Training Your Staff and Conducting Market Intelligence

Strategy and staffing clearly are important to your physician relations strategy. But it's just as important to be certain that your staff is properly trained and that you have a mechanism to gather the right market intelligence. These facets ensure you have people out there with the right tools, and that you're moving in the right direction.

A recap of the seven best practices:

1. Planning to Achieve Goals
2. Structure, Model and Approach
3. ROI
4. Messages
5. Right Staff in the Right Roles with the Right Pay
6. Training
7. Market Intelligence

Training

To many organizations, training is a new function. It's also one that requires a formal approach to orientation and training for the staff involved in physician relations referral development. As you develop your training, there are several phases to consider:

Orientation

Develop a 90-180 day program for all referral development staff. You may need to customize it for the individual, depending on their clinical, operations or product and sales experience. Those with extensive hospital-based experience may require less focus on clinical or operations, but more extensive focus on the customer perspective, their access to services and issue management systems. 

Staff with sales experience, but less clinical or operations experience, will need extensive insider exposure to service lines, product knowledge, clinical language, service-line connections by diagnosis/specialty and the “how-to's” of your organizational behaviors. 

Your orientation might include using a service-line readiness assessment tool—interviewing service-line leadership and staff about product, access, capacity, issues, barriers to service and optimal referral options. This tools also helps the staff develop a feature/benefit definition to sell the service and begin exploring the physician questions and positioning messages.

Formal Training

Provide formal classroom relationship sales training to everyone involved in direct physician relationship management: service, sales, retention and issue management. This ensures the team is using an agreed-upon approach, messages and style.

This type of training provides a process to the selling cycle, reviews personality styles, key steps such as prospecting, asking questions, feature/benefit, closing and management of objections. 

This instruction should include case studies, role-playing and scenarios. Together, participants can practice real-life situations and develop personalized messages that work both for them and your organization's services.

Provide a workshop for those involved in supporting the relationship in terms of issue management or delivery of service. This might be a half-day session helping them focus on the physician as a customer, retention of the referrals and management of issues.

Establish field training and observation that allows you, as manager, to either demonstrate or observe one-on-one appointments with staff and customers. This enhances and personalizes the classroom experience and ensures that the staff has embraced the approach, messages and methodologies that represent your organization. 

Market Intelligence

Make sure that you find a way to document and share the information gleaned by your staff. Consider value levels of the intelligence—is it a “hot” need/response now, “good to know” information that impacts planning or discussions, or just regular reporting of information captured?

Based upon the value levels, consider how you'll sharing the outcomes:

• Who needs or must have the information?
• Does any of it need to stay confidential?
• What's the timeline, process and level of who responds to the shared information or question posed?

Discuss these issues early with your team and Leadership: You'll help frame a consistent method and process and ensure that market intelligence is managed appropriately.

For information that's helpful to strategic planning, business partnerships or ventures or recruitment, it might be helpful to consider an advisory council or development/innovation council focused on the physician as customer. This lets your organization be proactive with ideas or issues while also aligning internally around them—rather than treating the suggestions as belonging to any one department or entity.

Dig in and get results.

There are no miracles or easy answers to creating a successful referral development strategy. It requires a “roll up the sleeves,” labor-intensive approach with Leadership's commitment and diligence to the strategy.

Success will come, whether you're new to this strategy or are in your second or third stage of it. It's in applying best practices and results. It's in contribution margins. And it's in increased satisfaction results within retention physicians through communication and volume management. 

Find more tips for boosting your sales work in the field: Click here to read more.

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