Healthcare Lead Generation Using SmartReach | Full Guide
Healthcare lead generation is a critical process for healthcare companies looking to expand their client base and increase sales.
While traditional methods like running ads and relying on clinic visits have their place, they often fall short when it comes to scaling a healthcare business effectively.
Ads can be costly and may not reach the right audience initially, while clinic visits are limited by physical capacity and geographical constraints.
Implementing outbound efforts offers a more targeted and scalable approach to connecting with potential leads and referral sources. For healthcare organizations aiming to improve operational efficiency, exploring healthcare BPO solutions can be a strategic advantage. And if you are looking for ways to generate healthcare leads via outbound process, you have landed in the right place.
At SmartReach, we often encounter companies from the healthcare industry who usually face issues such as –
- Finding the right decision-makers in the healthcare organizations
- Breaking through the oversaturated market
- Setting up a reliable and scalable healthcare lead generation system
Sound familiar?
Well, you’re not alone.
About 68% of B2B organizations struggle with lead generation, and in the healthcare sector, this number often feels even higher.
With the right approach and tools, you can transform your healthcare lead generation from a confusing mess to an organized and a precise, data-driven operation.
This article will provide you a data-driven, step-by-step approach to setting up an effective outbound process using SmartReach.io for healthcare lead generation.
By following these steps, you can significantly improve your healthcare lead generation efforts and close more deals in the competitive healthcare market.
So, let’s get started.
Why outbound focused healthcare lead generation process matters?
Before diving into the specifics of the outbound strategy using SmartReach.io, let’s briefly discuss what are the top challenges for lead generation for medical software companies:
✅ Highly specialized market: Your SAM (Serviceable Available Market) is limited and niche. So, every lead matters. Medical software development companies like AROBS, which create customized healthcare software and medical devices for large healthcare organizations, make it even more challenging for other medical software providers to compete in this space.
✅ Long sales cycles: Average sales cycle in medical industry lasts for 6-18 months. So, you need to gear-up the sales process with automation.
✅ Complex decision-making processes: Multiple stakeholders are involved in purchasing decisions, from IT to clinical staff to C-suite executives.
✅ Stringent regulatory requirements: HIPAA compliance and data security are non-negotiable.
These factors make it essential to have a robust and efficient outbound lead generation strategy tailored specifically to the healthcare industry.
Setting up a healthcare lead generation process using SmartReach.io
Let’s set-up a an effective outbound lead generation process from scratch.
Step 1) Define your ideal customers
In this step you need, to define what your ideal customer looks like. For that you will use these two concepts – ICP and buyer personas.
You’ll need to think strategically about who would benefit most from your product and who has the authority to make purchasing decisions.
Let’s break this down step-by-step:
1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Identify organization type, size, location, budget, and tech adoption level
- Focus on specific pain points your software/service/hardware addresses
- Consider industry trends and regulatory environment
- Example: 350-bed urban hospital in a healthcare network, with $1M+ IT budget, seeking to upgrade aging EHR systems.
Note: You may have more parameters depending on your how niche problems your software/service/hardware solves. These are some general parameters applicable to almost any business.
2. Buyer Persona
For your buyer persona, consider the key decision-makers in healthcare organizations:
- Develop detailed profiles for 2-3 key decision-makers of your target businesses. (e.g., CMIO, CIO, CFO)
- Include demographics, goals, challenges, and decision-making factors of these personas.
- Consider their information sources and preferred communication channels of your personas.
- Example: Nurse Sarah Johnson, 48-year-old LPN, interested in applying for the compact nursing states license to practice in multiple states.
💡 Some additional insights
- Use data from current customers to refine your ICP and personas.
- Consider the buying committee dynamics in healthcare organizations.
- Align your product features and marketing messages with the specific needs outlined in your ICP and personas.
- Regularly update these profiles as the healthcare industry evolves.
If you are still unsure about who your target customers are, you can follow this detailed ICP framework created by the OG Alexander Estner.
Step 2) Build a targeted prospect list
Now you have to find the relevant, accurate and useful contact information of your ideal customer that we talked about previously.
You can follow two different approaches here –
Approach 1 ➡️ Use your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) that you have generated from running ads, website sign-ups, waitlists or through social media. Run outreach campaigns on them directly.
Approach 2 ➡️ Build a prospect list from scratch. (in case you don’t have a MQL lead generation process in place yet)
In this article, we will be following the approach 2.
So, let’s start it from scratch.
For running successful outreach process you need some essential prospect information such as –
- Professional email addresses,
- Contact number (avoid personal contact number),
- Designation details in the organization,
- Organizational details (location, HQ, name etc.)
You can find all these information by either prospecting from a platform like LinkedIn or sourcing the lead information directly from a lead finder tool.
Prospecting from LinkedIn to find contact information
Search for your buyer personas in LinkedIn with all the details selected such as location, industry and anything else you want specifically.
It would return the result like this –
Now you can use any tool like Anymail Finder to extract their email addresses and phone numbers to a excel sheet like below.
This way you can find the relevant prospect information to build a prospect list from scratch in a google sheet or excel sheet.
❗Note of caution: This is not a recommended method since you may not find important prospect information such as phone numbers for all the prospects. Also, there is a high chance that LinkedIn may shadow ban your account for scrapping off data using a third party tool. So, use it on your own risk 🙂
Using a specific lead finder tool works better in this case to automate the entire process and source prospect data more ethically.
Using a lead finder tool to find contact information
This is a more viable, scalable and accurate process for finding contact information.
You can use the lead finder tool by SmartReach.io to find contact details in few clicks.
Just select whatever the criteria your buyer personas fall (such as industry, team size, company type, first name, last name etc.) inside the SmartReach lead finder and you will get your prospect information such as their contact number and professional email addresses.
Here’s how it looks like –
Now you can directly export the prospect data into your email, cold calling or multichannel outreach campaigns from here. (We will cover this part later in this article)
Prospecting + Data enrichment + Outreach —- all within a single platform under a single subscription plan. (Check out the pricing)
This is the basic way of building a prospect list from scratch as a beginner for sales outreach.
If you want a more in-depth guide you can check out “How to Create A Winning Sales Prospect List – A Comprehensive Guide”.
Step 3) Set-up and run the outreach process
Once you have got your prospect list ready, it’s time to reach out to them.
There are different channels you can you can run your outreach on, e.g., –
- Emails
- Calling
- Text messages
Some unconventional channels have also recently emerged fairly successful in B2B such as Instagram and Slack.
For a successful healthcare outbound lead generation process, you should combine all the different channels for outreach.
Prerequisities before starting a multichannel cold outreach campaign 👇🏻
- For email campaigns put your sending email accounts for at least 14 days of warm-up before you start sending emails to your prospects. (Use Warm-up Hero)
- Set-up your secondary domains properly before sending emails.
- Choose the right email service providers for cold email outreach. Outlook is recommended for its increased deliverability capabilities.
- Start your email campaigns with a soft-start and gradually increase the daily sending limits each week.
- If you are sourcing lead information by prospecting, SmartReach.io automatically validates those emails with the “Spam test report”. (SmartReach provides unlimited free email validation)
- Develop compelling value propositions and messaging tailored to your personas that you have built. (You can use SmartReach content AI to write personalised message with prompts during the email sequence set-up as well. )
- Set-up at least 5 sequences for your cold email outreach campaigns.
- For LinkedIn Outreach, connect with your prospects first and engage with their content (like,share and comment).
- Don’t fully automate LinkedIn activities such as messaging, profile view etc. LinkedIn may ban your account for automating tasks using third party tools. Instead, go for semi-automated LinkedIn outreach tasks. .
- For calling campaigns, create 3-4 different calling scripts based on your personas with the right talking points. (Check out the samples and customize it accordingly).
Let’s see how SmartReach helps you with a multichannel outbound set-up for healthcare lead generation.
Check out this youtube video to get the step by step process for setting up a multichannel campaign using SmartReach.io 👇
Here’s a basic outreach flow that you can follow 👇🏻
SmartReach.io allows you to run single channel campaigns as well as multi channel campaigns with channels such as email, LinkedIn, Calling, Whatsapp and text messages.
Below is a sample multichannel campaign flow that you can follow.
Step 1) LinkedIn connection request.
If accepted, engage with prospect’s content on LinkedIn and send InMail within 48 hours.
Step 2) Start email sequence 3-5 days after LinkedIn connection.
Step 3) Make phone call after 2-3 email touches.
If no response, continue email sequences.
Step 4) Use WhatsApp for warm leads or quick follow-ups.
Step 5) Cycle through channels, adjust based on prospect engagement.
Note: Based on your team size, sales and marketing budget, GTM strategy, channel knowledge you can improvise these steps accordingly.
Key principles to consider for the outreach sequences
- Personalize each touchpoint based on prospect’s recent activities, company news, or industry trends.
- Include easy opt-outs immediately across all channels and maintain a centralized do-not-contact list using SmartReach.io.
- Maintain a consistent outreach cadence across channels.
- Track prospect engagement and adjust approach accordingly.
- Provide value in every interaction with the prospects (insights, solutions, resources etc.)
- Continuously update your ICP and buyer personas based on engagement data and successful conversions.
- Always keep your email deliverability in check. SmartReach provides features such as inbox rotation, spintax, spam test report, unlimited email validation, unlimited email-warm-up, inbox placement and more for saving your emails from landing in SPAM and damaging your sender reputation.
Remember, this is a basic representation. You may have more complex decision points, parallel processes, and feedback loops.
So, consider factors like timing between touchpoints, A/B testing of messages, and personalization based on prospect engagement.
This brings us to the next step – managing your responses from the campaign.
Step 4) Manage your campaign responses
This is an important step in the outbound process.
Effective response management is crucial for converting enquiries and objections into opportunities.
Here, you need a centralized response system that lets your team collaborate with each other.
It will help them address the queries and objections received from running different campaigns on different channels.
Use the “Shared Inbox” feature of SmartReach to manage your all your campaign responses from a single place. It ensure your team never misses important follow-ups. (Here’s the 👉🏼 set-up guide)
You have the option to categoriae campaign responses to forecast your sales pipeline and opportunities further.
SmartReach.io automatically tags your campaigns responses into important insights such as –
- Positive replies
- Requests for more information
- Not interested
- Out of office
- Unsubscribe requests
Based on the responses, prioritize the follow-up on positive replies and information requests first.
Assign the leads to the team members based on expertise and territory using the roles and permissions features of the SmartReach.
As per survey, about 90% of the leads go cold after 1 hour.
So, aim to respond to positive replies within 24 hours. Use SmartReach.io’s notification system to alert team members of new high-priority responses.
Lastly, update the leads status in your sales pipeline regularly.
SmartReach.io integrates with popular CRMs to keep your sales data synchronized and up to date.
By using Shared Inbox and associated features, you can manage campaign responses efficiently, ensure timely follow-ups, and maximize your conversion rates from leads to opportunities. Additionally improving team collaboration.
Step 5) Monitor, analyse and optimise the campaigns according to your goals
This is the last step in the outbound process for healthcare lead generation.
Based on the sequences that you have set-up, continuously improve your campaigns by closely monitoring metrics such as –
- LinkedIn connection acceptance rate (aim for >40%)
- LinkedIn response rate (aim for >2%)
- Email open rates (aim for >50%)
- Email reply rate (aim for >3%)
- Call connection rate (aim>15%)
- Overall lead generation rate (based on your revenue goals, lead acceptance criteria and industry benchmarks)
SmartReach.io provides detailed reports and analytics where you can track all the channel metrics in a few clicks.
To track and optimize your email outreach campaigns, you need to monitor –
- Email activity report – it captures important email campaign metrics such as open rates (no. of people opened an email), reply rates (no. of people reply to an email), click-through rates(no. of people click an email link), number of positive responses, bounce rates(no. of email fail to deliver at the prospect’s inbox) etc.
- Prospect contacted report – to see how many prospects you have contacted across the channels, how many combined replies you got, the tone of the replies(positive, objection, do not contact, referral, other etc.)
- Best time to send report – Use this report to track which time your prospects are mostly engaging with your emails and schedule your emails accordingly.
- Hot prospects report – to identify potential conversion opportunities and take actions accordingly.
Apart from that, you need to A/B test different elements throughout the process such as –
- LinkedIn connection message variations
- Email subject lines and body copy
- Call scripts
- WhatsApp message formats
- Call to action placements
Use different email copies inside your campaign for A/B testing inside SmartReach.
Make sure to track their results to see which email copy is working and take your decisions accordingly.
For tracking your calling outreach, use the call activity report. You’ll get an overview of the total calls made, calls connected, total call duration, average call duration.
Remember, the key to successful optimization is continuous iteration—regularly review your campaign performance, gather insights from healthcare reviews, and implement improvements to stay ahead in the competitive healthcare market. Taking advantage of healthcare reviews and reputation management can enhance trust and credibility. Healthcare companies looking to expand their digital presence can develop an online pharmacy app to offer convenient medication ordering and delivery services to patients.
So, finally this is how you can set-up an automated multichannel cold outreach campaign for effective healthcare lead generation.
Now that you got the blueprint, try SmartReach.io yourself and see how it improves the bottom line of your business. With the plans starting at only $39 per month (Less than $2 per day), you get access to all the multichannel features shown above.
If you are still unsure, try this ➡️ 14 Day FREE trial of SmartReach.io to see if it fits your specific use-case. (No Credit Card Required)
If you have specific queries for the tool, its usage etc. book a FREE consulting call.
Bottom line
Effective healthcare lead generation requires strategic implementation, patience and continuous improvement.
Focus on creating a tailored mix of outbound channels that resonates with your specific audience, whether it’s patients, referral sources, or partnering organisations.
Start small, perhaps with LinkedIn outreach and targeted emails, then expand based on performance data.
Set clear, measurable goals like “increase qualified leads by 20% in 3 months” and adjust tactics weekly based on engagement metrics.
Lastly, always prioritize compliance with healthcare regulations in your outreach efforts.
By taking these practical steps, you’ll build a healthcare lead generation system that delivers tangible, sustainable growth for your business.
