Building a Steadily Increasing Pipeline For EMR System Sales

Electronic Health Records (EHR) sales is a perpetual cycle of generating leads, constant communication, more communication, making sales, and doing it all over again. Among the surest means of feeding your “sales pipeline” is creating a continual influx of qualified leads and efficiently running a CRM. Technology Advice found that businesses with pipeline management enjoy 28% more growth!

Here is how you can create an expanding EMR system sales pipeline to close more sales:

Know your customer’s buying journey

Your sales pipeline should reflect the stages of the Buyer’s Journey. The 3 stages of this journey are:

• Awareness Stage – Your leads know they have an issue and are currently working to identify and better understand it.
• Consideration Stage – Your leads understand their issues and are seeking potential solutions.
• Decision Stage – Your leads have arrived a decision about the solution they will try and are currently comparing options.

Define the sales stages

Using the Buyer’s Journey, the sales stages of your pipeline might unfold this way:

• Identify – You have acquired a lead from your website traffic. For example, they opted onto your email list, asked a question on your blog post or via chat feature, registered for a webinar, etc.
• Lead Nurture – You begin communicating with the lead. This could be with quality lead nurturing emails sent every week to share intentional content. At this stage, you shouldn’t be promoting your product or business. Instead, help them solve their problem. With the right software, you can track which leads are taking an interest in your content and tailor your approach accordingly.
• Engage – To learn whether or not your solution is right for this lead, get the dialogue going. Use email or pick up the phone to discuss their obstacles and agendas.
• Discover – Get specific here. Asking the right questions will help you to better understand your lead’s problem, goals, and role. This is information you need before pitching your solution.
• Custom Demo – Put together a carefully crafted demo of your solution tailored to your lead’s unique situation. Use the language of their pain points uncovered in the previous stage.
• Propose a Tailored Solution – At this point, the lead has agreed to meet with you in person or by phone to discuss the problem and your solution.
• Agreement Review – Your lead has requested your solution, and this positions you to better address questions and objections.
• Close – You have converted your lead to a paying customer.

Set your goals

Every stage of your EMR system sales pipeline needs its own goals and benchmarks. Creating these goals gives your sales team a target and improves their performance. For example, you might aim to close 120 large sales this year, and that gives your salesforce a goal of 10 deals per month.

Build a dashboard

Having clarified the stages of your pipeline and set your goals, build a sales dashboard to monitor progress. Remember to update dashboards daily with critical information about the pipeline. You and your team should be able to quickly scan the dashboard and know where you stand in relation to your goals, as well as the next move you should make.

Dashboards can be a simple as a spreadsheet or as slick as a powerful CRM like HubSpot. For more about HubSpot, take a peek at their Advanced Sales Dashboard here. Regardless of the format you decide, your dashboard should give an overview of:

• Priorities – Where is the most ROI?
• Calendar – Does your schedule reflect your priorities?
• Activity goals – What actions must you take today to meet your goals?
• Revenue goals – How close are you to generating the revenues you desire?
• Leads – Do you have enough leads in your pipeline to make this happen?

Fuel your sales pipeline

Sales pro Colleen Francis claims too many salespeople get mired in a ‘sales trap‘. If you’re spending too much energy into closing sales and not enough resources into generating leads, you’re in a sales trap. After a while, that pipeline is going to run dry. To keep it flowing, you need to always be feeding it. Here’s how you might do that:

• Buying Lists – Buying lists isn’t always a good idea, but in some cases they can help boost a struggling pipeline.
• Lead Generation Services – As with buying lists, you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get with a lead generation service. When they do pay off, though, they’re worth it.
• Build Your Own List – Leveraging resources such as LinkedIn are a great way to identify potential B2B clients. You can then use specialized software or services for uncovering the contact information you’ll need for helping you fuel the pipeline.
• Inbound Lead Generation – The most efficient method available today is Inbound lead generation: attracting leads to you. There’s greater potential for conversion here because these leads are already curious about some aspect of your solution. To convert them into qualified leads, you’ll need to get their contact information. You can learn more about that in “Generating Leads Online: The Birds and the Bees“.

Manage your pipeline

Always make time to replacing closed EMR system sales with new leads for your funnel. Don’t ignore this step. Make it a daily habit, and you’ll turn your pipeline into a virtual goldmine. So, do the math – discover how many leads you need to communicate with at the Engage stage to meet your goals. A good CRM for managing the progress of leads through the stages of your EMR system sales pipeline is essential here.

Tidy up your pipeline

When leads don’t respond to your communications or don’t progress from one stage to the next after a long period of time, you need to consider whether or not they’re right for you. Regularly cleaning your pipeline will help you zero in on those leads deserving your time. This will also help you improve your planning and forecasting of EMR system sales in the future. Making sure that all the information in your pipeline is accurate is also critical. For example, if a particular lead is no longer with the company whose business you desire, purge them from your pipeline and find the new, correct person.

The bottom line

Creating an effective EMR system sales pipeline isn’t an easy task. You need a deep understanding of your leads at all times and their relationship to the buyer’s journey in order to build a pipeline that gets the job done. And this is just one component of the larger Inbound Methodology of marketing and sales strategies.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tackle this alone. We here at Responsify team up with EHR sales and marketing professionals to develop strategy, provide support, and offer help creating an Inbound leads pipeline. By partnering with us we help you strategically draw new and better website traffic, convert them to qualified leads, and, eventually, create happy customers.

We’ve assisted countless EMR system sales pros to integrate Inbound into their existing sales processes. So, let’s talk. Reserve your free strategy session now and we’ll help evaluate your assets, provide free insights, and offer suggestions to move you in the right direction.