Value-Based Selling in a Reforming Healthcare Terrain

Selling value versus volume is like most things in life – easier to describe than do. Healthcare reform necessitates value-based selling. The entrenched behavior, however, is volume-based selling. For vendors, the basic underlying sales message has been buy our product and you will increase your volume and increase your income. That doesn’t work in the changing healthcare terrain.

An evolution to value-based selling requires what most of us resist: change.

When leadership institutes cultural change in an organization it takes time, a different mindset, and support for new behaviors to take root. But when it does, amazing things can happen.

The training that caused this very happy success story and many others like it is TIGI’s COF Value-Based Selling^SM, a market-based training program. It explains how to identify customer challenges (at TIGI, we refer to these as “hurts”). Hurts are the “root cause” of why we need to make a change or adopt a new solution.

Examples of hurts include: problems that make it difficult to deliver a high-quality job, issues that demotivate staff, workflow inefficiencies which increase costs, and anything that would diminish patient satisfaction.

At TIGI, we teach our clients to study a customer’s situation and engage with the customer to thoroughly understand the hurts from the customer’s point of view. Then we can clearly analyze and explain how each hurt impacts the customer’s operation in terms of Clinical, Operational, and Financial (COF) deficits.

Healthcare suppliers can use the intelligence revealed by the COF analysis: for messaging, account management, and building a business case. COF therefore becomes a very valuable and very relevant decision-support strategy for both the customer and the supplier. This powerful customer-centric framework creates a common ground that expands supplier and customer conversations.

The case study below showcases how COF Value-Based Selling can support the decision-making process. For each hurt identified, a solution was positioned in terms of how the COF framework could “fix” the hurt. In essence, it’s value talk versus volume talk.

The Opportunity

A global leader of medical technology was working with a 230-bed hospital system. The opportunity was a multimillion-dollar, multiunit sale. The sales team knew that the decision-markers were conservative. The team’s initial strategy was the traditional “volume-based” approach. It showed the hospital how adding new systems would increase revenues.

Their approach failed and TIGI was engaged to refocus their process.

In the COF Value-Based Selling market-focused training program the sales team learned how profoundly healthcare reform is changing customer decision making along with the most common hurts resulting from reform. They also learned how to:

• Use COF to reveal provider’s hurts
• Validate customer’s COF indicators with COF-based tools
• Fix the hurts by integrating sales solutions to improve identified clinical, operational, and financial deficits
• Apply COF-based tools to monetize the cost of deficits
• Reduce/eliminate the costs of the identified COF hurts

The team returned to the customer using the TIGI value-based sales process and won the business.

SOME SPECIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS OF COF HURTS

Clinical Hurts

Because of unpredictable machine downtime, the main hurt was the inability of oncologists to efficiently create therapy plans for oncology treatments. Therapy planning times were also unduly long for obese patients.

To help fix those hurts, the Sales Team offered a solution that was faster, safer, and more ergonomically designed, allowing the hospital to extend its reach into an obese patient population. The solution reduced the time-to-result (KPI) in half – improving workflow significantly. And it increased accuracy and hi-speed reporting for faster, higher-quality therapy planning. Results were better for patients and physicians.

Operational Hurts

On the operational side, unscheduled downtime negatively affected staff morale, increased patient wait times, and severely reduced patient satisfaction scores. The customer agreed that newer imaging systems could help retain valuable staff and attract new employees. Patient satisfaction would improve as patient appointments ran as scheduled and less time was spent in the procedure. The number of “repeats” would drop significantly, which would improve operating efficiencies and patient satisfaction scores.

Financial Hurts

When it comes to money, equipment downtime obviously hurts. The customer validated that the new technology, with additional dependability and functionality, could increase workflow and capacity, potentially increasing revenues and reducing cost of operations. The new technology is considered by the customer as a “mission-critical” asset that is pivotal to establish credibility and build the brand for the cancer service line, and for the hospital system.

The sales team applied the account specific information in the COF Project Evaluator Tool, and produced, in collaboration with customer, the targeted improvement on the oncology service-line financials, which would result from clinical and operational improvements.

COF INSPIRES SUPPLIER-STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT

As you can see, the COF framework requires hospital stakeholders from multiple functional groups to work together with the supplier sales-service team. Influencers may not make the final decision, but as we know, they can certainly sway decision-makers. That’s why it is imperative for the sales team to learn more about the “hurts” experienced by the staff (and the patients).

The application of COF Value-Based Selling by your sales team:

• Builds trust in the customer relationship,
• Evolves the sales team from the “feature-function” product pitch to value-based selling
• Fosters discussion with customers of their hurts and root causes for change
• Guides customers to find Clinical Mission-aligned solutions
• Assists the customer to monetize and thereby designate the value of the solution’s impact

COF is a framework that credibly demonstrates value to healthcare providers in this fast reforming market.