Elizabeth Hilla
By Elizabeth Hilla, Senior Vice President, HIDA
If you have to ask a customer what challenges or problems keep them awake at night, you need to do more homework.
I gained this insight from a participant at HIDA’s Streamlining Healthcare Conference, where I led a discussion on probing skills and talking about ways to get customers to discuss their pain points. Often, a sales rep’s effort to find those pain points starts with a very general open-ended probe, such as, “What are your biggest challenges?” But, as the conference participant pointed out, the risk in a question like this is that the customer may not want to spill discuss their issues or, worse, may perceive that you are not well-informed.
Instead, lead with a probe that shows you’ve been paying attention, such as:
- “Many of the nursing home customers I work with say that attracting and keeping nurses is a huge challenge. How big of an issue is that for you?”
- “What is your practice’s plan regarding the new MACRA payment system? Have you figured out what track you’re on and how that will affect you?”
- “With patient satisfaction impacting reimbursement levels, what are you focusing on to improve patient experience?”
Of course, you won’t be able to ask informed questions like these if you aren’t paying attention. Make yourself a student of:
- Reimbursement: You need to know how your customer gets paid, by which payers, and what’s changing. This is a continual effort because payment systems in every market segment are changing rapidly.
- Quality metrics: The most common change in reimbursement across market segments is tying reimbursement levels to quality and outcomes. That makes quality metrics incredibly important to your customer’s bottom line. As a rep, you need to know what metrics are most important to the customers you serve. (See Smart Selling, October issue.)
- Staffing-related issues: Every type of healthcare provider faces staffing challenges – managing a shortage of nurses and nurse assistants, dealing with millennial employees, and protecting worker safety are just a few that come to mind. (See Smart Selling, September issue.)
- Overall demand trends: You need to know if customers in a particular market segment or geography are facing more demand than they can manage, less demand than they need to be profitable, or something in between.
There are many ways to keep up on these issues, but they all begin with one step: setting aside the time to stay informed. We all tend to do what’s urgent and often skip what’s important, because important things often don’t have a specific deadline. So, make it urgent by:
- Scheduling time on your calendar for the reading you need to do.
- Signing up early for webinars and training programs (HIDA offers many) on the topics you need to stay up on.
- Setting aside time before important customer meetings to do your homework, maybe by checking out their quality ratings or by seeing what news is posted on their website.
By building this study time into your calendar every week, you’ll have the ammunition you need to already know what’s keeping your customers awake at night, and to offer the solutions that will help them sleep better.