3 Sales Enablement Best Practices for the Med Tech Marketer

As the medical device landscape continues to evolve, it’s vital to align sales and marketing. As a marketing leader operating in a highly regulated industry,  a critical factor of your overarching strategy is to ensure consistent, compliant communication.

In the past, it was usually sufficient for sales reps to maintain relationships with one or two healthcare providers (HCPs). These days, there are numerous decision-makers for each account in the healthcare landscape. To keep up with these demands, sales reps need to provide content to an increasingly diverse group of end users.

To help your company’s sales reps achieve efficiency, it’s important to leverage sales enablement. Not only does it help align marketing and sales, but it empowers reps to deliver relevant, regulatory information. Sales enablement makes the most out of content development and interactions while also  providing your organization with the information and tools necessary to sell more effectively.

To help implement a successful strategy, below are three sales enablement best practices for med tech marketers.

Setting Measurable and Actionable KPIs

KPIs pinpoint what sales teams need to focus on for success. To make sales enablement work, it’s important to establish KPIs that are both measurable and actionable—so that your team can analyze both shortcomings and success.

Here are some common metrics for marketing teams to track:

• Sales Rep Quota Attainment: Reaching quotas is a primary sales goal; marketing should be designed to empower reps to improve these rates.
• Time to Quota: The quicker you ramp up reps, the better, as research shows that up to 84 percent of sales training information is lost within 90 days.
• Conversion Rates in the Funnel: Sales enablement programs should help reps identify hot leads and enable them to respond faster with targeted messaging.
• Time Spent on Selling: Enablement should maximize the interactions that reps have with prospects. Marketers can help limit the time that reps spend searching for content.

By implementing an effective data collection methodology, med tech marketers can pinpoint, measure, and track the right KPIs. In doing so, you  can synchronize marketing and sales initiatives around proven strategies. Your sales enablement strategy should integrate with these data to provide a comprehensive overview of engagement and effectiveness.

Connecting Content to the Buyer’s Journey

No matter what KPIs your organization measures, the goal of sales enablement should be to track, analyze, and improve processes—including content engagement. Sales enablement tools track customer engagement through metrics such as email activity, page time, and demo requests. Leverage this data to identify which types of content your reps are using to interact with HCPs.

Sales enablement also helps teams track content consumption around specific buying stages. In turn, this allows teams to better connect the dots between content, the buyer’s journey and sales funnels stages.

When sales and marketing create a consistent conversation that’s bolstered by content targeted around individual prospects, reps can follow a well-defined nurturing process by providing compliant, customized content.

Assessing and Optimizing Your Process

Ensuring that content is connected around your end users is only the first step in an effective sales enablement strategy. It’s equally important to turn feedback into intelligence and build a process that’s measurable and scalable.

Sales enablement tools offer robust tracking and usage capabilities that not only optimize content development but also eliminate unused investments. As mentioned previously, software monitors which content resonates with your end users. It illustrates which content is being utilized by your sales team,  which is not, and helps your marketing team discern which topics and types of content your team should be focusing on.

Consider this a win-win-win situation.

Sales enablement helps measure efficiency while assessing and optimizing your processes.  The best tools connect the right people with the right content at the right time.  They keep reps compliant, improve communication efforts, and inform content marketing decisions through analytics. Ultimately, sales enablement enables teams to deliver the right message and encourages sales and marketing alignment.