5 Ways Medtech Sellers Are Dominating Their Competition
Technology is progressing at a breathtaking pace. Life-changing devices are being created every year and constantly improving. And medtech sales teams are the ones who are placing these innovative products where they can do their jobs.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American and European medtech market grew by 6.3%, and due to just how crucial the industry is, there’s no reason to think that kind of growth won’t resume as the world stabilizes from the pandemic.
The future is brightest, of course, for medtech companies with sales teams that are combining training and technology to win the day.
Here are five ways these top performers are dominating their markets, growing more revenue, and building deeper relationships with buyers.
1. Saving Time Through Account Planning in Medtech Sales
Selling into major accounts requires a lot of time and resources. When competing for these lucrative contracts, every day counts.
Account planning is how medtech sales teams avoid wasting their time and squandering resources. Creating a master strategy for one specific account – with a role carved out for every team member, and a clear understanding of processes and prospects – saves time by:
- Avoiding duplication of effort and overlapping responsibilities
- Giving reps a clear path to follow instead of wondering what’s next
- Streamlining how reps gather and us contact data
A CRM like Salesforce does a great job of helping to fulfill some of these benefits, but no CRM can help medtech companies completely unless it has built-in account-based selling capabilities.
By adopting comprehensive sales strategies, medtech sales reps can become more efficient. Less time wasted means more time being productive. In a fast-moving medtech industry, that’s a priceless competitive advantage.
2. Finding the Right Type of Contacts – and More of Them
Sellers thrive by building relationships, but many sales teams don’t have a great view of who’s who in their target accounts and how to get to the most important contacts.
They also stumble into blockers, those contacts who either aren’t interested or aren’t willing to help the sales rep (or both).
Plus, sales teams frequently don’t know where the centers of influence really lie within an account. Influence doesn’t always follow hierarchy and org charts. It usually cuts across position, title, and even business units or hospital departments. Sometimes, to find decision-makers and key stakeholders, you have to go to people who may not be anywhere near them on paper.
Relationship mapping is how the best medical sales professionals know who to talk to and who to avoid. It’s a pretty simple – but essential – process of using one connection to create pathways to two, three, or four more. It’s about learning more about each person so that you can build a good profile of who they are, what they’re responsible for, who they know, who they can influence, and their interest level in you and your product.
Contact networks are at their best when they’re both expansive and deep. Just like a healthy brain has dense neural networks, a healthy account strategy has dense networks of people.
Relationship mapping is one way to build those networks.
3. Growing Average Account Value by Farming White Space Opportunity
Normally, the metric used to figure out how much a customer is worth to a business over a given time period is average customer value (ACV).
But with selling into bigger accounts, top medical device sales teams understand that within one account can be many different customers. Sales reps know that where there’s one deal, there are several. The ones that stay on top become experts at finding these cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and increasing their company’s footprint within the account.
Depending on your line of products, every unit within a healthcare ecosystem can be a potential customer. Even if your medical devices are highly specialized and usually contained within one department or field – say, cardiology – there are often up-selling opportunities within that medical vertical to be farmed.
Any medical device sales strategy should include a dedicated plan to find and exploit white space within an account. But it can get complicated with the bigger prospects, and being able to process all of the data and connections can be tricky without some kind of platform to help (and an automated one, preferably).
Upgrading Salesforce with an app that can help medical sales reps find additional opportunities is one way to give medtech companies that extra reach to expand footprint, boost market share, and grow average account value.
4. Consolidating Data in a Centralized Place
In the healthcare industry, reps aren’t the only part of a successful sales team. A successful team also includes sales management and leadership, marketing support, customer success reps, product experts, healthcare subject-matter experts, and other personnel that all work together toward a common goal: closing the deal.
The only way to get all of those team members on the same page is through centralized data and tasks. Everyone needs to be accountable. Everyone also needs to know who is responsible for what. And the data that they gather – not just about prospects – everyone needs to have access to it. It shouldn’t be parceled out by an information traffic cop.
Medical device reps and other medtech reps at the top of their field gain a crucial edge over the competition because they communicate better. CRM technology enables that kind of frictionless data-sharing that is the heart of any outreach.
5. Keeping Track of Organizational Changes and Ever-Shifting Networks
Finally, top sales teams know that it’s not enough to create strong relationships with contacts; in order to win, they have to keep them.
Turnover in the healthcare industry among physicians, administrators, and healthcare systems execs means that the person you build a rapport within one account may not be there next quarter, let alone over the next year.
But a sales team targeting a large territory with lots of moving pieces and target accounts may find that keeping up with all these changes is both complicated and resource-intensive.
Sales reps that have the training and technology to keep in touch with contacts can take advantage of the chaos and use churn to their benefit. Each connection that moves to another account can potentially open doors that were previously closed. Those open doors have opportunities behind them.
It’s not just the people that change. Organizations change. They grow, expand, acquire. New departments open up. New services become available. They receive new sources of funding.
It’s important that sales reps train to know how the market changes so they can keep their finger on the pulse of it. Technology alone won’t do the job; reps have to get in the habit of reading, watching, listening and learning. It’s a fast-moving world. Reps should stay up to speed.
By following these principles, medical device sales teams can not only handle the changes they’re facing in the healthcare industry but also put themselves in a prime position to win in the medtech world.