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116: Transition Your Sales Efforts into Marketing

In this episode, Griffin expands on his past two articles about selling to fertility centers and differentiating your company. There is a right way and a wrong way, and he almost fell into the trap of doing it the wrong way. Along with telling his story in this episode, he expounds on the 7 challenges that face sales organizations today including fewer qualified prospects, limited time and access, more gatekeepers, detached point of sale, high regulation, short sales window, and paradoxically,  long sales cycle.

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

  • 7 challenges of sales

  • How some companies overspend on brand awareness

  • Proper positioning in the market

  • The transition from a sales mindset to a marketing mindset

To learn more about our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic, visit us at FertilityBridge.com


Transcript

Griffin Jones: Hi friends, on this episode of Inside Reproductive Health. I talk about the diminishing returns of fertility business marketing, and why fertility businesses are positioned as commodities in the eyes of practice owners and the execs who buy from them in the fertility field. What I tried to make different or go into more detail in the episode than I did in the written content, and I talk more about why, I think conference parties are so dangerous, I talk more about how fertility bridge directs our own sales process. And one thing that I didn't talk about in the body of the episode, Think I wanna use for the intro here is why I've doubled down on this point of view of shifting from the sales process to the marketing process.

Because every time I skip this step and try to do the things that I should be doing in positioning in the sale, I regret it. And the most recent example was at the end of 2020, because we were off from COVID. We weren't at ASRM. We weren't an MRS and PCRS and CFAS that I was just. Impatient. And even though Fertility Bridge's revenue was still going up and profit was still going up and client numbers were still going up.

I wanted to be where I wanted to be, that where I probably would've gotten, if I just had the help of some of those other things that were going on. So I decided to go on a sales blitz at the end of 2020. That was not entirely fruitless, but overall not net beneficial and not in service. To the value position that we really aspire to have.

So where I aspire to constantly develop expertise and constantly craft the points of view and put those out there to the field so that some of you hire us at least some of the time that is where. We get our value and our, how we're viewed in the eyes of you and our prospects goes up from that. And then here I am at the end of 2020 calling people, Hey, you want to do a goal diagnostic and running a sequence where we're emailing every couple of weeks and calling every couple weeks.

And again, it wasn't entirely fruitless. Some business did come from it, but it was not in service. To our brand and why it's like why that would just for eight months, because I was impatient of where we are now eight months ago, and I knew that we would be there within six months to a year, but I was captain Ahab on a whale.

And I know for some of you, it's not just being in that position. It's, you've got higher ups to report to, you've got shareholders to report to. The principle still is the same for having a little bit more of a long-term game. And then how that speeds things up later on. So those mistakes that I feel like I made, I just never want to go back to that.

There's a time where you have to do that in your career. And that should be like at the beginning or the very beginning of your company. I get it. Some people have to make the calls. They gotta they got to get any engagements where people are treating them like a vendor and they have to work their way up to either build the portfolio or everything else that's necessary for building a really good company, but it should be aspirational for most of us to get past that.

It's certainly aspirational for me. I really believe in hope that I'm past that part. There's no financial reason. For fertility bridge to do that and where we've seen the best growth where people treat us the best, where we get the best clients from that are both the most profitable that our team enjoys working on that is the highest value to the clients is when we take our time to really build out our points of view, build that into a content system, build that into a marketing system that segues into.

Genuine sales conversations, where the parameters are set by us. That level of detail, I did not go into the article, but you should know that. That's why I, that's why we did this. And so on with the show. And I really hope you enjoy it. Let's talk about selling to fertility centers, selling when fertility doctors, fertility, practice owners, and a couple of executives are the key decision-makers. Cause that's easy. Isn't it? I put two articles together. You may have read each of these articles. So I am going to give you a little bit more nuance in the podcast form.

And then in the email write-up, I will try to include. Different or new in the podcast. Some people like reading, some people like the podcast and some people like both so that, know, if you want to listen to read a different time, sometimes there's going to be more or less information in each one, even when we cover the same topic.

So the first topic I want to talk about is the challenges that fertility centers are facing. Excuse me, the businesses that call on fertility centers are facing, and then. Why the shift in sales and marketing has relegated them to vendor status they're related, but I'm going to start with seven main challenges at least that I can identify.

Why is it so damn hard to call on fertility centers? Some of these are new and some of these have probably been for as long as the field has existed, but the first is fewer qualified prospects. That's newer limited time and access more gatekeepers long sales cycle. Short sales window, paradoxically detached point of sale, and high regulation.

These are the seven challenges that I can see. So the first when I'm talking about fewer prospects it's cause I'm talking about consolidation. Stat news says that there are twice as many private equity affiliations made from 2017 to 2019. So if we think of that means. Major customer growth for some people that have the right deals.

And then for others, that means fewer customers. I know some groups that they can't make the decisions for their own group anymore. When it comes down to buying office supplies, when it comes to buying lab equipment. Which PGT provider they use. And so for some people, that's going to mean a lot more prospects. And for some people it's going to mean a lot fewer prospects because those groups have been consolidated.

Second challenge that we're facing is limited time and access. This has always been the case, but as. The field grows and the industry side of the field grows. I'm using that word deliberately because the commercial realm of the field is growing much faster than just the clinical part. And so as that happens, We're seeing more people call on the same people in the bottleneck.

And I've had Dr. Paco Arredondo on the show. I've had Dr. Andrew Meikle on the show. They have different views on the definition of entrepreneurship. I tend to agree with Dr. Meikle we'll link, both of those episodes in the podcast, but dammit, Paco. The more I think about it, the more. I just want to argue with Paco on this.

So, and Dr. Arredondo finishes Medical Preneur. He is going to come back on the show. We're going get you some free advertising to, for medical-preneur, Dr. Arredondo. I will read the whole book first. I will go through it with a highlighter and we'll talk about the exact parts where we agree and disagree.

The point is that there's a lot of people still in the owner's seat, the visionary seat for their company that are in so many different seats in sales and marketing, finance, and operations, and the seats underneath them, that it makes it even harder to call on those folks. They have not really delegated those responsibilities.

They've delegated some of the tasks, but very often not the decision-making. And that means there are more gatekeepers. This is a challenge. Number three more gatekeepers. We often think of gatekeepers just as somebody who's a receptionist who is the gatekeeper to the actual communication, like has the executives email or calendar?

That's only one fraction of who a gatekeeper is. It's much more useful to think of gatekeepers in these terms. And I think that I came up with this definition. If I didn't, you can find it someplace on the internet. Tell me why I'm a liar. But I think that I came up with this one. A gatekeeper is anyone who cannot say yes, they can only say no.

Long sales cycle. That's our fourth challenge that we're having is that sometimes it takes months for you to be able to call on somebody in order to even get that first meeting. And then to between the first meeting, when they're actually ready to purchase, they've got construction delays. They break up with their partner, they get consolidated, the recruiting, somebody.

Sometimes they wait for the pain to hurt worse, and it usually takes a long time to get in the door, get all the stakeholders. For the first meeting for the follow-up meeting, get the, yes, get the signature, finally get the payment. And so because of that really long sales cycle, the next one might seem paradoxical, but you think of the two as ying and yang challenge.

Number four is long sales cycle challenge. Number five is a short sales window because you've got your long sale. Your long sales cycle. You've got a short sales window because it's always hurry up and wait. It's like, when's the next fish going to be around to get on the line. So it's hurry up and wait until it's hurry up.

Again, the practice might just be opening up right now. They might not need another office for a couple years. They might not need another lab. This is, might be really big equipment that they only buy for a couple years or even decades. And maybe they just got out of a network affiliation or got rid of their EMR and hope.

God willing. They'll never have to do that again. The short sales window is the ying to the long sales cycles yang. Yeah. Challenge number six, that we've got a detached point of sale. And that sucks because in most areas of commerce today, that we're used to, as consumers, we have an attach point of sale.

I can get a handyman directly to my house. Now I can get somebody to pick me up and take me to the airport. I can book all of the arrangements for my honeymoon, with the click of a button. And it's only in a segment of. Business to business sales, where we still really don't have that. You don't buy an IVF club IVF lab at the click of a button, and that makes attribution hard.

There's not a single point of sale. And that makes some marketing efforts really difficult when you want a single source attribution. And in many cases, you're just not going to get it. There's many different ways that people are choosing you. They're coming in at different points of the sales cycle and there's various decision makers. 

All of this is compounded by high regulation, and I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing, but there are some segments of the fertility industry that the disclaimers have to be longer than the content there's limits to the interactions. They can do the joint ventures, the messaging they can do with physicians, practice owners.

And that difficulty might be obvious, but that challenge compounds how we move from. Where we are now in the sales process to where we need to be in the sales and marketing process. So I'm going to talk about that exact shift right now. So we've got these seven challenges that are really messing us up with sales.

How do we blunt some of that? And the answer has to do with moving from a lot of our efforts that are currently in sales. Towards marketing. The example that I started the other article with was who pays for dinner, because this was something that my account manager who had worked on the industry side again in air quotes of the field for a number of years, was really surprised by it.

When we go out with our clients virtually without fail, they want to pay for dinner. I like paying for dinner. I like paying for drinks to sometimes I pick up the tab, but I really like that they want to do that because it shows to me how they view the relationship. And this was not the case a couple of years ago.

And I see so frequently in our field, you're practically a vending machine. I see sometimes docs inviting their friends and it's like, oh, let's all go out to dinner on this person's bill. And sometimes it's like, it's, that's just because that's their relationship. And, but even then there still is that expectation.

And I don't like being so lopsided on that side of the value balance. So how is it that a tiny little firm like mine that had no money? Remember I came into this field in 20 14, 20 15, moved back to the United States. Virtually no money, never got any VC money, never got any, you know, like money from mommy or daddy or a commercial loan.

And also I'm not from the medical field. I don't have a clinical background. So how is it that we've been able to totally. I wouldn't say totally. I would say largely been able to move the sales process to the way that we can most help people and not acquiesce to people's unreasonable terms and do it in an efficient way where I don't have to hire an entire sales team.

I don't think that everybody in this field looks to us as the golden advisors yet, but I think I've got a lot of strong cases to make that we are moving in that direction. And our billing shows it, our client engagements show it, the people that are reaching out to us show it. And that's because we have moved more of what's in the traditionally in the sales funnel to the.

Marketing part of the funnel. If you go to the Fertility Bridge website, Google fertility, businesses as commodities, you're going to see an illustration that's by Steve Patrese that I credit on the site where you can see the marketing and sales funnel, and you can see what used to be just marketing.

What used to be just sales and how that's inversed over the last decade or so it's because. Reps. And sometimes entire companies are positioned as vendors and practice owners because they're doing too much in, in the sales and too little in marketing. The result of being over invested in the awareness stage and undifferentiated in the sale is if you're not, if you're not following this concept, there's a couple, there's two different examples that I'll give you.

One is massive industry sponsored parties that happen at our conferences. That is an over-investment in brand awareness or often an over-investment in brand awareness and expensive dinner bills and overpriced field reps, often a symptom of being undifferentiated in the sale. Don't get so mad at me.

I'm not saying that these are categorical mistakes. I will go to your events by the way, as long as we're back on this year, I'm there. You'll see me. What I'm saying is that they can be a tremendous competitive advantage when they're strategically sound. But even when they're strategically sound, I still have a couple of concerns about each.

I think it's worth saying this again, because it's probably like the ninth that I've said this on the podcast conference parties need to be careful in their positioning in of themselves guys, because they are a major PR liability. If not illegal liability, we work in fricking women's health.

And sometimes at these parties, I see behavior that I I'll say like, no, man, like don't do that, but I can't speak for other people because maybe both people are engaging, but I would not let someone. Talk to my employees like that, or do stuff like that in front of my employees, especially my female employees.

And that sometimes happens at events that are hosted in the field. And all you need is for somebody to put that on Tik TOK or put that on IG Reel whatever replace Periscope and and get picked up by the Huffington post. And now that is associated with your brand, I think that's a real liability.

So if you're going to do parties, Please have some sort of positioning for the parties themselves. Like this is why we're doing the parties. This is what we don't want to happen at our events. I do think they still are a net benefit for the field because they get us together in a way that allows us to build relationships that are really collegial because we're hanging out together.

We're not just in a conference room, going over the docket from the plenary sessions. But I am concerned about what these could do to your brand. So to just be careful. Okay. And be intentional. And let me know if you need some help with regard to the reps, the best ones are worth their weight in crypto.

They are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but so many of them do nothing. To drive sales too much payroll, too much travel, too much entertainment is wasted because reps are doing the job that you would just want your well-produced content to do. So this is how you position for expertise and value.

If over investment over and under investment in certain stages is what's causing you to be positioned as commodities. The solution is. Flipping the sales and marketing funnel a little bit. So if you go again to Fertility Bridge.com, you can either find it from the articles that will link in this podcast page.

Or if you go to Fertility Bridge.com on the homepage, you'll see a profile for your persona. If you are a business to business fertility company, click on that, you'll find this funnel and you'll see how you can adjust your investment at the different at the different phases I'm telling you right now, it's a mistake to treat the funnel merely as a checklist, you probably do webinars.

You probably do have client testimonials. It might even have a brand video. If they're the same as everyone else's, if they don't fluidly set up the sale, it doesn't matter. What are you listening to right now? Are you listening to the Griff Jones show? Are you listening to Fertility Bridges Podcast? Or are you listening to Inside Reproductive Health?

Why is this little podcast from a D student who came into the field with no money who owns not a big genetics testing company, but a little seven figure client services firm have the biggest following for the business side of the field because we've differentiated. So when I'm talking about differentiated, I got to give another shout out to Dr.

Arredondo because Paco gave me this. Stat a couple of years ago that I've gone back to it's researched by Bain that shows that 80% of companies say they provide a superior experience, but only 8% of customers say. So So I think about this all the darn time, knowing that my stuff will always stink. Hopefully I'll have that attitude until I die and that I will always have the impetus to want to improve it because.

There is huge expectations, inflated expectations, by the way, from customers everywhere, including in the fertility field, in business to business. And there's also inflated egos on our end that we think that we're meeting the regular expectations, much more of these inflated ones. So this gap, 80% of people saying they provide a superior proposition, 8% of customers agreeing with that.

Equals satis allows, provides the formula satisfaction equals per perception, minus expectation. Let me try to say that again. Satisfaction equals perception minus expectations. So we've got this huge expectations we've got huge expectations to begin with. And so using like what we think is that like quality measures as a differentiator is a bad idea.

For that reason because the customer almost never perceives it that way, even when you really are, because everybody else will say the same thing. So if somebody else can say it, it's not a differentiator. Here's a little test for. Take all the marketing agencies in the entire world and ask them how many people are human communicators.

How many people are creative? How many people get results for their clients? How many people really get their clients? Almost everybody would raise their hand. But if you say, how many of you mother-lovers have served more than a dozen fertility companies. It would be me and three or four or five other people raising their hands.

And then you ask how many of you have exclusively sub-specialized in just the fertility field, nothing else. Bridging fertility, marketing and sales together. That's us. Raising our hand. That's what I mean by differentiation. So changing in this way, moving to adapt the shift in the buying behavior is critically important because there's just too many of you all.

And there's too few of the people that we're all counting on and it is a supply and demand game for doctor's attention. And I'm going on this, expanding on this element a little bit more, because I was so surprised at how many doctors and practice owners clicked on those emails and read those articles.

I thought that it was going to be a lot less red and opened email because I thought, well, you know, only part of our list is from the industry side, the docs, the practice owners will be less into it. I don't think so. It was one of the most popular articles that we've written in a long time and a lot of doctors were reading it.

So if doctors and practice owners are listening now and how I'm counseling people to get to your attention is doing things that make it make you want to actually spend. That fractionalized time. And that comes through content. We've put out more than a hundred podcast episodes. We've written dozens and dozens of articles.

And now I'm in a position where I don't get to dictate the sales process, but I do get to very clearly say, this is what it is. And if people really don't like that, then they just don't enter into it because I can't help people. If they don't meet a couple of criteria, I really just can't help them. And it sucks because they'll, you could still get them to buy from you, but then you're an engagement in five months and they're questioning the value or it just doesn't work.

And so I get to qualify. A lot more readily in the sales process, but there's a catch for me being able to do that. The only reason why I'm able to put so many demands on the sales process and the demands that I'm talking about putting on my sales process are I don't talk to people that aren't the principal of the firm.

If they're not the chief executive it's, if it's on the industry side or they're not. Well, the one of the owners, one of the managing partners of the practice, I just don't talk to people in this sales process. And that's not me being a jerk it's I can't really help people if there's not buy-in and alignment from the very top.

I know that I can't help people over the course. A longer period of time. So I vet that very early on. And so that's one of the things that we say in our sales process, like your principals have to be there. You've got to be on video. So the people that are in our sales. Every once in a while they'll be five or 10 minutes late, but they're not 20 minutes late.

They're not rescheduling at the last minute. They're not then expecting us to go over it's they are generally on time, which for very busy doctors is pretty darn good. And they're not calling me from the. Yeah, the 4 0 1 expressway they're calling me while they're sitting at their desk with their team and they're on video and they're face to face.

Another constraint is that our various early engagements are advisory engagements that are paid. I'll talk to somebody for 15 minutes on the phone, if they're the principal and they just need a little bit of assurance or a little bit of clarity, but that's it. It's somebody is either going to show up.

They think that it's valuable enough for them to pay for. And then we go through the process and our engagements are phased in, but the reason why I'm able to do, like, why would somebody, why would any of you pay $1,500 for advisory with us? Why would practice owners pay $600 for just a little bit of advisory with us?

It's because we've already given them that much value in content by the time they're ready for that. They're not questioning it. And so when we've put out a hundred plus podcasts episodes and several dozen blog articles and a 60 page ebook with all of these guest authors, It's to show these people in advance.

This is the way we think here's our thinking in it's unapplied form. If you want it in supplied form applied to your situation, you have to pay. But having all of this content out there allows them to decide, like, I think Griff's a loser that has no idea what he's talking about or. Wow. They have really built these systems.

They've really hired the right people. They've really reiterated this over the years with multiple different clients in multiple different markets. Yeah. I think they're probably worth at least that conversation, at least that initial engagement. And so what I'm encouraging all of you to do just by virtue of what we've done.

These last few years is to start to build this content army through the brand and through the creative messaging that connects all of the dots from marketing to sales and moves a lot of those sales efforts into marketing so that sales can truly just be what sales is, the final relationships and the closing of.

What you have established through the marketing. If you want some help with that, we do that in the goal diagnostic. If you'd like our help taking a look at your funnel, taking a look at what you're doing and just giving you a little bit of advice of how you build that machine. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and we'll do more business to business content in the future.

I promise.