Marketing with Integrity
Quality selling is not convincing someone
to use your services, but
listening to what they need and letting them know if you can help them.
listening to what they need and letting them know if you can help them.
The American
Medical Association has come a
long way since it published a code of ethics in 1957 with many
anti-advertising recommendations. The AMA now encourages
physicians to market our practices as long as we do it in a
manner that is not deceptive. This means, in a single word, as
long as we do it with integrity. Dr. Arnold Relman, the former
editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine once summed it up this way,
“...ethical medical practice thrives best under free
market conditions when prospective patients have adequate
information and opportunity to choose freely between and among
competing physicians and alternate systems of medical
care.”
To have integrity means
that you are honest and willing to do the right thing
regardless of the personal cost to you. The business world is
filled with those who have not traditionally valued integrity
above all else—especially the bottom line. Recently,
though, there has been a shift toward marketing with integrity.
This new paradigm, if you will, is seen in a spate of
best-selling books that promote honest and ethical sales
practices—exactly what the AMA suggests. Sharon Drew
Morgen, a forerunner in this movement who penned Selling with Integrity, believes it’s necessary for any
‘business’ to “have the right and capacity to
introduce their products and ideas to appropriate
audiences.”
Rick Crandall, the author
of Marketing Your Services: For People who
Hate to Sell, notes that the
policy that professionals couldn’t market was
“declared illegal in a case about lawyers heard by the
Supreme Court almost 50 years ago, so forbidding marketing has
long been inappropriate.” Crandall says there are two
reasons that professionals try to limit marketing. First, they
limit marketing in order to maintain the “image and
professionalism for all.” This is a positive reason for
curbing marketing, according to Crandall. On the negative side
is the second reason—which is to try to reduce and
control competition.
Regardless of how much
(or little) marketing we do, Crandall notes that there are a
couple of reasons why many of us think negatively of all
marketing and selling. “The pushy and obnoxious way you
see [marketing and selling] done is not the way professionals
want to be,” he says. Moreover, he says, “Doctors
don’t understand what marketing really is. Marketing is
not making people do what you want them to—such as buy
your services. It is building a relationship and finding out
what patients need—serving them.” Crandall goes on
to say that too many doctors think that delivering good
technical services is sufficient. However, patients have
difficulty judging the quality of our medical acumen.
“They want to feel that you care about them. They
don’t have the expertise to judge your technical
competence, but they know how you treat them,” says
Crandall.
Filling a need
In this day and age of health care,
marketing is not only a right, it is a requirement for most of
us to stay in practice. We do somehow need to reach those who
would benefit from our services. While marketing is not
something that most of us want to spend an inordinate amount of
time on, it is comforting to know that our business colleagues
have given some thought to how we can do this and maintain our
professionalism—market with integrity.
Ron Willingham is the
author of the recently released book, Integrity Selling for the 21st Century. Willingham cites four “core
traits” that highly successful people have when it comes
to marketing. They are:
1. Strong Goal Clarity
2. High Achievement Drive
3. Healthy Emotional Intelligence
4. Excellent Social Skills
Willingham expands on each of these core
traits. For example, ‘Strong Goal Clarity’ means
that you have “...clear, specific, written goals of what
you want to have happen in your future. They must be goals that
you deeply desire, and most important, goals you firmly believe
are possible for you to achieve, and that you feel you deserve
to achieve.” He describes ‘Achievement Drive’
as “a latent, potential power that everyone has.”
Though Willingham says that it usually stays dormant because
people lack goal clarity. Emotional intelligence is “the
ability to understand the emotions you’re feeling (and
those of others) and their impact on your behaviors.”
Excellent social skills, Willingham points out, have
“little to do with talking or having the ‘gift of
gab.’ They’re more about communicating with
people—asking questions, listening, understanding, having
empathy and rapport.”
Willingham stresses
that in order to “sell” well, you have to look at
how you view selling. Many people believe that selling involves
convincing customers to buy things that they may or may not
want. Instead, he suggests, we should look at selling our
services as a way of identifying and fulfilling what our
patients need. Selling should be a “win-win
transaction.” Willingham argues that developing these
four core traits is the key to selling with integrity and can
further enhance whatever success you have already achieved.
At my hospital, Spaulding
Rehabilitation Hospital, there
has been a recent change in administration. The new president,
Judith Waterston, focuses on marketing our services with
integrity. Often this marketing takes the form of education.
Waterston says, “I do believe that educational programs
are a very good way to market the physicians’ expertise.
I have seen many times a physician do a case presentation to,
for example, a group of ICU nurses and physicians who in turn
become that physician’s best referral sources.”
Waterston notes that by educating the referral sources
“you focus on patient outcomes and care and avoid the
slick sales type of ‘promise anything’ to get the
patient.”
Waterston cautions
physicians to avoid “bad mouthing the competition.”
Instead, focus on the unique services and programs that you
offer. In recent marketing programs, Waterston has highlighted
some of Spaulding’s specialized rehabilitation programs
and a few of the amazing recoveries seriously injured patients
have experienced. These are just some of the ways that
Waterston has brought attention to the unique and important
services that the doctors and other health-care providers at
Spaulding offer. This effort has been very successful and
though Spaulding has always been fairly highly ranked, 2003 was
the first year in which we were among the Top 10 Rehabilitation Hospitals in U.S. News
& World Report.
Your marketable attributes
Regardless of your practice environment,
there are things that make your services special. Perhaps you
offer extended hours or same-day appointments. If you or your
staff members are fluent in a language other than English, this
will work. One of my colleagues, a pediatrician, has a thriving
practice with a number of deaf patients who come to her because
she knows American Sign Language. Whatever you do that makes
you stand out in a meaningful way is worth letting people know
about.
Sharon Drew Morgen
says that when a physician markets with integrity “the
doc is the true servant leader to the patient.” Instead
of believing that prospective patients will seek out a doctor
if she has the right “pitch,” Morgen says,
“Our new job as sellers is to help our patients make
their best decisions, with us as navigators to help them line
up their variables, so they can see/understand their best
answers.”
Morgen suggests three
ways that physicians can market their practices with integrity.
First, she advises creating ads that “focus on the
ability to serve rather than how great you are.” Second,
create an entry and exit questionnaire for patients that
includes questions about collaborative decision-making and
follow up. Then request referrals. Third, consider having radio
spots that ask “facilitative questions that leave
listeners thinking about how to answer the questions during the
day.”
Rick Crandall also
offers three tips to physicians on how to market with
integrity. He says, “Make your service more personal.
More than half your job is to make patients feel comfortable
with you and their treatments.” Next, he advises that
when you do formally market your practice that you “find
methods you’re comfortable with—from giving talks
at the Rotary, to writing articles to answering questions on
your Web site.” Finally, Crandall suggests that you
develop a specialty that will draw referrals from other
doctors.
However you decide to
market your practice, doing so with integrity is essential. As
Andrew Carnegie once said, “A great business is seldom,
if ever built up, except on lines of strictest
integrity.” g
Julie
K. Silver, MD is an assistant
professor at Harvard Medical School and the medical director of
one of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital’s outpatient
centers. Dr. Silver teaches a non-fiction writing and
publishing course for physicians at a resort in Falmouth,
Massachusetts (www.seak.com). She
is the author of numerous books, including Chronic Pain and the Family (Harvard University Press).
