By Rick Fromme
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| A Pain That I'm Used To (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
One of the biggest emotions we have is pain or discomfort.
When medical sales reps can uncover their clients’ poignant pain and offer a
solution to remove that pain, they’re more likely to get the deal.
(Incidentally, in a subsequent blog, I’ll discuss how job candidates and
interviewees can directly apply this proven methodology during their interviews
to maximize their results.)
People buy emotionally and make decisions intellectually. That is, people often make buying decisions from an emotional, non-rational basis, whether they realize it or not. Successful medical device sales reps can benefit from understanding and utilizing this concept to close more sales consistently.
One of the biggest emotions we have is pain or discomfort.
When medical sales reps can uncover their clients’ poignant pain and offer a
solution to remove that pain, they’re more likely to get the deal. (Incidentally,
in a subsequent blog, I’ll discuss how job candidates and interviewees can
directly apply this proven methodology during their interviews to maximize
their results.)
After obtaining a legitimate lead, first things first, you need
to build a rapport. This is crucial. In order to help establish a rapport, you
need to learn more about the key decision makers who will ultimately approve the
purchase order (administrator, hospital manager, OR manager, purchasing
department head, etc.) and his or her hospital, department, etc. Research time: Find out as much about this
individual (or individuals) as possible so that when you do meet them, you can build
upon some avenues of commonality. You need to personally or professionally identify
with the prospect. Whether it’s a mutual acquaintance, graduated from the same
school, share similar hobbies, belong to the same professional groups, attend
the same house of worship, etc., you have about 15-30 seconds for a prospect to
size you up and determine if they’re going to like you.
Wrong. Turns out, I’m in the market for a small, easy-to-operate,
personal sailboat.
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| Sailboat GBR 50816, Sada, Galicia (Spain) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I’m a big proponent of a system developed and taught by
Sandler Training. What I learned in Sandler Training is that after building
rapport, before you start talking about your product and what it has to offer,
you need to back up and start asking probing questions. You’re trying to find out
what their pain or discomfort is. By locating their pain and learning how it
makes them feel, they’ll tell you what happened to them in the past, what other
products they’ve purchased, what their concerns are, etc. You have to expose and
understand those underlying issues, similar to a psychologist who’s trying to
help a client experiencing emotional difficulties.
At that point, once you’ve established what their pain
points or concerns are, you can position your product and/or services to
eliminate their pain. When doing so, you’re predominately going to highlight
the specific features and benefits of your product and/or service that are
going to make their pain go away, whether it’s customer service, costs,
features and benefits, cross-specialty utilization, ease of use/training, etc. You’ll
predominately share those key elements of your product and/or service that are
going to make them feel better.
Here’s a real-life example from when I was a successful
medical device sales rep at Medtronic:
One of the products I used to sell was image-guided surgery (IGS)
systems. This equipment allows surgeons in a variety of specialties to three
dimensionally track surgical instrumentation while navigating through high-risk
anatomical areas such as the brain, sinus cavities, spine, and other delicate
regions. It’s like an internal GPS system. These systems are fairly pricey,
ranging between $180,000 to $500,000+.
One day, I received a general lead from a hospital O.R. director
in southeast Georgia that wanted to purchase an image guided stem. At that
time, Medtronic was just one of many companies offering this sophisticated
device, along with GE, Stryker, Brainlab and others.
I knew this was a C- Level decision, so I called the
hospital’s administrator several times ― for this story, I’ll call him “Mr.
Jones”― but he wasn’t returning my calls. So I reached out to Mr. Jones’
secretary who told me to send in a bid for one of my firm’s IGS systems just as my other competitors already had. I
said, “Sure, but I’d like to drop the proposal off in person so I can briefly
introduce myself to Mr. Jones.” She made an appointment for the following week
for us to get together.
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| Georgia Bulldogs helmet. Made with Photoshop. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
So when I went to visit him, I wore a red shirt and black
pants. No kidding. And, of course, once I was in his office, we immediately
started talking about the Georgia Bulldogs, college football, the SEC, and the
like. In talking with him, I also made certain comments and observations that
would help establish some type of common ground between us.
Eventually he asked me, “Where’s the bid?”
Keeping in mind that several other companies had already
submitted theirs, I replied, “There were several bids I could send, but I
wasn’t sure which one would be best. However, I’m happy to fax you the bid once
I know exactly what it is you want.” With that, I began my interview process by
asking probing questions to ascertain his concerns (i.e., “pains”).
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| BellcoFormula in (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
“You really should only buy what you’re going to be
comfortable with,” I responded, after carefully noting his issues with previous
expenditures.
My meeting turned out to be fairly comprehensive, where Mr.
Jones ended up telling me exactly what he wanted and why, all the way down to
the terms, pricing, guarantees, service requirements and other key details.
“Give me a day or two and I’ll have your bid,” I said, exiting his office. “And
go Dawgs!”
As promised, a couple of days later, I drove back up to
Georgia to personally drop off the bid he’d requested.
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| "$!" in Old Script font. Italiano: "$!" nel carattere Old Script. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
To summarize the steps I took to secure this lucrative sale:
- Research your client
- Build rapport
- Ask probing questions
- Identify the client’s “pains” (Why do they want to buy this product?)
- Discover what’s in it for them personally/professionally (i.e., gaining respect for championing a product into the hospital)
- Create a proposal customized to their specific needs
- Coach them how to handle your competition after they’ve committed to you
About the Sandler Selling System®
David H. Sandler developed his proprietary methodology
— an innovative, non-traditional selling system —in the late 1960s, and
subsequently created the concept of “reinforcement training” to support
it. From that foundation, he then created a series of proven sales
training programs for small- and mid-sized companies and Fortune 500
corporations. He went on to found the Sandler Sales Institute®. Sandler
provides both basic and advanced selling methods, strategies and tactics that
are marketplace proven across a wide variety of sales. It then provides ongoing
support to reinforce its principles until they’re mastered. This powerful
reinforcement training is Sandler’s key point of difference from all other
training in the marketplace.
The firm changed its name to Sandler Training® in 2008, to
more accurately reflect the diversity of its training offerings, which have
expanded beyond sales training to include management, leadership, negotiating
skills, customer service, as well as executive coaching and mentoring. It
has now grown into an organization that dominates the global training market,
with more than 200 offices worldwide, providing instruction in 27 languages.
In this article, I discussed the importance of why and how
successful medical device sales representatives should discover a prospect’s
“pain” in order to provide meaningful solutions to alleviating it. I gave a
personal example of how I effectively closed a major medical device sale using
these techniques established and taught by Sandler Training. I also briefly
provided some information about Sandler Training. If you found this article
useful, please feel free to share and repost it. If you have any questions or
comments, as always, I’m eager to read them.
Rick Fromme combines entrepreneurial enthusiasm with an
insider's knowledge of the medical industry to co-found MedMasters.com. Both his
drive and perspective helps provide health care professionals with a superior
mechanism with which to communicate, network and market their strengths. Prior
to founding MedMasters.com,
Rick operated a highly successful medical device distributorship. Other
milestones in his 12-year career in the medical industry include a key position
at a medical device start-up company that was later sold to the
Ethicon Endo division of Johnson & Johnson. You may also reach Rick
by connecting with him on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube.
