medical marketing

If you look at the web as a way to make more income for your gastroenterology practice, you can make good money. If you look at the web as a way of using your gastroenterology marketing knowledge, you can make great money.

Here’s an example. Unfortunately, I can’t give a lot of details due to the confidential nature of customer’s web marketing analysis. I’m working with some attorneys whose business model is primarily Fortune 1000s presently—they’ve been growing at a rate of about 15% per year. They wanted the website to increase their sales—and would be very happy at a rate of 18% per year.

I told them instead to utilize a subcategory of their workers to handle the smaller business they are currently referring out. Use a massive website to provides leads to this subcategory, set them up as a separate corporation, and then take a 30% ownership position. They are now beginning to see how they can attain a 25% sales rate increase instead of 15%.

The answer here was strategic utilizing their knowledge of laws’ marketing and revising their marketing utilizing the website. The answer is not, get more Fortune 1000 customers using the website.

The point of this is to say: though international patients are very profitable for your practice, the marketing means to attain them can be non-obvious. Your field is filled with opportunities; even with the limited knowledge I have, I have found highly profitable niches in gastroenterology that I can do. If you select the right niche, you can attain stellar returns.

Review of "The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop" by Elizabeth Pace

This book is unlike any other of the numerous sales training book I’ve ever read. Most of these others are focused on the process of selling, and most of these were probably written at a time when, particularly the B2B sales were sold to men. Times have changed—women now make many B2B decisions, and had always made most of the B2C decisions. This book focuses on the likely (and frequently hidden or understood only to the matching gender salesperson) agendas of the buyers.

The prior-history, sales processes types of books describe sales technique processes such as approach, find the hot button, present benefits, multiple close methods; and these are sales skills in process. But what are the buyers’ unstated goals and what are their preferred styles of buying? This is what Pace’s book answers well. If a seller understands what this books is teaching, and put together with the process methods of the other sales-training books, this will be a highly effective sales method.

Most of the critical reviews I’ve read here complain that Pace is somewhat sexist or her quoted science isn’t right. Pace readily acknowledges 10% of women or 15 to 20% of men think like the other gender, and she then describes the hidden goals and general agendas and style of buying of the remaining 80% to 90%. Of the remaining 90%, there are always still more deviations, so Pace’s observations and recommendations have to be seen as generalizations.

I feel that her observations and recommendations are very astute. It’s unimportant whether her biology-science views of gender differences are true or not, and it’s even less important whether some spheres of the brain are shown to light up with MRI or not. I think it’s very difficult for biology-science to make derive accurate results on these. What is important is that Pace is using these as a communications method for her ideas. As supporting communications (not necessarily scientific truth) evidence for her observations.

Some of Pace’s observations: Women tend to buy based on the benefits to her relationships. Men tend to buy based the benefits to his hero status.
Women tend to buy based on solutions that solve all her relationships’ benefits. Men tend to buy based on solutions that answer their top pressing needs. Women tend to buy by conversing and building bonding-relationship first, and then think it over carefully before buying. Men are more task-oriented first, have different types of bonding relationships and carry less verbal conversations on bonding. Women tend to ask questions to build rapport and then use group-decision making processes. Men tend to ask questions to get factual information and then tend to use individual-contemplation decision making processes. Women’s sales cycles tend to be longer than men’s sales cycles, because her decisions (as it involves the group), are more complicated.

These are all buyer variables that I never had understood, because unlike other selling technique books, none I’ve ever read focused on “how to read the mind”. Pace’s does. Yes, there are lots of flaws with this book, but for understanding what and how people buy—best I’ve ever read.

Book review-- Advanced Theory and Practice in Sports Marketing

Advanced Theory and Practice in Sport Marketing
By: Eric C. Schwarz, Jason D. Hunter

The title of this book isn’t quite right. This is a general marketing survey book in sports marketing—covering most parts of sports marketing. It is a competently written book, but not an “Advanced” marketing type of book, as all that seem to be here are basic marketing principles, with a slight skew toward sports marketing. There are very few insights about sports marketing.

I’m in marketing, but not sports marketing, and believe anyone already in sports marketing wouldn’t read this book, because it is boo basic. But, it’s a good introduction book to sports marketing for anyone wanting to know what its marketing people do. Too dry and lengthy for those for those who are in marketing wanting to know about sports marketing, and too much of a textbook for those who are simply curious about sports marketing.

Chen Sun
www.WebAndNet.com