Is the Enterprise Healthcare Buyer Set up to Win on Your Website?
The Core
Healthcare buyer preferences and expectations have transformed over the past 18 months.
Your ability to lead into the new engagement patterns will set you and your HealthTech company up for success.
What You Need to Know
We are still far away from equilibrium in the healthcare marketplace, but enterprise buyers are decidedly embracing the reality of a more self-service, digital sale.
This is not a new trend by any stretch, but for the sale of high-ticket complex solutions, the market has moved from unproven to undeniable. This sea change happened in months and is only going to continue to grow. In scenarios where buyers need a personal touch, they love, welcome, and expect the convenience of “remote” purchasing.
That means the entire buyer’s journey can be crafted, tracked, honed, and perfected within the context of your digital channels. Even traditional hold-outs like medical devices and pharma have embraced this trend.
A recent McKinsey survey found 70-80% of B2B buyers prefer remote human interactions or full digital services. These preferences are not just for small-ticket deals. McKinsey reports that 32% of B2B businesses are willing to spend $50,000–$500,000 through an end-to-end digital interaction. Those percentages are going to increase as vendors get better at creating great “discovery to close” experiences.
What You Need to Be
If you want to lead in this market then you have to lead the market.
Inspiring the kind of confidence that gets the process rolling requires guts and substance. You have to work with your team to cultivate and proclaim a strong point of view and generate the caliber of content that feeds the needs you know your buyers have. Then, as an organization, commit to mounting a determined and significant effort to promote that content through the channels where your buyers are living and learning.
This is not revolutionary, but actually creating the substance and having the persistence to consistently engage is what separates the posers and wannabes from the leaders. If your mode to date has relied on in-person sales engagements to win favor and communicate the complete essence of your value proposition, you are going to lose in this market.
You have to figure out how to communicate your value clearly and develop and promote a voice that demonstrates you are on the vanguard. Let’s face it, the best HealthTech solutions don’t always emerge as the market leaders. The ones that do the best job taking the helm of the conversation win the day.
Are you ready to lead? Give your buyers and competition something to talk about. Know your market, understand their real needs, and aggressively lead the conversation with a clear point of view.
What You Need to Do
Get your digital buyer’s journey in order. NOW.
Are you giving your buyers what they want? Follow these five steps to shore up your buyer’s experience.
- Help your organization see the reality that end-to-end digital sales are actually possible. Do you have internal examples of this? Tell the stories. If not, share the McKinsey survey in context with your leadership.
- Clearly map (literally map on paper or pixels) how potential buyers enter and progress through your digital channels.
- What is your entry point?
- What enticing bit of knowledge do you reward them with for coming in your front door?
- How do you move them to take the next step?
- What is their reward for joining you there?
- What would you like them to do next?
- Collaborate with sales and other stakeholders to ensure once you successfully start a conversation with a potential buyer you have the tools and content in place to continue to lead them every step of the way.
- Give your prospects every opportunity to discover and move further into an understanding of what your solution makes possible for them.
- When the time is right and they are ready to interact with someone who can usher them toward the close, make that process natural, seamless, and remarkable.
To achieve this process, your organization will likely require new tools, internal structure, and modes of working. This modality is where our industry is going. Getting it right will set you apart and help shrink time in the funnel.
If you are not actively mapping and monitoring this journey, you are leaving it to chance. Don’t do it!
There is no reason to do so with marketing automation, listening, and monitoring tools available. Put in place what you need to monitor and track buyers’ progress through your ecosystem then tune your content and sequences to optimize experiences.
Obviously, you need to possess an intimate knowledge of your buyer. We can’t underscore the importance enough. But remember, you don’t have to know everything. If you set it up well and monitor it regularly, you will quickly begin to gain insight into what their most acute issues are and you can optimize to better meet those needs.
The pandemic has pushed us into the age of end-to-end digital enterprise solution sales. You may be far down the road or you may just be beginning the journey. Either way, your work in embracing this reality now will help position you to win your market.
The First Thing to Do After Reading this Article
Get an objective audit of what you have in place today. You and your team can’t see the real journey. You’re too close to it.
Enlist a friend outside your organization who understands your market or hire an agency to perform an audit.
Ask them to approach your website like a prospective customer. Start by searching online for the answer to a common question your prospects ask. Find the entry point to your website in your search engine results. Then proceed through your site with your prospect in mind. Ask them to make notes throughout their journey.
- What captivated you?
- Where did you disengage?
- What did you not understand?
- What moved you?
- Where did you get derailed?
Then, set up a meeting with key members of your team to hear and discuss their findings. As a team, you will then make this end-to-end journey stronger.
