By: Susan Boydell | sboydell@barlowmccarthy.com
The dreaded “lunch” meeting requirement. I bet there isn’t a liaison out there that hasn’t been faced with a gatekeeper message, “Lunch is the only time our physicians will meet with reps.” While one can debate the merits of the lunch format, assuming lunch is on the books, are you maximizing the experience? There are ways to leverage the lunch to progress your relationship toward a referral.
First decide to use the lunch not “settle.” Proactively plan for it in our sales funnel. Consider when they are done, who we want included, what we want to learn and how it opens the door toward the next step in the relationship cycle. Notice I didn’t say what we want to tell them. This is about getting the physicians talking- talking about their practice and their patients. Talking about their referral needs.
Let’s play this out. Here are five must-haves for setting-up and conducting a meaningful lunch meeting:
- Segment your audience. You know how it works, you will be asked to get on the lunch schedule to bring lunch in for the entire office and then you sit in the break room and wait for the physicians to hopefully come in. This is not that. This is about setting up a customer-specific lunch- a lunch with just the physicians or with just the office staff. You will need to convince the staff why this is more beneficial but that’s what you are good at. Conversations with physicians and their needs are very different than a lunch conversation with the office staff about their needs. You can use some of the points in #2 to help position the value of the separate lunches.
- Learning objective. Notice that it doesn’t say “selling” objective. No matter where you are in the relationship process, the physicians should do the majority of the talking during this lunch. It’s important that you set-up the purpose of the lunch gathering and the process you plan to use. If this is one of your first meetings with these physicians then your purpose might be to learn about their practice and their patients. You might want to think about a specific clinical area you want to focus on. If this is a practice you’re been calling on for some time and they are used to you sharing what’s new in your organization, let them know this lunch is all about them. Tell them you plan to ask a few specific questions to better understand their practice and their patients related to the topic you would like to discuss. That moves us to must-have #3.
- Get specific and creative with your questions. If it sounds like a basic and expected question then it is. No pressure here, but you’ve got their undivided attention (except for the really good lunch you brought!) and you have to engage them by asking really good, meaningful questions. If you focus on a specific clinical area, use your internal specialists to help craft some really good questions to better understand the fit of their patients with your specialized service offering. Remember you want them talking.
- Listen, probe and guide. Know yourself when it comes to listening. If you have a tendency to talk a lot or even talk too fast think about how you can slow the conversation down. Be aware when you are “telling” vs. “asking”. It’s important to probe, getting them to go deeper but also to guide the conversation in a direction that makes sense for your services. It’s also important to pay attention to what each physician in the room says. There might be a physician or two that are more aligned with the services you offer. When the lunch is over you will want to be sure to have a 1:1 conversation with just those physicians. That takes us to #5.
- Set-up your next steps. This is before you ever leave. Always close the lunch meeting with a next step. Share that with them and ask if that makes sense. Then communicate that with the office staff and get any follow-up meetings scheduled. Make sure the office staff knows how valuable the meeting was and thank them for making it happen. Do the same with any individual physician conversations following the lunch. Use every angle you can to move the relationship forward. Then, it’s 100% up to you to follow-up!
These are five logical actions to help you get the most out of your lunch meetings but I have one more piece of advice, know what you want and plan for it. Begin with the end in mind and pre-plan your lunch meeting to get you there.
Many of you have had some great lunch meetings; please share your success stories or innovative approaches. We’d love to hear them.