facilities’ financial and clinical performance, physicians’ clinical activities, and executives’ contact information to personalize your messaging for their specific needs.
4. Make your value proposition clear
With assigned territories and promising contact information, you may be eager to get started on outreach. But before you do, make sure your value proposition is clear and that your messaging is customer-centered and highly targeted by considering the following questions:
- Who is your most receptive audience?
- What pain point do you solve for them?
- What do you do to solve it?
- How do you do it differently from the competition?
Addressing these four questions will provide valuable insight into a healthcare organization’s challenges that will help you craft a targeted message on how your product or service can meet their needs.
Let's say, for example, you’re a software and IT company selling into the healthcare space. The Atlas Technology Install Dataset can be vital in helping to answer the questions outlined above. The dataset, which provides up-to-date information on tech implementations at hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centers, and physician groups, can give you clear insights into what technology all these different care delivery systems use. These insights can be critical in identifying facility pain points, how your tech solutions solve these challenges, and which facilities are working with comparable or, better yet, underperforming competition.
5. Plan for change
The reality of life is that plans change. Building flexible goals and strategies around real-time data will put your team in a great position to adapt to the ever-changing healthcare landscape. If things are changing for your organization, they probably are for your prospects as well and you’ll want to keep up.
Healthcare commercial intelligence based on real-time and real-world data helps you keep up with the changing market and the activities of players within it. Use reliable and current data to spot new opportunities or potential obstacles, and plan accordingly.
Learn more
While these tips will lay a great foundation going into the new year, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The defining factor between a good sales plan and a winning sales plan is data and analytics.
Definitive Healthcare’s commerical intelligence can provide the insights you need to win more sales in the new year. Learn more about our solutions by starting a free trial.
