Case study

Healthbridge

Using Skynamo to target customers more accurately

Skynamo isn’t just a tool for managing sales reps, says Robert Delport, inland sales manager at Healthbridge. In fact, the healthtech company uses it much more for market intelligence and streamlining their sales process.

Healthbridge has been in the industry for more than 20 years, and started off as a traditional switching company, Robert explains: “We’d send a claim to the medical aid, and then deliver a response back to a medical provider – we were in fact the pioneer of the real-time claim,” he says. “Over time we’ve moved to a cloud-based clinical and billing system, so we offer an electronic medical records (EMR) system that integrates seamlessly into the billing component of our system. In layman’s terms, that’s a medical practice’s accounting system.”

Robert says when he joined the company more than 10 years ago, they were using Excel spreadsheets to drive their sales processes, and in the process of changing their own offering to be cloud-based, decided to move to Skynamo, so they were practising what they preached on the sales front.

“We were doing it the old-school way,” he says. “Old-school selling, old-school pipeline building, old-school leads management, and paper diaries. We decided to make the leap to Skynamo in 2015.”

Robert says their team has a national footprint, and comprises 13 business consultants, two sales managers and a tier of administrators, as well as a national sales manager. “We have our own sales methodology that helps us manage our pipeline and forecasting, which is driven by our customised Visit Forms in Skynamo. We have tweaked Skynamo to match our sales process and how we would go to market and sell.

“Our team has over time refined our sales approach to ensure that it more consultative in nature,” he explains. “Through this process we’re able to help a practice quickly identify the value that Healthbridge can add. Skynamo helps us measure the unique interactions that our team has with each practice (and consequently work out our closing ratios). When reviewing the reports, our team leaders can quickly understand where an excessive number of visits are being logged and we can quickly intervene, as we don’t believe in wasting the practice’s time.

He says Skynamo also helped to address a few inefficiencies within their standard process, in replacing the spreadsheets and other physical paperwork, and gave them visibility into where team members were from day to day. “We’ve also homed in on the ideal type of client profile we want to target,” he says. “Skynamo helped us to target the correct client, and to maximise on activity.”

Robert says that because Skynamo allows team leaders to see who has logged in, and where they are at any point, they can help their team members structure their days better. “Seeing our team’s activity means you know how you can help drive the team form the most productive behaviours,” he says. “My job is to upskill, mentor, coach my team and find the correct tools to support them.

“Because it’s a sales team, they are very driven. So it’s about how I make their lives easier and faster and how I can find ways to take the pain out of admin. They say sales guys don’t like admin. But trust me, my best sales guys actually do their admin. It helps that Skynamo automates a lot of it .”

Robert says that since they started using Skynamo there’s been a definite uptick in the number of visits their consultants get through, and the saving on daily admin has been a huge boon. While their consultants are engaging with prospective clients, they complete the admin, which is kept as simple as possible – about 15 questions with pre-populated slots that just require a drop, drag and click action. “They can complete a form in under a minute,” he says.

Robert advises to bear in mind that there will be a good deal of change management required when Skynamo is first implemented. “You have to drive the behaviour,” he says. “As a sales manager, we mostly look at the reports – at the numbers. And our admin people keep tabs on the dashboards and send prompts to remind people to log in, for example. It does require some management to embed the behaviour and ensure people are using it as intended.”