How Often Should You Call On Accounts in Medical Sales?

Here’s one of the most common questions I’m asked by medical reps:

“How often should I call on an account or prospect?”

I’m going to ask you to be the sales prospect for a moment for a common consumer purchase—a car.

Let’s say you test-drive a car, go through the entire sales presentation at the dealership, and meet with the business manager, the finance manager, the social media manager, and the customer experience manager…..you get the point.

But you’re not ready to buy, so you thank the salesperson, and tell them, “I’ll keep it in mind. I need to think about it.” (See that…you say that to get out of sales situations, too, just like your customers!).

You go back to your life, then sometime later, you receive a call from the auto salesperson: “Hi, I was just calling to follow up. Have you made a decision?”?

How do you feel when a salesperson hits you with a rhetorical question of sorts?

Here’s what I’d like to say… “Oh, thanks for following up. I was going to buy that $60,000 car, but I forgot. I’m glad you called….” But out of respect for a fellow salesperson, I don’t. I’m polite and say, “I haven’t made a decision yet. I’ll let you know if I decide to buy”

Chances are you can relate to this annoyance because it’s pretty common M.O. in the car industry…

Unfortunately, it’s also woefully common in the medical sales world.

Medical reps don’t plan their calls strategically. Instead, they get in front of a prospect and spew literally all the product data they can think of, or that the prospect allows them to enumerate in the allotted time.

Normally, the sale doesn’t happen right away, and now the rep is in a follow-up situation. Only they don’t know what they’re going to talk about when they follow up (since they already covered everything!).?

So, they let a week or two go by, or wait until they run into the prospect again and say something like, “I wanted to follow up with you after our last conversation. Have you had any thoughts?”

Yeah, they're probably having a thought right now—about you, and it might not be very kind. You might as well say, “We talked a week ago. You ready to buy yet?”

What’s the problem?

There is no sales conversation strategy!

Most product sales in healthcare require more than just one sales call. Sure, there are times when you can close a deal in one call, but your plan should allow for follow-up calls (since you’re in a follow-up situation most of the time).

If the decision to use your product boils down to something other than price, it’s likely that it will take multiple calls to close a sale. Therefore, I strongly urge you to try this strategy:

Break the sale into multiple conversations, each with a different focus.

Focus on just one topic during each conversation that you know is relevant to the prospect’s specialty. Let the prospect take the lead—if they want to discuss more than the subject focus you brought to the conversation, they’ll tell you. Go with the flow. But…

Always have another reason to come back, which is…you guessed it—a different but related relevant issue or topic.

You may have noticed, I still haven’t answered the original question: How often should you call on a prospect or account?

The answer is: Whenever you have relevant and valuable information to share. In other words, something which is of potential value or helpful to the prospect that you didn’t discuss previously, or are able to better explain.

When you sell this way, it does several things:

• It de-commoditizes your sales approach because you’re not product-focused like almost every other medical rep that prospect sees.
• You always have a ‘new’ reason to follow up, which, when the prospect benefits, tends to…
• Give you more access to that prospect (because the convo is about them and not about some product they already have).

Selling in healthcare almost always involves follow-up. This means having a strategy for your sales conversations. With some planning and, a little patience, you’ll never need to find more comfortable ways to ask, “Are you ready to buy yet?”

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