Knowing who to hire and what sort of traits to foster across an organization’s talent can go a long way in creating value for customers and seeing the business returns of customer success.
In the second part of SBI’s conversation with symplr on the GTM Value Creation Corner podcast, symplr CEO, BJ Schaknowski and President, Nicole Rogas talked about how they were able to achieve sustainable success by recruiting the right salespeople and educating them the right way.
“The first thing I said is, ‘What is the profile of a salesperson that we want to bring in to this organization? What does it look like?’” said Rogas.
While sales experience was the obvious requirement, they also sought out talent who are good learners, consultative by nature, and listens well to customers. Such sales talent would be adept in learning about the healthcare industry and its nuances, enabling them to become capable industry consultants that know how to help solve customers’ problems.
Even though two-thirds of their sales organization had only been recruited in the last 18 months, symplr invested heavily into sales enablement for the continuous certification and education of their talent to ensure that their people have the skills and the mindset required to succeed.
“We do not expect any of our folks—who are in the market talking to customers—to ever stop learning, because that’s where we’ll stop creating value,” said Rogas.
“Learning selling organizations—learning selling cultures—are sustainably the most successful,” added Schaknowski.
Looking at the outlook of the healthcare industry in the United States as a whole, symplr recognizes that the value they can add in terms of maximizing workforce productivity and cost savings is something that many healthcare companies will badly need.
“The reality is that these systems have been under—and will continue to be under extraordinary financial pressure. Staffing levels, which were also depleted pre-COVID, are now anemic. You’re looking at a 43% nursing shortage and a 17% physician shortage in this country,” said Schaknowski.
“So, the key to healthcare in this country is going to be really maximizing the productivity of the healthcare workforce that we do have and augmenting them with technology so that we can get better outcomes for more patients.”
With most healthcare companies likely to already be using a brand that belongs to symplr, symplr focuses on what each customer engagement looks like, as well as the value that they have created for customers up until now. The next part of their strategy entails reaching out to customers to let them know that symplr is listening to their needs and is there to support them.
According to Rogas, this is where symplr takes a proactive approach by keeping track of where customers are in their consolidation journey and what they plan to do next. This creates opportunities for symplr to talk to customers early, acting as a consultant that can help them envision how symplr expands within their systems to help them achieve success on their future plans.
“Then we start talking about how we can add more value or incremental value to the investments they’ve already made,” said Rogas.
“Because our portfolio is so large, we can offer them the opportunity in some areas to create more value, to get more efficient—and in some areas, just cost savings by consolidating the different contract management vendors that they have in place today and they can work with symplr.”
Catch the rest of the conversation on “Big Returns from Customer Success, Part 2”—episode 8 of the GTM Value Creation Corner podcast. Listen to the podcast here.
