Harness Design Thinking Now For Increased B2B Healthcare Sales

Design thinking in B2B healthcare sales enhances customer understanding and relationships.

In B2B healthcare sales, challenges are abundant and multifaceted. Sales leaders must navigate a landscape filled with new technologies, the ongoing impact of COVID-19, frequent mergers, the shift towards value-based care, and heightened competition amid market noise. It’s not enough to sell a product or service; sales teams must genuinely understand their customers and innovate continuously to succeed.

Enter Design Thinking—a transformative problem-solving approach that revolutionizes healthcare sales by fostering empathy, creativity, and collaboration. In an industry where innovation is paramount, design thinking paves the way for breakthrough solutions, increased sales, and sustained success.

Understanding Design Thinking

Design thinking is a user-centered approach to problem-solving that emphasizes understanding users’ needs and developing creative solutions through iterative collaboration. According to IDEO, a pioneer in design thinking, the foundation of this methodology is a deep understanding of people, and it leverages empathy to drive innovation. How does it work? Let’s break the process down to the three stages that are key to sales :

1. Empathize: Gain a deep understanding of the users and their needs through research and observation.
2. Define: Clearly articulate the problem based on insights gathered during the empathize stage.
3. Ideate: Generate various ideas and potential solutions through brainstorming sessions.

Remember, these stages are only sometimes linear and often loop back as your team gains new insights. In B2B healthcare sales, design thinking’s emphasis on empathy and collaboration is particularly relevant, as it aligns with the industry’s need to address complex, multifaceted challenges.

Applying Design Thinking in B2B Healthcare Sales

Empathize

Understanding the end-user is crucial in healthcare sales. These users can include healthcare organizations, patients, and administrators—each with distinct needs and challenges. Techniques such as interviews, observations, and surveys are invaluable for gathering deep insights into their experiences and pain points.

For example, your sales team might shadow nurses and doctors in a hospital to understand their daily challenges. By observing their workflows and listening to their frustrations, your sales professionals can start to identify unmet needs that their solutions could address. The Empathize stage sets the foundation for all subsequent steps, ensuring that the solutions developed are user-centric.

Define

Next, your team translates their insights into clear problem statements. They identify the core needs and pain points of healthcare customers and articulate them in an actionable way. A well-defined problem statement might look like this: “Healthcare organization X needs a more efficient way to manage patient records to reduce administrative burden and improve patient care.” This clarity helps your sales team focus on addressing the most critical issues and avoid getting sidetracked by less important details.

Ideate

With a clear problem statement, the next step is brainstorming innovative solutions collaboratively with the buyer. Techniques like mind mapping, brainstorming sessions, and collaborative workshops are particularly effective. They enable your sales team to work with the buyer’s team to ideate solutions, drawing from your most relevant solutions and features.

In SalesSparx Shared Vision Selling training, we use design thinking to shift the sales process from selling TO buyers to selling WITH them. This process empowers buyers to take ownership of the shared vision for their future. This collaborative approach fosters long-term partnerships crucial for healthcare buyers navigating a rapidly evolving technological and regulatory landscape.

How Design Thinking Benefits B2B Healthcare Sales

Provides Insights Into Customer Needs

Among the most significant benefits of design thinking are its profound insights into customer needs and behaviors. By spending time with healthcare providers and understanding their daily challenges, your sales teams can build stronger, more empathetic relationships with their clients.

Enhanced understanding leads to more tailored and practical solutions, boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers who feel heard and understood are more likely to trust and engage with the sales team.

Helps Sales Offer Better Solutions

By addressing pain points with innovative strategies, sales teams can offer clients more valuable and impactful solutions. This enhanced understanding enables your company to offer the best solutions from your existing portfolio, emphasizing the benefits that matter most to the buyer and demonstrating a commitment to improving the customer’s workflow.

Creates Better Close Rates and Enthusiastic Customer Evangelists

Design thinking encourages a collaborative culture within your sales team. It engages multiple stakeholders in problem-solving on both buyer and seller sides. This collaborative approach ensures the team considers diverse perspectives, leading to more well-rounded and practical solutions.

Most deals are won or lost in the discovery and ideation stages. By using design thinking, your sales teams ensure they have already addressed the clients’ core needs and concerns by the time they reach the proposal stage. This approach leads to a smoother and more successful sales process and better close rates–creating enthusiastic customer evangelists about the solutions your team has provided.

Accelerates Innovation

The iterative nature of design thinking leads to quicker implementation of solutions. Rapid innovation ensures that healthcare sales teams stay ahead of competitors with cutting-edge approaches.

In an industry as fast-paced as healthcare, the ability to quickly adapt and implement new solutions is invaluable. Sales teams that embrace design thinking maintain a competitive edge by continuously improving their offerings.

Increases Long-Term Customer Value

Solutions configured through design thinking are inherently more aligned with customer needs, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty. When customers see their feedback is valued and incorporated into the final product or service customization, they are more likely to develop long-term partnerships and trust with your sales team.

A healthcare organization that experiences firsthand the benefits of a solution developed through design thinking will be more likely to recommend that solution to others, further enhancing your sales team’s reputation and reach.

Innovate to Accelerate

Design thinking allows for rapid innovation and ensures that healthcare sales teams can configure their offerings to best fit customer needs, staying ahead of competitors with tailored approaches.

In an industry as fast-paced as healthcare, the ability to adapt quickly and implement optimized solutions is invaluable. Sales teams that embrace design thinking maintain a competitive edge by continuously improving how they configure and present their offerings, ensuring they meet each customer’s unique needs.

At SalesSparx, we incorporate design thinking into our Shared Vision Selling (SVS) training, helping sales leaders harness the power of this methodology to improve close rates, make larger deals, and increase long-term customer value.

By embracing design thinking, you can unlock new efficiency, creativity, and customer satisfaction levels, ultimately driving your sales team to new heights. Don’t wait—take the first step towards revolutionizing your sales approach and achieving unparalleled success in the B2B healthcare industry.