Where will you find your next MedTech sales opportunity? Healthcare datasets can be great tools for identifying prime prospects in your market. Leveraging healthcare datasets to market your MedTech systems, however, isn’t the same as using a list of marketing leads and email addresses that you collect on your website or at an industry event. Healthcare datasets aren’t usually compiled for the purpose of marketing. Rather, they include medical data, healthcare statistics, population demographics, or insurance data that professionals, organizations, and regulatory agencies use for other purposes.

For a MedTech company, these datasets can provide information that helps you improve target marketing and focus sales efforts on physicians whose patients would benefit from your systems.  For example, healthcare datasets may include ICD-10 codes or CPT codes, which can identify physicians or healthcare facilities most likely to treat patients with certain diagnoses or to perform certain procedures.

When it comes to using healthcare datasets for sales and marketing, though, there is a definitely a right way and a wrong way to do it. Follow this list of dos and don’ts for the best outcomes.

The MedTech solutions that your company delivers, no doubt, add significant value to the doctors and hospitals that adopt your innovations. Most medical technology or healthcare IT companies focus on enabling their clients to provide better patient care and clinical outcomes or allowing them to work with greater efficiency. Other healthcare technology companies may assist doctors, medical groups or facilities with compliance around clinical standards, security or other regulations. But has your team considered the value you could be adding by focusing on developing a broader market for your client?

If a hospital has invested millions in the latest technology or equipment, but isn’t effective in educating their community doctors and patient panels about the benefits, then will the technology reach its full potential? By raising awareness and educating patients and doctors about the benefits of your medical technology or system, you can help build and sustain your clients’ practices and, as a result, also strengthen your business and reputation as adding more value. 

​Consider how these three approaches to growing your physician referral network can help promote your MedTech solution. 

If it seems strange to think about marketing and sales organizations in the same company as “frenemies,” you probably haven’t been a part of marketing or sales teams.

There are many understandable reasons why dysfunction exists between these teams that are so dependent on each other for shared success, most notably:

• Marketing and sales personnel generally function as separate departments and silos within a business. They are not organized in a way that invites interaction and collaboration.
• Salespeople have quotas and are measured and compensated based on those metrics. 
• Marketers may be expected to produce a specific number of leads, but their compensation is not usually tied to the number of leads the marketing activities produce. Of course, sometimes the marketer’s employment status is dependent on quantifiable results. Marketers with any track record will tell you their departments and personnel are among the first to be downsized when budgets shrink.
• It’s easy to default to finger-pointing between marketing and sales teams for failures and disappointments regarding company growth targets. 

For scalable success at any company, including those within healthcare and MedTech, it’s important to keep harmony between marketing and sales teams. Here are six tips for fostering win-win relationships.

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:

• What is the total potential market for your technology based on a variety of attributes that could define a sale such as such as patients diagnosed, cases worked, procedures performed, or prescriptions written?
• Which companies and products are currently sold that address your target market?
• How are the current, established products are represented or described within healthcare data sources?
• Which doctors and hospitals (and other facility types like ambulatory surgery centers, skilled nursing facilities)  are involved in using, prescribing or delivering your product?

Let's start with a short quiz.

​In which of the following scenarios should you incorporate email as part of your marketing strategy?

• Supporting a hospital's efforts to build awareness for your surgical equipment among community doctors after the sale
• Educating surgeons on the latest data on morbidity and length of stay for your company's high-tech surgical assistance tool 
• Exposing physicians to a brand new device or implant that your company is launching
• Following up with a group of radiologists you met at a trade show who wanted to learn more about your latest digital imaging machine
• Convincing an independent physician to adopt your electronic health record or back-office billing app
• All of the above

We have all been there ... you finally landed a meeting with a hospital executive after months of trying. Success!!!

But then reality sets in and you are literally pulling our hair out trying to come up with engaging content, while staying on point with focused messaging relevant to your product and service.  

Like many MedTech Commercial leaders, you are probably pulling your hair out to get your field based team to fully adopt your CRM. You spent months implementing and training on it, not to mention the big check of your budget that gets allocated to it. Get your sales reps excited to use your CRM with this one super simple technique: consider their needs by putting yourself in their shoes.

To understand why this simple change in orientation works, let's dive into the root cause of the problem of lackluster support for your CRM workflows. 

​It's hard to hear and painful to digest... but most issues teams face can be traced back to the top levels of management. ​

Like many well-seasoned healthcare marketers, planning and executing outreach campaigns to target physicians may conjures up memories of poring over countless spreadsheets, with a feeling of dread that you'll be faced with a sparsely-filled hotel conference room on the day of the event. The lesson learned is that the success of any given physician marketing campaign relies on your ability to identify, understand and meaningfully engage the right physicians.

​Medical device companies face significant headwinds with increased competition resulting in heightened scrutiny over price, preference and availability. 

​One way medical device commercial teams stand out from the competition is to prove to your healthcare providers that you are a valued business partner who understands and cares about their business… you aren't just there to drop off more inventory and provide a free lunch!

While healthcare data is becoming more available by the day, the challenges inherent in working with these data are increasing in number and complexity.

​Since most available healthcare data is derived from financial reporting and accounting systems (EHRs, by design, are billing systems, and most third-party healthcare data comes from the 'switches' that connect providers with payers to facilitate payment), the data structure, field availability and ease of analysis are all skewed toward financial reporting purposes not so much toward extracting other business value.

We've all seen the billboards, lining the highways in our cities, advertising the wait times in the ER.  A not so subtle reminder that (potentially) expedient service is available during your next medical emergency.

Hospitals and health system often try to extend the success they have had with driving a message to consumers to advertise their other specialty service lines... robotic surgery, colonoscopies, cardiovascular care, join replacement. While hospitals may be targeting to potential patients, they are equally trying to reinforce a message to community doctors who may refer patients to their facilities and specialists for advanced care.