5 Healthcare Sales Training Tips to Grow Patient Census

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While smart assisted living marketing campaigns play an instrumental role in growing patient census for physicians or senior living organizations, they are of little use without being complimented by a strong sales strategy. Excellent assisted living marketing can bring you hot leads, but what ultimately matters is whether these can be successfully converted into new residents or patients. The best senior living facilities and medical practices know how to seamlessly integrate assisted living marketing and healthcare sales training.

What is Sales Training?

A typical sales training program will help organizations enhance their communications with potential customers. In senior living and healthcare, great communication is perhaps more important than in any other industry; when a senior’s health and happiness is on the line, impersonal pitches and lazy sales efforts simply won’t cut it. Making a real and personal connection to each prospective customer is not only useful, but absolutely vital.

Excellent senior living or healthcare sales training will empower each member of your team in their personal role. The most effective sales training programs go beyond sales teams, too, because every staff member has an important role to play in your success. Your sales training program could include everything from essential sales skills like cold emails, prospective resident communication, right through to CRM training and team building exercises.

Why is Healthcare Sales Training Important?

Everyone agrees that perfecting your assisted living marketing strategy is vital for growing resident census, but the importance of robust sales training is often overlooked. Unfortunately, even the smartest and most costly marketing efforts will never perform at their peak without being complimented by a team with excellent healthcare sales training. While marketing draws in hot leads and inquiries from prospective residents, sales training can help you effectively convert these into visits, tours and ultimately, residents.

Actions speak louder than words, and bold claims mean nothing if you don’t follow through with targeted action. With excellent sales training, your team will be prepared to maximize the chance of each walk-in, call, tour, inquiry, or appointment becoming a resident or patient in the future. A stellar marketing strategy can attract your ideal customer, but seniors need to feel real, human connection to trust a community or physician with their health and wellbeing. Effective healthcare sales training will provide your organization with the tools you need to deliver this compassionate, reassuring and tailored communication.

Each senior who makes an inquiry should be treated as a possible new resident or patient; families typically carry out extensive research before taking any further steps at all, so if they’ve got as far as reaching out, there’s a good chance you’re a serious contender. What you do next is of vital importance, and with solid sales training your team will know how to take each inquiry one step further. Ultimately, a good sales strategy could be the difference between securing a new resident and losing them to a more proactive competitor.

5 Powerful Healthcare Sales Training Ideas and Tips

1. Work with your CRM system. As a senior medical practice or assisted living facility, your customer relationship management (CRM) system has powerful potential. Not only can your CRM streamline and personalize communications with both leads and existing residents depending on their circumstances, but it also serves as a vital data hub. The data collected by your CRM can help you get to know your customers better and create targeted assisted living marketing campaigns.
2. Get to know your customer. Creating consumer personas can be an excellent way to tap into your audience and tailor marketing and sales strategies to meet their needs and address their unique pain points. As a senior living organization or medical practice, it can be useful to focus on both seniors themselves and their younger relatives or family caregivers. Consumer personas may be based on data from your CRM and current residents, alongside extensive market and competitor research.
3. Learn how to treat each lead as an individual. Though consumer personas can get you so far in understanding the general needs of your prospective residents and their families, no two seniors are the same. In your sales training, highlight the importance of offering every visitor a personalized experience based on precisely what matters to them. When conducting tours, for example, it can be tempting to spend a lot of time highlighting your newest and most cutting-edge facilities. But spending 15 minutes talking to the adult child of a senior with advanced dementia about your new virtual golf system will only tell them that you are not listening to their needs.
4. View sales training as a dynamic practice. As time progresses, so will your customer’s wants, needs and pain points. Sales training is never ‘complete’, and should instead be viewed as a process that adapts and evolves as the industry, local community and wider world changes. Review and refresh your senior living or healthcare sales training at least quarterly or semi-annually. This dynamic approach will help you stay one step ahead of the competition at all times, keeping inquiries flooding in and resident census up.
5. Play to your team’s strengths and offer incentives. Making sure your healthcare sales training is engaging and enjoyable is half the battle. Most of us have likely attended a sales training event which felt like a waste of time and left us counting down the minutes until the end. Make it clear how the training you deliver will benefit your community, and demonstrate how valued your staff members are by offering incentives and rewards for successful implementation of new strategies. While highly trained staff are vital, so are authenticity and integrity; a team who are all equally passionate about improving your community is truly the most valuable asset you can have.

Invest in Healthcare Sales Training Today

Scott Marketing and Consulting Group’s® sales coaching program will help your organization get the most from your marketing strategy, focusing on your team’s unique strengths. Get in touch today to find out how we can grow your resident or patient census and improve ROI with targeted assisted living or healthcare sales training.

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