Industry playbooks
Healthcare sales call playbooks
Your buyers run clinics where physicians finish their notes at 9pm, a fifth of the schedule no-shows, and two staff per site do nothing but chase prior auths on a fax machine — all on a two percent margin with a security review and a BAA standing between you and a pilot. Practise against a CMIO who says 'if it doesn't live in our EHR they won't touch it' and a revenue cycle director who wants the ROI in their own numbers, so you've already handled it before it costs you the deal.
Every call type for Healthcare
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Healthcare, the people who pick up are healthcare operations and clinical leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO)
- VP of Clinical Operations
- Director of Clinical Informatics
- Chief Medical Officer / Medical Group President
- Practice Administrator / Clinic Operations Director
- Director of Revenue Cycle Management
- Chief Nursing Officer (CNO)
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Pajama time — clinicians charting until 9pm
Primary care and specialty physicians are finishing notes at home after a 22-patient day. Leadership can pull the EHR audit logs and see 90+ minutes of after-hours documentation per provider per day, and they know exactly which docs are closest to quitting because of it. Every conversation about it eventually lands on the same fear: replacing one departing family medicine physician costs six figures in recruiting plus 12–18 months of lost panel revenue while the replacement ramps.
No-shows and open slots bleeding contribution margin
A 15–20% no-show rate in behavioral health or Medicaid-heavy clinics means a fully staffed pod with an empty exam room. The clinic still pays the MA, the front desk, and the rent. Ops leaders track fill rate and third-next-available obsessively, and they've already tried text reminders, overbooking, and waitlist backfill — each of which created its own problem.
Prior authorization run on fax machines and hold music
Two to three FTEs per clinic doing nothing but payer portals, faxed clinical documentation, and peer-to-peer scheduling. Turnaround runs 3–10 days, patients abandon care, and the denial comes back for a missing chart note the referring provider never dictated. Nobody in the building defends the process; they just don't have a replacement that all fourteen payers accept.
Staffing gaps that can't be hired out of
MA and front-desk vacancy rates in the 15–25% range, travel nurse premiums still in the budget, and credentialing taking 90–120 days per new provider. Any solution that requires 'just add an FTE' is dead on arrival, and any solution that promises to reduce headcount runs into the fact that they can't fill the roles they have.
Documentation quality driving denials and downcoding
Rushed notes mean E&M levels get downcoded, HCC conditions don't get recaptured for risk adjustment, and the payer denies for medical necessity. Revenue cycle sees it as a coding problem; the CMIO sees it as a burnout problem. Whoever you're talking to only owns half of it, which is why deals here need two sponsors.
Change fatigue and a graveyard of failed pilots
They've been through an EHR conversion, a telehealth scramble, a patient portal rollout, and at least one scribe vendor that didn't stick. Medical staff have veto power in practice even when they don't have it on the org chart. Leaders are less worried about whether your product works than whether their physicians will still be using it in month four.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “If it doesn't live inside our EHR, clinicians won't touch it. They're not toggling to another window in a 15-minute visit.”
- Agreed — anything that adds a login is a dead product. Be specific and let them check you: name the integration path (SMART on FHIR launch, sidebar embed, whatever your actual mechanism is), name the health systems on that EHR where you're already live in production, and offer to walk their informatics analyst through the build in a technical call rather than arguing it with the CMIO. Then flip it: 'What's the last third-party tool that actually got adopted inside the chart here, and what made that one work?' Their answer tells you the real integration bar, which is usually cultural, not technical.
- “Patient data. Legal will need a BAA, and we'll have to run you through a full security review.”
- Never resist this — it's a qualification signal, not a stall. Say 'Of course, we sign BAAs as standard, here's our SOC 2 Type II and our HITRUST status, and here's the completed vendor security questionnaire we've submitted to other systems on your EHR.' Then ask the question that actually moves the deal: 'Who owns third-party risk review here, and how long did your last clinical vendor take to get through it?' If it's 90 days, you now know your close date and you can start the review in parallel with the pilot conversation instead of after it.
- “Our margin is under two percent. There's no budget for anything that isn't billing or compliance.”
- Stop selling software and start selling the P&L line they already have. Two levers work: physician retention (one avoided departure in a specialty line often covers a multi-clinic contract) and throughput (if a provider recovers 45 minutes a day, that's one to two more visits, and they know their own contribution margin per visit). Make them do the arithmetic out loud with their numbers, not yours — 'How many providers, and what's your average contribution margin per encounter?' — so the business case is in their handwriting.
- “We tried a scribe vendor two years ago. Half the docs stopped using it after a month.”
- Ask what killed it — turnaround time, note quality, specialty coverage, or that it was optional. It's almost always one of those four and the answer is diagnostic. Then reframe adoption as something you own with them: name your utilization threshold, propose measuring it weekly in the pilot, and put a clause in that says if you're below X% active use at day 60 you'll pull it out. Physicians trust a vendor who volunteers an exit more than one who promises success.
- “Anything touching clinical workflow has to go through our EHR governance committee, and they meet monthly.”
- Don't try to route around it — get on the agenda and get your sponsor to co-present. Ask what the committee has approved and rejected in the last two cycles and why, what documentation they require in the submission packet, and who on the committee is the skeptic. Then arm your champion with the one-pager and the reference call before the meeting. Deals die in governance because the sponsor showed up alone with a vendor slide deck.
- “Our EHR vendor says they're releasing something like this natively next year.”
- They probably are, and the honest answer beats the defensive one: 'They will, and it'll be fine for the average note. The question is what your physicians are doing for the next 18 months while it's in early adopter release.' Then ask which of their sites is on the vendor's roadmap and when — usually nobody knows, or it's three releases out. Also ask about specialty coverage; native tools tend to launch strong in primary care and thin in ortho, derm, and behavioral health, which is where the charting pain is worst.
- “We'd have to get patient consent to record, and our state is two-party consent.”
- Have the answer ready before they raise it: the standard consent language other systems use, whether it's verbal at rooming or in the intake packet, and what your product does when a patient declines. Offer to share how two or three comparable systems operationalized it — most of them handled it as a one-line addition to the existing consent-to-treat, and the front desk barely noticed. The objection is usually a legal reflex, not a blocker, but only if you don't fumble it.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- EHR (and knowing whether they're an Epic, Cerner/Oracle Health, athenahealth, or eCW shop — it changes the whole conversation)
- BAA — Business Associate Agreement; no PHI moves without one signed
- PHI vs. de-identified data
- pajama time / after-hours EHR time — the audit-log metric for charting at home
- in-basket — the physician's EHR inbox of results, refills, and patient messages
- prior auth (never 'pre-approval') and peer-to-peer review
- wRVU — work relative value unit, how physician productivity and comp are measured
- panel size and third-next-available appointment
- census — inpatient headcount, not a survey
- E&M level, HCC recapture, risk adjustment, and downcoding
- chart closure / encounter lock within 24, 48, or 72 hours
- SMART on FHIR, HL7, SSO — the integration vocabulary informatics will test you on
- CMIO, CNIO, and the EHR governance or clinical informatics committee
- MIPS / value-based contracts / capitated lives
Metrics they are measured on
After-hours EHR time per provider per day (target: under 30 minutes), Chart closure rate within 24 or 72 hours, Physician and APP turnover rate (10–15% is common; every point costs six figures), No-show rate and slot fill rate by clinic and specialty, Visits per provider per day and wRVUs per FTE, Days in accounts receivable (A/R) and first-pass clean claim rate, Denial rate and denial overturn rate, split by prior-auth denials, Operating margin (frequently 1–3%) and cost per encounter, Patient experience scores — CG-CAHPS / Press Ganey provider communication domain
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Healthcare buyer
A live AI prospect with Healthcare context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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