Establishing A Unified Sales Process at Philips Healthcare

During the 47^thAnnual L-TEN Conference in Phoenix, Sales Performance International and Philips Healthcare hosted an interactive workshop led by Director of Richardson Sales Performance Health, Brad Ansley, Richardson Sales Performance Senior Sales Consultant Nick Maslanka and Director, Leadership Development & Selling Skills at Philips, Mandy Dunnuck, Workshop participants learnt how Richardson Sales Performance helped Philips establish a unified sales process across an entire sales organisation in just 12 months.

Phillips Healthcare Sales Challenges

As regulatory and healthcare provider reimbursement changes are being introduced, there is a fundamental shift in the business paradigm for physicians. As such, the traditional call model of selling into the healthcare practise is no longer as effective as it once was. Healthcare is evolving and decision-makers are becoming more strategic in nature, so “old conversations and clinical/operational relationships established in the past don’t work like they used to” says Mandy Dunnuck of Philips Healthcare. It was now time for Philips to revisit and reevaluate their sales process. They learnt, however, that they had a more pressing need.

Within such a heavily matrixed organisation, Philips realised that they had different businesses within the organisation operating differently. “At any given moment, we had 30 different employees in a healthcare setting calling on the same IDN” Mandy said. Without a sales process that focuses more on the buyer than on the seller, conversations can become misaligned and Philips needed to establish a common language internally, understand interdependencies, and align on their sales process across the company.

Philips Healthcare Sales Training Success Story

How does a company as large as Philips Healthcare, with so many moving parts, align across the organisation in a timely and effective way? Richardson Sales Performance introduced Philips to the Solution Selling® method, a customer-centric engagement approach to collaboration, where the focus is on a solution rather than a product.

Rather than just showing up with a list of the features and benefits a product offers, Solution Selling® equipped Philips Healthcare with the situational fluency and conversational selling skills needed to effectively communicate the value of their solutions.

The Solution Selling® methodology does not stop there, however. Beyond the teaching and practise pieces of the, there is the emphasis placed on being sure the process is being properly implemented beyond the learning event. Richardson Sales Performance worked through the heavy matrix at Philips to ensure that there were reinforcement and coaching conversations being practised from top to bottom.

Every level of the business, from technology and management up through senior and executive-level officers, must be aligned through every step of the selling process. Richardson Sales Performance helped Philips understand how critical it is that this type of unification initiative be company-sponsored and supported throughout the entire organisation.