8 min reading time

At the MedForce Summit yesterday, we hit upon a real pain point for every sales professional in the room. Paraphrasing here,

“Our sales force can talk features and benefits. But effective sales has gone beyond that. Now we deeply need to understand our customers’ pain points. We need to know the latest healthcare reform affecting them. We need to know how to talk with Value Analysis Committees.”

The pain: Many companies struggle to educate their sales force on all these aspects. So I asked,

“How does your company prepare your sales personnel with the education they need to represent you well?”

Rick VanSaun, Varian Medical Systems: “We are turning to outside consultants that specialize in healthcare reform to educate our sales teams about hospital customer challenges on outcomes analysis, asset utilization, and care coordination.”

Tony Mattair, LifeCell; an Acelity Company: “We have sales sit with corporate accounts and health economics to learn the evolving needs of our customers. We also produce customer-facing collateral based on these insights around patient presentation, procedure, product and outcomes.”

For today’s discussion, are you facing this challenge too? How are you dealing with it?

What’s working? What isn’t?

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SALES TRAINING IDEAS

7-Step Sales Process training with test and certification at http://medicaldevicemarketingsummit.com – Your instructor has his own medical device company and includes GE Healthcare and many others among his sales training customers. Mike can also come to your office to train your whole staff.

Also…

Get your team signed up for free http://tigi.net content. My friends Gunter Wessels and Sam O’Rear know healthcare reform pain points better than anyone I know. Their name came up yesterday at MedForce – Varian’s Rick VanSaun uses them!

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FREE UDI WEBINAR THIS WEDNESDAY

It’s the last one we’ll do before the September 24, 2016 deadline for Class II devices.

See http://medgroup.biz/UDI-by-September

All who register will get the video replay, slides, and transcript.

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DISCUSSIONS

Australian TGA
http://bit.ly/Au-TGA

Can new technologies help the management of diabetes?
http://bit.ly/Db-mgt

General surgeon: “How Government Killed the Medical Profession”

Feedback Requested – Do you think this could help people?
http://bit.ly/nw-prod

Does ISO 14971 Require Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA)?

Re-sterilization of medical devices

Independent reviewer in Design Reviews

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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

P.S. Consider MDMS, the Medical Device Marketing and Sales Workshop, in August. http://medgroup.biz/MDMS

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Ian Wood
Sales Consultant at Resource Label Group LLC

Marketing?
Wouldn’t some of you agree this is a topic for the marketing departments? In my opinion an informal top to top meeting (more of a focus group) with you biggest and best customers may provide some of the expert answers you are looking for.
In turn that information would drive the advertising and messaging tied to the sale.

Kanwar Kang
VP Sales and Marketing at Vios Medical

Really tough challenge. Its a farmers v. ranchers thing. During our sales force training we ask each trainee to answer the? ” What does the customer want? ” and then use Why? Why? Why? to try to get to underlying need. Works sometimes to slow them down . . . but most sales professional’s self image is tied to numbers and their closer personality eventually kicks in. We find it more efficient to let the Strategy team listen in and synthesize the message intp a message tree that the sales team practices practices practices.

Tony Signorelli
Passionate Proponent of Solar Power * Author * Avid Sailor

Modesto (Mo) Casas I would be interested as well, if you are willing. tony@signorelli.biz.

Brad Bolen
Senior Project Manager at Michigan Medicine

In my opinion, it is a challenge to ask a sales professional to be both a clinical and a healthcare economics expert. Towards the end of my time as a device sales rep, we were beginning to really see the transition from primarily needing to show the clinical value to the physician as our primary sales strategy to the need to show the clinical and financial value to the hospital VAC. We would often bring in our healthcare economics and national accounts team members to support those meetings. Now in my role as a consultant, our clients see the same challenges and often ask us to help them navigate the VAC process for new product introductions to reduce the burden from the clinical sales team.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥

Yes, Modesto (Mo), email me at JHage@MedicalDevicesGroup.net.

Modesto (Mo) Casas
Increasing Worldwide revenues

Completing the thought:
The technical sales person can quickly get deep into features and benefits. This focus is embraced by the technical buyers and becomes the central objective of the sale. Lists of features, long evaluations and product comparisons fill their activity lists, while the business problems take a secondary place in the sales process. This leads to long evaluations, changing requirements and lost business, often as a last minute surprise.
Today’s technology customers have complex problems to solve, usually bringing a combination of business, technical experts and typical users together into a team of influencers who advise the decision maker in the investment decision. It is imperative for the sales person to identify the business problem, align business objectives with the ultimate decision maker, qualify the technical requirements and determine if his/her company has a solution.

No wonder sales people are always so stressed!

Modesto (Mo) Casas
Increasing Worldwide revenues

Successful companies do 3 things very well

I come across this problem with my clients who sell complex hardware or software products. Most technology companies are founded, built and managed by technical managers, often giving technical knowledge a heavy weighting in the hiring process, including sales candidates.

The successful companies do 3 things very well:
1. Aligning business objectives with the decision maker before starting the sales campaign.
2. Identifying each of the buying influencers and agreeing on their problems.
3. Organizing the selling approach and addressing all influencers’ business and personal needs.

Joe – I can share my Practical Solution Selling primer with anyone who might be interested. Write me if you are.

Tony Signorelli
Passionate Proponent of Solar Power * Author * Avid Sailor

Here is a link to a what paper I might recommend: From Physicians to IDNs: Building the Medical Device Sales Force of the Future (http://signorelli.biz/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016WP-From-Physicians-to-IDNs.pdf). It is a huge challenge.

David Lachmann
Experienced Cross-Technology Manufacturing Specialist

Hi Joe, it’s been a while.
I am not a sales person but I have worked alongside them frequently and it seems to me like there is a function missing in most organisations.
Sales people, in order to be effective, usually convince themselves that their product is the best thing since sliced bread.
When a customer starts telling his pain points, the sales person is usually listening for an opening to angle in with the product he/she represents. This is understandable but counter-effective, as the customer will usually clam up, having recognized you are not really interested in his problems.
Sales people will either have to learn to dedicate sessions to listening rather than sales, or medical companies will have to invent a new function, to be manned by exceptional, non-marketing professionals (experienced engineers or OR/ER staff) to really go out and listen to the customers.

Michelle O’Connor
President and CEO | Director | Learning Strategy | Life Sciences Sales Training | Corporate Educational Partnerships

Joe, great question! Like you found at the MedForce Summit yesterday, here at CMR Institute, we also find that many sales organizations are challenged the changing landscape including how to get a seat at the table with Value Analysis Committees. It’s critical that the sales team really understand customer needs and pain points. Market access is a huge area of focus for us at CMR.

We work with healthcare leaders at the frontlines of these issues to develop training material that offers real-world insight for sales teams. For example, one company worked with us to train their sales force through a program of role-based, blended learning modules that allowed them to distinguish themselves from the competition and sell more effectively.

As a free training resource, members of this group can create an instant market access training plan at our website to begin the process of addressing this very issue.

M. Kelly Murphy
Geriatrics, Pharmaceutical, Health Science and System’s Liaison. Educator.

Sounds like you need to talk to a nurse!

Ana Paula Guimaraes
Entrepreneur in Specialty Food Retail, Marketing and Sales Executive and Innovation in Automotive and Healthcare

I faced this challenge and I believe we need a sales force with different skills to address the value equation. That’s how I did it with great results.

Jeff McGovern
Medical Equipment Specialist

Finding the customer’s pain points is key to maintaining an open door with your customers. It comes with time and, for me, personal interaction. By meeting with several customers over time you begin to get the data you need. you can identify certain issues that are central to all your customers. These are their pain points. Customer A told you this. It likely holds true for Customer B and C. At that point you assume this issue is a problem and you come into meetings talking about it. And have possible solutions for it that include your product. The customer thinks you are great because you know their problems before they verbalize them.
This is more helpful if the company has several sales reps who can share customer’s pain points with each other. I was fortunate to be a part of a salesgroup, eight of us, in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect, and we learned so much from each other. It was very successful.
Training to know your products and/or services is key.

Dan Golka
CMO at Med Tech Directory

This is where sales management comes into play. From someone who has been a footsoldier, management and business owner this on the responsibility of the higher ups. If you have competent sales people then work a plan in advance. Schedule meetings and discuss with your sales team short-term and long-term goals. This is very important when bringing in new product lines or revenue streams.

Robert Hartmann
Vice President Business Development at Soft-Link International Inc.

Just as with features and benefits, different pain points exist at different levels, depending on what impacts them the most. Lab technicians will have different pain points while hospital administrators will have perhaps similar but more far-reaching pain points.

The secret is to understand the entire process for a particular area of the hospital, and then how that area of the hospital interacts with the entire hospital itself. That experience is not easy to come by, and The analytics involved to solve those problems become more complex as the overall hospital workflow is incorporated into a solution.

The main question is, are companies willing to invest the time and money required to train there field staff personnel? I would say in most instances no, they are not. We continue to work in an environment that is transactional and not strategic. Sales quotas are generated and must be met in the age-old top down performance matrix.

Harsha Mohata
Sr. SEO Executive at Researchmoz Global Pvt. Ltd.

Analysts forecast blood gas and electrolyte analyzers market size is to exceed USD 700.4 million by 2023. Increasing number of emergency cases due to growing incidences of chronic diseases, and surge in demand for point of care analyzers are pivotal factors driving global blood gas & electrolyte analyzers market size.
see the market research report @ https://goo.gl/LSB9Jx

Robert Hartmann
Vice President Business Development at Soft-Link International Inc.

(Additional comment) Until companies take a more strategic look at long-term performance rather than quarter by quarter, the ability to provide insightful solutions to a customer’s pain points will continue to be ignored.

Doug Hudiburg
Product Management and Marketing Professional – Medical Device and Healthcare Technology

It requires more involvement on the part of marketing too. It’s marketing’s job to identify core user needs, create products/services around those needs, help build sales processes that effectively educate and inform customers, and to help train the sales team. Often people are just missing the marketing (product management) component.

Nadine Lepick
VP Business Development at CTX, Inc.

Joe, I agree with you about having more involvement from sales with the “other” departments at hospitals. Essentially, this is now a business meeting and, as a sales person, you need to understand what is going inside any hospital. This would be similar to selling a piece of capital equipment, where you would be required to sit down with a committee to get the sale.
We all need to know more about each hospitals’ “system” and work within its structure.

Jim Lemle
Regional Vice President, North America at Admedus

Joe, you couldn’t more accurate with your communication. Today’s providers are focused on Fee for Value, digital and population health. Products need to deliver evidenced based medicine improvements that can translate into improved HCAHPS, less re-admittance and lower cost! High quality healthcare for less cost and improved outcomes!