Sales leaders, such as yourself, spend countless hours planning and optimizing their account targeting strategies. However, without the right strategy for analyzing accounts, your sales reps may end up targeting the wrong referral partners and miss out on potential opportunities.
It’s crucial to have a strategy that involves the whole picture of your referral sources, including your current market share, areas for growth opportunity, and how you can most efficiently direct your team’s time, effort, and ultimately ROI to grow your business.
With an account planning strategy, your sales and marketing team can thoroughly analyze their targets and ensure your sales reps are spending their time with the right referral sources with a proper healthcare market assessment.
Start with a healthcare market assessment based on share and opportunity
The first step to creating your strategy is assessing your potential accounts based on market share and the level of opportunity for growth. We recommend using our market assessment tool to visualize your opportunities. This is a simple way to evaluate the referral partners your sales team is currently targeting and as well as the providers they want to be working with. Once the targets are collected – plot them on the chart in one of the four quadrants and determine what the outreach strategy should be.
When plotting the targets on the quadrant, you want to focus on the X and Y axis. The X axis signifies the opportunity or volume of patients the referral partner may have, and the Y axis indicates market share relating to the referrals your organization is currently receiving from those partners.
Once you have created the X and Y axis, you should focus on how each referral target fits in the quadrant based on their referral potential:
The four quadrants indicate the opportunity and market share levels:
- Quadrant 1 – high opportunity, high market share
- Quadrant 2 – low opportunity, high share
- Quadrant 3 – low opportunity, low share
- Quadrant 4 – high opportunity, low share
After plotting the accounts on the quadrant, your sales and marketing team can determine how to adapt your strategy to create a plan focused on the right referral partners, gain more referrals, and grow your business.
Below is an in-depth view of each of the quadrants and where to plot your targets.
High opportunity, high market share
Protect and grow
For referral partners that have high opportunity and high market share, you want to protect and grow these accounts as they are the top referrers for your agency. These accounts provide a significant amount of opportunity to provide post-acute care services for new patients that need your services. The targets in this quadrant should be your main focus to build your market share.
Even though your team is dominating this quadrant, there is always the opportunity to grow and increase your market share with these partners.
Low opportunity, high market share
Re-evaluate
Lastly, the accounts with low opportunity and high market share are the ones your sales team should re-evaluate. These are tricky because there isn’t a high amount of opportunity, but there is a high market share, so your organization is receiving the referrals that come from these referral partners. They don’t refer a lot of patients, but when they do, your organization receives those referrals.
With these referral partners, you should review each one carefully and determine: if your team were to receive 100 percent market share in these accounts, is it enough to justify the time and effort your team is spending to maintain these types of accounts.
Low opportunity, low market share
Walk away
Referral partners with low opportunity and low market share don’t have a lot of referral activity, and your organization receives little to no referrals. These are the referral targets you and your team need to reflect on and re-evaluate. Are these accounts worth it the time we are spending with them? Could our time be better spent on quadrants 1 and 2? How would our market share improve if we shifted our efforts from the left side of the quadrant to the right side?
These identified referral partners should become a lower priority as your team re-evaluates your outreach strategy.
High opportunity, low market share
Grow
The strategy for accounts with high opportunity and low market share is to ensure that these targets become an area of focus. There is plenty of opportunity for growth in these accounts, and your sales team needs to increase their outreach efforts and grow their relationships with these referral partners to increase your market share.
How to successfully become the top referral destination in your market with the right healthcare sales strategy
By adding this healthcare market assessment tool to your sales strategy, your team can reflect on your outreach efforts and align with your marketing team to ensure your messaging is data-driven, persuasive, targeted, and easily conveys your agency’s strengths in the market.
Always make sure your sales team is set up for success with the right tools to compliment the market assessment – such as persona-based messaging, market data and insights, and activity reporting tools – like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) dashboard – to help track metrics, keep conversations and tasks with reps up-to-date, and ensure KPIs are aligned with the goals of your strategy.
Want to learn more about account strategy planning? Watch the “Roadmap to Smarter Agency Growth” Webinar
