Greetings my fellow FWers. I know that there are a lot of brilliant minds that frequent these forums so I would like to reach out to this community in search of help. Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.
I’m preparing to embark on a business venture around this same time next year. Every variable within my control is in place except for one very critical piece, “finding clients”. I see it as the Achilles heel of a start-up. This is the one variable I feel that no matter how much you prepare for it, you can never guarantee its success. I intend to do everything within my power to mitigate this risk and improve my chances of succeeding. Anything beyond that is left by and large to chance.
What I ask of from the community is for advice on any techniques or methods I can use to market my business in hopes of attaining clients. I know the line of business very intimately and I‘m confident that if I am successful in finding these clients, the business will run like a well-oiled machine.
Business Scope Business Type: Long Term Care Pharmacy Target Location: San Diego, Riverside or Bakersfield, CA (dependent on potential clientele in the area) Target Clientele: Long Term Care/Skilled Nursing Facilities, Intensive Care Facilities, Assisted Living, and any facilities/hospitals in need of sterile compounding
Marketing Ideas These are the marketing ideas that I’ve come up with thus far. I am hoping to eventually expand on this from the feedback I receive. 1. Offer a finder’s reward. Anyone able to find clientele for the business will be compensated for their efforts (i.e. reward ranging from $10,000-$50,000 depending on the size of the facility found). 2. Spam the net. Post this reward notice on any online websites/forums that I can, to increase possible hits. (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Craigslist, even SD and FW if they would allow it). Suggestions for any additional promising websites or other media would be nice. 3. Door-to-door. Set up meetings with any potential clients that are willing to lend an ear. Present my business proposition and even possibly offering them a sign-on bonus of some sort as an incentive for switching over to do business with me.
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1. Kickbacks are questionable. If the care is substandard or an issue arises, then the kickbackee is exposed to legal cation for sending Grandma to her doom for lucre.
2. You're kidding, right? A come-on for a pharmacy interspersed with the Viagra, Rolex knockoffs, and hot girls from Russia ads? Like hell would I ever send a loved one to somewhere that appeared in my bulk mail folder.
3. Door to door? Do you mean cold calls, or professional calls setting appointments?
I don't get it. You've identified your target audience. Just use the Yellow Pages to get a list of them. Just make a courteous phone call and attempt to set up an appointment.
I suggest a different approach, though. You want to pay people for referrals. Why not get salespeople, and pay them for making sales, like everyone else does? Your proposed referral idea is unconventional, and could create the appearance of conflicts of interest.
TidesOfFortune said:Greetings my fellow FWers. I know that there are a lot of brilliant minds that frequent these forums so I would like to reach out to this community in search of help. Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.
I’m preparing to embark on a business venture around this same time next year. Every variable within my control is in place except for one very critical piece, “finding clients”. I see it as the Achilles heel of a start-up. This is the one variable I feel that no matter how much you prepare for it, you can never guarantee its success. I intend to do everything within my power to mitigate this risk and improve my chances of succeeding. Anything beyond that is left by and large to chance.
What I ask of from the community is for advice on any techniques or methods I can use to market my business in hopes of attaining clients. I know the line of business very intimately and I‘m confident that if I am successful in finding these clients, the business will run like a well-oiled machine.
Business Scope Business Type: Long Term Care Pharmacy Target Location: San Diego, Riverside or Bakersfield, CA (dependent on potential clientele in the area) Target Clientele: Long Term Care/Skilled Nursing Facilities, Intensive Care Facilities, Assisted Living, and any facilities/hospitals in need of sterile compounding
Marketing Ideas These are the marketing ideas that I’ve come up with thus far. I am hoping to eventually expand on this from the feedback I receive. 1. Offer a finder’s reward. Anyone able to find clientele for the business will be compensated for their efforts (i.e. reward ranging from $10,000-$50,000 depending on the size of the facility found). 2. Spam the net. Post this reward notice on any online websites/forums that I can, to increase possible hits. (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Craigslist, even SD and FW if they would allow it). Suggestions for any additional promising websites or other media would be nice. 3. Door-to-door. Set up meetings with any potential clients that are willing to lend an ear. Present my business proposition and even possibly offering them a sign-on bonus of some sort as an incentive for switching over to do business with me.
Thanks for hearing me out.
who are your competitors? what is your competitive advantage? what does the Porter's 5 forces diagram look like for your market? what is the size of the market? growth rate? expected revenue, expenses, and profit? how much capital investment is needed, and the weighted average cost of capital?
TidesOfFortune said:Business Type: Long Term Care PharmacyMost have cut their own lucrative deals already; you will have to compete on price alone to get to move, not a winning proposition.
The word of mouth buzz can be very powerful. I think Facebook is a great place to start. Regarding the kickbacks, paying a 3rd party to find a client should be ok. I don't see this as any different from paying a sales person to do this for you. Paying the client directly, on the other hand, may be a different story. I would double check this if I were you, just in case. Good luck with this. Long term care is a tough niche. It's not like you get new walk-in customers stumbling into your pharmacy every day.
I've been (distantly) involved with a similar venture over the past two years - it ended badly for all and they had the customer problem already taken care of - they owned their own nursing home chain. They also "knew the business intimately" but it turns out there was a lot they didn't know. After watching their mistakes I'd suggest starting small and growing slowly with customers that will understand as you make the inevitable mistakes. Get your systems working! Make sure your software can keep up, your pharmacists are reliable and that the billing and collections is accurate and on time. This last one sounds so obvious, but it is always a huge problem in LTC and dealing with Medicaid/Medicare/Insurance Companies. (On paper the company I knew was making $500K profit a month, yet they never collected it.)
Find a small growing chain and partner with them. Grow as they grow, and the unrelated customers will come from normal channels as you are ready for them. (Tradeshows, cold calls, Associations, word of mouth...) The industry is still very fragmented - a few big chains, but the bulk of is still mom and pop homes where they may own one or two facilities. It is also very insular - homes change hands regularly and your typical Nursing Home Administrator has worked for many chains/owners and dealt with many suppliers - they talk to each other and know who to avoid.
Don't expect to get into a big chain until you are well known and have proved yourself (if ever) - the profits from LTC pharmacies are so great that they already have their own inhouse pharmacies. Be prepared to spend lots of time on the road selling one on one. Make the effort to visit the small towns - and hire someone with sales experience in the region that already knows who's who.
Don't do #2. First of all it is likely illegal. Secondly promoting pharmacy and drug sales is pretty much verbotoen by search engines and such. You have to deal with a lot of red tape and issues and such. Plus you are just going to get scammed.
I would suggest you have a sales team that makes appointments and visits all the facilities in your service areas and tries to earn their business. You can certainly create an online presence for support and awareness, and if you want to jump through the regulatory hoops required to advertise a pharmacy on something like Google you could do that as well for relative search terms.
The cold sales calling is a tough road for any business though, and as others mentioned, there is already a lot of entrenched deals that would be hard to unseat. It is likely you will need to come up with a creative avenue or method to acquire customers.
Honestly, you should have had this in hand before proceeding very far with the business. This should not have been the last thing you addressed in starting a new business but the first.
owenscott said:Just use the Yellow Pages to get a list of them.
Ha ha ha .. yellow pages .. ha ha ha .... not usually your wisest way these days.
Why not? OP stated that his prospective clients are as follows:
Target Clientele: Long Term Care/Skilled Nursing Facilities, Intensive Care Facilities, Assisted Living, and any facilities/hospitals in need of sterile compounding
So they're all commercial enterprises. Why not the Yellow Pages if they're local?
Step One is finding customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business.
It costs money to find customers. Figure out what each new customer is going to cost you. There are tons of ways to find customers, but they all have associated costs. Often, the difference between profit and loss is the cost of acquiring customers.
Thank you all for spending the time to read and reply to my thread. All points have been noted.
- I will definitely research this possible kickback issue in further detail. I have a corporate lawyer friend who I can actually enlist the help of. I know that law, at times, may be very ambiguous and left up to interpretation so if you happen to be a corporate lawyer yourself, I would love to hear your opinion on the issue. - I agree that spamming the internet may not be a very personal approach but it does have the advantage of reaching out to the masses. Besides, I don't think it would hurt to try. Getting just even one customer this way will be a big success in my eyes. - When I say door-to-door, I mean trying to set up professional appointments to come in and meet with the clients. Cold-calls are very annoying. It'll leave a bad taste in their mouth and probably burn down the bridge for any potential business with them in the future. - I've thought about hiring a professional salesperson to market the business for me. I've even had a co-worker who wanted to refer me to one. My biggest fear is that the salesperson will turn out to be a money sink with little to no results. Using the finder's reward method, I can theoretically hire an unlimited amount of workforce, where I would only need to pay them upon delivered results. - Anakin, I see you have quite a number of questions for me. We've completed our core analysis but the data is saved in one of my business partner's desktop computer. He is actually out of town at the moment, but when he gets back, I'll provide you with the answers to the best of my knowledge. - tmonkey, boy do I have a whole load of questions for you. We have pharmacists in place, ready to go, who are already familiar with the applications we will be using. We have help from people experienced in systems testing and integration. As for billing, my only concern is that with the current economic and political climate, reimbursements from the government may be delayed or even impacted pending the direction healthcare in the US will be taking. The big thing that we are lacking are the contacts/connections, but I would still love to hear the details from your experience (i.e. which applications, vendors, GPO's, etc... did you guys use?) I want to compile a list of more detailed questions I'd love to ask you. I hope you will be around to answer them. Or even better yet, if I can contact you directly via PM or even by phone, I would greatly appreciate it. - aeiouy. Not sure what "verbotoen" is. Regarding method #2 (finder's reward), I plan to protect myself from being scammed by allocating the bonus in equally divided disbursements over a specified period of time. The beneficiary will only receive payment following each successfully completed period of business. The language details will all be included in the contract agreement that I will draft up with the help of my lawyer friend. - No need for Yellow Pages. We've completed our research of all the potential clients around town already. The million dollar question is, (reiterating the main point and title of this thread) how do we get these clients to do business with us?
I understand that it is a basic building block, but it is a high risk variable that is not 100% within my control. For example, if I can't get my computer application to work properly, there is no excuse and that is entirely MY fault. But if the customers don't want to do business with me, there's probably not much I can do at that point. My goal here is to gather tips on how to improve my chances of getting this variable as close to 100% under my control as possible.
Feel free to PM me - I was the IT guy for the nursing homes and got called in to the pharmacy to help the initial setup and for a few other problems. I heard a lot of the stories (and complaints) but never technically worked for them. Depending on the questions I may point you in the direction of a couple of the guys that were directly involved.
But if the customers don't want to do business with me, there's probably not much I can do at that point. My goal here is to gather tips on how to improve my chances of getting this variable as close to 100% under my control as possible.
If customers don't want to do business with you, you find out why - and you give them what they want. There is a lot that you can do!
What is your business USP - Unique Selling Point? What do you offer that no other company offers? Low price? High quality? Cute logos (don't laugh), advanced technology, geographic proximity, celebrity spokesperson etc? Easy credit terms? There needs to be some reason for them to buy from you, and nobody else - and you need to figure out how to let them know about it.
You're not in the business of providing a service, not with a start-up. You're in sales. If you're not selling, you don't have a business. All the product research in the world won't give you customers - unless you figure out a way to translate that product research into sales. You can't just put out a product and expect people to randomly buy it. You need to sell it to them.
Just because you personally hate cold calls is no reason to decide not to cold call. It's as useful a sales technique as any. You test cold calling, find out how effective it is, you test other methods, figure out what works - and then keep testing. You need to know how much it costs you to land a customer.
You don't want to waste your time and money marketing to people who will never buy - that's just throwing money away. You want to target your efforts to actual potential customers. There are marketing firms who will gladly work with you based on what information you have about your customers are looking for. There are also great salespeople who can take those leads and close a sale.
There are many ways to get customers. Have fun with this.
I wish you the very best with your start-up. It's not easy but when it takes off, it's great.
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