Becoming a successful healthcare entrepreneur requires objectivity and clear thinking. Sometimes, this means revisiting and reconsidering ideas that influence our behaviors but to which we haven’t previously given much thought.
For example, in this age of aggressive online sales (witness the pop-up ads we get the day after we search for a product), and aggressive marketing (candidates can’t successfully run for office without using robocalls), the terms “sales,” “marketing,” and “branding” have taken on negative connotations.
In fact, each is a key element of any successful economy, and each is an important tool for a prosperous business. Each can and should be implemented in ways that are professional, respectful, and effective. It’s important to keep an open, objective mind.
Marketing Is Not Sales
Although they are sometimes paired, marketing and sales are two separate and distinct functions. Marketing is the process of promoting awareness of a product, service, or brand. An example is the banners a sports medicine group hangs on the fence at every little league and high school playing field in their region. Selling is the process of convincing someone to actually buy a product or service. Often, this comes in the form of addressing the prospective patient’s concerns about the treatment or service they are considering. An example of selling is the cosmetic surgeon’s recounting of how quickly their patients are back to their daily routines.
Each function obviously influences the other, and for this reason, they are sometimes housed together in an organization. Unfortunately, many professionals confuse the two functions and end up doing both ineffectively or not doing them at all.
Marketing Activities
Marketing activities are designed to raise awareness of a specific service, treatment, brand, or type of product or service such as holistic medicine. Marketing campaigns capture the consumer’s attention through a marketing medium such as the Internet, newspaper ads, church bulletins, banners, and sponsorships at charity events.
The most effective professional healthcare marketing efforts are educational in nature and are focused on services or treatments. Examples include marketing campaigns extolling the benefits of robotic surgery, ocular lens implants, or psychotherapy. In professional marketing, you are not competing with your colleagues because you are promoting services they also promote. Marketing yourself is the unavoidable and desirable side effect of having your business, your name, and your image associated with the educational piece.
Educational marketing stands in contrast to marketing efforts from other non-healthcare professions in which marketing efforts, sometimes of necessity, focus on convincing potential consumers they should employ a particular professional or company. These are “branding” campaigns. The legal profession uses branding and, less often, general marketing.
It is relatively rare for attorneys to be able to use educational marketing to promote a new service, because relatively few new services emerge in law. An exception was the emergence of “collaborative family law” in which attorneys help marital partners negotiate the terms of their divorce without resorting to litigation. Practitioners who trained in and offered this service were able to switch from branding campaigns with themes like “hire me, I am better than the rest” to marketing campaigns focused on messages such as “you can have divorce without war.” Those that made the marketing shift immediately gained prominence by demonstrating their knowledge of a new and desirable service.
Healthcare entrepreneurs always stay ahead of the game by simply keeping abreast of the latest research, technologies, and methodologies for their specialty. After learning about something new that has clinical value, the successful healthcare entrepreneur also considers how to market what they have learned.
Most marketing campaigns require repeated exposure of their message over time. Rarely is a single exposure enough to imprint a brand or service in a consumer or referral source’s mind. So, when a novice healthcare entrepreneur drops off brochures at a potential referral source’s office, that marketing effort is unlikely to bear much fruit without repeat visits and other reminders necessary to prime the pump with that referral source.
When done thoughtfully and well, marketing can have a rapid impact, because most consumers base their decisions on impressions and subjective reactions rather than facts. The more your marketing campaign saturates its target audience, the more likely it is that a prospective patient will think of you if and when they need services. That’s why swag — items like pens and T-shirts bearing your practice’s logo — are effective marketing tools.
Marketing for Healthcare Entrepreneurs
Some professional marketing lends itself better to a one-to-one approach rather than more widely to groups or communities. Successful personal marketing by a healthcare entrepreneur involves building enough of a relationship with referral sources and patients that they become justifiably comfortable with you. The feeling may arise from personal qualities you display, your impressive credentials, your outstanding achievements, things you and another person have in common, or simply getting to know each other over time. Building relationships at this level is a key to successful marketing.
When marketing, it is essential to take time to visit with your prospective referral source or other business associate. Learn about the other person and let the other person learn about you. Although it is important for you to carry your share of the conversation, let the other person lead the way. When other people feel heard by you, they will be more attentive to what you have to say. Ideally, they have shared information that allows you to make the points you want to make in ways that tie into the prospect’s interests and needs.
Learn about the prospect’s needs, interests, goals, and preferences. Some of this information can be gleaned from an Internet search prior to the meeting; most can be determined by asking the right questions and listening to your prospect’s answers. This is an important step in both marketing and sales.
Some of your marketing efforts will benefit your competitors, because as you market your own services, you are marketing those of your entire profession. For this reason, it is essential to know what differentiates you from your competitors. As soon as your prospect shows signs of being sold on the service in general, you, as an effective salesperson, should guide their attention to your own unique features.
Tip: While it is common to use business lunches and other activities to build relationships, consider the question of who picks up the tab. Paying for a lavish meal while meeting with someone who does, or may in the future, make referrals might be construed as an inducement to make those referrals.
For example, once an occupational therapist has interested a gerontologist in the benefits of occupational therapy for homebound patients, the occupational therapist should highlight features that make their practice unique, such as specialization in the needs of the elderly, ease of scheduling, the convenience of location, and so on.
Sales Activities
Sales activities are targeted toward getting people to buy what you are selling. The focus here is on completing a business transaction between a business owner or representative and a customer. Consider, for example, two chiropractors who often recommend yoga and muscle stretching to their patients, emphasizing the health benefits of such activities. Their recommendation is a marketing activity designed to increase patient awareness of a beneficial service. But — if one of the Chiropractors offers yoga classes as part of their practice and encourages their patients to sign up for the classes, this is a sales activity that comes on the heels of the marketing effort inherent in recommending the health benefits of the service.
One component of the sales process involves what salespeople call “overcoming objections.” A potential buyer or referral source may not have voiced any objections aloud; however, by our nature, people are always screening information for “the catch” or problem with whatever is being proposed or discussed. Even when your prospect is intrigued by what you have to say, their internal voice may warn them against moving too quickly or deviating from their current way of doing things. One of the many ways that salespeople help overcome objections is by anticipating likely objections and addressing them before they are even spoken.
Anyone who has purchased a car has likely heard a salesperson say, “Excuse me for a moment. I am going to talk to my finance manager to see if I can get you a better deal.” The salesperson might even “sweeten the deal” by not charging for an accessory that the customer previously said he or she would like to have. With either of those simple statements, the salesperson attempts to overcome and preempt the buyer’s objections to pricing.
For the most part, car sales techniques are not recommended for those attempting to sell professional services. For example, using financial incentives to entice a professional prospect can be illegal and is likely to backfire. On the other hand, many of the principles underlying commodities sales can also play a role in professional marketing. One example is changing the prospect’s perception of the risk-to-reward ratio. In many businesses, this can be accomplished by reducing the perceived risk by putting items on sale. In professional marketing, this is ill-advised. Instead, the risk-to-reward ratio is managed by adding to the reward. A dietitian might accomplish this by co-hosting cooking classes with a local restaurateur at their co-host’s restaurant, for example.
As you talk to prospects, listen for what they see as the potential risks and rewards of working with you. Make it a point to address the risks and enhance the rewards. For example, a healthcare entrepreneur who does not accept insurance should make that fact clear, all the while emphasizing advantages such as more time with each patient that comes with a fee-for-service practice model.
“Closing the sale” is used to describe the successful culmination of a sales effort. It involves a clearly stated agreement as to what each person will do and when. Broad, general agreements bode poorly for future business transactions. Consider the difference between the prospect who says, “I will be happy to send a few patients your way,” and the prospect who says, “Let’s do this. I will send you the next two cases I see. After that, we can look at how things went with those cases.”
Professional sales rarely involve a “hard” sell or any form of pressure tactic. The exception is when a healthcare entrepreneur is competing for a contract with a large corporation or other business entity. In virtually all other circumstances, healthcare entrepreneurs rely on the merits of what they are offering, combined with frequent reminders that their services are available and have value.
Networking and Community Relations
Healthcare entrepreneurs start their practices from many different postures. Some start their practices in their hometowns, where they are well known and already well networked; others stay in the vicinity in which they trained, where they have some roots and connections. Still others move someplace they have never lived, where they know few if any people and must establish new relationships with colleagues, referral sources, and the community at large. Successful sales and marketing depend heavily on building and maintaining networks throughout the community in which you practice.
Regardless of where you are beginning, it is essential to develop the relationships you need to build and sustain your business. Some of those relationships will be built on a one-to-one basis; others will be built naturally with relatively little effort in small groups such as professional societies, hospital staffs, religious congregations, and recreational events.
Effective healthcare entrepreneurs do not stop there. They also build relationships with the community at large. One way to accomplish this is by accepting leadership positions in organizations that can help rapidly and widely expand the healthcare entrepreneur’s networks. These positions serve as a branding tool. The time spent is the fee for the marketing. As with any fee, the cost–benefit ratio should be reassessed periodically.
Reputation Management
Although the times are changing, most professionals’ reputations are tied to their personal names. However, the reputations of most businesses are also associated with the business’s name and the names of its products or services. Cleaning up a public relations problem is easier for a named business than it is for a healthcare professional whose personal name has been besmirched.
Healthcare entrepreneurs tend to handle adverse publicity differently than business owners in other fields. Their time and other resources are more limited than those of larger businesses. Time spent responding to patient complaints and bad press is time away from providing the services that generate the money needed to run the practice. Deciding whether and how to manage bad press boils down to dollars and cents. Emotional factors such as the desire to “clear my good name” muddy thinking and can lead to regrettable choices. When faced with negative press, the prudent healthcare entrepreneur takes several steps before deciding whether to get caught up in the perceived problem.
First, to the extent possible, stop the problem: don’t add fuel to the fire. Second, perform a cost–benefit analysis to determine whether the potential for financial damage justifies the cost of responding. Third, consult a public relations expert who can review your cost–benefit analysis, point out missed considerations, and, if need be, implement strategies to respond to the threat successfully.
Although most public relations problems eventually lose steam and die down, these problems live in perpetuity on the Internet. Innumerable websites purport to offer web surfers valuable information about how each healthcare professional performs in the eyes of those who take the time to post opinions and ratings. Of course, these ratings are spurious and are likely to be more heavily loaded with the discontent of unhappy consumers in need of some catharsis than the praise of happy patients who are willing to take the time to offer their opinions.
Regardless of their validity and accuracy, online ratings do influence consumer opinions and consumer choices, so it is worthwhile to keep your online image clean. Prevention is, perhaps, the best weapon. Within the bounds of professional ethics, campaigns to encourage patients to share their positive experiences online can help tilt your ratings. When the damage is already done, there are professionals who will, for a fee, clean up your image on the web.
You can err in the rush to address negative press. For example, it can be a mistake to respond to criticism publicly; doing so keeps the focus on the bad press and risks violations of confidentiality. It is also a mistake to post your own ratings using pseudonyms. Besides being dishonest, these postings tend to come off sounding stilted and “canned.”
Some bad press is built into the healthcare system in the United States. For example, payers, including federal government payers, sponsor aggressive campaigns to encourage patients to ferret out and report fraud and abuse by healthcare providers. These campaigns can leave the public with the impression that no one in the healthcare industry can be trusted.
The private insurance sector uses industry-specific jargon that implies that healthcare providers are unscrupulous. Terms such as “not medically necessary” and “charges above the usual and customary” are used to describe reasonable bills and fees that are not covered or not well covered by a given insurance plan. The implication of such terms is that healthcare professionals routinely take advantage of the patients to line their own pockets.
When patients call their insurance company to complain about a denied claim, the person to whom they speak is charged with calming the patient down and making sure the patient, who, after all, is the insurance company’s customer, leaves the call feeling good about the company. Sometimes this is done by blame shifting. For example, consider the insurance company representative who explained a denied claim by telling their customer that the claim would have been paid had the doctor “billed the correct code.” The patient is left with the belief that the doctor’s error left them, the patient, with an avoidable bill when, in fact, the doctor billed honestly and correctly, but the insurance policy does not cover the code that was billed.
The savvy healthcare entrepreneur avoids the temptation to manage these slurs on their reputation by fighting fire with fire. Speaking badly of the source of misinformation is more likely to leave patients feeling befuddled than it is to help calm the patient and restore goodwill.
Two other strategies are more effective here. First, always maintain a positive relationship with your patients. Even during brief visits with patients you seldom see, it is possible to engage the patient in a relationship by expressing an interest in something that is important to them beyond their health. Some healthcare entrepreneurs keep notes about things like their patients’ hobbies and children’s names so that they can engage the patient in brief, relationship-building conversations.
Education is another effective way to help a patient who has been misinformed or misled by others. Ideally, education starts early. For example, printed material in the waiting room can help educate patients that “not medically necessary” means “not covered by your insurance policy” rather than “not an important component of your care.” Additional education can occur as patients use services, such as advising patients in advance when a procedure they believe will be covered by their insurance is not, in your experience, typically covered under this patient’s unique circumstance. When necessary, education can also be provided later by inviting an upset patient in to discuss, perhaps with a staff member, why the coding you used was the only honest coding available.
Savvy healthcare entrepreneurs know there are plenty of other competent professionals in their field, so they manage their reputation, maintain their personal and professional networks, and look for opportunities to market their valuable services.
Excerpted from Lucrative Practices: The Comprehensive Handbook for Healthcare Executives, by Michael B. Spellman.