Building a Steadily Increasing Pipeline for Patient Engagement Sales

Patient Engagement and Education sales is an endless process of prospecting, constant outreach, even more outreach, closing sales, and then starting all over again. One of the best ways of managing this “sales pipeline” is by creating a solid flow of qualified leads and managing your CRM correctly. According to a Technology Advice report, companies that use pipeline monitoring experience 28% greater development compared to those that do not!

Here are ways you could boost your sales pipeline to increase your sales:

Understand just how your consumers buy

The phases of your sales pipeline should line up with your Buyer’s Journey. The Buyer’s Journey is made up of these three phases:

Awareness Phase: Your potential customers know they have a problem/challenge and are trying to figure out what it is.

Consideration Phase: Your potential customers know what their problem is, and are trying to find out how to solve it.

Decision Phase: Your potential customers have decided what approach they need to take and are looking for providers.

Plainly identify the sales steps

Keeping the Buyer’s Journey in mind, the phases of your sales pipeline could look like this:

Identify: A visitor of your site takes an action by filling out a form, going to a webinar, or asking questions in the comment section. You can also proactively prospect and build your own list of these leads.

Lead Nurture: In this phase you could begin communication by sharing consistent content using strategically crafted Lead Nurturing Emails that you send every week. These are not sales emails, but ones that could help leads with their problems. Use a monitoring software service to better engage leads that respond to the content around specific topics.

Engage: You can have a conversation via phone or email about their difficulties to determine whether the prospect has an issue you can fix. Then when you continue making contact, you can build trust and rapport.

Discover: In this phase you are asking questions and finding out more about the prospect’s problems, objectives, and responsibilities. You want to fully understand their situation at this point, not sell yet.

Prepare Presentation of a Tailored Solution: Create a customized presentation based on what you have discovered about the prospect. Keep in mind to use their language and provided information.

Recommend a Tailored Solution: At this point, your potential customers have a conversation with you by phone or in-person to talk about their objectives, troubles, and how your solution could help.

Arrangement Review: Once they have decided to use your service, prepare an agreement to go over with the prospect and iron out all the details.

Close: Your customers authorize the agreement, sign the dotted line, and make the payment.

Develop your objectives

You have to have detailed objectives for all of these phases of the sales pipeline. This will keep your sales team encouraged and will improve their possibility of success. For example, you could have a goal of close 120 big sales a year. This means 10 sales a month.

Create a dashboard:

Once you have specified the phases of your pipeline and developed your goals, you need to create a sales dashboard to track your development. The dashboard should update you each day with the details concerning your sales pipeline. With a glance, you should be able to tell where you are and what the strategy is. You could build a dashboard using a spreadsheet or advanced CRM software, like Hubspot. Take a look at Hubspot’s Advanced Sales Dashboard here.

The dashboard should help you monitor:

Priorities – What are my most important projects?
Calendar – Does my schedule reflect my priorities?
Activity goals – For example, how many proposals do I need to send every month?
Revenue goals – How much have I made toward my revenue goals?
Leads – Do I have enough leads to fill my pipeline?

Keep your sales pipeline full

Sales master Colleen Francis said that many salespeople find themselves in the “sales trap.” This occurs when a lot of initiative is taken to making sales and no attention is paid to creating new leads. With time, this results in a dry pipeline. To prevent this, you should be loading your pipeline constantly. Here are a handful of ways to keep a stable pipeline:

Buying lists: Bought lists can sometimes be inaccurate, but they can also be a good source for new leads.

List Generating Services: Like buying lists, these solutions are hit or miss, but specialized solutions can give you a good result to add to your list.

Develop Your Own List: Use networking sites like LinkedIn to produce a list of excellent firms and people who work there. Then, use services to obtain their contact information to turn them into qualified leads.

Inbound Lead Generation: Of course, the most ideal situation is getting leads to come to you. These leads know your brand and have some rate of interest in a topic related to your option. This could vary from having looked at your website, opening an email, downloading a premium offer, asking for a demo, and completing a contact form. To get more information about these leads to load up your pipeline, look at the post “Generating Leads Online: The Birds and the Bees.”

Maintain your pipeline

Once you are sending out proposals and closing deals, take some time to discover brand new leads to load the top of the funnel. This should be an every day routine to make sure your pipeline is constantly flowing. Find out the number of leads you need in the Engage phase to make sure you meet your sales goals. The bright side is that there are sales monitoring software programs available that could help you keep an eye on the activity of your potential customers in your sales pipeline.

Tidy up your pipeline

If a potential customer ends up being a dud, it’s time to reassess them. From time to time, clean your pipeline to help you concentrate on your qualified leads that deserve your attention. You will be able to then prepare and make better sales projections. Cleaning up your pipeline also means making sure contact information is up to date. For example, if a prospect leaves a company, take them out of the pipeline and find out who the new contact is. Check your goals to make sure they are feasible.

The bottom line

Developing a constant sales pipeline can be difficult for even the best salesperson. A good understanding of who your leads are and where they stand in the Buyer’s Journey will help you keep a well-flowing pipeline. This process belongs to a bigger body of marketing and sales strategies called Inbound Methodology.

But it can be hard to do this by yourself. Responsify works with Patient Engagement and Education sales and business development pros to offer strategy, support, and help in developing an inbound leads pipeline. By collaborating, we help marketing and sales teams purposefully bring in brand-new website visitors and then convert them to qualified leads and pleased clients.

We’ve helped many sales pros integrate Inbound right into their existing sales process. Do not hesitate to book a totally free strategy session to help you assess your methods and take them to the next level.