The Social Sale: a New Year, a New Way of Connecting

Jennifer Dennard, Social Marketing Director
January 7, 2012

Though it may still be a bit early to tell if 2012 has come in with a roar, the Year of the Dragon is definitely off to a busy start in healthcare. The presidential race is heating up, with healthcare reform front and center. The current state of reform is giving the industry - and everyone on its fringes - ample opportunity to implement, innovate, merge, acquire, consolidate and coordinate. Whether it be care for patients, or products for providers, everyone is busy trying to move this market forward.

Those on the B2B side of healthcare are looking for new ways to reach the new customers that reform has helped create. The B2C market realized a while ago that social media offers untapped potential in this area, and it seemed last year that B2B folks were warming to the idea. Marketing folks certainly helped to spearhead this lead-generation effort, and as seems to usually be the case, continue to try to bridge the gap between themselves and their sales teams.

No matter what the name of the department, "social" and "selling" are, like the healthcare industry itself, hot topics. But like any buzzword, the hype can often belie the true meaning of and intent behind the term. So, just what is "social selling?" A quick Google search yields several angles:

3 Ways to Build an Awesome Social Selling Machine
Need Extra Cash? Learn How to be a Social Selling Superstar
Social Selling - Everybody's Talking About the New Sound

Though many in this industry would undoubtedly love to be awesome selling machines earning loads of extra cash, using social media to help make the sale ultimately boils down to one fundamental concept: "The best use of social media in selling is to increase the rapport and interest from the prospect based on significantly improved preparation prior to actual prospect contact," explains Don Graham, General Manager of Billian's HealthDATA. "It calls for much better 'homework' and increases the probability of a successful sales call.

"In other words, says Billian's HealthDATA client Chris Luoma, Vice President of Business Development at Vendormate, "the cold call is dead."

"I know that if I get a call from someone trying to provide a service to us who doesn't know anything about our company, then I'm immediately turned off," he explains. "But if you can approach someone with an understanding of their business, you're in the door a lot faster."

Vendormate, a healthcare technology solutions company that helps buyers manage their supplier relationships, is working to create social networks that enable their customers to build relationships among themselves, outside of the direct Vendormate relationship. At the same time, the company is educating its sales teams on the value of information found in social media updates from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook along with the challenge of filtering those updates down to the most relevant.

The company currently has an active blog, a Twitter presence, and targeted LinkedIn group participation handled through marketing. "We aren't necessarily pushing our sales force to do that," Luoma says. "More of what we're doing on the sales side is mining social media data to learn about our customers."

He adds that social selling ultimately comes down to using social media to:

understand a customer or prospect's business;
present them with information about a new product based on that information; and
gauge their response and then refine that message to suit where they are in the sales cycle.

"Our mantra is to help the people in our network - both buyers and sellers - better understand who they're doing business with today and who they should be doing business with tomorrow. We're interested in helping to drive that transparency and activity in and around our network."

Look for future monthly installments of "The Social Sale," the latest Billian's HealthDATA blog series.

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