By  Tom Flynn, VP of Marketing

Last week, the SpendMend Sales, Marketing, and Account Management teams traveled to Chicago for a three-day Sales Summit. It was a week filled with awards, training, team-building, and strategic planning, setting the tone for an exciting year ahead. In this blog, we’ll dive into the highlights of our meeting and the valuable lessons we took away from it.

The week began with an Awards Dinner on Monday night, a night to honor and recognize the hard work of our dedicated employees. Over ten team members received awards for achieving or surpassing their quotas in 2023, a testament to our collective success.

Following the awards ceremony, we geared up for two days of intensive training, team-building exercises, and strategic planning for the upcoming year with aggressive goals and high ambition. These sessions were helpful for setting the tone for 2024!

As I sat through the sessions, I was struck with five major lessons learned from the week.  In some cases, I knew a few of these lessons, but it was a very revealing week, and it cemented a lot of the things I only thought I knew.

Here are my five lessons learned:

1. The Importance of Thoughtful Planning: Annual “kick off” meetings are useful, but too often they can often lose focus and fall victim to poor logistics, overstuffed agendas, inconsistent content, etc. However, when executed correctly, these meetings can have a major impact on success. Through the lead up into this event, I witnessed firsthand (more than any other time in my career) how important it is to carefully and meticulously plan an event.  I believe our positive results from the Summit were a direct outcome of all the great planning.  Huge thanks to the marketing team: Aiden, Amanda, Hannah, and Kylee for their help before and during the event.  Great job team!
2. Continuous Communication: Every year presents a unique puzzle that requires careful thought and strategy to devise the appropriate solution. Throughout our sessions, it became very clear that open communication was necessary for success. The more open and honest our communication, the better we identify potential risks and threats.  And by identifying these downsides we could more confidently construct a plan to move forward. Kudos to the brave team members that stood up and stated unpopular opinions and pull the conversations into more difficult but productive areas.  We’re better because of you… you know who you are.
3. The Power of Leadership: SpendMend is fortunate to have passionate founders and a highly engaged Senior Leadership Team (SLT). We even had a member of our ownership group, MSCP (Morgan Stanley Capital Partners) attend, and actively participated – contributing valuable insights and ideas. So much of our success comes from the examples set at the top of the organization and our various departments. Commitment flows into every corner of the company.
4. Invest in Team Bonding: Team bonding sometimes gets a bad rap… it’s sometimes a punch line…  but the truth is, I don’t think I can overemphasize the importance of good team bonding. While training, strategy, and forecasts make up the larger bricks in the structure of success, it’s the personalities, willingness to work together, and the ability to overcome differences that act as the mortar holding our structure firmly in place. Investing in team building and team bonding (when done sincerely and correctly) is absolutely worth the investment. (or maybe I just like the free drinks.)
5. The Right Mission: Our mission at SpendMend aligns closely with the healthcare community’s mission. Throughout the week, we centered our discussions on our most core belief – that we exist to help hospitals deliver better patient care. Our primary deliverable is cost savings, and our cost savings solutions help hospitals to address the Four C’s: Complexity, Compliance Issues, Unyielding Change and Capacity Constraints and we do this by illuminating the dark data that prevents hospitals from hitting their full strategic potential. It is our privilege to do this work and to help hospitals better fund patient care.

In the end, our Sales Summit was a resounding success. It not only celebrated our past achievements but also laid the groundwork for an even brighter future. The lessons learned during this event – the significance of thoughtful planning, continuous communication, strong leadership, team bonding, and a clear mission – will undoubtedly guide us towards a year of growth, innovation, and service to the healthcare community. As we move forward, we remain dedicated to our mission of helping hospitals deliver better patient care.