INBW25: Behind the Marketing: Preparing Account Management for Successful Selling Into Health Systems, With Co-Hosts Stacey Richter and Dave Dierk, Co-Presidents of Aventria Health Group

In this episode, Stacey Richter and Dave Dierk, co-presidents of Aventria Health Group, discuss how to prepare an account management team for successful selling into health systems.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why sellers need to understand health system problems on a micro level, not just the whole

✅ Why the value you bring is the incremental gap between where a customer is now and what they could attain

✅ The difference between collaborative selling skills and consultative skills

✅ Why getting to "yes" doesn't mean the job is done

✅ The five links in the chain account managers need: market knowledge, customer knowledge, collaborative skills, consultative skills, and strategic ability

WHY THIS MATTERS

Building on The #HCBiz Show!'s "Selling Into Health Systems" series with Don Lee and Shahid Shah, Stacey and Dave lay out what it actually takes to prepare an account management team to sell successfully into a health system. The throughline is that success depends less on pushing a product and more on being relational rather than transactional—understanding the customer's strategy and plan, building real business cases, and recognizing that value changes depending on the organization you're working with.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

✉️ Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to the free weekly newsletter

🫙 Support the podcast with a small donation to the Tip Jar

📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel

🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts

🎤 Listen on Spotify

=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

✭ LinkedIn ✭ Threads ✭ Bluesky ✭ X

00:00 Introduction

03:37 Don Lee on understanding problems in health care on a micro level rather than on the whole.

03:55 Focusing on larger entities that are looking to collaborate with a health system rather than innovators and start-ups in health care.

04:52 Looking at innovation and affecting behavioral change more broadly.

05:42 Helping manifest potential value.

06:06 Don Lee on being a proactive innovation guide rather than telling a health system how their system works.

07:39 Learning new skills and putting new infrastructure in place to support new approaches.

09:24 "The value that you bring is the incremental between where they are now and what they could attain."—Stacey

10:42 "It's more about you than it is about your customer."—Stacey

12:41 "All of that is predicated on, 'What's your strategy? What's your plan?'"—Dave

14:54 Don on doing the consulting work.

15:16 Shahid on building business cases for everything you bring into the health system environment.

15:48 Don on the number of perspectives at the table and needing to understand and align your product to this multitude of needs.

17:24 "Once you get to yes, your job is not done."—Dave

18:55 Shahid on common mistakes on consultative work.

20:35 "If it's not meaningful to them, relative to other choices, then they might not act on it."—Dave

21:48 "That challenge is underestimated."—Stacey

23:21 Collaborative skills vs consultation skills.

24:18 Shahid on how the value of your product changes depending on the organization and clients that you're working with.

25:42 Shahid on pushing a product before considering the customer's needs.

28:39 What an account manager needs in order to be successful.

30:22 What a paradigm of success consists of.

32:47 Breaking down barriers and paradigms to get the right approach.

33:35 Being relational, not transactional.