Once a prospect decides to get serious about purchasing your health care product or service, one of the best times to gather marketing success stories is during their trial period. Negotiations are sometimes challenging, but repositioning your company from bidder to partner is important at the outset of the customer relationship. When the customer is running their trial, your company will likely be training their staff and ensuring a smooth and successful implementation. Since this trial period is never a time to be sitting on the sidelines, it’s the perfect time to do the investigative reporting that results in human-focused marketing material.
Potentially, various roles within your company might have customer touchpoints that can result in good content marketing. Your clinical team or product marketing staff might provide the initial product presentations and training to clinical, administrative and purchasing staff. The interaction they have with the customer’s staff can guide your company toward better marketing. Clinical team members might also serve as the best witnesses of the proving out of your products (we’ll tackle the topic of working well with your clinical team in a later post).
Alongside the clinical team, the sales team engagement is ongoing, and sales representatives are even incentivized to remain in close contact with customers. While the sales team might be focused on closing sales opportunities and operational details, they certainly are in a prime position to observe and interact with the customer’s clinical staff.
Additionally, your company leadership might be a good source for leads to great stories to investigate or leverage in various content marketing. Occasionally company leaders encounter compelling stories “from the trenches” in their discussions about significant clinical implementations.
Your Clinical Staff Is Close to the Action
The clinical staff will likely be involved in presenting your product benefits and proper procedures with clinicians. Clinical staff continues to engage with customers as needed but oftentimes has the highest level of engagement during the trial. Because of this, these staff members can serve as an excellent liaison with the in-trial customer.
Your company’s clinical staffers might also get a feel for which customer contacts might be better sources for information, comments or testimonials you can later use in your marketing content.
Your High-Touch Sales Team Maintains Close Customer Contact
Any good sales representative keeps close ties with customers throughout the business relationship. Generally, representatives don’t completely hand off a new customer to a clinical team during a product trial. Salespeople continue to be very involved, and they might even be required to be on site at health care facilities when their products are being used, implanted, etc.
The job of the sales team is to grow the business and doing so requires them to be participatory in their customer’s experience. This close engagement provides many opportunities to ask probing questions about patients’ and clinicians’ experience with products and services. Salespeople might also have frequent opportunities to observe the use of products. During the clinical trial and beyond, the sales team is uniquely positioned to gather success stories that provide the foundation for meaningful marketing.
Look to Your Leaders; They Have Stories Too
If a company’s leadership and culture has a human-centered focus and there’s a marketing appetite for people-based narratives, company leaders might be gathering and sharing stories that can be leveraged in content marketing. In relationship and reputation building, leaders often seek ways to connect to audiences in meaningful ways.
Additionally, leaders might have greater access to medical facilities and ability to talk to staff and management. Occasionally, great stories emerge from the top, so regular check-ins with leadership can also reveal avenues to great marketing content.
When a prospect decides to make changes and trial your product or service, you’re suddenly coordinating supply and potentially scheduling installations and training. Customer trials can be busy and hectic times. But they might also serve as some of the best times to gather great marketing material.
Worrell Communications provides content marketing to highlight your success in your clinical trials. Contact us to find out how we can help you find and tell great stories.