The Ultimate Guide to Objection Handling:
9 Common Sales Objections & How to Respond

The following list encompasses a number of common objections you might hear from Hospital Executives and outlines a possible response--or set of responses--for each.

Remember: It's one thing to print the Carevoyance sales reports; it's another entirely to be able to defend and interpret them. And on that front, we've got your back!

1. This data is Medicare only, so it doesn't represent a true picture of my facility.
2. This data isn't recent enough to be useful.
3. This data isn't accurate.
4. We don't have the money for your piece of equipment.
5. I don't see ROI-potential.
6. We're already doing great in this area.
7. Your {medical technology} is too expensive.
8. I can't sell this internally.
9. You don't understand my challenges: I need help with Y, not with X.

#1 This data is Medicare only, so it doesn't represent a true picture of my facility.

• The fact that Carevoyance is Medicare-only can be framed as a good thing. The benefit is that the Carevoyance data, sourced from Medicare, is definitive, indisputable and complete. It literally reflects every inpatient and outpatient claim the facility submitted to the Medicare fee-for-service insurance program. Importantly, the Carevoyance reports reflect a similar level of comprehensive Medicare data for facilities competitive to your prospect. Those are data and insights your potential buyer is unlikely to have.
• It's important to know that there exists no complete source of 100% private insurance claims. The alternative is to build extrapolation models off of portions of those data sets. The problem is that those extrapolation algorithms can get complicated to explain. And no extrapolation model is perfect, so you risk getting into a debate with a prospect over methodology, variance, and error rates. You lose control of the conversation if you start down that rabbit hole.
• For sales conversations, start with the Medicare data. What you see is what you get. You might encourage your potential buyer to regard these as conservative figures.  Later, when you're building your ROI story, you can emphasize that you're basing it on just the definitive Medicare figures. If you can build an ROI based on Medicare, imagine the potential when you expand this to other payer types (that may ultimately represent higher volumes of cases at even better reimbursement rates!).
• Remember you aren't telling your prospect that your technology will only attract new Medicare patients (after all the hospital may get reimbursed at a higher rate for commercially insured). Instead, you are simply using Medicare data to surface trends and insights that can be applied to patients, regardless of what insurance card is in their wallet.
• A final note to consider: While the Carevoyance sales reports represent Medicare claims data only (except for the Facility Demographics Overview portlet), you can access extrapolated data at the DRG level on the search results page to understand what the facility's total utilization is likely to be across payer types (private, Medicare, Medicaid, uninsured and other). 

#2: This data isn't recent enough to be useful.

• The fact is, all claims-based data sets are on a lag (it's never real-time), and ours is no exception. The claims submission and adjudication process can take several weeks (if not months) to sort out. The lag ensures you are looking at data that is settled, NOT data that is still being processed.
• CMS releases claims data from Medicare for inpatient and outpatient on a six-month lag and claims data for office on an eighteen-month lag. Carevoyance waits to update our system as soon as we have access to a full calendar year (all four quarters of data). As such, you are seeing the Medicare data as soon as it is possible to be seen; another vendor cannot deliver this data in a more timely manner.
• Use this objection as a conversation starter to focus on the latest year's numbers. From there you can begin to explore the change year to year using our own data. You can investigate the Facility Dossier to direct the conversation toward year-to-year change in the past. Use the DRGs tab (see screenshot below) to filter for the overall volume of procedures of interest for various years. The DRGs tab also shows the percentage change for a previous year. You can even target particular codesets by loading one into the Select a codeset field to the left of the timeframe selection.

#3: This data isn't accurate.

• The data in the Carevoyance sales reports are based on the actual claims submitted to Medicare by facilities for reimbursement; there's no extrapolation or estimation involved. We are telling you exactly what's in the claims data. If you're looking at the data in a report, it is in 1:1 correspondence to what is in the Medicare data.
• The only exception to this is in the Facility Demographic Overview portlet, which often begins a report. This specific data comes from the Medicare Cost Report, submitted annually by the facility itself, and represents data across payer classes.
• If the hospital executive still resists believing these numbers, then collect information for your prospect on what s/he thinks the right counts are for their facility. Ask if it is possible to verify with the hospital's Billing & Reimbursement team. Reach back out to Carevoyance support and we'll do a deep dive into the facility's claims to understand the potential disconnect.

#4: We don't have the money for your piece of equipment.

• Carevoyance reports can be leveraged to tell a story: Both of how the facility stacks up against local competitors and where they can make future improvements.
• Little do they know, the facility may be losing out on all kinds of revenue potential revealed by the Patient Treatment Destinations, Hospital Service Area, and Case Loss portlets. In this vein, you can start to emphasize the ROI potential your product will bring.
• For example, you could use the Case Loss portlet to highlight the ROI potential of maximizing the conversion of patients who visit the facility and ultimately select to receive a procedure of interest at that facility. For more details on just how to do this, read on to #5.

#5: I don't see ROI-potential.

There are several strategies to build toward an ROI for your technology at any given facility.

1. Find new patients.

• Gain net new patients based on greater capture from competitive geographies along with capturing more patients in their own backyard.
• Analyze the Hospital Service Area portlet to understand which geographies are currently most important to the facility. In addition, gain an appreciation for whether those geographies represent high or low patient volumes, whether those geographies are in growth or decline, and finally how competitive those geographies are. Perhaps the hospital should be targeting larger geographies or less competitive ones.
• Also analyze the Patient Treatment Destinations portlet to understand whether patients originating in the focal facility's home county stay in the county or if they elect to travel outside the county for a procedure of interest. Identify other counties, beyond their home county, where the facility has market share but perhaps could capture even more patients.

2. Keep existing patients.

• Analyze whether patients who receive care at the focal facility at some point in the year prior to the procedure of interest stay loyal or go elsewhere. The Case Loss portlet tells you the financial value of patients who decide to go elsewhere for the procedure(s) of interest.
• You can underscore that the financials calculated in the Case Loss portlet represent a conservative estimate of lost revenue, given that it's based on Medicare data only. If your piece of equipment would lead even a third of these patients to choose the focal facility for their care, the investment would pay for itself in just a few years.

3. Increase physician loyalty

• Are the focal facility's top surgeons loyal to the facility or are they splitting their procedures of interest at other facilities?
• Use the Physician Loyalty portlet to understand where physicians are performing the procedures of interest. They may be splitting their time between affiliated facilities OR they may be taking certain cases to a competitor of the facility.

#6: We're already doing great in this area.

• The Procedure Summary and Market Share portlets both give you a look into how a particular facility stacks up compared to their local competition in capturing patients getting procedures of interest. You can use these portlets to see not only the whole bundle of procedures of interest but also a breakdown of the share by individual procedure. As such, you may find that a facility that dominates overall may still have room for improvement in capturing a subset of the available relevant patients.

You can use the Hospital Service Area and Patient Treatment Destinations portlets to highlight which geographies a facility is drawing patients from both in terms of overall Medicare treatments and treatments specific to the code set you used to run the report. Look for competitive zip codes and counties where the facility is drawing patients but not leading in order to emphasize the potential to do better in terms of patient capture.

#7: Your {medical technology} is too expensive.

• Again, use the aforementioned portlets--Case Loss, Patient Treatment Destinations, Hospital Service Area, Procedure Summary, and Market Share -- to explain where the money is going to come from in concrete terms.
• Emphasize specific strategies that can be deployed to capture more patients, retain existing ones, and build even stronger ties with both the facility's key surgeons and community physicians.

#8: I can't sell this internally.

• Use the Carevoyance report to begin to explain how to align the sale with stakeholders.
• Check out the Leadership Tab in the Facility Dossier to figure out who's who inside your prospect (note, your organization may not have elected to upgrade to this feature).

Dig into the Top Affiliated Physicians portlet to make sure you know which physicians are performing the most procedures of interest. Also learn who is doing some cases but perhaps would champion your technology if it allowed them to further build their skills and create a reputation within the community.

Investigate the Physician Loyalty portlet to understand which doctors may benefit most from the investment in new technologies that make their jobs easier or allow them to practice at the top of their license. Examine the Physician Loyalty portlet to answer whether or not physicians are taking cases elsewhere, and if so, why. For example, are they taking cases to facilities with better technology available?

#9: You don't understand my challenges: I need help with Y, not with X.

• Listen to your contact at the facility. Then look up the facility in Carevoyance to dig in deeper. Is the problem really Y? Or is it X? Use our data to verify whether or not this is truly the case.
• If an executive claims that Case Loss is not actually an issue, you have the answer in your report. If they say that patient capture or market share is not an issue, verify it.
• Some Sales Executives bring the PDF of the Carevoyance Sales report into the meeting with them. Others elect to take screenshots of the most applicable sections and integrate those "snagged" images directly into their PowerPoint decks.
• Either way, we've found that most hospital administrators crave deep analytics into both their facilities and their local markets that they can't always access elsewhere.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or you can contact our Support Team by emailing support@h1.co