Preparing a path to Be a Top Performer in 2025

Now is a great time to develop a sales plan focused on achieving your goals by shifting your thought and sales process to how can my customers and potential customers utilize our product or service to meet their strategic goals.

Research indicates that common strategic goals for health care providers (HCP) in 2025 might include:

Enhance Patient Experience and Satisfaction

Providers aim to improve the quality and accessibility of patient care to increase patient satisfaction and loyalty.

Advance Digital Transformation and Data Analytics

Healthcare providers are focusing on digital solutions like electronic health records (EHR), artificial intelligence, and data analytics to enhance clinical decision-making, reduce errors, and streamline operations.

Increase Workforce Recruitment, Retention, and Well-being

In response to workforce shortages, providers are investing in recruiting, training, and retaining healthcare workers.

Optimize Financial Performance and Operational Efficiency

Rising operational costs are driving providers to focus on improving financial performance. This includes reducing waste, optimizing supply chains, and employing value-based care models to control costs while maintaining high-quality patient outcomes.

Implement Value-Based and Population Health Management

As the healthcare industry shifts from fee-for-service to value-based care, providers are focusing on managing chronic diseases, preventive care, and community health to reduce hospitalizations and improve long-term health outcomes.

Each company and sales representative needs to carefully identify what the key strategic initiatives are for their existing and prospective healthcare providers. Once this is known, sales and marketing can work together to craft positioning of the product or service that aligns with these initiatives.

The role of sales, and that of marketing, is to define and align the company’s offerings as either solutions or improvement aides that will allow the HCP to achieve one or more of their specific initiatives. By doing so, the success of offerings will be greatly enhanced.

Another key to your 2025 plan should be to fully understand the HCP’s buying process. Knowing the process, priority, and players arms you for developing an action plan for each account as well as the key decision makers. What this takes in is a willingness to adapt to the sales philosophy that is customer centric and not product focused. Each salesperson needs to become educators and trusted advisors since HCPs are risk adverse and will need confidence that any decision, they make regarding products of service poses no risks to both patient care and the bottom line.

Now is the time to develop your approach to understanding the strategic initiatives and buying process for your key targets and existing clients. Begin by thinking about the key initiatives outlined above. How do your offerings align with any or all of those? Can you speak to those points? Does your marketing content?

Validate the lists by both independent research and direct questioning of your key customer contacts. Share that you have been researching — ways that you and your product or service can assist them and would like to confirm the top 3-5 areas they are focused on. At the same time, asking directly what steps they will use to reach a decision to potentially purchase, upgrade lease, or rent a solution achieve those strategic initiatives, as well as, who will be involved in each phase of their decision process.

These two steps will set you apart from the representative that wants to secure their business by focusing on features or past allegiance. You want to earn their trust and business by helping them to achieve their success.

While there are many more steps to arrive on stage at the end of the 2025 sales year, these are suggestions that many well-known companies and consultants recommend as being among the first ones leading you to success.

Hopefully you made the award stage in 2024. As you enter 2025, I challenge you to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve going forward. Good luck to each of you.