When it comes to customers in healthcare (and other industries) vendors can face the music and dance, or face the music and, ‘Chicago style’, get your ticket pulled at the dance marathon.

The crux of the matter is understanding ‘vendor-customer relations’. It's a huge issue (in our view, under represented in professional literature), but our research suggests that there are two important dimensions to the challenges of this relationship –
extending the sales cycle unnecessarily, leading to a larger investment in the cost of sales.

The first is getting customers and having any kind of positive relationship. This is a process that requires a lot of hard work at the front end of the sales cycle. Here are some good questions to ask about your sales (and marketing) team in this phase:

• Does it have a good knowledge of the healthcare industry so it knows how both to target prospects, qualify them, and align your company's products and services to customer needs? Do you and your associates know what kind of information is needed and the best way to distribute it? Do you have powerful web-based tools and information resources?
• Once your team has identified potential customers, how much does its members know about their business requirements? ROI requirements? And their customer relationships? What processes do you have for getting and sharing this knowledge? 
• Is your team making calls in the right part of the organization, and once in the door, does its members speak the right language? Does your company provide them with important vocabulary and organizational characteristics information? Do you communicate regularly about cultural issues, including those which pose barriers to your success, a particularly important issue in healthcare  where there is still reluctance on the part of many physicians and others to use new IT products?
• Can you and your sales team show loyalty to the healthcare industry by belonging and activity participating in local and national chapters of organizations like HIMSS, HFMA, etc.? 

The second challenge is satisfying and keeping customers, and this at a time when they are becoming more and more interested in qualifying you, their suppliers of products and services. Per Insuring Satisfaction -- Health Plans are Steadily Upgrading Their Customer Relationship Management Capabilities, a recent cover story in Healthcare Informatics, they will be qualifying you to be sure that you can provide systems that are accessible, user-friendly, inexpensive and effective in a time of HIPAA, public concerns about safety, growing interest in direct-provider patient communications, and the monitoring of chronic conditions. This excellent resource shows that your customers are very likely focusing on satisfying their customers by dwelling on traditional customer relationship management and the newer process of patient relationship management (PRM), which means they are therefore:

• integrating new automated transactions capabilities
• compartmentalizing service on the basis of type of benefits and plans
• building much better data warehouses 

The implications of all this are that you will need to come up to speed on CRM and PRM as you sell integrated, standardized systems, and plug the use of the internet as an enabler. Doing so will allow you to drive home the point that your customers will meet the safety, confidentiality and other issues driving their buying decisons. The trick is to see all this as part of the same puzzle -- and part of the contiuum of a good vendor-customer collaborative relationship. If you can do it you will set yourself apart from the competition.

To sum up, you have to keep orchestrating the dance, having great dress rehearsals and demonstrations and your knowledge of the music in all its phases by

• Building close collaborative customer relationships which include a ‘hands-on’ approach (not just the occasional e-mail or phone call) that builds confidence and lets customers know they can consult with your sales team and partners about their needs as they develop, implement, and evaluate their business plans
• Keeping everyone -- your sales team, marketing specialists, management and partners -- up with the industry, its language, trends and external policy and technical developments that will drive investment

There’s a lot more to this story and we are ready to help you learn it to meet your needs. We can provide the research as well as sales development and education tools that help get and satisfy customers in healthcare and other industries. Our experience with Dell, Compaq, HP, Data General and many industry leaders, as well as with some of America’s finest health systems and universities, has given us a wealth of information and tools that can help you stay on the dance floor, and enjoy Chicago when you're there!.

For general information on our research and tool development contact Ron Goodenow. For sales specific information and feedback contact Ed Deppert, our senior consultant and sales expert. We want to thank Ed for his ideas for this month's  Prescription for Success.
 
We welcome your input. If you are interested in sharing your ideas let us know. And, be sure to distribute Prescription for Success to your associates.

Please e-mail Ron Goodenow or call 508-393-5619 so we can help you.