How to find and engage healthcare decision makers

B2B sales isn’t for the faint of heart. Long sales cycles, overlapping stakeholder authority, and complex tech stacks are just a few of the challenges a sales rep has to contend with.

In healthcare, these complicating factors are often ratcheted up even further. Broad organizational structures with a variety of business functions and service lines create a convoluted network of influencers, gatekeepers, and decision makers. To close deals, sales professionals need to navigate these networks and home in on the most lucrative nodes—typically, those individuals with the greatest decision-making power.

But while healthcare buying decisions are increasingly centralized, successfully finding and engaging the right healthcare decision makers isn’t as simple as finding stakeholders with a “C” at the front of their title.

Successful sales professionals will understand not only the structure of a healthcare organization, but also its affiliations with other organizations and vendors, the influence of secondary stakeholders including boards of trustees and investors, and the importance of timing in what are often highly regimented buying cycles.

This guide will equip sales teams with a practical, data-driven framework for identifying healthcare decision makers and engaging them effectively.

Step 1: Use data to prioritize the right accounts
Step 2: Understand healthcare organizational structures
Step 3: Identify decision makers vs. influencers
Step 4: Map IDN and affiliation relationships
Step 5: Tailor messaging to stakeholder roles
Step 6: Engage across channels with consistency
Step 7: Measure engagement and optimize over time

Step 1: Use data to prioritize the right accounts

This guide is focused on identifying, understanding, and engaging the people within an organization who are best positioned to close a deal. But before you take on that work, it’s worth stepping back and using data to verify that you’re prioritizing the most lucrative accounts in the first place.

Through market research and/or partnership with a reputable data vendor, you should have deep, data-driven insights into your target accounts’ pain points and organizational goals, as well as real-world evidence demonstrating how your product or service can alleviate those issues and achieve those goals.

As you’re establishing the priority of target accounts, be sure to draw from a wide range of data sources to paint a clear picture of their needs and your ability to meet them:

Medical and prescriptions claims provide insights into service line usage and growth opportunities; procedure, diagnosis, and prescription prevalence; and the patient journey itself.
Reference and affiliations data help you track referral relationships and network integrity, and may also include details like contact information and organizational structure.
Population-level consumer data, including social determinants of health (SDOH), clinical interest models, and preferred engagement channels, make it easier to understand the patients being courted by or cared for by a target organization.

Step 2: Understand healthcare organizational structures

If you want to find the contacts best equipped to make or influence a buying decision, start by learning everything you can about the structure of the organization you’re targeting.

No two hospitals or health networks are structured quite the same. Healthcare organizations tend to be laid out vertically, with layers of various functions reporting up to a narrowing group of executives, but particulars like naming conventions for departments and titles, reporting hierarchies, and committee compositions can vary considerably from one organization to another.

If you’re lucky, the organization you’re interested in will have made some information about its structure and hierarchy public, though this is unlikely to be comprehensive. To get a full, up-to-date map of a provider organization’s decision-making structure, you’ll probably need to do some hands-on research, tapping into sources like:

LinkedIn and other professional social networks
News stories and press releases about mergers, acquisitions, and leadership updates
Direct inquiries to human resources or department heads
Conversations with other current or former employees

Don’t have time for cold-calling and web trawling? You can always partner with a third-party vendor that offers organizational charts, ideally with contact information, on your target hospital or health network.

Step 3: Identify decision makers vs. influencers

An up-to-date org chart equips you with a list of names, titles, and a basic sense of who’s responsible for what teams and functions within the organization. But it doesn’t necessarily tell you who’s really calling the shots related to your sales opportunity.

Of course, the final sign-offs are most likely to come from CEOs, CFO, COOs, and CTOs, depending on what you’re selling. But physician leaders and service line heads who actually oversee the work related to your product may also have some decision-making power, or are at least likely to be strong influencers or gatekeepers.

Using further research or intelligence from a reliable vendor, try to determine which members of an organization are the ultimate users of your product, as well as who is positioned to make a buying decision within that service line or business function.

While the daily users of your product may not have a hold of the purse strings, they’re likely to have significant influence over a buying decision, especially if they can vouch that a deal would help them perform their role with improved efficiency, safety, or cost-efficacy. These “product champions” could be doctors, nurses, technicians, IT professionals, or other workers without official decision-making authority.

In some cases, an influencer might not even be a prospective end user, but rather someone within the organization with considerable sway due to their patient base, professional connections, research output, or even a large social network. These key opinion leaders are valuable influencers who may have reach beyond the organization you’re actively targeting.

By the end of this process, you should have a list of decision makers and influencers, a basic understanding of their connections to one another, and any other details you can gather to help cultivate relationships with them.

Step 4: Map IDN and affiliation relationships

Most of the 7,300+ hospitals in the U.S. are part of an integrated delivery network (IDN), supporting more efficient patient care transitions as information and resources are shared between facilities.

Understanding the scale and makeup of these networks can help you craft your value proposition and find additional points of contact who can make or influence business decisions.

For instance, some IDNs leave purchasing decisions entirely up to their member hospitals, while others strategically manage all purchasing and distribution from a central administrative authority. Certain networks may operate under a hybrid model, in which individual facilities are granted decision-making authority over specific functions like supply acquisition, but intra-network technologies and pharmaceutical purchasing are centrally managed.

By pairing network affiliations with all-payor claims data, you can dig into the referral patterns and provider relationships at the core of a healthcare organization’s operations. This intelligence won’t tell you who makes decisions within an organization, but it can help you identify physicians responsible for generating referrals—and who thus may be influencers in their organization—as well as points of patient leakage that can inform conversations around pain points later in the sales cycle.

Step 5: Tailor messaging to stakeholder roles

With a clear understanding of an organization’s structure, its decision makers and influencers, and its affiliations with other facilities and organizations, you can begin to craft messaging that speaks to the unique needs of the stakeholders you’re targeting.

Take the value proposition for your product or service and walk through it from the perspective of each stakeholder you plan to engage:

What is their “why”? Hone your messaging to focus on the top reasons a deal would benefit that stakeholder specifically. Try to tell a story that speaks to them rather than listing generalized benefits.
What’s their preferred “language”? Are they used to communicating in highly technical terms, or are they more concerned with the bigger picture? Make sure your messaging meets their expectations, and don’t forget to include relevant visuals when possible.
Which channels are they most likely to engage with? In-person meetings and face-to-face video calls help bring a personal touch to your engagement, but initial outreach is likely better suited to an email, LinkedIn message, or phone call. Consider the stakeholders’ role and persona to get an idea of which channels they might prefer.
How do they prefer information to be packaged? Again, consider the stakeholders’ role and other details as you select informational collateral to accompany your outreach. If the stakeholder has a social media presence, see what kind of material they’re sharing and engaging with—blogs, whitepapers, one-pagers, presentation decks, etc.
What takeaways would they want to share with their peers/leaders? Based on your understanding of org structure and internal affiliations, include key data points and benefits that they could bring to other influencers and decision makers.

Remember: their time is limited, and there’s a good chance you’re competing with other vendors for their attention and a place on their calendar. A tight, highly tailored message will leave a greater impact than a barrage of data points.

Step 6: Engage across channels with consistency

Once you’ve squared away your messaging and determined which channels your target stakeholders are most likely to engage with, you can begin the outreach process.

Plot an outreach cadence that offers multiple opportunities for engagement across a consistent schedule. Depending on your resources and the organization’s buying cycle, you might send an email a week over the course of a month, each featuring a different type of marketing collateral, then slow down to once a month over the next three months if they fail to engage. Alternatively, you could try a twice-a-week blast for a few weeks, tapering to once a week and eventually once a month.

Step 7: Measure engagement and optimize over time

There’s no right or wrong cadence, but whatever approach you take, be diligent in tracking engagement rates over the course of a set period (a quarter is a good place to start).

As you move on to the next engagement cycle, take what you learned from your initial efforts and adjust the cadence, messaging, and collateral accordingly. Don’t be afraid to experiment or A/B test different variables in your process. When it comes to outreach strategies, fortune tends to favor the patient and consistent.

As we’ve written before, running an engagement campaign is a lot like caring for a plant. Results may be slow to come, but as you nurture your campaign with timely and relevant data, and learn from previous efforts, you’ll develop a natural “feel” for what timing and tactics deliver the best outcomes.

What it all means

Finding the right healthcare decision makers doesn’t need to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And engaging them shouldn’t require cold calling down a list and hoping for the best.

With a little research and a reliable source of data, you can develop insights into an organization’s administrative and operational structure, the people who make and/or influence purchasing decisions, and their connections with other relevant organizations and professionals. From there, you can craft personalized messaging, build impactful campaigns, and optimize them over time for the best results.

For more information on how to sell effectively in the healthcare industry, read our blogs on using healthcare data for sales and marketing success and identifying key opinion leaders and decision makers.

Want to see how our data can help you find and connect with the right people at a healthcare organization? Book a demo today.