Putting the Patient First in Your Sales and Marketing Strategy

It may seem like a simple concept, a strategy that cuts to the main stakeholder in the entire healthcare delivery supply chain; the patient. If you have spent time in a professional setting with individuals involved in patient care, you already know the emotional and logistical connection to the patient is front and center.

Why then do we as sales and marketing professionals often overlook the effect on the patient when planning marketing campaigns, sales strategies, and overall business plans? Its common to evaluate our objectives in terms of market share gained, net revenue achieved, brand awareness etc., but it's rare to establish and track a metric which directly impacts the patient.

I would suggest any organization providing goods or services to the healthcare ecosystem have at its core a metric on how what you are doing positively affects the patient.

When I interact with other sales and marketing professionals and ask if they are doing this, I usually get a straight up answer, or can read between the lines a response similar to "we're not in the business of taking care of the patients, we are in business to support and sell to the people that do".

Then I ask if a key motivator (if not the main driver) of those customers is, in fact, taking care of a patient as well as they can? That's usually when the light bulb goes off. Now the conversation is headed in the right direction, but my point is far from made.

The next questions I receive are: How does your organization think about that? More importantly, what do you do about it?

If I get this far in the conversation, I know I have a shot to influence that individual to take this philosophy back to their respective boardrooms.

There is a relatively easy way to start this process within your own organization and scale it as your organization evolves.

During that first meeting to discuss the upcoming year's sales/marketing strategy, or that first meeting to discuss a potential new product or acquisition, the question: "how does this decision help the patients we serve" should be asked. If there is not a clear answer, that’s a red flag. It's not to say the product, or strategy should be scrapped, far from that. In reality, it's more of a mindset than a specific feature or benefit that answers that question.

Once this philosophy gains traction in the organization, people will think ahead to the answer and as they become more and more comfortable, think more and more about how their daily work impacts the patient in a positive way.

If this philosophy permeates the organization, your customers will see and feel it, the patients who are served by your product will benefit from it, and it will give the other more traditional (still very necessary) metrics such as market share, revenue growth, brand awareness etc. more meaning and context and will likely afford your organization more sustainability in achieving those metrics over the long term.