Notes for owners · Industry playbooks
What healthcare buyers check before they choose you
A patient, a referring doctor and a hospital purchase team each check something different before choosing a provider. This post lists what each one looks at and where a clinic, lab or supplier loses them.
The GullySales team · Updated 6 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Rules for this trade differ by state and professional body, and they change. Check the current position with your own council or adviser before you act on anything here.
On this page
A patient checks three things before booking: whether anyone answers, whether the doctor is a named person with a registration, and whether someone they trust has been there. A referring doctor checks whether sent patients come back with a note. A hospital purchase team checks registration papers, specifications and whether you call after the demonstration. The questions differ, but each buyer is looking for the same thing: a reason to stop comparing. Healthcare is eleven trades with three kinds of buyer, and most lost enquiries come from answering the wrong buyer's question.
Who is actually buying across healthcare?
Read the healthcare category page and you see the pattern. A dental clinic, an IVF clinic, an orthopaedic clinic or a dermatology clinic sells to a patient and the family around the patient. A diagnostic centre or a pathology lab sells to two people at once: the clinician who writes the prescription and the patient who rings round for a price. A device maker or a medical supplies distributor sells to a biomedical engineer, a finance desk and a surgeon who wants one brand.
Mixing them up is the commonest mistake. A device maker who fills its page with reassuring photographs of smiling patients has written for the wrong buyer.
What does a patient check before booking?
Nobody types your clinic's name until they already know it. They type the problem, then look at two or three places on a phone, usually in one sitting, and message more than one. So the checks are quick and mostly visible from outside.
| Check | Where the patient looks | What loses them |
|---|---|---|
| Is it open and does it answer? | Google Maps listing, WhatsApp | A listing with the wrong hours; a message read at eight in the evening |
| Is the doctor real? | Doctor profile, registration details | "Our team of experts" with no name |
| Has anyone like me been here? | Recent reviews and the replies to them | Reviews that stopped a year ago |
| What will it cost? | The WhatsApp reply, the page | No figure at all, or a figure that changes at the desk |
| Is there a clear next step? | The reply itself | A reply that says "call us" and nothing else |
An orthopaedic clinic sees this most sharply: the enquiry is a photo of an X-ray, and the reply either reads it and offers a slot or it does not. An IVF clinic meets a buyer who searches in private and compares quietly, so privacy in the reply matters as much as speed.
What does a referring doctor want back?
A family doctor, a gynaecologist, an optician or a physician sends a patient on trust and judges you by what returns: a call, a report, a short note. Silence ends the arrangement without anyone saying so.
Most places cannot name the doctors who send them patients, because nobody wrote the source down at the desk. A diagnostic centre or pathology lab that fixes that one habit finds its real salespeople within a season. There is a longer treatment of this on the referral marketing page for diagnostic centres, and a worked example in how a pathology lab gets doctors to refer patients.
Be careful with inducements. Rules on what a provider may offer a referrer differ by profession and change, so ask your own council or adviser before you design anything.
What does a hospital purchase team check?
A medical device maker or a medical supplies distributor is judged on documents first. Registration and approvals, a specification sheet, a price list that matches the requirement, and a demonstration the biomedical engineer can attend. After that comes the part nobody writes down: who calls the purchase desk three days after the trial.
A hospital is also a buyer in this chain, and a seller in another. Its own patients come by TPA panel, by referral and by emergency, and each has a different clock. The follow-up systems page for hospitals covers the handover between desk, department and billing, which is where admissions quietly go elsewhere.
A week in one small clinic
For example, a three-chair dental clinic in Yelahanka gets a WhatsApp message on a Sunday: "implant cost for one tooth?" The receptionist is off. The message sits until Monday at ten. By then the patient has heard from two other clinics, one of which sent a range, a doctor's name and a slot on Tuesday.
Nothing about the dentist's skill changed. The clinic lost the patient to a reply. A dental clinic can fix this without spending on advertising: one person owns the phone on Sundays, one standard reply gives a range and says what the first visit includes, and every message is logged with its source.
Where all eleven trades lose enquiries
The leaks are the same in each trade, only the names change.
- The enquiry arrives on a personal number of a doctor who is in a procedure.
- The estimate is said aloud and never written.
- The patient advised surgery or a long treatment goes away for a second opinion and nobody calls.
- The referrer hears nothing.
- The sample, the demonstration or the quote goes out and no one asks what happened.
None of these needs a bigger budget. All of them are visible in a written record of every enquiry, which is what the GullySales free audit looks at in its 90-minute call: how enquiries arrive, how fast they are answered, and what happens at each handover.
Where to start
Pick the buyer who matters most to your trade and write down the five checks they run. Then walk through your own phone, listing and quote as that buyer would, once, with a colleague who has never worked for you. The gap you find first is the one to close first. Advertising rules for doctors, clinics and hospitals differ by state and body and change, so run any new claim past your own council before it goes live.