Selling medical devices should be easier than this. You’ve got a great product. Physicians love it. And patients, while they may not recognize the role of the specific piece of kit, enjoy the greatest benefit of all in the form of enhanced medical outcomes.
Yet, still it’s tough.
This isn’t due to cut-throat competitors, skeptical buyers or budgets under relentless downward pressure. That’s all table stakes for a sales professional. You can cope with it. And working in the medical world, you’re used to the strict regulatory compliance needed to start any conversations, let alone get a deal over the line. In a field where human health is at stake, you’d expect nothing less.
What makes selling medtech tough is the complexity involved. To start with, who are you selling to? The surgeon who’ll be using your kit or the hospital buyer who holds the budget? Both of course. And both have different needs. Then there’s the physician’s staff and partners. Ignore them and you may never even get to make your pitch.
Then you have to map which hospitals each physician has privileges to work at and which hospitals are in the same group and so controlled by one buyer.
If all that isn’t enough of a headache, your salespeople are likely to be specialist manufacturers reps rather than payroll employees. You’ve got to figure how to onboard them, make sure they have the right documentation, keep them up to date with the pipeline, and get a clear view of what and where they are delivering.
There are few fields with so much complexity, and it makes selling even the best medical devices far tougher than it needs to be.
In our new whitepaper “Cutting through complexity in the medtech market” we explore how businesses in this market are using CRM to simplify and streamline the entire process.
We look at how they’re using CRM to map their eco-systems and so manage their pipelines far more effectively, optimizing the timing and content of their approaches. And how it’s giving the sales managers in these businesses a helicopter view of who is doing what where. To give just one example, if a rep is meant to be covering three states but the CRM helps them see that rep is only landing sales in one, they can assign a new rep to the other two.
Finally, we show how many medtech businesses are using CRM beyond sales, to enhance their marketing, operations and entire business management. Used in this way, CRM is helping medtech businesses to get their products into the operating theatres of the right surgeons and so improving medical outcomes for many people across the country. To find out how click here.