As digital transformation sweeps across all industries, commercial teams must also adapt and figure out how to use it to their advantage. To remain competitive, healthcare and life sciences companies need the right tools to be more efficient and strategic. Winning sellers will adopt a solution-based sales approach where they diagnose prospect or customer needs quickly and accurately to recommend products that support those priorities.
To quickly identify pain points and recommend the right products, you can't waste time hunting down crucial information or piecing together data. Instead, sales reps need the right tools to find the best opportunities to focus on, easily anticipate prospect needs, and make agile decisions to close deals quickly.
In this post, we'll share ways you can lean into sales tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to quickly spot customer trends and give customers what they need in the moment, all while staying compliant during sensitive conversations.
What healthcare companies need to thrive in this moment
According to KPMG, commercial teams that are thriving in this new disrupted healthcare and life sciences sales environment focus on optimizing these three areas:
- Connecting processes: Align marketing, sales, and service with your go-to-market strategy to create differentiated customer experiences.
- Remaining flexible: Update (or get rid of) spreadsheets and clunky business intelligence (BI) point solutions that prevent you from keeping up with changing customer needs, business strategies, portfolios, and competition.
- Leveraging intelligence: Capture (and capitalize!) on the endless amount of data available. Then leverage AI capabilities to organize and analyze those insights into winning business decisions.
This post will show you how to make your healthcare and life sciences sales team more productive and efficient using sales technology.
Streamline tedious tasks so you can focus on selling
Sales technology eliminates the busy work that pulls you away from revenue-generating activities. Sales tools streamline processes like data entry and lead qualification, ensuring that you always have accurate information at your fingertips.
In addition, seeing critical sales data at a glance allows you to easily monitor deal progress and quickly customize follow-up emails for each prospect. With more visibility, you'll know which opportunities are most likely to convert into closed/won deals so you can prioritize your outreach accordingly.
Sales automation tools make it easier for reps to stay focused on what truly matters—closing deals—without getting bogged down by time-wasters like manual data entry into CRM, sorting through emails, or searching for contacts.
Run productive 1:1s and pipeline review meetings
If you want to move important deals forward, it is crucial to coordinate consistent 1:1 meetings and deal inspections. However, to make your meetings productive, the conversation should focus on discussing deals and pipeline data rather than on playing catch-up.
A Revenue Platform captures and organizes every data point (sales activities, relationship insights, pipeline stage, deal amount), which means you run highly productive and motivating meetings with sales based on must-have facts. This means more time spent talking about critical deals and prime opportunities for more effective coaching.
Gain control of your pipeline
Having true control over your pipeline means knowing which deals are moving, stalled, or at risk. Automating pipeline management allows you to identify risk and upside in real time.
Using a Revenue Platform with automated contact management, streamlined workflow management, and real-time analytics makes it easier to stay on top of leads and opportunities.
As a sales leader, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that your pipeline is always showing you the most accurate representation of your sales opportunities. No guesswork needed.
A data-driven approach to spotting customer trends
Choose the ideal time for to discount
The big benefit of sales technology is having a single source of truth with all sales activity in one place. You can easily optimize your pricing strategy for each customer when you have instant access to past deals and discounts.
You can track customer behavior throughout different periods using the right analytics. For example, understanding seasonal trends and the long-term purchasing habits of your existing customers or new buyers can help you adjust your sales approach accordingly.
Know what customers need at the moment
The most digitally mature companies in the healthcare and life sciences space (typically biotech and digital health companies) use bleeding-edge sales technology tools like conversational intelligence (CI) software.
By giving sales teams the option to record non-sensitive customer interactions automatically, CI software helps commercial teams easily spot customer needs. For example, sales reps can use call recordings and real-time transcription instead of sorting through CRM data and poorly recorded call notes.
Using the automatic flagging of specific keywords and phrases feature of a CI tool like Clari Wingman could allow sales reps to sell more life-changing products to the hospital, research center, doctor, and other stakeholders. Alternatively, other phrases mentioned could prompt you to remedy potential issues before they result in lost sales.
Conversation intelligence features allow you to skim through a transcript and listen to recordings at 2x playback speed. In addition, AI charts out call summaries so you can review calls by speakers and keywords that indicate customer dissatisfaction.
Industry-specific insights help you stay compliant
The healthcare and life sciences industry is highly regulated, bringing unique challenges to the sales role. On top of hitting quota, a large part of your job is continuously learning complicated, lengthy regulations and laws to ensure compliance with industry standards.
With sales technology, commercial teams don't have to worry about unintentionally breaking laws during sensitive conversations about topics like safety standards or treatment efficacy.
Pop-up cards, contextual cues, and battle cards will provide you with the information you need on the spot when interacting with customers. For example, CI technology will prompt you to "review regulatory laws before recommending or sharing additional info" when the customer mentions a new drug or medical device.
Use sales technology to unleash peak performance
Sales technology allows you to stay competitive in the healthcare and life sciences industry, where success depends on knowing the broader market and keeping up with ever-evolving regulations. Why limit AI/ML capabilities to research and development teams alone?
Commercial teams can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help have more informed, sensitive customer conversations.
It's time to optimize your sales activity capture and collection process to get time back and get better, higher-quality data in your CRM.
Finally, healthcare and life sciences companies in all areas—medical devices, biotechnology, contract research organizations (CROs), and digital health companies—can finally spend more time on high-impact, revenue-generating activities.
All thanks to smart pipeline management, automatic data capture, and conversation intelligence. Combining the right solution-selling strategies with the right tools will unlock true sales productivity!
Looking for the ultimate sales productivity boost? See how Clari can help.