The medical devices industry is complex in more ways than one. With complicated instrumentation and devices for diagnosis, monitoring, or working with diseases and disabilities, as well as juggling regulations, providers, patients, and insurance, selling medical devices can be a challenge.
Successful medical device sales teams have one thing in common: the ability to be agile in any customer situation. Closing a deal requires speed and flexibility at every stage in the sales pipeline.
Their secret? Powerful technology underpinning the sales process that provides speed and flexibility. Here are four ways Salesforce enables an improved medical device sales process for your team:
1. Build a custom sales process
In a complex industry like medical devices, no two products are exactly the same. Devices range in complexity from band-aids to dialysis and beyond, so it makes sense that there isn’t one standard sales process you might follow, even within the same organization. Whether there’s an intermediary buyer or you’re selling directly to consumers, you can use Salesforce to boost your medical devices sales processes.
Salesforce offers out-of-the-box functionality for a standard sales process, but it’s easily customizable to how your teams work best. You can make the technology work with what you’re already doing, rather than institute a brand new process just to check boxes or “get it in the system.” (And Silverline’s SME’s can help you define and automate the best sales process for your business, if you need a little help.)
2. Engage with providers
Most patients come to use a given medical device based on the advice of their healthcare provider (HCP). So, providers need to know in great detail about what you’re offering and how it helps their patients, and they’re going to want to engage with you on their terms.
If you’ve ever been in surgery doing hip replacements or compound fractures, logging every time the patient or doctor uses your product, training the doctor at the same time on how to use it, it can be challenging. Salesforce can offer you a way to standardize some of the process so it doesn’t slow a rep down — especially if they’re in the surgical suite!
For your largest accounts, you can create a self-service portal for providers so they can easily order medical devices from you without needing to jump through hoops, opening up your sales team to offer support, upsell/cross sell, and training as needed, rather than get stuck in the administrative work.
Leveraging a platform like Marketing Cloud also gives your sales team access to more information about an individual HCP’s engagement with your brand, their requests, and any personal preferences based on their specialty or patient demographics. This gives your sales folks immediate understanding of where they are in their customer journey, what information they need to close the deal, and how to move them along the sales cycle.
3. Leverage a single source of truth
In addition to ensuring the device is collecting, analyzing, and sharing to proper stakeholders (i.e., health insurers, hospital systems, physician staff, patients, and caregivers), it’s important that you’re able to figure out internal IT infrastructure to support updates and internal system tie-ins to maintain data integrity with a singular source of truth.
Analyzing your data in the context of your business can lead to many interesting insights you can leverage to improve your sales process and your organization’s success. For example:
- Teams and team members know where they stand and what the delta is between where they are and where they need to be with respect to their pipeline and their quotas
- Managers can mentor individuals based on their individual performance metrics
- Managers can identify pipeline shortages or gaps versus sales/revenue targets and adjust early
- Pipeline data can be socialized quickly and easily, as needed
For your sales team, this means a complete picture of their opportunities and current customers, so they know at-a-glance how they’re doing against their numbers, what activities they need to take on each account, and which accounts are up for renewals or new orders. The easier it is for them to do their jobs, the more you’ll sell.
4. Effective post-sale training
After a sale is complete, there’s the training process. Now, even though a sales rep isn’t responsible for the complete training, they’re still the main point of contact for a physician or patient, and they’ll need to get the process started and make the handoff to support specialists.
Salesforce can offer an easy-to-use portal with training materials, videos, or guides in a patient support program can give your sales team the tools they need to easily make that handoff. Pairing key ecosystem and patient journey knowledge from subject matter experts with the right Salesforce products makes it easy for your organization to create personalized patient support programs that deliver a great experience.
Empower your medical devices sales team with Silverline
How many sales have you lost because of an inaccurate quote?
Or a customer process that was mired in back-and-forths and approvals?
Medical devices can be complicated, but the sales process doesn’t have to be. With Salesforce, you can empower your sales teams to be less reliant on the home office and accelerate the time to close a deal, giving them all the tools they need in the field.
Medical Devices companies are at the forefront of healthcare transformation. The ecosystem is looking toward them for real-time data to prove their economic value, real world outcomes, adherence success, and the effective use of new technologies while staying compliant and maintaining data integrity.
With Silverline’s firsthand industry knowledge of the required journeys and pitfalls to avoid, coupled with our Salesforce Platinum level Partnership designation, we are best positioned to help you navigate and execute in this fast-changing space. The Medical Devices field is complex, and we have consultants with real industry experience to help assist you in your journey to better outcomes and greater ROI — no learning curve required.
