Empowering Your Sales Team to Sell in the New Normal

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPPACA), passed and signed in March 2010, was a horse-traded document of complex, multilayered legislation that transformed little overnight upon signing but promised enormous change down the road.  The 2012 reelection of President Barack Obama cemented a likely follow through of most or all PPACA provisions.  The ground has now definitively shifted beneath the feet of all segments of the healthcare industry.  Final legislative changes to the scope and administration of healthcare are not scheduled until January 1, 2014, but many significant changes have triggered as of January 1, 2013 – not least of which is a 2.3% excise tax on durable medical devices.

The economic, medical and actuarial metrics of all the changes to law and mandate remain largely in flux, either because some of the PPACA instruments, such as the Health Insurance Marketplace, are unprecedented in American history, or because many provisions, such as the excise tax, could yet face a legislative repeal from popular or industry pressure.  In more than one sense, producers are as unsure of what to sell as consumers are of what to buy at the moment.  How are managers, in this landscape and at this moment, to empower their teams to productively sell in this “new normal?”  Key to a sales motivational strategy is to characterize the new healthcare landscape not as a risk or a negative change, but instead as an opportunity.

Visualization of new opportunities is three-pronged:

First, while competition for sales might be greater than ever, the marketplace will have more depth and breadth than ever before.  An already-significant number and percentage of Americans have gained health insurance either directly or indirectly as a result of programs created, enhanced or motivated by the PPACA through 2011.  Estimates for the final number of insured Americans under the aegis of the larger initiative remain difficult to interpret, but are certain to number tens of millions more.

Second, while cost control may take a renewed primacy in administrative (perhaps even medical) decisions, the continued graying of the American population for the foreseeable future will fuel a demand for sales of medical devices to be limited only by further invention and future perfection of products.  The story of a grayer United States is also literally neither static nor sedentary – Social Security faces continued insecurity and wages continue to stagnate or erode against cost of living across much of the U.S.  Current workers and future retirees must look forward to working and remaining productive well into their 70’s, and perhaps beyond.

Finally, it’s important to take a step back and appreciate the cumulative portrait of healthcare in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.  What’s going to change and how?  The “what” of American medical care – the fact of frequently available, innovative and effective care that has led to a longer and more enjoyable life for many Americans – has been proudly unquestioned.  But to ask “how” we achieve that possible level of care brings to mind, for many Americans, a recent memory of relentless inflationary economics, “unnecessary,” possibly dangerous methods, as well as frequent anecdotal evidence of abusive consequences.

With healthcare mandated for more Americans than ever, a greater equality of care is hoped to emerge.  The cost benefit and expanse of that care promises to remake the image of healthcare into the tool for societal improvement that medicine held in the early twentieth century.  It’s incumbent on managers to impart on their sales teams that this new image is possibly the most profound aspect of the “new normal.”

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