How to advertise to hospital administrators

A hospital purchase has at least three people in it and usually five. The head of department asks for the thing. The administrator scopes it, collects the quotations and builds the comparative statement. The purchase or materials officer runs the paperwork. Finance checks the budget line. The trust, society or managing director signs above a threshold. Advertising cannot move any of them on its own. What it can do is make sure your name is on the shortlist when the enquiry goes out, and make sure the specification the administrator writes is one you comfortably meet.

Get on the enquiry list before the enquiry exists

Almost every hospital purchase above a small value goes out to three suppliers. Which three is decided by the administrator from memory, from a supplier list, or from whoever demonstrated something recently.

That is the whole game. By the time you receive the enquiry, the specification has been written, and if it was written from a competitor's brochure your quotation is already non-comparable.

So the work is upstream. Be known to the administrator and to the relevant head of department before the requirement is raised, and be the person who helped write the specification rather than the one responding to it.

The four calendars that decide timing

The budget year. April to March, like everyone else. Capital purchases cluster in the last quarter when sanctioned money must be committed, and again early in the year when a new allocation is fresh.

The accreditation cycle. A hospital preparing for NABH or NABL assessment, or for its renewal, buys equipment, documentation systems and training to close gaps found in the internal audit. If you know a hospital's assessment window you know when its administrator is buying and what for.

The empanelment cycle. Getting on a scheme or insurer panel brings conditions about facilities, staffing and record keeping. The preparation is a buying period.

The academic and seasonal load. A teaching hospital's administrator is unreachable during inspection and admission weeks. Any hospital is unreachable during a dengue or a viral fever surge, and in a monsoon district that is a predictable month of the year.

Where an administrator is reachable

In the office, between about 10am and 1pm. Before 10am is the morning round and the night's handover. After 3pm the evening OPD builds and by 5pm the administrator is handling patient complaints, staff issues and whatever went wrong in the day.

Fix the appointment through the head of department who wants your product. An administrator will give time to a supplier the clinical side has already asked about, and will give very little to a cold visit.

Hospital management bodies and their chapter meetings. The Association of Healthcare Providers India and the state and city level hospital associations run meets where administrators of thirty hospitals sit in one room.

Medical equipment exhibitions and conference trade halls attached to clinical conferences. The clinicians come for the sessions and the administrators come for the hall.

The hospital two kilometres away. In this trade a working installation nearby, that the administrator can ring and ask about, closes more than a campaign does. Ask your existing customers for permission to be named and keep a current list of installations by city, with a contact who has agreed to take a call. When GullySales starts with a healthcare business, and Chord Road Hospital is one of ours, that list is the first thing we ask to see. An administrator will ring a peer. They will not read your brochure.

Patient advertising does not reach a buyer

Patient-style advertising. A hoarding or a radio spot aimed at a hospital's patients does nothing for a business-to-business sale, and the administrator sees it as noise.

Email to the hospital's published address. It reaches a front desk.

A brochure with claims and no specification. The administrator needs the model number, the power requirement, the footprint, the consumable cost per test, the warranty terms, the service engineer's location and the delivery lead time. A comparative statement has columns, and every column you leave empty is a reason to drop you.

Anything that touches prescribing or referral. A marketing team should not be deciding where that line sits. Say what your product does, put the price in writing, and leave inducements alone entirely.

Price alone. A hospital that buys the cheapest machine and then waits nine days for a service engineer has bought a problem, and the administrator knows it, because they were blamed for it last time.

What the administrator is judged on

Write to the row your product actually affects. One row, argued with the hospital's own numbers, beats a brochure that gestures at all six.

A worked example

For example, a company selling a point of care testing analyser to hospitals of a hundred to three hundred beds. The figures here are illustrative.

The approach that fails posts a brochure to fifty hospitals and waits for enquiries.

The approach that works builds a list of forty hospitals in two districts with the administrator's name and the pathology head's name, gets introduced through the pathology head at a state association meet, and offers a two-week placement of the analyser in the lab. During those two weeks the lab runs its own samples, and the administrator gets a page showing turnaround time before and after and the consumable cost per test against the current send-out rate. When the enquiry for three quotations goes out, the specification includes the turnaround time the hospital has just measured for itself.

What to do next

Take your last ten lost hospital deals and find out, for each one, who wrote the specification. If the answer is a competitor in most of them, your problem is not the advertising and not the price. Build the named list of administrators and department heads for the hospitals within reach of your service engineers, and work the list through the clinical side, because that is the door that opens.