Good Checkup

Since the program's inception in March of last year, Avnet said it has seen sales of health-care technology solutions rise by more than 40 percent, and solution providers say that the program's HealthPath University is making them more effective when courting customers.

So far, the Phoenix-based distributor has held eight HealthPath University seminars around the U.S., and more are planned. The three-day course teaches solution providers how hospitals run, who the key decision makers are in different departments in the hospital, and how to approach those decision makers by addressing both business and patient-care problems.

"Our goal when we created the practice was to try to find a way to find double-digit growth for Avnet and its partners. Obviously when we looked at the market, we could figure out where the spend was coming from—health care jumped out," said Tony Vottima, vice president of business development at Avnet Technology Solutions.

"This is one of those verticals where almost all of it is midmarket, with the exception of maybe 200 or 250 hospitals which, from a category perspective, we could call enterprise accounts," he said.

While big university hospitals and clinics are more likely to have CIOs and IT plans, midmarket hospitals are more likely to go through solution providers. "The primary goal of a hospital is around taking care of patients, and the folks you're talking to are doctors focused on the patients, not necessarily around profits or making money. You have to understand what that doctor or what that executive inside a hospital is actually thinking about," said Vottima.

"It's a unique market in that they really haven't spent a lot of money on technology in the last 10 years," he added. "It is very much a greenfield opportunity for them, but they need to know what the priorities of the hospital are."

That's where HealthPath University comes in, said Vottima.

So far more than 50 solution providers have sent more than 100 students to the course, and Avnet is also instituting an internship program where resellers actually spend time in hospitals to get a feel for who does what and how the organization is structured. The five-day program starts in admissions and takes solution providers through different departments to get hands-on experience with the various microcosms that make up the hospital.

"We're working with some local hospitals and we're trying to get this through the partners that come through this will probably have the best education on how to sell to hospitals short of what you'd have from going through medical school," said Vottima.

Next: Reseller View Charles Tsoi, president of Sudden Service Technologies, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based reseller, has gone through Avnet's courses and is waiting for the opportunity to participate in an internship.

Although he's been selling into health care for 12 years and the vertical makes up about half of his business, Tsoi said that the program helped him better grasp the intricacies of working with health-care customers and make more sales.

"I wish I had known some of the stuff that they were teaching," he said. "I was surprised to learn that the clinical side of the business was quite lucrative in terms of the amount of business you can get. Since attending that training I've been doing more on the clinical side, like IT systems that impact patient care."

Selling into the health-care market isn't like selling to other kinds of business, Tsoi said.

"A lot of salespeople give up on working with hospitals because they don't understand how big the business is, and you have a lot of people you have to deal with. You also have to understand that you're selling to committees, which means 10 or 20 people have to make a decision. For them to make a decision they have to have lots of meetings, and sales can be anywhere from six months to two years," he said.

"That's part of the reason why I like HealthPath University. It helped me understand all those implications so that when you talk to a customer in a particular department, you kind of understand their world. I think that is the biggest value I got out of it," he said.

For Beverly Budden, national sales manager for the health-care business unit of XWave, a division of Bell Aliant, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the training has helped her sales staff approach health-care customers with more confidence and a greater understanding of their roles within hospital organizations.

"You need to understand what the doors are to knock on," said Budden. "In medicine it's areas of specialty. Oncology is a whole business in and of itself, and [they have their own processes for] how they capture information, what they do with information, their requirements for storing the information and protecting it. Within the clinical side, there tends to be almost separate business units in each medical division."

Three of Budden's sales representatives have gone through the seminars and she also hopes to participate in the internship program. Although the reps just completed the program in April, Budden said that she's seeing more opportunity in the company's pipeline and they've increased their customer base.

"We're moving in the right direction and we're moving, I believe, up the value chain with our customers," she said.

Once solution providers have the knowledge they need to hone in on health-care customers, building relationships can often lead to lucrative deals.

"I think the one thing that people don't realize about selling IT systems in health care is that it is more or less a lifestyle. A lot of people think these deals are huge, there is money to be made. Sure, absolutely. But the one thing that makes health-care IT professionals different is that your customers are different. They really look at you differently when you care about them and when you understand their business. Once you're in, you're in," said Tsoi.