By: Susan Boydell | sboydell@barlowmccarthy.com
As the year comes to a close, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate the successes of 2024 and gear up for the exciting opportunities ahead in 2025. To help you start the new year strong, I’ve put together 25 impactful ideas, strategies, and tactics designed to inspire action and set you up for success. Let’s hit the ground running and make 2025 your best year yet!
- Learn something new. Challenge yourself to uncover fresh insights in offices you’ve been visiting for years. Relationships are great – deepening them is even better.
- Take on a clinical area you have less knowledge of or you just don’t feel confident going deeper in with a potential referral source.
- Refresh your field approach. Markets change, physician needs change, patient expectations change so you need to change adapt to remain effective.
- Be quiet. It’s less about what you have to say and more about what they have to say.
- Put gatekeepers at ease. Move beyond standard lines and try something creative to lower their guard.
- Ask clarifying questions. Ensure you fully understand their needs. Think conversation vs. talking about what you have to offer.
- Ask a “By the way…” question before you leave each visit. It’s a great way to gather field intelligence and real time voice-of-customer input. Keep track of your learnings and share with your offices and internal stakeholders.
- Be prepared. For visits, for calls to set up visits, for calls with internal stakeholders. Dare I say… pre-call planning!
- Use your activity documentation to adjust what’s working and what needs attention in the field. After all, you took the time to put it in there, use it to get better results!
- Commit to prospecting. Analyze your activity and see what targets you’ve not visited. Pick three and create a plan to uncover a need.
- Read an article about asking better questions. There’s hundreds of articles and, yes, some aren’t great. But, there are often a few good questions you can customize.
- Win over a grumpy internal stakeholder. Build a plan to earn credibility with even the toughest colleagues.
- Get educated on value-based models. Understand their current and future impact on referrals and market dynamics.
- Research primary care needs. Deepen your understanding of what primary care physicians expect from your health system.
- Create an agenda for each visit for one week, use it to set up the reason for your visit and see what difference it makes on the outcome of each call.
- Take on niche selling. Focus on a specific clinical procedure for a targeted patient population.
- Refine your introduction. Perfect a concise “elevator pitch” that differentiates you from all others wanting time with the physician.
- Adapt to personality types. Research personality styles and tailor your approach to connect more effectively.
- Know your competition. The referrals you want are going to the competition so know why you vs. them.
- Be mindful of word choice. Swap overused terms like “multidisciplinary” with descriptions that highlight tangible benefits.
- Take on sales planning. Know where you can earn referrals, what it will take to get them and your plan to make that happen in the field.
- Know when to walk away. Sometime the effort isn’t worth the reward because the reward is not enough to justify the effort!
- Build resilience. With so much change and tougher challenges in the field, being able to “bounce back” and learn from tough situations can often be what drives long-term success. And, it will help with your own well-being!
- Find a mentor. Pick an area you struggle in and find a mentor or a coach to help you learn and grow. It could be help with analyzing your data or getting past tough gatekeepers.
- Commit to the field. Balance other responsibilities so you can prioritize being present in the field – where the real impact happens.
Success in the field isn’t just about making visits – it’s about building meaningful relationships, being flexible and adaptable, and continuously refining your approach. These 25 ideas are designed to inspire change, foster resilience and help you create measurable impact in 2025.
Take this list as a roadmap and remember: every small step forward adds up to big achievements. Commit to the work, embrace the challenges, and make the upcoming year one of growth, innovation, and success. Here’s to hitting the ground running and making 2025 your best year yet!
As a national leader in physician relations at Barlow/McCarthy we would love to partner with to take your physician relations to the next level in 2025. Reach out to info@barlowmccarthy.com to see how we can help.