Navigating Healthcare Sales Negotiations in a Changing Landscape

Healthcare Sales Negotiation Strategies for a Changing Market

How Sales and Marketing Teams Can Negotiate in Today’s Evolving Healthcare Landscape

Why Healthcare Sales Negotiations Are More Complex Than Ever

From hospitals and GPOs to imaging centres and dental practices, healthcare procurement negotiations have dramatically shifted. Decision-making power has shifted from clinicians to procurement teams – who now control and will soon dominate vendor selection, pricing conversations, and contract negotiations.

Healthcare institutions are also hiring aggressive cost-reduction consulting firms to reduce their non-labor costs throughout the supply chain. These consulting firms are well-prepared and armed with information.

Healthcare sales professionals face increasing pressure to deliver cost-effective solutions amid tight budgets, longer sales cycles, RFP processes, and internal value assessment committee reviews.

If your sales, marketing, and cross-functional team still tries to “sell” clinical product and service “features” and talking points instead of developing negotiating skills, commercial negotiation strategies, and tactics, you’re falling behind.

Negotiating Advantage Tip: Adapt to the New Healthcare Buyer

Today’s healthcare procurement teams are savvy, analytical, and process-driven.

To succeed in today’s increasingly complex marketplace, salespeople in healthcare must:

Understand the full institution buying centre beyond just clinicians.
Align with procurement’s value-based decision-making process and criteria.
Understand the differences between great capability presentations, solution-based and price-based proposals, and focus on bottom-line impact and benefits – not just features.
Learn how to navigate the RFP, RFQ, and RFI process strategically.
Avoid dumping clinical data onto non-clinical decision-makers.

Most healthcare suppliers lose deals not because of a lack of new product development, innovation, or poor-performing products and services – it’s because they fail to align with the procurement process and mindset, or poorly manage the negotiation process.

Key Insight: Healthcare Negotiation Is a Business Skill – Not a Clinical One

Top-performing salespeople and sales teams need to invest in real-world negotiation skills training, not just product knowledge training. You need to build relationships with relevant members of the buying center, procurement professionals, master blueprinting questions, and defend your value with skill and confidence. This is the path forward to success.

Don’t wait until you’re told to “go speak with purchasing” by a surgeon or clinician – by then, it’s too late.

Healthcare Sales Success Requires a New Approach

Equip your team with commercial negotiation tools.
Customize value messaging for each healthcare institution.
Train cross-functional teams to communicate cost effectiveness and switching risks.
Build trust with procurement, not just clinical champions.

Additional Insights and Tips for Successful Healthcare Sales Negotiation:

Understand the Procurement Process: Learn procurement teams’ decision-making criteria and priorities.
Understand the Healthcare Customer Buying Centre: Most sales organizations I teach need to learn how to develop a better working knowledge of the people in any institution who make or influence decisions.
The Sales/Marketing Challenge: Improve alignment and cooperation between your company’s sales, marketing, and product management teams.
Do Your Research: Carefully and thoroughly research customer personnel and information about each institution or customer.
Stay Informed: Keep up with non-clinical healthcare industry trends, regulations, and technologies.
Customize Your Approach: Tailor sales and negotiation strategies to each healthcare institution.
Contract Negotiations: Understand how negotiations impact letters of agreement, supply agreements, and contracts. Most organizations have seriously flawed contracts.
Emphasize Value and Cost Effectiveness: Highlight the value and cost-effectiveness of your products and/or services. Also, determine the ‘switching costs’ if your company is the incumbent vendor for capital equipment, medical devices, equipment, or supplies, and there is a risk of losing business to a lower-priced competitor.
Build Strong Relationships: Foster positive relationships with procurement professionals. Don’t avoid these people. Don’t wait to be told by surgeons or other clinical personnel that you must “meet with purchasing” – after you’ve let the “value cat out of the bag.”

Remember: A negotiated dollar is a bottom-line dollar. You can’t make – or save money faster than when you’re negotiating.

Take Action and Invest in My Negotiating Advantage Newsletter, Expert Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Consulting and Coaching Services, Digital Negotiation Learning Products, and Self-Paced Online Course to Become a Better Negotiator.

Subscribe to the paid Negotiating Advantage Newsletter to receive in-depth insights, strategies, tactics, questions, questioning techniques, and practical tips on business and personal negotiation topics – delivered weekly to your inbox.
Hire Negotiating Coach® Michael E. Sloopka to conduct a tailored in-house negotiation skill training presentation or seminar to enhance negotiation skills and achieve better results.
Hire Negotiating Coach® Michael E. Sloopka to provide expert negotiation consulting and coaching for your leadership, sales, marketing, and cross-functional teams.
Explore and buy results-producing digital learning products (E-books, the Audio Learning Program, and turnkey tools) and negotiation coaching solutions designed to improve negotiating skills and results.
Speaking Engagements – Industry Associations and Companies: Book a tailored, engaging, and impactful 60-minute to two-hour presentation at an upcoming meeting, conference, or convention.
Online Sales Negotiation Course: If you’re in sales, sales management, or a cross-functional role that supports sales, you can benefit from enrolling in my NEW self-paced Negotiating for Sales Success online course.