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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.
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MedTech isn’t a typical B2B industry. The systems you develop and the partnerships you form literally transform — and even save — lives. MedTech success has always required higher doses of trust, relationship building, and customer focus. Today, you have a somewhat-overlooked tool that can make achieving those objectives easier than ever before: social media.
If you need some convincing before you can believe that social media can be effective for raising awareness about your MedTech innovations, and for growing your business, here are eight compelling reasons to consider social media for your next marketing activity.
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:
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.
MedTech salespeople are understandably so focused on their day-to-day sales activities and quotas that they often miss opportunities to improve their knowledge, skills, and networking opportunities. The most proactive MedTech sales professionals tend not to wait until they are seeking a new job opportunity to connect with thought leaders and read up on trends in their profession, but it’s challenging to find the time to participate in, much less seek out associations and networking groups.
Not to worry. We’ve compiled a list of sales associations and networking groups that medical technology salespeople should know.
There’s no escaping the reality that MedTech sales are getting harder in the new era of value-based healthcare. Hospitals and their health system parents are getting squeezed financially. The same reality applies to larger medical groups, ACOs, and just about any other healthcare provider business model.
As the pressure is increasing for the healthcare industry to make more careful purchases, mergers and rollups that are increasing the size of IDNs are giving these larger organizations more negotiating leverage, and not just with payers. This means that MedTech companies also feel the financial pressure. Price sensitivity (always an issue) is more acute than ever, and value-for-price considerations are a major focus for the customers of MedTech companies in their evaluation of medical technology purchases. Further, product life cycles in the MedTech market are longer, and differentiation between competitive products is more difficult and less driven by features of the technology. Decisions to purchase refurbished equipment are increasingly driven by price considerations and what is “good enough” rather than best in class. In this challenging business environment, how can a medical technology company scale its sales model to help increase sales system efficiency and hit company sales targets?
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.
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. |
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