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Specialty Medical Company
When Your Salespeople Need an Insider's Perspective on What's Keeping Customers Awake at Night
 Business Issue
Sales staff of this specialty medical company were accustomed to selling to clinical personnel such as doctors and technicians. But the evolving health care environment required adapting to new decision makers non-clinical personnel such as materials management directors and purchasing staff-who base their purchase decisions on economic considerations. Sales staff needed new knowledge to frame products in terms of their impact on non-clinical business issues.
Process
The Advantage solution was Celemi's Apples & Oranges Health Care, a customized business simulation in which sales people actually experience a chief hospital administrator's job. It gave the medical company sales staff an insider's perspective on how to win business by speaking to product virtues that help drive down the cost of care.
Apples & Oranges Health Care was presented to 170 sales staff and managers. During the simulation, participants ran a hypothetical hospital. They created the budgets, solved the issues, and planned the cost-saving strategies that were typical of their customers' businesses. In this way, the sales staff gained a better understanding of how health care providers reduce costs through more efficient use of resources and better management of the financial impacts of patients, insurance companies, and suppliers.
Result
- Sales force able to sell effectively to new, non-clinical decision makers
- Business relationships enhanced because sales force can demonstrate insider's perspective on health care cost issues affecting customers
By teaching sales staff how to change the way they sell, the company took an important step in a highly competitive and evolving market environment. Apples & Oranges Health Care gave the sales force the ability to create a proactive, non-clinical selling approach that would engage business-focused decision makers. This knowledge was new territory to the sales force, and it was highly welcomed. After the simulation, one manager echoed the group consensus by saying, "Now I have the confidence to call on a materials manager and ask good, important business questions."
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