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Oct. 2004
Marketing to Succeed, Staffing to Fail
As healthcare leaders build a marketing plan, they must simultaneously look at both the capital and the human resources needed to make it happen.
1. Strategically Organize Your Marketing Staff
Often times hospitals have many people wearing marketing hats in some capacity but yet each of these persons report to a different part of the organization. When that happens, there are both communication lapses and redundancy in roles.
For example, there may be a women's affinity group director reporting into a vice president of operations over women's services. An affinity program is a marketing program and should report under marketing. Or, separate service lines have physician liaisons each detailing the same physicians with different messages, creating confusion in the minds of doctors.
Take an inventory of all the people who have a marketing role. It's not quite time to reshuffle the organization. That comes later. First, find out who you have.
For example, one hospital had great marketing ideas but only one person serving in a marketing coordinator role just three days a week. Still others served in marketing roles and reported to various functions, overlapping duties. Oftentimes, two people from the same organization would call on the same physicians about the same services. Physicians, with limited time, were confused as to who actually represented the hospital and what messages were important. By restructuring the liaisons under one marketing umbrella each was responsible for their own book of business. They now call on specific physicians. There is no overlap. There is one voice to the customer. The biggest benefit is that each can spend more time with the physician and build positive relationships.
Following a marketing audit, this hospital made yet other staff changes, committing to hire a full time director and also moving the marketing coordinator into a full time position.
2. Perform a Skills Assessment
Assess what the staff is actually doing and what they are capable of doing. Look at the skill sets of each staff member by performing a SWOT analysis--skills, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. (In this case, "threat" might be too heavy a word, but look at what could happen if their skills were not improved or if they were personally unhappy in their position and might leave with any intellectual property in tow.)
What do they need to learn? What is their future potential? What keeps them motivated and satisfied? Ask lots of questions and get to know each person. Are their skills being used in the right capacity? Sometimes organizations hard pressed for resources will have a marketing person also filling a public relations role that this person has not been trained to do and is uncomfortable doing. When someone is not confident in a role, they may shy away from that particular set of duties and concentrate on what they feel are their strengths.
Spend one or two days with each person observing and learning what they do on the job. Ideally an outside consultant who can bring total objectivity to the assignment should do this shadowing. Seeing first hand how time is spent and how staff interacts with others will say a lot about the person.
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One hospital, eager to market its specialty services, assigned a staffer in a physician liaison role to this task. In shadowing the individual, it became clear that the relationships with the specialists and their staffs were strained and someone else was needed to work with this group. This person had strong skills and was loyal to the organization but was placed in a no win situation based on personalities and politics. Marketing thrived afterwards.
3. Compare the Skills Against the Plan
Look at the marketing plan again and see if the skills match the goals of the strategic marketing plan. Perhaps your marketing has had some success in particular areas – affinity group formation, direct mail, etc. These niches have brought revenue. But you have not capitalized on your strengths using public relations skills to increase media placements.
Build strategic public relations tactics into your plan to increase the number of people who may make inquiries of you. After performing a skills assessment, assess whether the talent is available. It's a simple yes or no. The bigger question is what to do about it?
One hospital performed a skills assessment on the marketing staff and found that a person serving in a marketing role was much more suited and comfortable developing and pitching stories to the media. When that person moved into a media relations role they created a program to reward employees for relating stories to the department that were evaluated and then appropriately pitched to the media. It resulted in at lease one story placement a month in both television outlets and newspapers.
4. Train, Cross Fertilize, Outsource, Hire
It is always preferable to keep existing staff especially if people are hard working, loyal and passionate about what they do. So the first consideration should be whether individual staff members can be and would want to be trained to perform other roles as outlined in the plan. If they can, then where will the training come from? Is there an in-house training organization that addresses the skill sets to be learned? Most likely not. Professional organizations might offer resources. Or it may just be time to go back to school at night to learn. Weigh the time of the learning curve as well. The marketing plan needs to be executed for success now not later.
Can you train employees to perform multiple roles as the hospital cited earlier did with their physician liaison? Each liaison was trained so that they could detail a physician about all services, reducing the quantity of physicians seen but increasing the quality of the relationships built.
As you perform your skills assessment, also analyze what is currently being outsourced and the appropriateness of it. Are things being outsourced that are better done in-house? And conversely, are things being done inside that are better done outside?
If the current staff simply cannot be trained for particular skill sets and those skill sets are needed in-house and cannot be outsourced, then it is time to consider bringing in new talent to fill a particular weakness.
5. When All Else Fails
Hospital marketing departments, especially in suburban and rural areas, are often so short staffed that there needs to be a commitment to bring in more staff resources or the marketing plan will simply not be executed. There is seldom time in these situations to train or cross-train. Indeed, there may be no staff to cross-train.
When the commitment is not there you often find the sole marketer, faced with a budget to spend, resorting to the knee jerk reaction of throwing money into collateral and advertising. With no human resources to track effectiveness, you might as well be throwing good money into the wind, money that could be used to bring in staff resources to execute the plan and work the needed relationships.
But there are a few things that marketers can do to address the issues presented:
It is easy to become so focused on coming up with the right plan that is going to spark the market and to lose sight of whether you can implement the plan however appropriate and right it may be. Don't be short sighted or you will find yourself short staffed, short skilled and short on the market share you wish to achieve.
Anthony Cirillo, CHE, ABC is president of Fast Forward Strategic Planning and Marketing Consulting, LLC in Huntersville, NC. He is a board member of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, a Diplomate of the American College of Healthcare Executives and an Accredited Business Communicator of the International Association of Business Communicators. You may reach Anthony at Anthony@4wardfast.com
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