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Hospitals have too many contacts to be dealt with by post-it notes and the business owners memory.
Also, the casual environment of typical small business clientele is not found in health care such as extreme flexibility in scheduling, not documenting activity or no need for referencing a purchase order to be able to get paid.
In preparing to take the small business leap into selling to hospitals, there are three systems that must be put into place prior to commencing on the initial campaign.
These include systems to monitoring marketing activity, the companies sales pipeline and an accounting system for billing and collection.
When a company initiates its first, thought out sequential marketing campaign, the influx of inbound leads is substantially more than at any other time in the small businesses history.
The typical owner has a couple of phone calls per day and spends the rest of the workday either on the job site or working in the business.
It is essential that a system is put in place to record the inbound leads, their information and the next step with a date / time to accomplish the action item.
Momentum is key to getting a small business launch to be successful.
Nothing kills momentum more than leads falling through the cracks and not being responded to.
Another critical reason to establish a marketing system to measure activity is monitoring the result of that activity.
It is crucial to a small business that a commitment is made to direct response advertising, where if the company spends a dollar on marketing they will know exactly how much work was proposed and eventually acquired for that dollar.
This can only be done with a system in place prior to a roll out.
The second basic system that must be in place is the sales pipeline which tracks the different stages of the sales process, such as amounts, type of health care account, percentage of closure and closed / lost deals.
Weekly monitoring of this report will give a small business owner the ability to be proactive in addressing lagging stages in the pipeline before they become critical to the companies cash flow.
Third and most important is the accounting system that needs to be present.
Billing and collection of the money owed by hospitals has to be very organized or it can reel out of control quickly if it is not.
The informal billing method of a small business that has been performing residential work or local small business jobs will not work in the formal health care world.
This report also requires a weekly viewing so any areas of concern of late payments get dealt with sooner rather later.
There are several economical versions of software that can perform all three of these areas of marketing, sales and accounting so there is no reason any small business wanting to enter the health care market should not have these in place before rolling out.
These numbers will be the lifeblood of a healthy business.
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