SPONSORED CONTENT
Kip Creel, President, Standpoint
kcreel@standpointgroup.com
www.standpointgroup.com
How can researchers help health care marketers craft winning value propositions?
Marketing and selling solutions to health care providers is hard. Health care is a complex ecosystem and most decisions are made by diverse committees rather than individual decision makers. Mapping the ecosystem and pinpointing what each stakeholder values is critical to success.
Let’s consider the value proposition. An effective value proposition needs to be tuned to the needs and goals of the customer. The good news is that, from hospital to hospital, those goals and needs are nearly universal. However, each member of the diverse decision-making committee will value different things. Herein lies the challenge for marketing and sales: crafting an umbrella value proposition supported by message tracks that resonate with a diverse group of influencers and decision makers. Cracking this code is make-or-break for marketers. And health care researchers are the key.
For every solution and in every hospital, the acquisition and usage cost will always be evaluated against these four value drivers:
- Impact on patient outcomes
- Impact on patient experience
- Risk to the patient and provider
- Reduced costs
Patient outcomes means that your solution must make the patient better faster. Similarly, patient experience encompasses the tangibles and intangibles that foster greater word-of-mouth and lead to that doctor or health system becoming a trusted expert. The risks of the new solution for patient and provider will be evaluated against current options.
Marketing touting reduced costs is omnipresent; pinpointing the term’s precise meaning is critical because it could encompass acquisition cost, usage costs, maintenance costs, replacement costs, switching costs and more. What is often overlooked and increasingly important is the impact on labor costs and productivity. If your solution clearly saves time and money, the value proposition is strong. Oftentimes, however, the direct cost of new solutions may be higher to the department that is paying for it but could be saving the hospital money elsewhere. Identifying that “somewhere else” is very important.
The goal, of course, is to create enough value where acquisition and usage costs are less of a barrier. While still important, higher costs are justified if enough value is being created in the other buckets: outcomes, experience and reduced risk.
The next step for the researcher is to map out the sales roadmap. For capital expenditures in a single hospital, adoption may be contingent on the commitment of time and money by five or more people. The researcher’s mandate is to identify all decision makers, influencers and likely champions. For each member, the marketer will rely on you to understand the resonance of each value driver, identify message tracks to deliver to each person, uncover the necessary content for sales aids and map out the exact steps for the sales team to drive awareness, trial and ultimate adoption.