By: Steve Sullivan, Sales Director
Image: Getty Images
About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here. To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.
By Steve Sullivan, National Sales Director
One of the many business casualties of the pandemic is healthcare sales—its process, its people and its results.
Since March, the world has changed for people calling on providers, payers, life sciences or healthcare service, and technology companies. Their process has been upended. Sales teams have lost their normal way to encounter and engage buyers and decision-makers—conferences, seminars, lunches and in-person meetings are all but gone. Add to that, calling on those who are now forced out of their natural office habitat is all new territory.
By Steve Sullivan, National Sales Director
You’ve heard Hammock talk over the years about how marketing with content should never solely focus on a product’s features and benefits. We should focus on the solutions a product, service or treatment delivers. I heard that reinforced in a talk this week by Michelle Peluso, senior vice president of digital sales and chief marketing officer at IBM.
Peluso started Site59, a last-minute travel site, which survived 9/11 and then was bought by Travelocity, where she rose to be CEO. After C-Suite stops at Citigroup and Gilt, she now runs global marketing and brand initiatives for IBM―quite a resume.
By Steve Sullivan, National Sales Director
I spent an eternity last week with U-Haul trying to solve a simple moving problem. I may as well have been looking for the Coke recipe or Google’s current search algorithm.
We were looking for a certain sized trailer for a family member’s move to a new city. But searching for the trailer online, getting help from customer service, and then seeing the difference between what exists at the local U-Haul center and what appears online—each person we talked to seemed to have been speaking a different language. And this is not complicated stuff.
By Steve Sullivan
Deciding on partners to help your business is a tough job. We must all decide: Is this function core to our business, or can we benefit from outside help?
By Steve Sullivan, National Sales Director
I recently attended a meeting in which chief technology officers (CTOs) were discussing their buying processes and how they handle marketers or sales professionals who are eager to pitch to them.
Hearing insights from across the table is always enlightening and provides a few important reminders for marketers. Here are a few that stood out:
By Steve Sullivan, National Sales Director
I’m hearing more and more buzz about ABM (Account Based Marketing) as a “new” idea in marketing. For those of you scratching your head, we can boil it down fairly simply—it is an approach that targets large prospects by targeting each buyer or person with influence.
I recently attended my first Lunch & Learn hosted by Association Media & Publishing. What a great program for association professionals! This one was covering use of social media — an important topic around here at Hammock.
One of the things that I always find most valuable at such gatherings is the questions people ask. They give you a little window into understanding the association audience they serve.
I found myself asking “How would we answer that at Hammock?” since we are using all types of social media tools as part of our content marketing strategies every day. Instead of blurting out answers there, I circulated the questions to our Internet marketing team and here’s what they said.