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Marketing teams at medical technology companies are under constant pressure and scrutiny from corporate executives and sales forces to create more demand for their company’s products. Though demand generation is hardly a new requirement for marketing departments, lead generation tactics must continually evolve to keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions and pressures felt by customers and targets of MedTech companies.
What worked even six months ago to increase demand and produce qualified leads may not be effective next quarter, much less next year. “Change is the only constant in life” is not a recent quote (check your Greek history from 2,500 years ago). At the same time, the pace of change has never been faster in human history, and that certainly applies to healthcare — and to marketing for demand generation. Read on for an update on the most popular demand generation tactics for medical technology companies as they stand today. Each of these topics is worthy of an entire article or series unto itself, so consider this more a brief overview and impetus for further research and reading than anything complete unto itself.
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Do you know how much data decay is costing your business? Data loses value over time; what was true and accurate last month is probably not completely true and accurate today. In fact, ZoomInfo compiled the results of research on B2B data quality and found that, each year, 30 percent of people change jobs, 43 percent of people’s phone numbers change, 34 percent of people’s titles and job functions change, and 37 percent of email addresses change.
It’s possible, with the rapid innovation and M&A activity in the MedTech space, that your customer and prospect database could experience even more data decay in a year’s time. So, it’s likely that the next time a member of your sales team logs into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, at least one piece of information that he or she needs will be inaccurate. And the next time your marketing team sends an email campaign, there will be more hard bounces than you’d like to see. Even worse when your field-based sales team is in market and didn’t realize a practice moved offices or became employed by the local hospital. There’s no doubt that bad data is frustrating for your sales and marketing teams, but remember it can also be a source of frustration for clients. Data that causes a breakdown in communication may seem like unanswered emails or calls to your sales team, but it may come across to the client as a sign of poor service. And in the MedTech space, the inability to connect with suppliers is more than inconvenient; it can directly impact patient well-being, and it may be reason enough to start talking to your competitors.
The circumstances leading to people’s visits to hospitals and doctors’ offices are as unique as the people themselves. If you were to try to imagine all of the possible situations that could result in a visit — both commonplace and unusual — you might doubt that healthcare settings could rely on pre-created codes for diagnoses that weren’t so general as to be useless.
Before you get too far in that line of thought, I suggest you scroll through the list of ICD-10-CM codes.
The MedTech industry is having another active M&A year, fueled by new technologies and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) broadening their portfolios to provide new products to the markets they serve. Mergers, however, can create uncertainty for your customers. They may have heard horror stories of how doing business with a company can change after a merger. Perhaps they’ve even experienced firsthand a decline in customer service or product quality — and in the MedTech space, neither of those is acceptable.
Your sales team is the strongest and probably the most influential connection you have with your customers. Here are five tips that can help sales reps retain current customers and, ideally, even close business with prospective customers during a merger.
In this era of value-based care, hospitals and the health systems to which they belong are intensely focused on metrics that directly impact their scores and related financial incentives and penalties affecting their reimbursement.
For marketers and salespeople who target hospitals and health systems as clients for their products and support services, performance metrics are equally important. Sales and marketing teams also benefit when they can look at these metrics across facilities and geographies to slice and dice the data to better understand their prospects and opportunities. So which metrics are most important for MedTech marketers and sales teams, and how can those metrics be used to align the value of your company’s MedTech products to the needs of those hospitals and health systems?
Just about every marketer is familiar with the sales funnel, a graphic used to depict the buyer’s journey from first discovery to final sale. The funnel is wider at the top to represent all the people that you’ve introduced to your company through activities like brand awareness campaigns. In the middle, you are able to identify who of that initial population you could persuade to consider doing business with you. At the bottom of the funnel is the percentage that converts from prospects to clients.
What may not be familiar to you is how to match marketing activities with those different levels of the sales funnel — particularly which activities will get people into the funnel in the first place.
Healthcare analytics is robust and increasingly critical as a sub-industry and set of tools driving many critical decisions in the arena of healthcare, both in the U.S. and globally. All healthcare analytics are built on a foundation of data, but that data is only as useful and as powerful as it is effectively analyzed, and then applied, to improve clinical and business processes and outcomes.
Big data is increasingly available and used by MedTech and other healthcare businesses in new market development and related marketing and sales strategies.
Data-driven marketing is not new, but is gaining rapidly in popular application. However, data application for use by sales teams, particularly in new market development, is adopted less frequently and at a slower rate, and that translates to missed opportunities. Below are some guidelines for new market development strategies and tactics that incorporate a symbiotic approach involving both marketing and sales.
If you sell medical technology products to doctors you already know the importance of physician education goes much deeper than a simple presentation and discussion of product features and benefits.
Whether your medical technology is specifically sold to and used by primary care providers (PCPs), medical specialists, or both, the PCP should be the target audience for education about your technology. Yet many MedTech companies whose products are intended for use by medical specialists put limited or no resources toward educating PCPs on their products. It may be understandable, but it’s also shortsighted.
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The most successful businesses don’t rest on their laurels, and they never get comfortable. Even if you have a great product, it can only take you so far within a given target market before your growth begins to flatten.
MBA students and marketing majors learn about market development as one quadrant of the Ansoff Matrix in Marketing 101, but it’s important for salespeople to understand and contribute to market development as well. Market development directly affects sales success, and salespeople are on the front lines with the customer - daily. That close connection to the customer makes sales representatives very valuable in identifying new market development opportunities.
When you market solutions and services to the healthcare industry, it’s easy to pick up a lot of terminology that you may even use in your marketing content, but have you ever wondered what those acronyms your healthcare clients use in their everyday conversations really mean?
CPT code is a prime example. You may have seen “CPT” if your solution involves a part of the medical billing procedure — or you may have noticed it on your own medical bills, or Explanation of Benefits statement.
If you’re like most busy healthcare marketers, it can be a challenge to stay on top of news and trends that help keep your campaigns and messaging perfectly on point. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone.
Here are nine healthcare marketing blogs to follow, whether you’re looking for how-to’s, tips, industry insights, or just inspiration to help you move past writer’s block. After you have had a chance to review our list of best content, be sure to leave a comment with your favorite healthcare or marketing blog that didn't make our list.
It seems like almost every large MedTech company has climbed on the big data bandwagon in an effort to drive more effective and targeted marketing to physicians and sales activities.
Big data for precise targeting is, in fact, one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of both marketing and sales teams when they have access to it and know how to mine, analyze, and use it. However, there are a number of challenges and inequities that separate the organizations that can track a direct, positive correlation between use of data and increased sales from the ones that can’t or don’t leverage this kind of data and analytics for more accurate targeting, such as:
Big data and its powerful insights could make all the difference in your strategy and approach to healthcare sales and marketing. However, big data is as complex as it is intricate, and many find it overwhelming or have no idea where to start. That doesn’t mean you have to be a data scientist to harness big data and reveal opportunities in your market.
As a sales and marketing professional in the healthcare industry, you probably already have some connection to big data, but it may not be doing all that it can for you. Big data is an essential part of growth. In fact, 53 percent of companies that rated themselves as effective users of analytics were deemed to be fast growers. While that demonstrates the correlation, the survey, conducted and published by McKinsey Insights, also revealed that 57 percent of organizations rated themselves as ineffective at analytics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t a buzzword or the plot of a sci-fi movie. It’s actually revolutionizing sales and marketing in every industry, including healthcare. While there are lots of AI solutions to streamline the buyer’s journey and automate campaigns, you’ll want to choose a tool you know has the features that will make a difference in your workflow.
This isn’t a question of should you embrace AI but rather how to embrace AI. There is also the need to strike the right balance of science and human touch points that will propel your prospect to convert. Let’s explore how AI is changing the healthcare marketplace.
The sales process is increasingly complex for customers and suppliers in many industries, including medical sales. Mapping your sales cycle accurately can help simplify the sales process and shorten the sales cycle for your sales team and your customers.
How complicated has the process become? Here are some eye-opening, assumption-challenging statistics:
The following aims to provide your sales and marketing teams with a good road map for simplifying and abbreviating the medical sales cycle by properly mapping it for your company and your products.
Medical technology continues to evolve rapidly as MedTech companies become even more integral in a wide range of healthcare settings. Here are some current trends that can be expected to accelerate through 2018 and into 2019.
There’s nothing more important than being relevant to your audience when it comes to sales and marketing. Even when you offer a single solution, its application will always have variances. That’s why your sales approach can’t be one-size-fits-all.
If you’re selling to doctors and hospitals, you likely segment your prospects in many ways already, but have you considered the differences between selling to doctors in big cities versus those working in rural communities? They have different needs related to almost any healthcare solution. Homing in on these differences can help guide your sales strategy and ensure your message fits their challenges.
Any discussion of email marketing to physicians must begin with the understanding that most doctors are incredibly busy. Some are so busy they barely have enough time to provide proper patient care, so they certainly don’t have time to read the vast majority of emails that clutter their inbox every day.
In an age when so many messages are deleted without ever being opened, how do you break through the noise and ensure your email marketing gets noticed by a physician? Simple. Follow the rules below. Here are nine tips to greater email marketing success with clients and prospects when you’re selling to doctors.
Imagine you are interviewing for a sales executive role at a medical technology company.
You already have 20+ years selling healthcare technology to hospitals and doctors and you are looking for new opportunities. Whether you currently have a job and looking to switch or you are between gigs, you can expect the process to take at least a few months ... and be incredibly competitive! Assuming you have already gotten through the initial screening process with the recruiter and / or HR manager, you'll likely find yourself faced with a range of interviews with the hiring manager, other sales reps and members of the management team. No doubt, you'll be looking for ways to stand-out from competition and really shine.
But exactly how much effort should you put into preparing for a job interview?
We are excited to share with you how a top sales executive used Carevoyance to expertly navigate the interview process and win more job offers!
What does accelerating sales mean?
Here at Carevoyance we think of sales acceleration as successfully engaging more prospects, progressing more deals to the next meeting, and, of course, making every meeting count. All these steps accelerate you to the end goal which is closing more deals. Every sales person obsesses over closing more deals. You've got a couple of options here when it comes to accelerating sales and closing more deals --> you can work harder or you can work smarter. Since there are only so many hours in the day, we are big fans of working smarter! Let's explore how you can work smarter using data and technology as a strategy to accelerate sales.
Looking to better understand and size up a market opportunity for your healthcare technology?
Whether you are a healthcare entrepreneur formulating a business for a new product or a research scientist justifying a funding request or a marketer at an established medical device company recommending which market to target, the process for researching and sizing the opportunity is typically multi-dimensional. In this blog post we'll review a data-driven process for better understanding the dynamics within a market for a healthcare technology or product.
When sizing up a market, you'll want to look at the opportunity through multiple different perspectives to understand the following:
Selling to doctors used to be more straightforward than it is today.
Reps could drop by the practice office with lunch or snacks in hand, and catch the doctor in between appointments to chat about the latest products or technologies. Not surprisedly, the MedTech and Pharma industries historically relied on interpersonal networks with individual physicians to execute transactions and drive growth of their technologies.
It's surprising how rapidly and drastically processes for purchasing medical technologies have changed over the past 10 years. Access to physicians is way down as more practices, clinics and hospitals control the flow of sales reps through their halls.
In addition, rather than simply placing orders for products based solely on a physician’s preference, hospitals and other facilities are assessing value across all purchase categories, looking for reductions in costs or an improvements in outcomes. The changing dynamics is especially true for more expensive products like imaging equipment, surgical robots, surgery assistance tools, complex medical devices and health information technologies or services.
Let's start with a short quiz.
In which of the following scenarios should you incorporate email as part of your marketing strategy?
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