When connecting with physicians in your market, you want your sales reps to show up feeling empowered and confident – and you want them to bring their A-game in order to demonstrate the value of your agency and the quality of care you can provide.
So how can you get more from your reps?
The simple answer is – arm them with the information they need to help your agency win more often.
- Prioritize and assign the best-fit accounts
- Find new opportunities with existing referral sources
- Look at who is competing in your space to grow market share
- Get to know target accounts inside and out
Let’s dive into 4 ways your HME organization can accelerate growth with greater efficiency.
1. Prioritize and target the best-fit referral sources in your market
Sales reps can call on accounts all day long, but are they targeting the highest-potential referral partners? Or are they flying blind and talking to anyone who listens? With the right data at hand, sales leaders can prioritize their team’s effort.
Start by examining:
- Your market share
- Top competitors in the market and who is referring to them
- Physicians who are most likely to refer patients for medical device needs
- New referral sources entering the market
There are numerous ways to create a targeted strategy:
- Total market opportunity – is there a competitor who receives a lot of referrals that you know you do X,Y,Z better than them?
- Current relationships – does the physician send out a lot of referrals to different HME suppliers?
Neidi Mack, Vice President of Ancillary Services at Prism Health Care Services, Inc shared:
“With Marketscape Insights, we can filter by physician ranking within our market, then export the data and sort by city so our team can prioritize their routes for the week. These targeted filtering capabilities within the Marketscape Insights platform allows our team to be more efficient and effective to achieve our business development goals.”
Now let’s dig a little deeper. What is your organization’s total opportunity within the market and who are the key physicians who can become your top referral sources?
For example, your reps should be able to identify which physicians in your market are ordering a certain amount of equipment or seeing a significant number of patients that could be taking advantage of the type of equipment your organization provides. And maybe, through the market data they notice this physician is not ordering the equipment, but instead sending the patient elsewhere.
Therefore, this opens an opportunity for your organization, as reps can see which physicians aren’t actively prescribing certain equipment and target them as potential referral source to grow the business. It’s important for your sales reps to get granular when creating their targeting strategy and remember to utilize the market data available to them. With this increased visibility into the market to aid your sales reps, they will be more efficient and successful when calling on referral partners.
2. Find new opportunities with existing referral sources
While finding new partners is great, it’s also important to focus on current relationships with your physicians and grow your organization.
Next, let’s explore how you can leverage your current relationships with referral partners to grow your market share. For example, let’s say one of your reps is looking to find out more information on their closest physician, Dr. Smith. With a data intelligence platform, the rep can view Dr. Smith’s profile in detail to understand the order shares he writes. Then, your rep might see that Dr. Smith writes Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) and does respiratory and mobility orders as well.
With this knowledge, your rep could analyze Dr. Smith’s account and see who he is referring orders to and speak to him about the opportunity to work with your organization for respiratory and mobility equipment. Therefore, this provides the opportunity to showcase the additional value your organization can bring to him.
3. Look at who is competing in your space to grow market share
Next, let’s explore opportunities to grow your organization’s market share.
For instance, maybe you want to grow your market share in respiratory and show physicians why they should be writing order shares to your organization.
To expand upon the example from above:
The rep who has a relationship with Dr. Smith analyzes the market data on the platform and sees that your competitor has a greater share in the respiratory market. So, your sales rep can leverage market insights to get in front of Dr. Smith and differentiate your respiratory products from your competitors.
As another example, here is how the Prism Health Care Services sales team utilizes their Trella Health market data:
“The main focus for our team is respiratory. We primarily target skilled nursing facilities, cardiologists, and pulmonologists, and are going into hospitals, family physician’s offices, and internal medicine practices. With Marketscape Insights, we are able to look at the data related to our code sets, and drill down into specific physicians to see how much they’re ordering, what their insurance mix is, and where they are located. From there, we identify these as our key targets and know how to implement them into our routes,” explained Pat Finnegan, Account Executive at Prism Health Care Services.
Darren Van Dyke, VP of Sales, added, “The data also helps us understand who not to target, so our team can be more efficient in our sales tactics. We are looking to continue to utilize Trella Health as a part of our strategy for 2023 to meet our goals and be able to target the correct referral sources.”
4. Create an efficient and effective data-driven market strategy
Now that you’ve identified new referral sources, leveraged your current relationships with physicians, and found new opportunities to grow your organization – your team can utilize all three of these strategies to put together an overall data-driven plan.
One important tip to remember is when reps go to visit a physician, PAC provider, or hospital – they need to understand the physicians’ practice behavior.
A few examples of understanding practice behaviors are:
- What does their payer mix look like?
- How many patients are they treating?
- What does their diagnostic breakdown look like?
- Where are they sending patients to today?
- How do you compete with those providers?
- Who employs that physician?
With these questions answered, sales reps can walk in with the confidence and knowledge to engage and connect with physicians.
Empowering your reps for success
With the four strategies mentioned throughout this article, your team will be able to create a successful actionable data-driven HME strategy. It’s important to align your team for success and empower your reps when they connect with high-potential referral sources and strive to hit their goals.
Ready to grow your organization with an actionable data-driven strategy?
Take a personalized look into your HME market – Request a Marketscape Insights demo here
