If you’re a marketer who markets products or services to doctors, we bet sometimes you wish you had a magic wand or some special formula for getting their attention.
While a few years ago, you could simply send your representative to the physician’s office to market your products, things are way different today. Today’s doctors are a lot busier and a lot less receptive to marketing messages aimed at them.
The other challenging factor is the fierce competition in the market. As per Statista, there are over 1 million professionally active physicians in the United States. This opens marketers to a great opportunity, but the odds are high that your competitors are already eyeing them.
If you, too, have steeled yourself to the uphill battle of getting the attention of the doctors with no success, here are some strategies you can implement to increase your chances of success.
1. Segment to Know your Prospects Better
A great buyer-seller relationship always requires a steady foundation. Therefore, it is very crucial to know your customers well. Start by segmenting your target group and knowing which market segment you are selling into.
Source: LinkedIn
Some questions you can ask yourself include:
Is the doctor self-employed? Or is he/she an employee of a large medical group? Is the doc a staff physician? Is he/she the only decision-maker? If no, then which other person has a say in the purchase decisions, and so on.
Once you have identified your market segments, tailor your market strategies to those specific groups. Try and understand what is important to each physician on a personal level.
2. Focus More on Educating
We get it that you have to sell your products or services, but it’s important to understand that we’re not selling $50 impulse buys; we’re selling products or services that sell for thousands of dollars, sometimes even higher.
Therefore, don’t just ramble on about your product; instead, show the doctor that you are aware of their challenges. Doctors always believe facts, so remember to bring up evidence-based facts in your conversation. Use doctors’ experiences, scientific evidence, statistics, and facts in your conversation.
3. Use their Language
When communicating with physicians, it is very important to learn about their academic focus and use terminology specific to their discipline.
It is a skill that every marketer should possess in order to gain access to doctors and other healthcare practitioners. Doctors like to talk based on facts; therefore, the marketers must learn to link clinical data to business solutions and communicate in the physician’s language.
4. Make your Prospect See Value in your Offer
While cost-cutting and making profits are every business’s ultimate goals, improving patient care is extremely important for doctors. If you can associate your solution with the achievement of all the three goals, your prospect will see value in your solution.
Never hesitate to reference other doctors’ experiences with your products and how they helped them improve patient care and the bottom line. Talk about how your brand helps a particular specialty or use case and cite a range of results.
Training videos, product demonstrations, case studies are great collaterals to show to the physicians.
While demonstrating your product’s value is good, resist the temptation to claim that you’re the “best.” Instead, help the physician come to the realization that it’s your product that offers the best solutions to their problems.
5. Demonstrate Time Saving Features
After all the hard work of getting an email list of physicians, making strategies to contact them and get their attention, it would be such a waste of time and effort if you put them off by beating around the bush.
Doctors are busy individuals who work 40-50 hours a week on average (American Medical Association).
Source: AMA ASSN
They look favorably on products and services that free up their time and allow them more time to focus on patient care. If you can demonstrate how your solution will enable them to manage their practice better and save time, they would surely consider you.
6. Make your Product Stand Out
In this fast-paced world, innovations are happening at a very fast rate, and chances are someone else is also offering a solution similar to yours. So why would a prospect buy your product? What makes your product different and cut above the rest? Go into detail. Cite statistics and studies. Even better if you can write a secret sauce eBook aimed at your market segments.
You may even cite a third-party analyst report (if you have), the published results of a clinical study, or a published product showdown.
Wrap Up
A typical busy physician’s day is structured around short, controlled segments. Therefore, when communicating with the physicians, it is important to convey convenient and quick snapshots of pertinent information that leaves the maximum impact in the shortest amount of time. Make efforts to demonstrate the value of your products but, most importantly, tie the benefits of your products to the doctor’s financial results.
