Ultimate Guide to Health Tech Sales: Improving the Process

In the healthcare technology B2B space, traditional health tech sales involve interrupting your target prospects by pitching your product or service to them via email and cold calls. We now define this strategy as “Outbound Sales”. Since modern-day decision-makers are bombarded with marketing messages and sales pitches, buyers are more interested in researching health tech sales solutions online on their own, before being ready to speak with a salesperson. According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase. When buyers are able to find your website and get access to the information they need to educate themselves, they are one step closer to reaching out to you. This is part of what is known as “Inbound Sales”. Inbound Sales involves using customized content to attract the attention of your potential customers throughout your sales process. The cutting-edge technology leader called Hubspot, identifies the following as the stages of the sales process:

• Prospect – Carrying out research online to identify new prospects
• Research – Finding out more about potential customers and their companies
• Connect – Making contact with potential customers
• Advise – Making a tailored demonstration or presentation of your solution
• Close – Negotiating, delivering a proposal or quote, and making a sale

Here are some ideas for improving your health tech sales processes:

Understand your ideal prospects

It’s difficult to make health tech sales if you don’t understand who you’re selling to. The first step to improving your processes is to learn more about your prospects and the companies they represent. The profiles of your ideal buyers are called the Buyer Persona. You can outline buyer personas by asking questions via online surveys or face-to-face interviews. Find out about their needs, struggles, likes and dislikes, etc. In addition, you need to find out if they have already entered the Inbound Sales cycle and where exactly they are. According to a research by CEB global, the average B2B buyer is 57% through the purchase process before getting in touch with a sales rep.

Create and provide relevant health tech sales content

Providing relevant and helpful content will make it easier for potential customers to find you online. In addition, it establishes your healthtech company as an authority in your industry and wins the trust of your prospects. During the earlier stages of the sales process, you could provide basic educational content through blog posts or infographics. Remember to include relevant keywords in your page URLs, post titles, image names and image alt texts. This will boost your search engine ranking and make you more visible online. In the latter stages of the sales process, long-form content such as whitepapers, eBooks and webinars can be very effective for converting leads into buyers.

Improve your landing Pages

The landing page is a page that loads when visitors to your website click your Call-to-Action (CTA). It serves to capture these visitors’ personal information for further lead nurturing. In return for submitting their details, your prospects get a premium offer such as a discount voucher, competition entry, webinar registration, free report or free trial. Make sure the forms on your landing page are as concise as possible. In most cases, the name and email address of the prospect is sufficient. In addition to having great landing pages, the CTA that leads to your landing page should also be simple and compelling. On top of that, it should create a sense of urgency to get people to act immediately. ‘Get started now!‘ or ‘Learn more today!‘ are good examples of punchy calls to action.

Train and retrain

92% of salespeople agree that sales trainings have helped boost their selling abilities. To improve your health tech sales process, you will need to continually train and retrain your sales team. Keep them updated on new services, products and value propositions. Send them to workshops and seminars where they can obtain the newest skills. The better your sales team is trained, the more leads and customers you will attract. There are however a lot of conflicting sales training programs out there. For B2B sales in healthcare, we highly recommend Hubspot ‘s free online training called Inbound Sales Training.

Update your data

The kind of data presented during the sales process can either make or break health tech sales. You need to ensure that your salespeople have current and relevant data when pitching your products and services in the Close stage of the sales cycle. This includes up-to-date details such as the features, benefits and pricing of your products and services. Be sure to update this information as often as possible. Presenting the right data in the right manner will make your sales process much smoother and faster.

Align your sales process to the Buyer’s Journey

The Buyer’s Journey has three stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage. Aligning your sales process to the buyer’s journey will make your work much easier and result in more successful sales. Look out for signals that will show you that your prospect is ready to move onto the next stage of the journey. For example, a lead who fills in a form on your landing page is ready to move on to the Consideration stage. If someone requests a consultation or demo, this prospect is most likely already in the decision stage.

Leverage the right technology

There are numerous devices, apps, tools and software that can make the sales process less painful and more productive. You can use a spectrum of these tools to get the job done, however ideally it’s far better to choose an all-in-one tool like Hubspot CRM to harness the latest software features for marketing, sales, and customer success in one place.

The Bottom Line

Crafting an effective sales process is likely your biggest forte as an experienced salesperson. Nonetheless, just as children mature to become adults, the health tech sales world is continuously evolving to match the desires of your prospects. Therefore, it’s crucial to match your steps with those of your prospects when working through the sales process. We’ve helped many sales pros like you build effective, customer-centered sales strategies via Inbound. Feel free to book a 1-on-1 Inbound Strategy Session to help you evaluate your assets and gain valuable insights and suggestions to improve your sales process!