is a true story from my days as a sales rep for a Hospital Information Systems vendor.  As we were driving on the way to a sales call, my colleague gestured at a street sign and laughed, “See, our customers are so easy to find there are even signs pointing the way there!”  As healthcare industry vendors who focused on the multi-million dollar operations known as hospitals, HMOs, and clinics, our situation was the opposite of most B2B companies whose main challenge is generating new prospects.

Which begs the question, if all prospects are known, why bother with a marketing automation solution if you are a healthcare industry vendor?  The main reason is probably timing.  A Sales 2.0 solution will identify which of those institutions are sales-ready at the exact moment in the sales cycle.  As a sales rep, it is very advantageous for me to be notified when a hospital had downloaded a particular white paper, watched a video, or visited a certain page on our corporate website.  And more importantly, have that information delivered directly to my Salesforce.com account and with email, at the moment it happens.  It goes without saying, that this would give me a huge competitive advantage due to knowing their TIMING. Hospitals and their constituent departments each have their own budgeting cycle so it helps to be alerted when funding might be kicking in.

Another reason is INTELLIGENCE.  Even if a hospital isn’t ready to purchase your healthcare product or service, an advanced marketing automation solution will tell which ones are researching your offering.  And if you have multiple products, it will identify which of your products have attracted their attention.  Better products will even give you contact names, the size of the institution, location etc. This helps to qualify opportunities. You can even to put them on a ‘watch list’ so that you can tell when they re-visit and alert the right sales rep.

Today, leading healthcare companies use Sales 2.o tools like this to be more competitive, more productive and more timely. They’re the guys who seem to ‘know’ where there are deals, and when they’re sales-ready.