Converting X2 Appointments in Healthcare Using 3 Types of ICPs

Client's challenges

OpenTeleHealth is an exceptionally successful project that offers highly technological problem-solving gadgets for hospitals and healthcare. Before working with Belkins, they would find clients mainly through referrals. While having a good sales acquisition channel, they needed to level up their outreach in order to drive improved tangible results.OTH applied to Belkins and named prospecting and lead research among its major challenges.

1. Client influx. OTH goal was to fill its sales pipeline with high-quality prospects. Comparatively to a professional lead generation agency, the sales team couldn’t reach out to as many prospects as needed. So the initial request was to create an influx of top-quality leads so their sales team could spend their focus closing deals rather than searching for new customers.
2. Title research. The client didn’t have a lead prospecting strategy that would cover all titles interested in the product. As most OTH customers came from referrals, the sales team hadn’t yet developed a specific ideal customer profile (ICP) that could be worked out into several customer personas and result in an effective title research.

Solutions

Known for its well-coordinated teamwork as a healthcare lead generation agency, Belkins used its proven sales strategy while OTH supported the effort with timely feedback. To help OTH with prospecting, here are some of the major points Belkins touched on.

Title research

The primary target audience for the OTH product is healthcare providers, including public hospitals, private hospitals, clinics, caregivers, and nursing centers. The Belkins team, however, expanded the pool of titles beyond medical positions (like head doctors) to include IT people, CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, VPs, and other C-suite titles responsible for finances, business development, and innovation.

Language advantage

OTH runs its marketing campaigns in northern Europe. Given the German-speaking SDRs on the team, Belkins reached out to prospects using their native language. As a result, click-through rates and reply rates were significantly higher in German-speaking countries than in the rest of Europe.

Campaign development

Since we were expanding the ICP with IT and financial titles, we launched 3 different campaigns for the 3 types of personas we needed to reach out to. This helped ensure our value propositions really spoke to their pain points.

We wanted to ensure that our messaging was clear, consistent, and unique enough for each audience. We developed a content series tailored to each persona’s needs and goals. These include blog posts, e-books, guidebooks, and even videos.

• Campaign 1

Cold email campaigns must have a straightforward message to be effective. So addressing medical titles, Belkins would say something very simple: we’ll solve your nurses’ problems by automating the workflow. Our cold emails didn’t need to tell more as the recipient’s mind picks up the thought and imagines a future where workers have much less paperwork. It worked like magic because it really hit the nerve.

• Campaign 2

The OTH platform is easy to use and integrate into hospital systems, making it a boon for IT specialists within medical facilities. The Belkins marketing campaign targeted IT titles to inform them of an existing solution that required minimal integration and onboarding effort.

• Campaign 3

Another group of relevant titles is CEO, CFO, directors of services, and business development senior positions. Belkins cold email informed them that OTH knows a way to cut the cost and solve the problem of beds lacking at the hospital. Titles in charge of finances and processes understand like no other that if you stumble across a system that saves you over 60%, you need to grab it. And COVID also revealed it because automation saves money and nerves.

Main challenges we faced

Luckily Belkins team had no significant challenges during the OTH project other than handling a large volume of appointments. Managing and distributing the calls between four Belkins’s SDRs was tricky. When you have so many appts, SDRs struggle to follow up with all of them, keeping them in the pipeline. In turn, the client needed a sales team to nurture prospects consistently all the way down the sales funnel.

Eventually, we sorted out the influx of appointments. The client now has an impressive pipeline to work with and vast opportunities for new lucrative deals.

Results

According to a Belkins sales representative, the client’s first phrase on the meeting call was: “I heard great things about you guys, and now you have to prove it.” Needless to say, we exceeded their expectations. We’re happy to report that OpenTeleHealth was delighted with the results of our campaign.

Usually, Belkins’s SDRs manage to convert 1 appointment from 100 leads. Within the OTH project, we accelerated the traction so well that we could book a call after nurturing every 50 leads.

Here’s what Belkins achieved in four months:

• An open rate of 76% and a reply rate of 30-35% in German-speaking countries, as they’re usually high performing in terms of KPIs;
• An open rate of 57% for the UK and Nordic countries and a reply rate of 9-10%;
• 91 scheduled appointments out of 60 promised in the first three months;
• An extremely low number of no-shows;
• Prospects are hot, and all the appointments are high-quality so the client has seen a high conversion rate in new customers.

Key takeaways

1. Communication is key. The Belkins formula goes like this: a well-developed strategy + communication from the client = guaranteed success. Please communicate with your outsourced teams whenever possible to find out how your lead generation campaign is going. Whether they have any issues with your value proposition or maybe they have some questions about your target audience. Whatever it is, it’s better to address it in a timely manner.
2. Speak the prospect’s language. Salespeople who work internationally can dismiss the importance of native languages. However, seeing a subject line in your language works like an automatic impulse, which cannot be rejected in sales.
3. Tailor your outreach. Money-related arguments are less compelling on frontline workers, while a promise of less paperwork may not energize a CEO as much as a tired nurse. So you have to tailor your outreach because each group has very different needs and pain points. We had 3 campaigns targeting different titles with specific templates. For example, when it comes to IT titles, we would give technical details of the OTH solutions which appeal to tech people. For the C-level campaigns, we would center the message on how much money they can save.
4. Don’t underestimate teamwork. Things are much easier when the product you’re selling is superior. But to reach the target audience and let everybody know how great it is, you need a seasoned sales team that can maintain an excellent work dynamic. How can you achieve this? Build a trust-based partnership so people can work together as a team and support each other through effective communication.