Building Competitive Immunity-A Strategic Approach to Sales Success in the Healthcare Marketplace

Failure to understand healthcare issues from a broad perspective. In surveys we ve done over the past ten years, customers consistently identify this as the main weakness of sales and marketing professionals.
Not only do customers want sales professionals to be expert in their area of clinical focus, they want them to understand relevant issues at a higher level. So what is this higher level something? Strategy. Strategy is that something you rely on to meet your objectives and achieve your goals. Technological advances and especially the Internet allow both the clinician and non-clinical influencer easy access to product features, benefits, core messages and technical performance information. E-Details and Key Opinion Leader testimonials are routinely included on company and product-specific websites. This is the new reality in it customers are looking for something more from the sales call, something they cannot get anywhere else: expertise and guidance that only the sales professional can provide.
Personal interaction with customers is changing dramatically and sales professionals need to know how to change with it. Customers want to interact with professionals who demonstrate a larger understanding of their world and who can apply this perspective to topics relevant to their customer. In today s marketplace, sales and marketing professionals must become more relevant resources for their customers. Doing so will gain them greater access to both current customers and to higher levels of influence in their accounts. This in turn will allow them to build immunity against their competition.
How does all this happen? By being willing to stop using a purely tactical approach in sales and embrace strategy instead. How do you get there? The goal of this book is to show you this larger understanding always offers more opportunities for building a robust strategy. Chapters One through Five illustrate our approach to Building Competitive Immunity and teach you what the strategic process is and how to begin to use it. The remaining chapters introduce and apply the teachings of Sun Tzu s The Art of War. Understanding this classic and revered text on strategy will move you to an advanced level of positioning products and services strategically in the healthcare marketplace. Our intent is to be provocative in our more strategic, customer-relevant approach while also giving you ways to use it.