How to Sell a Product and Succeed with Medical Industry Clients

Knowing how to sell a product or service is crucial for long-term success. Any business needs to have a solid strategy in place for marketing their product or service, getting in touch with their target audience, and building relationships that ensure repeat business.

Many medical and pharmaceutical companies struggle with meeting sales goals—and individual sales reps are often under extreme pressure to hit their numbers. This can make for a stressful environment that results in high sales team churn.

Following a few tips to close a sale and knowing what to sell and when to sell it can help increase success, reduce stress, and make for a better bottom line. With that in mind, here are some things to consider when trying to sell a product to medical/pharmaceutical industry customers:

Who Is Your Target Audience?

While the medical industry is certainly more niche than the general consumer sales industry addressed by Amazon Shopping, Wal-Mart, and other retailers, there is still a need to identify your target audience within the industry.

Why? Because there is often a world of difference between trying to sell to a doctor at a private practice, the Director of a major hospital, or a supply chain manager at another corporation. Each of these individuals will have their own preferences which will influence how to sell products to them.

Do I Know How to Market My Product to My Target Audience?

When identifying your target audience, it’s important to consider how to market your product or service to your target audience. Two major things to investigate when learning how to market a product to a specific type of customer include:

• Where Does My Target Audience Get Their Information? When marketing a product, it’s important to know where your customers go to get information. Do they read online medical journals, business management advice columns, or other online publications? Do they follow social media influencers in the industry? Knowing where your customers go to get information is crucial for selecting the most effective places to put ads.
• What Does My Target Audience Want? What are the goals of your customers? Is their top priority improving patient outcomes, saving money on medical procedures, improving efficiency to increase patient throughput, avoiding shortages of crucial medical supplies, or something else? Understanding the target’s goals and motivations is vital for knowing what to sell and how to sell it to them. Offering a poor-fit product and not showing customers how they benefit from it can negatively impact long-term relationships.

Having this information can also help with qualifying prospects that are acquired from your marketing efforts. For example, it can be useful to compare a prospect’s information to your target audience profile to see if they fit.

How to Calculate the Selling Price of a Product

While having things for sale is important, it’s also important to have those things for sale at the right price. If a product’s price is too low, your company won’t turn much of a profit. However, if the cost is too high, then that can be off-putting for potential buyers—especially if there are competing products of a similar quality at a lower price point.

As noted in an Inc.com article on setting product prices: “there’s no one surefire, formula-based approach that suits all types of products, businesses, or markets.”

Some things to consider when calculating the selling price of a product or service include:

• Direct Product/Labor Costs. How much does it cost your business to make a product or provide a service in materials and labor?
• Operating Expenses. How much overhead does your business incur to operate? This includes things like rent for office or manufacturing facility space, utility bills, salary for management team members, etc. that are incurred every day regardless of sales.
• Product Development Costs. How much did the product being sold cost to develop? Being able to earn a return on investment is important for staying in the black.
• Warehousing Costs. How much space in a warehouse or climate-controlled storage facility does a product take up? What is the cost per square foot for storage? How long does the product stay in storage, on average, before being shipped to the client?
• Your Revenue Target. How much profit should your business make from selling each product.? This is useful for setting a per-product profit margin that helps your business meet its profitability goals.
• Your Competitors’ Product Prices. Do your competitors have similar products or services? If so, what are they charging? This can help you establish a baseline for what is reasonable pricing for your target audience. However, if competitors are selling at a loss (or prices that would force you to do so if you price matched), then it may be necessary to focus on the unique benefits/advantages of your product instead.

Having this information can help with selling medical and pharmaceutical products at a reasonable price that still allows for profit.

However, in some situations, it may be beneficial to accept selling a product at a loss. For example, you could do this to clear inventory of an item that is being phased out or to attract customers so they can be up-sold on other items with a stronger profit margin.

Choosing How and Where to Sell Your Product

There are many different ways to sell a product these days. In medical and pharmaceutical sales, the preferred method has long been to use face-to-face meetings between sales representatives and decision-makers. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, arranging in-person meetings with doctors and other decision makers has become difficult.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the different channels for selling pharmaceutical or medical goods:

Website/E-Commerce Sales

Thanks to pioneering giants of commerce like Amazon Shopping, selling products online has gone from being an occasional business model to being the norm. In fact, online shopping spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to data cited by Digital Commerce 360, “Consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020, up an incredible 44.0% year over year.”

While the market for pharmaceutical sales is more restricted (and heavily regulated) than general consumer sales, marketing and selling products on the company’s website could be a valuable revenue generating opportunity.

However, it can also carry a number of hurdles for pharmaceutical companies to clear. For example, companies interested in distributing prescription medications directly to consumers online will need to meet the U.S Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which is designed to “build an electronic, interoperable system to identify and trace certain prescription drugs as they are distributed in the United States.”

It also means creating a website that can attract your company’s target audience, guide them to the specific products or services they want, and allow them to close a deal (or at least arrange a meeting with a sales rep). This can be an expensive and time-consuming project.

Plus, online-based shopping models that rely on a decision-maker to fill a cart might not always be practical for medical sales industry companies that focus on delivering products or services to hospitals or businesses in bulk.

Mobile Apps

Take the convenience of online shopping and put it in the palm of your target audience’s hand with a mobile app. This carries many of the same benefits of having a website-based store, except even more convenient.

However, in addition to having to maintain a digital storefront, the company will have to build, update, and market the app that prospects will use. This can be a large ongoing expense, as smartphone apps will need to be updated regularly to keep up with new device and operating system releases.

Mobile applications may be a good fit for companies in the medical industry that sell a variety of over-the-counter medications for numerous conditions directly to the general public.

Face-to-Face Meetings

For years, face-to-face meetings were the preferred method for selling pharmaceutical products to key decision-makers in medical organizations and businesses. However, there have been a number of events that have many decision-makers reconsidering meeting pharma sales reps in person.

The COVID outbreak in 2020 was a major driving factor for limiting face-time between sales reps and their prospects. However, that isn’t the only factor. There have been lawsuits alleging fraud levied against pharma companies in the past for paying doctors to “unlawfully induce them to prescribe” their drugs. Avoiding the negative perception of a bribe has motivated some decision-makers to distance themselves from their pharma sales rep connections.

However, face-to-face meetings, if they can be arranged, remain a powerful tool for building relationships with customers that last and for closing deals.

Over the Phone/Videoconference Sales

As an alternative to in-person meetings, many sales reps opt to conduct sales via phone calls or videoconferences instead. Calling a prospect over the phone poses some challenges, such as getting by the prospect’s “gatekeepers” or not being able to read body language to gauge their responses more accurately.

Video calls help to simulate in-person meetings by letting sales reps and prospects converse with a camera. While not a complete replacement for in-person meetings, this can be incredibly useful for keeping in touch with contacts who are out of town or prefer the convenience of remote communications. It’s also useful for field sales teams who have to service a large geographic area and cannot meet every client in person in a timely manner.

Any sales channel has potential advantages and drawbacks. Knowing when to sell on one channel versus others can be incredibly useful for promoting long-term sales success.

General Sales Tips for Pharma Sales

So, how can your sales reps close deals consistently? While there is no one-size-fits-all “perfect” solution for medical sales, there are some tips to close a sale that reps can follow to help improve their results:

• Get to Know the Product. Doctors and other decision-makers will have questions about the products they’re being asked to buy. Knowing the details of the product inside-out can help keep conversations moving smoothly and impress potential buyers.
• Try to Learn the Customer’s Challenges and How the Product Addresses Them. Why should your prospects care about your products? While a doctor might have questions about the exact content of specific active and inert ingredients in a medication, that isn’t the selling point. Instead, the selling point is how a product or service addresses the prospect’s needs. To that end, asking prospects questions about their goals—and then highlighting how your products helps them meet those goals—can be a crucial sales strategy for closing deals.
• Build a Relationship with Clients. Medical sales aren’t just a “one and done” situation. Closing a deal with a prospect is good, but building a relationship that keeps them coming back for more is better. This may mean learning how to break the ice, asking personal questions in addition to business-related ones to encourage familiarity. Also, reaching out to prospects around major holidays or their birthday to just say “Congratulations” without pressuring them for a sale can help keep you top of mind and build a rapport.
• Be Honest about the Product at ALL Times. It should go without saying, but it’s important that you never misrepresent a product’s capabilities to the customer. Trust is the hardest thing to earn in a business relationship—and it’s almost impossible to regain once broken.

These are just a few tips for closing sales and building long term success. Do you need help building a successful sales team? Reach out to Axxelus today to get started with contract sales services!