This Week Health

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What's the secret. Today we discuss.

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 Today in health, it we're going to take a look at how to sell. To a healthcare CIO. That's right. I'm going to give you the secret handshake you knew there was one. And I'm going to tell you what it is. Not really, but anyway, we'll get into it in a minute. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system. And creative this week health. Channels and events dedicated to transform healthcare.

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You check it out at this week. called.com/artist site. Let's see Al Hey, we are still doing our fundraiser for Alex's lemonade state. If you get a chance. Hit our website top right-hand corner. Go ahead and click on that to give today. What we have done so far is raise 142. Thousand dollars. Since the start of our campaign. And it's really exciting. We have a very generous community.

We appreciate you and everything that you do. We have a thing going for this month. This month is Sarah Richardson's 50th birthday. And we're asking people to give 50 in her honor. And you can go ahead. And when you get to that website, select her name, click 50 bucks and say happy birthday to Sarah Richardson. All right, . Oh, one last thing. Share this podcast with a friend or colleague use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics that are relevant to you and the industry. It's a form of mentoring. In fact, with this episode, you could share it with your vendor partners. And they can listen to it and maybe sell better to you, or be more aware of what you would like out of somebody who sells to you. They subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, let's get to this. I just finished a meeting with 30 Tech. Salespeople. And they wanted to know. I essentially had a cell to CEO's. And so we did about an hour. Conversation, including Q and a on things.

I'm going to give you some of the things I said, if you were one of my CIO listeners, On this, shoot me a text. Let me know if I hit the mark. If I've missed the mark love to hear it. But this is the kind of stuff I say to people. When they say, what does it take? To sell to a healthcare CIO. I want to start with the cliche. Cause the cliche happens to be true.

There's a reason it's a cliche and that is CEO's are extremely busy. They're juggling, hundreds of active projects, managing infrastructure security. New initiatives across the organization. They're just really busy. So that's not an excuse. It's just to say for, I describe it like this as a CIO, you gotta stick and move.

You can't dwell on any one problem for too long of a. Period of time because you have hundreds of problems. If not thousands of problems that you need to help solve. For the health system, because there's a technology component to almost every solution that's going on in the house. As of now, obviously you have a team, you have staff and those kinds of things, you don't have to be involved in every one of those things that is going on, but you are busy.

There's a lot of things on your mind. What I have really stressed with salespeople is that they need to own the problem. Understand that the CEO's key. Problems, and position your solution to solve those rather than pitching features. It's interesting because one of the questions was about AI. And the organization is saying Hey, you should. You need to get in front of all your clients and talk about our AI. Solution to this, you know what we're doing in the industry around AI?

And my response to that person is no CIO is sitting around thinking, how can I get more AI into this health system. That's not what we're thinking. It's not a problem. That's not a problem we're trying to solve. AI is a feature like it helps me to do something else. What's the something else. What does it help me solve? Does it help me with data governance? Does it help me with. Charge summarization.

Does it help me with a patient flow? What does it help me with focus on the problem? No, the problem. No, the problem so well that if I give you five minutes to pitch to me, you should talk about the problem for four minutes. And say, we know that a lot of health systems have a problem like this. And it feels like this, and it has these components to it.

And where it gets stuck is this and this. And the more we talk about it, the more we realize that this is the real crux of the problem, and this is the real thing that needs to be solved. Our solution does this. If I had four minutes, I talk. If I had five minutes, I talked four minutes about the problem.

And one minute about the solution. If you gave me two minutes, I'd spent a minute and 30 seconds talking about the problem at 30 seconds talking about the solution. They don't want to know about the solution until they know that you really understand. The problem that they are facing. And I described it like this.

When you're getting all those affirmative signals those visual cues from the person that they catch you.

The best case scenario is you're talking about the problem. They're shaking their head. I know it would be better. If the CIO was actually crying, if you were talking about the problem and they were like in tears saying, you get me. You absolutely understand what I'm going through.

But they're probably not going to do that. They're probably not even gonna shake their head, but if they're making eye contact, if they're looking at you and God. Yeah. They're going to give you some visual cues okay, you get this. I know, no, you one, if you get to the end and they essentially. They're not going to hand you a PO. There, but they're going to look at you and they're going to go. Yeah.

Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what you do. How do you do that? How long does that take? How much involvement do you need for my team? How much clinician involvement do you need when they start asking those follow on questions? Then they feel like you've explained it in a way that resonates with where they live.

And I will tell you the CIO, his mindset is in problem solving mode. I don't know, 90% of the day. They come in and they start reading their emails. If you think their emails are all, happy, go lucky. Hey, great job today. I logged in today, it's great.

It's working that kind of stuff that nobody writes that email. From the minute they get in there reading emails that are essentially problems, and then they have to categorize and organize the problems. The other thing I told them is if they're. Speaking to an acute problem, they're going to get more of your attention. If they're speaking to a secondary problem, they're going to get less of your attention.

It's not that it's not important to them. They do want to solve that problem. It's just not the problem. That's on their plate. They literally have so many problems. They can't house all the problems in the frontal cortex. They would just implode. So they have to prioritize them and say, that's a problem for another day.

I have people in sales positions all the time, say to me, do they not realize how important this is? And I want to say to them, Yeah. Do you not realize how important. Mortality is to them and reducing mortality in addressing COVID and, fill in the blank and standing up that new building and making sure you return to profitability.

There's an awful lot of things here that are important and yes, your thing's important, but in the scheme of things, it's not on their plate today doesn't mean it's not going to be. It just means it's not today. So I tell people. Focus on the problem set. Really understand the problem set when you really understand the problem set, you'll also know, does your solution really solve this problem? And then you can speak to it. Specifically. I also tell them that referral selling is. I don't want to say everything in healthcare, but it's really important. You build credibility by sharing how you've solved this similar problem. For their peers. And I realize everybody has to get that first client.

And that's a whole nother conversation, a whole nother topic. But once you have those first couple of clients, that's how you build credibility. Hey. I'm working with X over at this house system, they had a similar problem. They're doing a pilot right now. Would you like me to connect you with them? That would be, that conversation of that CIO that CIO is going to move the cell further, faster than anything.

You're about ready to say any words that come out of your mouth. The referral network within healthcare, if there is a secret handshake, it's that? It's that we talked to each other. And a failed implementation is really death in our industry because we all talk to each other. In fact, when we're looking for a new solution, Our first thing is to pick up the phone or shoot an email.

Most of the times she email. Hey, has anyone else seen this? Is there anyone else working on this, that kind of thing. That's one of the primary ways that you're gonna build credibility is how you solve that problem. But again, focus on the problem, how you solved it for pier, make those connections. And some of the other things I ancillary things I said is the budget process matters. People are like, why did, why does this move really quick in one house with somebody really slow in another health system? And I don't know specifically about those health systems, but I will say that the budgeting process does matter. If a salesperson is calling on a health system and can't tell me what their budgeting process is, or the timing of that budgeting process, they haven't done their work. They need to do that work.

They need to understand when's the best time to get this in front of the budgeting process and understand their budgeting around problem sets. We want to serve this underserved population better. We want to serve this community better. We want to expand this these all create problem sets that they're trying to solve with technology with investments. And I would say it used to be like you could come in with a technology focused kind of thing and maybe get that through, but more and more, it is business focused problem set focused. I would say, oh, almost exclusively now. There's still going to be some health systems out there that maybe you hit that innovation bucket, where they go, Hey, we're going to try something new over here.

That kind of stuff. Sometimes that happens. I'm going to close with this. One of the last things I said to them is develop relationships across the entire it team. Not just the CIO. I relied very heavily on my team on my VPs, they were experts in their field. They knew things really well in a lot of cases, they negotiated all the way through the contract.

They would, we'd have weekly meetings and they'd come in and they'd talk to me about the various things that they were doing or negotiating So that, there were there was buy-in for me. So by the time the contract got on my desk, I was blindsided. We had a process of communication, but the CIO just cannot do it alone. And that's one of our key messages at the 2 29 project.

You have to have a good team and we want to be a part of that team that supports you. But at the end of the day, the CIO cannot carry the burden by themselves. They have to have a good team if you're selling into that organization and they sponsor you with the CIO, sponsors you to one of their team members. That's gold. Like that's what should happen.

It should move from the strategic down to the tactical. And don't be surprised if that BP has people depending on the size of the organization who are even more tactical than them, that they say you want to work with this person. They know the people in the department, they know that. and they have the access to the tools.

I want to get their analysis of working with you. Now, some people might view that as a slight like, oh, I was at the CIO level and I got pushed back down. But that's just how sales work. You have to get down to the tactical people who are going to evaluate what. You know what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. And they're going to provide feedback to the VP and a good VP is going to be able to process that and keep that moving.

But sometimes it's going to come back to the CIO to say, Hey, This isn't going to work in our environment because of X, Y, or Z, or, wow. Hey, this does more than you think it does. This might be able to solve not only that problem, but this problem and that problem. So develop relationships down through the entire organization. I'm going to end with that on a Friday it's Friday ramblings.

I talked for an hour and five minutes. To this group of 30 salespeople, it was a lot of fun. But let me just summarize this real quick. CIO is, are busy, lots of active projects, lots of things on the top of their mind, but they are in problem solving mode. 90% of the time frame your. Your pitch around their problems.

It's, help them to let them know that you understand what they're going through. You understand you're approaching things from a problem standpoint as well. Do not pitch your features. I do not care about your AI. I care about what your AI can do for me. If your AI can do something special for me, for our system, for our physicians, for our patients, I want to know that. But again, you're getting back to the problem set. We can help you to solve this problem for your patients. Build credibility through solving similar problems for other health systems or peers within the industry is extremely valuable. And no, the budget cycles and finally go ahead and develop relationships across the entire it organization.

So those are some of the things I said. I said a lot more stuff. But this is a short show. So that's a, that's what you're going to get for this Friday. Again, if you're a CIO listener, just go ahead and text me, let me know if I'm close. What I missed, what I should have talked about more and really appreciate your feedback. All right.

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