Healthcare sales and marketing teams are extremely busy in most companies. It’s a competitive industry, but there are several simple things your team can do to improve your performance. By working together, your team can learn from one another to improve several aspects of your business. It’s not just limited to sales and marketing, either!
Establish a Feedback Loop
It’s pretty well known that a cohesive team performs better than teams that work separately, or worse, against each other. Among many great ways to improve working relationships, a marketing-sales feedback loop is essential to optimizing sales and marketing efforts.
Traditionally, marketing only has visibility into the number of leads they gather. This can lead to problems where marketing may believe they’re doing a good job by driving a lot of leads, but the sales team is unhappy with their quality. A feedback loop helps resolve this dissonance by establishing a consistent back-and-forth between the teams.
How your team manages the feedback loop will vary, but setting a consistent reporting cadence can be a great first step. Simply opening the feedback loop and encouraging communication between the teams sets a precedent for collaboration. This allows the teams to gain valuable insights from one another and further improve their performance.
How Sales Can Help Marketing…
Your sales and marketing teams can discuss what channels and messaging are driving the best leads and customers. This gives marketing deeper insights and a better understanding beyond surface-level metrics. When marketing makes changes with these insights in mind, this should in turn improve the sales team’s performance as lead quality improves too.
Sales can also share ideas for messaging to address common objections from prospects and correct confusing or unclear messaging. The sales team will typically have the most insight into lead quality and response, so whatever insights they can share with marketing will be helpful.
…And Marketing Can Help Sales
On the flip side, marketing has plenty to offer to the sales team. Marketing works best when messaging is consistent across all touch points and it’s often the same for sales. They’re also able to provide guidance to the sales team using more analytical optimization.
For one, marketing can review the sales team’s outbound emails. Data like open rates and click-through-rates (CTR) can show how effective the copy is. If marketing sees room for improvement, they can share this with sales. In remaining consistent, they can also help sales ensure they’re offering the same deals to avoid confusing the prospect.
Create Healthcare Sales and Marketing Collateral Together
When sales and marketing align, it can help them create collateral that works together. From ads and emails to website copy, it should all work with one goal in mind: selling to the prospect. This can be a cycle, with ebooks and case studies providing more information without truly selling. Ideally, they should educate the prospect about your solution and get them curious enough to take the next step. These transitional calls-to-action often help drive leads in the long run, too.
This is where that feedback loop really comes in handy. If sales sees common objections or questions from prospects, marketing can use that feedback to better educate leads. For example, if those prospects keep asking about certain features, this may tell us that our current education doesn’t adequately address them. If that feature doesn’t exist, it may be something valuable for your product and development teams to know, too. It’s not just marketing and sales that benefit from working together!
When One Wins, The Other Wins
Healthcare sales and marketing teams often conflict with one another, but that doesn’t have to be the case. When working together, a win for marketing should be a win for sales and vice versa. It’s marketing’s job to help bring leads to the company, and it’s sales’ job to close them. When marketing brings quality leads, sales has an easier time closing them. And when the sales team closes, marketing proves that their methods are effective.
A closed deal is a win for the entire company. That’s additional revenue that can be invested back into the business. To set up a feedback loop for your sales and marketing team, I recommend you introduce it as a win-win. Walk through the process with your teams together. You’ll be sure to see something great come out of it. Want to learn more about how OM can support your sales and marketing efforts? Reach out to book a discovery call.
