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Selling to the Pain: Closing More Deals in Healthcare Sales (2016) is a revolutionary strategic methodology to improve sales efficiency and close rates. The pain a potential customer is experiencing is the result of a lack of performance in financial, quality, or satisfaction key metrics. To be successful, you must diagnose the pain, communicate your solution effectively, and close the deal. 

During the past two decades, the culture of decision making has changed but many companies have not pivoted their sales strategy to be effective long term. Competition is fierce. Selling to the Pain is proven to create a competitive advantage to drive results in what matters – efficiently closing more deals.

Dr. Tom McDougal, accepted his first hospital CEO position at age 27 and led seven different hospitals and health systems over 23 years. He also has eight years of experience directly helping companies sell their solutions to these same organizations, now as the CEO and Founder of Badlands, the premier and professional sales growth consultancy firm. Dr. McDougal provides deep insights from his unique perspective of both a decision maker and a sales professional.

Selling to the Pain includes three critical components to sales strategy success:

1.  Understanding the decision process and the factors that affect decisions as explained in The Decision Table©;

2.  Developing a Value Proposition Message to identify the pain a customer is feeling and communicate an actionable solution; and 

3.  Applying Accountability Sales© to hold the decision maker accountable to help you close the deal.

Through Dr. McDougal’s insights and advisement in of the Selling to the Pain strategy, you can achieve an advantage over your competition by capturing the decision maker’s attention and improving efficiency to close more deals. While Selling to the Pain is developed from experiences in healthcare, the strategies are often applied to other industries that have long sales cycles, centralized decision making, and strong administrative leadership. Dr. McDougal has your prescription to Sell to the Pain.

Prior to 2019, Dr. Tom McDougal’s work with companies selling solutions to healthcare organizations led to revolutionary strategies and accelerated sales growth. During his time as a professor at Samford University, he instructed graduate students in Economics and developed a passion for Behavioral Economics. His first book, Selling to the Pain, was growing in impact in the industry. But, Dr. McDougal developed a new curiosity related to patient decision making of when and why they choose to purchase healthcare services, and from which healthcare provider.

In late 2019 following multiple podcasts and speaking engagements, Becker’s Healthcare asked Dr. McDougal to speak at their 2020 conference for healthcare leaders. He was happy to accept the invitation and began preparation. Unfortunately, COVID resulted in cancellation of the 2020 Becker’s conference. Dr. McDougal also had other priorities in leading a hospital through the COVID crisis. 

After months of intense work as a hospital CEO during COVID, the economy was still largely closed and Dr. McDougal had some free time. Cleaning out his home one Saturday morning, he found his work preparing for the Becker’s conference and began reading. What he realized was he had a detailed framework for a new book – and, the information needed to be shared broadly. So, he started writing. 

In late 2020, Dr. McDougal published Predicting Patient Decisions which has sold 1000s of copies and is used in the same Samford University Economics course he created. Economics, and more importantly Behavioral Economics, provides clear insights into why, when, and from which organizations patients will choose healthcare services. Before spending substantial time or capital, healthcare executives of all levels need to understand the why of patients. The ROI can be substantial.