Secure Health, Inc., (www.4securehealth.com) located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is a national company that specializes in marketing non-invasive medical products and services to improve the quality of life of patients and the bottom line of physicians. They created the Better Balance Fall Prevention & Wellness program to reduce the incidence of falls in the elderly. The program indentifies patients who are at higher risk of falling and provides specific diagnosis and treatment of balance disorders. Their typical sale is $60,000 and up.

Challenges

Secure Health’s sales leads come from three primary sources:

• Their national network of independent representatives who have direct relationships with primary care physicians.
• Web site search engine activity.
• National and regional medical trade shows and seminars.

Generally, because their medical products and services are cutting edge, prospective doctors need to be educated on the scope of our programs and what the positive rewards are for their clinics. They need to know how the program will impact the quality of lives of their patients by helping them avoid the painful and expensive experience of falling and breaking a hip. In most cases, we have a long sales cycle, lasting several months or even a year. The sales cycle involves complicating factors such as extensive technical information, how to get reimbursed for services, financing and leasing options and often there are multiple decision-makers.

“I needed a system to efficiently track where each prospect was in the sales cycle,” said Daniel B. Scherer, CEO of Secure Health, Inc. “At a glance, I need to quickly find and review complex information regarding each customer. Doctors are naturally very busy people and don’t have time to wait. When on the phone, it’s essential for me to rapidly access what information was sent, what still needs to be sent, specific terms of the proposal or sale, follow-up correspondence, or to address each obstacle and what was done or needed to overcome it. A major objective is to interface the information to project sales revenue for each Independent representative and the entire sales funnel.”

“Post sale, our clients require ongoing education and support to remain current with technology and research, health care regulations and medical reimbursement. We required a solution that allowed us to track all activities, follow all support requests, and communicate changes and updates to regulations in a seamless way. We needed the ability to correspond with the entire group of our clients with one e-mail and retain documentation of who received what correspondence and when,” he added.

Solution

After initially analyzing the issues, they felt we had to settle for trying several off-the-shelf software programs, knowing they would be sacrificing some of their identified objectives.

“Each solution offered varying degrees of a total package, but none completely fit all of our prerequisites,” Scherer said. “We quickly found the sacrifice was not worth the cost of admission. In addition to not meeting our complex needs, each off-the-shelf program we tried lacked fundamental functionality. Each caused system crashes on a daily basis. We needed a better solution, fast!”

Secure Health felt hosted CRM services seemed to offer the most flexibility and provide convenient access for our independent reps. Another consideration was their desire to access data while traveling to stay current with progress and sales activities. A hosted service would allow them to meet all of their criteria and provide the convenience of not having to back up data since it would be stored off-site.

“Initially, after reviewing a demonstration of Avidian’s Prophet OnDemand, I was skeptical that a CRM solution could be that simple, based on my past experiences with off the shelf systems,” Scherer said. “However, I agreed to conduct a complimentary trial period to experience first-hand if it really was that simple. None of the off-the-shelf programs ever offered a free trial. Had they done so, it would have saved our company a lot of money, time and frustration.”

Implementation

Secure Health began trial deployment of Prophet OnDemand in May 2009 and its real time deployment was in June 2009.

“After the first day of the trial, I became encouraged that this was our answer,” Scherer said. “I experienced no system crashes and I experimented with most of the tools available. I also found the program easy to implement. From the time the software was installed, it performed perfectly and with this positive experience, I determined that this CRM system would fit all our needs with a minimum of modifications to our existing systems. The trial period sold me.”

As far as their goals in implementing a hosted CRM, first, they wanted to meet all of the objectives outlined above; second, they wanted to shorten their sales cycle; and third, they wanted to improve their response time and post-sale effectiveness.

As far as their goals in implementing a hosted CRM, first, they wanted to meet all of the objectives outlined above; second, they wanted to shorten their sales cycle; and third, they wanted to improve their response time and post-sale effectiveness.