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Getting information about your product or service past the front
desk (i.e. the gatekeeper) and into the hands of the office manager
or clinical staff can be one of the biggest challenges in getting
your business recognized by the important decision makers in an
office. Mailers and drop offs generally just get lost in the garbage
with the hundreds of pharmaceutical mailers that the office receives
each month. Trade shows can be in incredible opportunity to mix and
mingle with decision makers, but finding the right trade show can be
tricky.
TEPR.
The Towards an Electronic Patient Record Roadshows and their
National Show are one opportunity to showcase your EMR. At
these events you will find a good number of physicians and generally
those physicians will be looking to see what is available for them
in an EMR, however, TEPR on broader scale is really more of a show
for the Vendors to get direct feedback on their product, bolster
their marketing, and receive direction on the strategic market
positioning of their EMR. It has been my experience that TEPR,
though a very important and strategic tradeshow, will not in itself
directly affect sales of your software or services.
HIMSS.
The
Healthcare Information and Management System Society Annual
Conference is another exceptional tradeshow for healthcare IT that
brings out a large variety of sponsors and attendees. In
recent years, it seems that HIMMS has had a distinct focus on the
managed care side of healthcare IT. Thus, if you have software
or services that are geared to managed care (i.e. capitation,
compensation, disease management, NCQA accreditation, contracting,
ethics, practice management, formulary development, and other health
insurance issues), this can be an ideal tradeshow as it is one of
the most professionally organized and well managed healthcare IT
tradeshows in the country. Still, like TEPR, this national
tradeshow is generally better left to the vendors and not the
resellers of the hardware or software.
MGMA. For medical software resellers it has been my
experience that the most ideal fit, in terms of tradeshows for
marketing your small business, is the
Medical Group
Management Association National and Regional Events,
particularly the regional meetings. These regional tradeshows
are an incredible opportunity for healthcare IT resellers because
they put you face to face with some of the most active and
influential office managers in your geographic area.
Additionally, at the regional events sponsorship prices usually
start at under $1000 and are well worth the investment.
U-MGMA-zing. My experience last month with the UMGMA's
Annual Meeting (Utah's regional meeting) was very rewarding.
The software reseller that I assisted last month left the conference
with sales appointments for 11 offices that were looking to switch
software in the immediate future. Additionally, there were
another 20 offices that were also good candidates for sales
presentations at some point in the future based on conversations
with them at the booth. One other helpful touch with the UMGMA
(and I'm assuming, maybe incorrectly, that all of the regional
shows do this) is that, as a reward for sponsoring, they
provided us with a list of all of their members. This list
included e-mail, phone number, office address, office names, and the
names of the office managers.
So can getting past the gatekeeper really be just as easy as going
to some local resort for a couple days with 200 office managers,
enjoying a round of golf with them, and then setting up appointment
times to come and show them your solutions? Sound too good to
be true? It is just that easy.
You can obtain a list of regional MGMA shows by contacting the
MGMA directly from their website:
www.mgma.com
-- Kevin Burdick,
InvestMedLLC.com
August 2006, TOP STORY:
What is all this CCHIT?!?!?
May 2006, TOP STORY: Happy
Anniversary InvestMed!
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