A long-standing challenge for many executives is aligning the physician relations/liaisons and the marketing departments. No matter the industry, often we find these two related, but separate functions operating in silos.
For healthcare organizations, the challenges are unique:
Even with these challenges, physician liaisons and sales directors can find great support from the marketing team. They're actually one of the strongest allies that a sales or physician liaison group has, and they're often right down the hall.
Depending on the structure of your organization, physician sales employees may report within the marketing department. Or they could report to a service line or operations manager or to a physician relations department. No matter what the organizational structure, the questions below will have merit because the point is the better questions the sales team has for the marketers, the better the help and support they receive.
Following are some of the "typical questions" that physician liaisons/sales often ask of the marketing team. However, we've offered some "better questions" that will be infinitely more useful in tapping into the full extent of marketing's resource.
Questions for your colleagues in marketing:
Typical Question: "Can you create a brochure for physicians about our new service?"
The Better Question: "Can you and I find some time to meet? I would like to share our strategic sales plan with you and discuss ways marketing may be able to help us in our sales meetings with physicians?"
Many times people think that a brochure is a must for communicating a service or product. Often, it's not. For the most part, brochures are produced as general service overviews to fit multiple purposes or, if physician-specific, are used as leave-behinds that busy physicians rarely read later. True "sales brochures" 1) are very different from marketing brochures, 2) require specific expertise and 3) are time-consuming to produce. Generally they're not often necessary for a health system sales or physician liaison team.
However, the marketing department has a host of other communications tools that they might suggest instead. So reconsider going to marketing for some specific marketing tool. Instead, ask for their help and ideas of what tools and resources will help you reach different audiences, using different messages and ultimately assist sales staff with key challenges they face.
Also, a brochure can become obsolete very quickly unless you do a lot of research prior to developing it and even then, messages are not always on point. You'll want flexibility in your messaging that a printed brochure can't provide, especially if you create it early in a service launch or upon initiating a sales program. Marketing experts can help you with key initial messages and the marketing tools that will be most effective whether that be a brochure, a special web page, an e-mail campaign or direct mail.
Typical Question: "Can Marketing get us an address list of physicians?"
The Better Question:"We would like to work with marketing to assure we have a clean, up-to-date database of physicians and other referral sources so that we can contact them. Can you help?"
If you have a new service line, for example, you might be tempted to go to marketing to ask for a list of physicians in your area. They could certainly oblige you by simply contacting the mail house company to get you a mailing list and a price. But there's much more they can offer you. For one thing, marketing may suggest using an existing list or database of the physician specialty you are asking for. Or they might explore with you whether a more targeted subset of physicians would generate better results. Marketing could also assist you by helping you to identify other key referrers to your service — referrers who might not be physicians.
So, instead of asking a narrow question, discuss with your marketing colleagues your intentions for connecting with potential referral sources. Talk specifically about how you plan to use the list and what details you need. With this information, they can either pull the list from an existing database, identify the best vendor for the information you need, and/or suggest another referral source category based on their experience with other services.
Typical Question: "At lunch, the surgery department manager asked one of our physician liaisons for our help to get more referrals. Can marketing help us promote the surgery department?"
The Better Question: "When a service line manager asks marketing to help promote their services, how do you handle such requests?"
The wording of our question and answer assumes the marketing department is not set-up like an in-house marketing communications vendor charging each service line for the marketing support provided. Some health system marketing departments are managed in this way. Unless directed in this or other similar fashion, sales and marketing want to view their priorities in light of corporate goals. By doing so, you can focus your energies, resources and budget on the right activities. If the sales team doesn't take a deliberate and specific stand on their priorities, they're more likely to be approached — and, even hijacked — by service line managers and others.
By aligning your goals with corporate goals, you'll be less likely to engage in discussions on request for your help at unlikely times such as a chance meeting at lunch — from the heads of individual service lines. However, when you have your goals clearly in mind, you'll be in a better position to address each request. For example, when a service line manager asks you to discuss their services when calling on physicians, you can reply in one of a couple of ways, You can answer, "I have other priorities in this fiscal year that come straight from the C-suite," or "Our priorities come from corporate and our revenue goals are tied exclusively to specific services. So I have to focus all of my time there."
Even better, by creating sales goals that align with corporate goals, it's more likely that you will be the one to approach service line managers with, "I'm here to support you. Let's talk."
Conclusions
When you are clear on how best to work with marketing, you're in the best position to benefit from their help. With today's technology, marketing can offer your team highly targeted messages using a variety of media. When communication is a part of the overall strategic sales plan, marketing can "grease the skids" for your sales people —providing them targeted messages to help gain access and/or to reinforce messages throughout the sales process. In a reciprocal way, sales can also support marketing: When the sales team shares needs and messaging information they receive from the field, marketing can use that information in reaching physicians in other ways. When sales department goals are aligned with corporate priorities, and the marketing department goals are aligned with corporate priorities, you both share greater synergies to support the organization's goals.
So get marketing involved in your sales efforts. They might even add support for your team in their next budget!
Kathleen Harkins is principal of Harkins Associates, a healthcare business development and sales consulting/training firm. As a career-long healthcare strategist, seller, sales trainer, manager and company executive, Ms. Harkins' has experience in several healthcare sectors — health insurance/managed care, capital equipment, professional services, information technology, hospitals and pharmaceutical. Prior to establishing the consulting and training firm 12 years ago, Ms. Harkins was employed as chief marketing officer for Progressions Health System, a managed inpatient and outpatient provider system; she also served as vice president of sales and marketing for Westmeade HealthCare, Inc.
Is Your Organization's Physician Relations Team Centralized?
Cutting Out the Middle Man: Opportunities for Hospitals to Partner Directly With Employers
For healthcare organizations, the challenges are unique:
- First, healthcare executives have only recently begun to get comfortable with having a "sales" area or department that oversees physician relations and works to attract new physicians to the hospital.
- Second, expectations for "result-driven" objectives such as increasing revenues are not clearly defined.
- Third, in several health systems, the function of "sales" actually sits in the marketing department.
Even with these challenges, physician liaisons and sales directors can find great support from the marketing team. They're actually one of the strongest allies that a sales or physician liaison group has, and they're often right down the hall.
Depending on the structure of your organization, physician sales employees may report within the marketing department. Or they could report to a service line or operations manager or to a physician relations department. No matter what the organizational structure, the questions below will have merit because the point is the better questions the sales team has for the marketers, the better the help and support they receive.
Following are some of the "typical questions" that physician liaisons/sales often ask of the marketing team. However, we've offered some "better questions" that will be infinitely more useful in tapping into the full extent of marketing's resource.
Questions for your colleagues in marketing:
Typical Question: "Can you create a brochure for physicians about our new service?"
The Better Question: "Can you and I find some time to meet? I would like to share our strategic sales plan with you and discuss ways marketing may be able to help us in our sales meetings with physicians?"
Many times people think that a brochure is a must for communicating a service or product. Often, it's not. For the most part, brochures are produced as general service overviews to fit multiple purposes or, if physician-specific, are used as leave-behinds that busy physicians rarely read later. True "sales brochures" 1) are very different from marketing brochures, 2) require specific expertise and 3) are time-consuming to produce. Generally they're not often necessary for a health system sales or physician liaison team.
However, the marketing department has a host of other communications tools that they might suggest instead. So reconsider going to marketing for some specific marketing tool. Instead, ask for their help and ideas of what tools and resources will help you reach different audiences, using different messages and ultimately assist sales staff with key challenges they face.
Also, a brochure can become obsolete very quickly unless you do a lot of research prior to developing it and even then, messages are not always on point. You'll want flexibility in your messaging that a printed brochure can't provide, especially if you create it early in a service launch or upon initiating a sales program. Marketing experts can help you with key initial messages and the marketing tools that will be most effective whether that be a brochure, a special web page, an e-mail campaign or direct mail.
Typical Question: "Can Marketing get us an address list of physicians?"
The Better Question:"We would like to work with marketing to assure we have a clean, up-to-date database of physicians and other referral sources so that we can contact them. Can you help?"
If you have a new service line, for example, you might be tempted to go to marketing to ask for a list of physicians in your area. They could certainly oblige you by simply contacting the mail house company to get you a mailing list and a price. But there's much more they can offer you. For one thing, marketing may suggest using an existing list or database of the physician specialty you are asking for. Or they might explore with you whether a more targeted subset of physicians would generate better results. Marketing could also assist you by helping you to identify other key referrers to your service — referrers who might not be physicians.
So, instead of asking a narrow question, discuss with your marketing colleagues your intentions for connecting with potential referral sources. Talk specifically about how you plan to use the list and what details you need. With this information, they can either pull the list from an existing database, identify the best vendor for the information you need, and/or suggest another referral source category based on their experience with other services.
Typical Question: "At lunch, the surgery department manager asked one of our physician liaisons for our help to get more referrals. Can marketing help us promote the surgery department?"
The Better Question: "When a service line manager asks marketing to help promote their services, how do you handle such requests?"
The wording of our question and answer assumes the marketing department is not set-up like an in-house marketing communications vendor charging each service line for the marketing support provided. Some health system marketing departments are managed in this way. Unless directed in this or other similar fashion, sales and marketing want to view their priorities in light of corporate goals. By doing so, you can focus your energies, resources and budget on the right activities. If the sales team doesn't take a deliberate and specific stand on their priorities, they're more likely to be approached — and, even hijacked — by service line managers and others.
By aligning your goals with corporate goals, you'll be less likely to engage in discussions on request for your help at unlikely times such as a chance meeting at lunch — from the heads of individual service lines. However, when you have your goals clearly in mind, you'll be in a better position to address each request. For example, when a service line manager asks you to discuss their services when calling on physicians, you can reply in one of a couple of ways, You can answer, "I have other priorities in this fiscal year that come straight from the C-suite," or "Our priorities come from corporate and our revenue goals are tied exclusively to specific services. So I have to focus all of my time there."
Even better, by creating sales goals that align with corporate goals, it's more likely that you will be the one to approach service line managers with, "I'm here to support you. Let's talk."
Conclusions
When you are clear on how best to work with marketing, you're in the best position to benefit from their help. With today's technology, marketing can offer your team highly targeted messages using a variety of media. When communication is a part of the overall strategic sales plan, marketing can "grease the skids" for your sales people —providing them targeted messages to help gain access and/or to reinforce messages throughout the sales process. In a reciprocal way, sales can also support marketing: When the sales team shares needs and messaging information they receive from the field, marketing can use that information in reaching physicians in other ways. When sales department goals are aligned with corporate priorities, and the marketing department goals are aligned with corporate priorities, you both share greater synergies to support the organization's goals.
So get marketing involved in your sales efforts. They might even add support for your team in their next budget!
Kathleen Harkins is principal of Harkins Associates, a healthcare business development and sales consulting/training firm. As a career-long healthcare strategist, seller, sales trainer, manager and company executive, Ms. Harkins' has experience in several healthcare sectors — health insurance/managed care, capital equipment, professional services, information technology, hospitals and pharmaceutical. Prior to establishing the consulting and training firm 12 years ago, Ms. Harkins was employed as chief marketing officer for Progressions Health System, a managed inpatient and outpatient provider system; she also served as vice president of sales and marketing for Westmeade HealthCare, Inc.
More Articles on Physician Relations:
Finding the Right Sales Training for Physician Relations StaffIs Your Organization's Physician Relations Team Centralized?
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