How to Find and Connect with Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry

Guess how many people the healthcare industry employs in the US: 

A: 2 million

B: 15 million

C: 22 million 

The answer’s C. That’s right: 22 million 🤯

Healthcare is a big industry – and it’s big business, too. McKinsey estimates that healthcare profit pools will grow to $819 billion by 2027. 

As a healthcare sales professional, you want to make sure that you’re getting your piece of the pie. And that starts with finding the right people to sell to. In an industry as big as healthcare, being able to filter out the people you actually need to be speaking to is a skill – one that’s going to save you a huge amount of time and effort in the long run. 

That’s where this blog post comes in. We’ll be covering exactly how to find and connect with top executives in the healthcare industry: 

• Understanding the Target Audience of Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry
• The Old Way of Finding Healthcare Industry Executives 
• Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Identify Top Executives in Healthcare: the Newer, Faster way
• How to Find the Email Addresses (and Phone Numbers) of Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry

Once you’ve finished reading, you’ll be able to find exactly who you need to speak to in the healthcare industry – and be perfectly set up to find out more about them, enrich your contact data, and begin targeted outreach campaigns. 

Let’s get into it.

Understanding the Target Audience of Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry

First things first: what does a top executive in the healthcare industry actually look like?

Top executives in the healthcare industry often have either a medical or business background, and are experienced employees with many years of experience behind them. In a nutshell, their role is to set the strategic direction for the rest of the business. Let’s take a look at some of these specific roles: 

The Founder 

Founders are the people who start businesses. They’re often the people who have the big idea – and actually follow through with building a company to match their vision. It’s pretty common for there to be more than one founder; it’s a huge responsibility, and individuals often team up to lighten the load. You’re most likely to be selling to the founder if you target earlier-stage businesses in the healthcare industry. 

The CEO in the Healthcare Industry  

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is the top executive within the business and is responsible for the overall strategic direction. They’re responsible for making sure the business meets its goals, fulfills its responsibilities within the healthcare industry, and continues to grow. The CEO usually reports to the board. 

The CFO in the Healthcare Industry  

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is responsible for the finances of the healthcare business. They will oversee financial operations, budgeting, and reporting, and balance allocating resources with managing cash flow. 

The Vice President in the Healthcare Industry 

A Vice President (VP) is often one step down from a C-level executive. They often are responsible for a specific department, function, or region within the organization. A VP often focuses on implementing the strategy defined by the C-level executive; while senior, they’re more involved with day-to-day operations and making sure targets are hit. They still have plenty of decision-making power – which is why they’re a valuable person for you to target as part of your outreach – but need to make sure that their decisions tie in with the strategy set by their higher-ups. 

Top executives in the healthcare industry will often have: 

Decision-making authority: final decisions often lie with them. These decisions have to be made in line with the organization’s strategy and overall direction. 

A focus on risk management: depending on the specific business, these healthcare professionals have to keep a careful eye on patient or customer safety, compliance, and financial stability, and make sure any of the above are not being compromised by growth or financial goals. 

A strategic vision: senior leaders in the healthcare industry have to have a vision for the company that is far ahead of where it is now. They have to make sure the company is working towards this vision, no matter what else is happening in the industry. 

How Can I Decide Which Top Executives to Target in the Healthcare Industry? 

The short answer: it depends. The longer answer: you can decide who to target based on the size of the business you’re targeting, what its team looks like, and how your sales cycles usually play out. 

In healthcare sales today, it’s common for sales professionals to be in contact with multiple people from the same business (known as a buying group). When you’re working with businesses of a significant size and deals of a significant value, the process is likely to involve more than one person. For example your primary contact might be the VP of a certain function, but the final decision might lie with the C-level executive that manages them. 

The best way to decide who to target is to look at your business’s historical data, or, if you don’t have that, to draw on your industry knowledge. From there, you can test, learn, and iterate until you have a clearly defined ICP.  

Note: finding who to target is only a small part of the process. To successfully connect and start a relationship with your prospects, you need to understand who they are, what they’re interested in, and what their pain points are. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck pushing generic sales content at them forever – which will ultimately limit your success. 

The Old Way of Finding Healthcare Industry Executives 

Ok, let’s take a minute to touch on the old way of finding healthcare industry executives. We’re going to take a wild guess and say you’ve landed on this article because you’ve just tried something similar. 

Perhaps you knew of a specific company you wanted to target. You probably went to their website, found who you wanted on the team page….but couldn’t find any contact information. Or, even worse, you couldn’t find a team page, so had to google each and every role to find out who was responsible for what. 

Or maybe you didn’t have a specific company in mind and instead Googled ‘Top healthcare companies’ or something similar. All you were left with was very, very generic results – fancy trying to stand out amongst the thousands of sales reps contacting executives at United Health or McKesson? No? Didn’t think so. 

If these sound familiar, this might just be the best day of your (professional) life. Why? Well, we’re going to show you how to make sure you never, ever have to go through the process again. Here’s how. 

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Identify Top Executives in Healthcare

Meet LinkedIn Sales Navigator: it’s going to become your best friend. No, it’s not free – but it’s an absolute necessity for sales professionals. 

Why? Well, it’s built to help people like you find who you need to contact quickly and easily. Its powerful filtering capabilities allow you to narrow down LinkedIn’s user base until you have a list that closely matches your ICP. 

For your search, we’d recommend setting the filters to be healthcare and to include the type of roles you’re looking to target – that is, the C-levels or VPs that we spoke about earlier. After that, you want to get more specific. What traits does your ICP have? Think geography, company size, headcount, and revenue. 

Once you’ve got a list of promising-looking profiles, it’s a smart move to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s lead lists feature to categorize who you find into groups. This could be a specific company size or authority level, for example – you’ll want to tweak your process depending on specifics like these. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Tips and Tricks 

Hold on for a sec, there’s more! Here are our favorite under-the-radar tips and tricks for getting the most out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator: 

Utilize recommended lead lists: this is a handy tool that builds you a list of up to 100 recommended leads based on your past activity. You can use this to find people you might not have otherwise come across – and therefore expand your list of people to reach out to. 

Save your searches: save your searches, and you can speed up future ones which might just require a tweak to a filter or two. Plus, doing so will mean you receive alerts on new profiles that fit the same criteria. 

Use Boolean search: use keywords alongside operators like AND, OR, and NOT to make sure your leads fit your ICP as closely as possible – a mirror image, if you will.

How to Find the Email Addresses (and Phone Numbers) of Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry

Ok, so you’ve got a nice shiny list of top executives in the healthcare industry to reach out to. But first, you need their contact details….gulp. 

No need to panic – there’s a tool to help. It’s called Surfe (hey👋) – and it’s going to change your life just as much as LinkedIn Sales Navigator will. 

Without further ado, here are three ways to use Surfe to find the email addresses and phone numbers of top executives in the healthcare industry: 

Visiting a Specific LinkedIn Profile

Say you haven’t got LinkedIn Sales Navigator yet – or maybe you’ve been told about someone specific you need to target. Here’s what to do: 

1. Download the Surfe Chrome extension (don’t worry, it takes 2 minutes) 
2. Head to the executive’s LinkedIn profile, and hit the ‘Add as Contact’ button’. 
3. Surfe will find an accurate email address and phone number in a few minutes – and then feed everything through to your CRM of choice with the LinkedIn CRM integration. That’s literally it!  

Want to know how Surfe works its magic? It all comes down to its intelligent waterfall enrichment technology. This basically means that Surfe searches through the best contact databases – think Apollo, RocketReach, Dropcontact, Hunter, and People Data Labs – one by one. Once it’s found an email address and phone number that look accurate (if they appear in several databases, for example), it will run the email through ZeroBounce to make sure it’s valid and active. 

Pretty neat, right? 

Enriching Sales Navigator Lists 

Remember your new best friend LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Well, Surfe works with it too. If you’ve just built a big list full of people you’re desperate to contact, Surfe will find you all of their contact details – in just one click! 

Once you’ve got your list, simply select the profiles you want the details for, or select all, and click ‘Export to CRM’. Surfe will use the same waterfall enrichment technology to quickly hunt through the best – and only the best – contact databases, find the details you need, and send it all through to your CRM. 

By Using the Surfe App 

While LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the main tools you use as a healthcare sales professional, we realize it’s not the only place you find your leads. Maybe you’ve been sent a big list of inbounds from your Marketing team, or maybe you’re going to run through people you’ve already targeted and try them again. 

Whatever your reason – if you have a CSV list of top executives in the healthcare industry that you need to contact, the Surfe App can help. Simply upload lists of hundreds or thousands of contacts and Surfe will enrich them all – that means finding email addresses and phone numbers at an average find rate of up to 93%. Love it.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Time to go out into the wild and put what you’ve learned into practice! Remember, use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find top executives in the healthcare industry for you to speak to – and then use Surfe to find their contact details and pull them straight into your CRM. 

Follow this process, and you’ll have a list of people ready and waiting for you to connect with. Job done. 

FAQs About Finding and Connecting with Top Executives in the Healthcare Industry

Are Healthcare Professionals on LinkedIn?

The short answer: yes. In fact, 8 million US healthcare professionals are on LinkedIn. That’s a huge opportunity for sales professionals working in the industry. 

How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the Healthcare Industry? 

The best way to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator is to use advanced filtering to quickly and easily build a list of profiles that much your ICP. Use filters to pull up businesses in the healthcare industry and profiles that match the level of seniority you need. Then, narrow it down further with filters like geography, revenue, business headcount, and more. 

How to Find Email Addresses of top executives in the Healthcare Industry? 

You can use Surfe to find email addresses from Linkedin or from a CSV file. For the former, simply download the Surfe Chrome extension and hit ‘Add as contact’ on an individual profile or ‘Add to CRM’ on a Sales Navigator list. For the latter, upload the CSV file to the Surfe app. Surfe will use its waterfall enrichment technology to find the email addresses you need – and phone numbers, too.