Prospect Engagement Strategy for Health Technology Companies

Every Healthcare Technology sales professional knows building long-term relationships with qualified leads is mission critical. With long-sales cycles being the norm in this field, a prospect engagement strategy is the best way to keep leads warm. The more you engage them, the higher the chances they will convert to new customers. Given how fast the technology market is growing, and how competitive it is, the salespeople who engage the best, win the most. Continue reading to learn how you can develop an effective prospect engagement strategy.

Here are some prospect engagement strategy ideas for engaging your Healthcare Technology prospects to gain a competitive edge:

1. Identify your ideal buyers

Let’s face it, there are a lot of potential customer out there, and if you try to go for them all, you’ll spread yourself thin. Identifying and understanding your ideal buyers is the first step to making the most progress in sales. Start by teaming up with your marketing team and craft Buyer Personas, which are fictional characters that best exemplify your ideal customer. For instance, you could start out by creating characters such as ‘Clinician Carol’, ‘Hospital Administrator Alex’ and ‘Physician Philip’. Then, you can research the answers to the following questions for each of them:

• What is their responsibility in the organization?
• What goals are they pursuing?
• What challenges are they likely to encounter in their work?
• What motivates them?
• What is their buying process?
• Where do they look for information?

Answering these questions will help you plan different, personalized engagement strategies for each type of Buying Persona. Remember to be as specific as possible. Fact: A recent study revealed that only 44% of businesses have Buyer Personas. So, what are you waiting for?

2. Leverage LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers a great opportunity to engage your prospects and ultimately convert them into customers. You can begin by creating a LinkedIn summary that shows what value you can offer potential customers. Give them the impression that you understand their challenges and can provide a solution. We also recommend that you include a Call-to-action at the end of your summary. For instance, you could ask potential customers to send an email or call you for a free consulting session. Another way of engaging prospects on LinkedIn is by using its feed to share links to your own blog content. Make sure the content is educational and demonstrates your expertise in the industry. This will build your credibility among prospects. Hootsuite is a good example of a B2B company that shares lots of blog content on their LinkedIn feed. Don’t forget to monitor LinkedIn notifications for special occasions. Take time to congratulate your prospects on their career milestones, new job or birthday. Personalize your message and end with a call to action that will keep the conversation going.

3. Personalize your sales emails

Merely sending out emails to prospects does not guarantee success. You need to optimize your emails in order to maximize engagement. Make sure you personalize your emails using the name of your recipient. According to a study by Experian, personalized emails generate up to 6 times more revenue than non-personalized emails. The subject line of your email needs to be brief and catchy so the recipient is compelled to open it. Avoid boring and generic headlines such as ‘Newsletter No. 13’. Also, the content of your email should be less ‘salesy’ and more educational. Don’t forget to add a call to action at the end of your email, such as a free eBook or report. Finally, make sure your email is optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

4. Conduct webinars

According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 60% of B2B marketers are using webinars as a part of their overall strategy. Unlike other forms of marketing content, webinars happen in real time and allow you to engage with prospects via audio and video. You can work with your marketing team to educate your prospects on relevant topics and even give them a live product demonstration. Having a Q&A session at the end of the broadcast allows you to respond to any issues quickly, thus shortening your sales cycle.

5. Nurture Leads with content emails

In addition to sending personalized emails to your prospects through your personal email account (Gmail, Outlook, Etc. ), you can team up with your marketing department to repurpose the content created on the company’s website (blog posts, eBooks, white papers, etc) into Lead Nurturing Email Campaigns. These campaigns consist of a series of HTML emails that provide your prospect with helpful content related to them, delivered once a week. The purpose of these emails is not to be self-promotional and share information about your company, product, or service, but rather to purely provide educational content to keep your prospects engaged and coming back to your website. These types of emails, when combined with a sophisticated email marketing automation system like HubSpot, can provide both the marketing and sales teams valuable data on lead engagement.

6. Make timely follow ups

Timing is crucial throughout your prospect engagement strategy. A research by the Harvard Business Review showed that many companies were slow to follow up on their leads; 24% of companies took more than 24 hours to respond, while 23% never responded at all. The timeliness of your response could make the difference between making a sale and losing a customer. Therefore, when someone shows interest by joining your mailing list or asking for more information, you need to respond immediately with relevant content. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by automating your email marketing. Don’t forget to respond to blog and social media comments immediately as well. This will help you win the trust of your prospects and enhance the chances of converting them to customers.

The Bottom Line

The prospect engagement strategy ideas outlined above are a part of the novel marketing and sales methodology called Inbound. Your Healthcare Technology company can utilize the Inbound Methodology to engage with existing leads, help qualify them better, to close sales more quickly. It can be very challenging to do all of this alone. We here at Responsify partner with health technology professionals to offer strategy, support, and help implementing these activities. By collaborating we help marketing and salespeople strategically attract new website visitors, convert them to qualified leads and happy customers, right in the comfort of their own company website. We’ve helped many brilliant sales pros improve their lead engagement and speed up their sales cycle. Feel free to reserve a free strategy session now to help you evaluate your assets and get insights and tailored suggestions to help guide you in the right direction.