Healthcare business practices have evolved. Face-to-face interaction is no longer the leading sales tactic, and MedTech companies must adapt to the reality of unreachable decision-makers. With stagnant sales pipelines and restricted access to countless providers, healthcare innovators are scrambling to find new ways to generate leads.
Digital Opens Doors
Digital marketing paves the way for MedTech companies to get back in front of decision-makers. A recent survey found that over the past five years, digital marketing increased by over 60% in the healthcare industry, with digital taking up 40% of MedTech marketing budgets.1
As healthcare marketing moves online, the next step for MedTech companies is rededicating resources to inside sales growth. However, successfully using digital channels may require extensive internal changes.
Before diving into the “how” of digital outreach, take the time to ask yourself these questions:
How are your sales team, marketing team, and sales operations team working together to drive revenue for your company?
How are you creating opportunities and nurturing leads?
How are you converting prospects?
Your answers will reveal which strategies are digital-ready — and which aren’t.
Rethinking Sales and Marketing
Despite the history of bad blood between sales and marketing, these two entities must be aligned for a successful move to digital.
The goal is to get prospects to later stages of the sales process with the least amount of time and effort. Start by giving your marketing team the front-end functions of the buying process. Marketing — not sales — is best at generating demand and building awareness for your brand. This way, your sales team isn’t responsible for the jobs they don’t want to be doing anyway, like cold calling, and your reps are supplied with prospects who are ready to buy. With just a small number of people who can say “yes” to your company, it’s in your best interest to set your reps up for success before sales conversations.
Measuring Your Success
Assess the progress of your sales and marketing integration with the following metrics:
Length of your active sales cycle
Percentage of new customers who independently accessed marketing materials before or during the sales process
Number of sales-qualified opportunities active in your pipeline
That last metric is a critical measurement of success. A notable advantage of digital marketing is qualifying leads ahead of time. Instead of wasting time and resources on prospects who aren’t really interested in your technology, send your sales team warm leads who are more or less ready to buy.
Achieve this with an omnichannel digital marketing strategy. Develop ads that build brand awareness and trust in your expertise, and embed links to various assets–downloadable content, landing pages, videos, etc. After launching these ads on a number of social media platforms and online channels, follow up with email retargeting to give prospects every opportunity to engage. The final piece is trackable data that shows which assets succeeded in prompting a sales conversation. Prepare your sales reps with this valuable information so they can be more persuasive and help prospects feel confident in their buying decisions.
Although COVID limited access to decision-makers, you can still get in front of your prospects in a way that is both compelling and efficient. Set your company up for success by integrating your marketing and sales efforts before you make the move to digital. Use the strengths of each team to help the other succeed, which in turn will help the entire company gain traction in the new era of post-pandemic sales.
MedTech companies are facing major roadblocks in generating demand for their new technologies. Gone are the days of catching doctors scrubbing in for surgery — and the endless sales opportunities that followed. In this new age of medtech sales, many are wondering if we will ever have the same access to decision-makers that we did before.
Even before COVID, there were forces at play limiting access to clinical decision-makers — the pandemic just sped up the process.
Those megatrends include:
Physician employment by IDNs
Vendor credentialing and other access-limiting efforts
Professionalization of supply chain, including Value Analysis Committees
With so many factors curbing the adoption of new technologies, one question is consistently at the forefront of the minds of medtech companies concerning their marketing and sales efforts:
How do we get good sales opportunities in our current environment?
When finding new sales opportunities, the core aspects of prospecting remain the same: your target audience must have a pain point they would like addressed, and you must present your solution in a meaningful way that solves their issue. None of that has changed. What has changed is how you do those two things.
Before we get into the details, there are three things to remember:
Prospects are still as interested as before — you need to get in front of them so they can act on that interest.
Doctors are people, too. Like you and me, they spend much of their downtime on their phones. Name the social media platform, and you’ll find them there.
Doctors always want to make their practices better, and they don’t turn it off at 5pm. Finding ways to leverage that fact will get your foot in the door with key decision-makers.
With all these things in mind, let’s look at how strategically using digital marketing strategies solves the problems created by the pandemic in the medtech industry.
Contextual Marketing
The first thing to do is define your target audience. The healthcare industry has a limited number of decision-makers in each specialty. Your task is to identify the key players who will champion the adoption of your product or service, down to the names, emails, and phone numbers of those people.
The next step is creating relevant and interesting content for your audience. Through a personalized marketing experience, you catch their attention and encourage engagement by appealing to the needs of their practices and patients. Content should be easily digestible, speak directly to their concerns, and promote further interaction with your company.
The “Surround Sound” Approach
Now that you have your content, present it to your target audience in a way that draws them to you without being too forceful. In other words: pull, don’t push.
An omnichannel approach finds clinicians where they are already online. Marketing on channels and social media platforms they use every day, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, generates a high frequency of touch with your content. Supplementing digital ad campaigns with email outreach ensures no prospect is left behind. Surrounding your audience with content holds their attention and encourages them to act. Campaigns should be consistent across platforms, with similar calls-to-action.
Measurable Success
A vital component of digital marketing is identifying strategies that worked — and those that failed to engage. Not only can you focus your efforts and resources more effectively, but you can also provide valuable information to your sales team. That way, when a salesperson prepares to contact a prospective client, they’ll know what led that prospect to request more information. Identifying what leads to success saves you time and money while filling your sales pipeline.
Although the landscape of healthcare marketing has dramatically shifted, digital marketing provides a new path forward that reopens doors to the easy access we had to decision-makers back in 1999.
Implement a successful digital outreach strategy. Jairus can help you create tactics that will generate better prospects and boost your sales cycle.
