When Just Surviving Is A Struggle, It's Time To Assess Your Marketing Strategy

Traditional sales techniques depend on one-on-one relationship building, or sales techniques. 20 - 30 years ago this worked fine. In fact, one-on-one meetings were the primary vehicle  used in business to learn about new products or services.Today, however, business systems have changed on almost every level; managers have markedly less time for "how do you do" meetings, and an overwhelming amount of easily accessible information reduces the need for personal meetings. Consumers frequently consult search engines and websites before heading for the store. This trend will accelerate.

Finally, The Most Common Goof Of Old-School Healthcare and Physical Therapy Marketers Explained
By David C Steinberg & Trent Wehrhahn, Senior Consultants, The PT Referral Machine

For years, healthcare marketing consultants have been recommending a variety of techniques for garnering referrals. Typically, the recommendations focus on relationship building. In fact, just yesterday I got an email from a client saying they just received a "How To" report from a consultant encouraging him to consider hiring a "practice representative".  The rep would make visits on his behalf so that he could spend his time in the clinic. Our client wanted to know if I thought it was a good idea.

What do you think - good advice?

If your  initial reaction is yes, you may want to reconsider.  Here is why.
(If you are a practice representative, we mean no disrespect, but it is our job to call ?em like we see'em).

Problems with practice representatives (and links to solutions):

1.       The days of traditional selling in healthcare are over. Relying on a representative to communicate on your behalf is like driving with the brakes on. That is why many practice managers give up on this after turning over a few reps.  In the words of the esteemed late Peter Drucker, modern marketing techniques make selling superfluous.  

2.       When relied on as the engine for developing and maintaining your referral relationships, even good representatives may be an inefficient use of your budget. With the right communications (marketing) system, you will get much more for your money - reaching more people, more frequently, with a well-planned message.

3.       A bad representative can set you back rather than move you forward. What they say and how they say it is a reflection on you, and you have very little control over how many people they see and what they say on your behalf. Nothing is more frustrating than listening to excuses as to why the rep was unable to make an appointment. Problems may not be obvious until it is too late.

4.       Unless you have an iron-tight non-compete agreement that you are willing to enforce, you always run the risk of having your investment train and prepare the rep to move on to greener pastures with your competitors.

We're not saying there isn't an important role for practice reps, but if you are going to use one, then you should put this luxury at the end of your sales and marketing process.  A better approach  is to set up your business so that the sales are driven by marketing, and not the other way around. When you succeed at this, you'll enjoy more control and a bigger bang for your buck. Think about it - a good rep will cost moderate to high five figures just for base pay with no incentive, and, to be effective, they need an expense account, a laptop, cell phone, and other benefits.  Your marketing system can (and should) be the engine that drives referral patterns.

Today, many industries have marketing solution providers with real stuff you can use, ready to go, not just consulting. For a more complete description of an industry solution just for physical therapy, download a complimentary copy of the Clinic Owner's Guide To Marketing and read actual case studies at www.PTreferralMachine.com/from_the_trenches.  For those who want to see a live demonstration, sign up for a webinar.

NOT AFTER THEY READ THIS THEY WON'T...

Here's an unspoken truth - Sales and marketing professionals frustrate each other - and for good reason...

If you've ever participated in sales training, you know that the emphasis is on one-on-one selling skills. There's the Sandler Sales System, Dale Carnegie, sales trainers like Kevin Daley, Tom Hopkins, and thousands more. They teach concepts like relationship selling where it all

starts with taking a "special" interest in your customers, or Socratic selling where questioning techniques are used to "get to yes." All those programs have really great stuff, but the problem

is each salesperson has to learn it, practice it, and develop the talent. That means the value of sales training is dependant on EACH and EVERY salesperson. This is a huge burden on any company. That's why many companies don't use sales trainers. And for those companies that do make commitments to ongoing sales training and development, the reality is that even

after their best effort, it takes each salesperson years of experience to get good at it. And the icing on the cake comes when salespeople finally "arrive" as rainmakers, after years of company support and investment, and they leave for greener pastures or the promise of fatter

commissions.

Wait, there's more, the cherry on top, when, after years of "relationship building," the buyer  leaves or gets fired. Oh, and before I forget, there's one more downside to the sales paradigm - MOST salespeople never develop the talent no matter how much training they get, AND THEY ARE THE ONES THAT SEEM TO HANG AROUND FOREVER! True enough?

Sales trainers and sales professionals criticize marketers for not providing enough support to sales. I must confess, in most situations, they are right. Marketers have a long way to go when it comes to getting it right.

Peter Drucker, writing in 1988, sums this up best in his book, The New Realities, when he says,

"When managers speak of marketing, they usually mean the organized performance of all selling functions. This is still selling. It still starts out with "our products." It still looks for "our market." True Marketing starts out the way Sears starts out-with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, What do we want to sell? It asks, What does the customer want to buy? It does not say this is what our product or service

does. It says, These are the satisfactions the customer looks for, values, and needs."

And here's the kicker, the crux of the bad blood between sales and marketing professionals. The unspoken, intuitive truth. Drucker continues, "Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than synonymous or even complimentary. There will always, one can assume, be the need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of

marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself."

Sales gurus, what say you to THAT?

So if you're a business owner or executive, and you could find a why to fix that whole deal, a way to make selling superfluous, do you think it would make a difference in your company's ability to compete? Can you imagine innovating your business to a point where selling becomes

superfluous, while your competition clings to the old sales training model? This is an opportunity that many business executives recognize. Taking advantage of it depends on a company's ability to shift from a sales model to a marketing model. Well designed marketing systems flow from the customer to the organization. Those that are poorly designed are simply

extensions of the sales discipline - a discipline that tries to figure out how to convince and close, ONE AT A TIME, rather than nurture the entire market with powerful, customer-driven, marketing operations.

In another Marketing Tips blog post entitled, "Do Your Marketing And Sales People Get Along?" I made an argument for why companies should rely on marketing to do the heavy lifting in the sales process. To sum it up, why would you send your sales force to battle with pea-shooters when you could give them automatic weapons?

The answer is that you wouldn't, unless, of course, all you knew how to operate was a pea- shooter. No matter what you are using now, a pea-shooter or an automatic, there's always room to raise the bar, agreed? To help you do that, here are four questions you can use to

jump-start the process:

Question 1: How do you generate and measure leads, one at a time or in bunches?

Question 2: What formats of preformatted information do you use to educate customers and prospects?

Question 3: Once a prospect raises their hand and says, "Here I am, and I'm thinking about buying what you are selling," what happens next?

Question 4: Which statement best describes the way your sales people are trained:

A) Do your best to qualify the customer, and then figure out what we can sell them; Or B) Let the marketing system qualify and educate the prospect about what the options are, and then you'll spend more time closing the sale.

When you dig into this a bit more, chances are you'll spot some opportunities that will help make the sales challenge a litlle less challenging and lot more profitable.

No matter what business or profession you are in, from a marketing perspective, you have leads. When a lawyer begins discussing a potential case, that's a "lead", and it's no different than a customer browsing in a store, or a plumber answering questions about a potential service call. Leads are the lifeblood of the business. As such, it makes sense to take a closer look at your system for generating AND handling leads, right through the entire sales process.

Once you look a little closer, the next question is, "Are you getting your fare share, and if not, how do you get to work on fixing that?"

Here's a 3-step process to help you begin figuring this out.

First, profile your typical prospect's thought process. Use the questions below to get started:

·         When does your typical prospect START to think about buying the product/service you sell?  

·         What kinds of information does your typical prospect want or need in order to feel like they have made the best decision possible when it comes to buying what you sell?

·         How does the information you currently provide match up with what they want to know in order to make a final decision?

Second, armed with the information from your answers to the above, review how your competition is handling the situation. You may need to do some business intelligence to

get answers, but it's well worth the time and expense. It's like the football coach going over game films with the team. You will see competitive openings that have been right under your nose - like a child tugging at your sleeve because they want to show you something you're too busy to notice. All you need to do is pay attention to the tug, take a look, and ACT.

Third, quantify your market based on the total number of possible prospects, AND what percent are NOW buyers versus FUTURE buyers. Answering the first two questions above will

give you a pretty good general idea on how to break your market down into Now Buyers and Future Buyers so you can put some numbers to it.

We use this process to quantify where your lead opportunities may exist. Once you document the information gathered in the three steps above, you're ready to go to work on a strategy that will literally dominate the competition.

It's really simple. Not easy, but simple.