Which Do You Believe: "Education Sells" or "Make It Quick" ?

Our healthcare system is an environment driven by safety with a goal of bleeding off risk by making safe, evidenced-based decisions concerning all that we do. What works for most are highly informative facts succinctly presented--just like a patient’s medical record.


If you are a CIO, we begin any buy-cycle knowing that we’ll be using too much of our time, and the staff’s, to separate fact from hype and then getting that out to the rest of the buying committee to get them up to speed. This is a major cause for slow buy-cycles and it injects enormous costs, for both the buyer and seller.

If you are a marketer, in any environment our job is to make the company stand out from the crowd and keep all eyes on it as we start to pull away from slower economic times. More than ever before building and maintaining customer attention and loyalty requires that we go beyond run of the mill mass marketing messages. We must be preemptive in providing knowledge and expertise that generates visions of competency and confidence at all layers of industry interaction and phases of the buy-cycle.

The good news is that the current economic cycle has helped both sides of the healthcare transaction shorten the amount of time required and costs. It has accelerated long developing trends away from mass market image advertising and toward highly individualized access to information that educates rather than merely pitches a image, feature or benefit.

For healthcare, best practice is a customized blend of evidence-based educational strategies and a presentation form that meets the needs of today’s more technologically autonomous buyer. It requires highly informative, educational communications that are edited, compressed and succinctly structured for rapid scanning--“education sells” is the new mantra, but “make it quick” is the directive. It must be so inherently valuable to the reader/buyer that it becomes a reference point that influences the buying committee’s thoughts and behavior and moves them down a desired path.

A recently quoted study gives us some general indications about what buyers prefer:

The study concluded that whether your are a car buyer or a hospital patient, you are more satisfied and likely to recommend the product or service when custom publications are provide to you by sellers.

We’ll continue this thread about what buyers want from the communications they receive in coming weeks. In the interim, download our FREE REPORT ABOUT BUYER’S PREFERENCES.

Image credit: pearbiter